In the United States, the agricultural system is heavily industrialized, and relies on inputs such as diesel, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and, perhaps most importantly, financing. In the current financial climate, the farmers’ access to financing is not at all assured. This agricultural system is efficient, but only if you regard fossil fuel energy as free. In fact, it is a way to transform fossil fuel energy into food with a bit of help from sunlight, to the tune of 10 calories of fossil fuel energy being embodied in each calorie that is consumed as food. The food distribution system makes heavy use of refrigerated diesel trucks, transporting food over hundreds of miles to resupply supermarkets. The food pipeline is long and thin, and it takes only a couple of days of interruptions for supermarket shelves to be stripped bare. Many people live in places that are not within walking distance of stores, not served by public transportation, and will be cut off from food sources once they are no longer able to drive.
Dmitry Orlov
February 13, 2009
Social Collapse Best Practices
[It’s harvest time on the farm. I’m going to visit and drive combine for a while. It’s been a couple years since I did that and it’s time to satisfy that urge again.
The farm visit reminded me of the above quote. We do burn lots of fuel on the farm and of course the fuel consumption is far from over by the time the crop is delivered to the grain elevator in town.–Joe]
He seems to be yet another nutroot, hippie-dippy, Rainbow-people, Mankind hating, Renaissance Fair attendee, post apocalypse fantasizer socialist, on the model of Chairman Mao and Pol Pot. He wants us all working on small, communal farms, by hand, using public transportation, relying on government for practically everything, at a bare subsistence level.
What he didn’t say is how he’s going to de-populate the Earth to “Sustainable” levels.
“The heavy farm machinery [in pre revolutionary Russia] alternately compacted and tore up the topsoil while dosing it with chemicals, depleting it and killing the biota.”
Bullshit. Industrial farming methods produce more food, at lower cost, on less land, than any other. Ever. Period.
As for his assertion that oil production shortages are a precursor to collapse; I would tend to agree, and this is one of the things about the Left that pisses me off more than most. Any production shortfalls we may have are due to legal restrictions promoted by the Left. They piss and moan about our reliance on foreign oil, while at the same time pushing for more restrictions and impediments on domestic production.
Nutroots.
The only way they make sense is if you assume that what they want stagnation and decay, and this guy’s fantasizing about it seems to be another example. I notice also that early in his speech he makes no distinction between the super power of the Soviet Union and the super power of the U.S., except to say that the Soviet model was superior in preparing its people for collapse. He refers to both countries as seeking world dominance.
Moral equivalence.
He also asks us to look to Cuba for “excellent” solutions.
I didn’t see anything in his speech that I haven’t heard in a thousand different iterations from communists worldwide. A lot of it seemed to have been culled from “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, et al.
I can summarize the whole, tedious, cliché-ridden speech in one sentence; People suck (especially Americans) they want too much, they’re destructive, and communism (though probably just as bad as capitalism) is better at showing us how to cope with our inevitable self destruction and the Great New Society to follow.
It’s a religion. Like Marx and Lenin (and the Jihadists) they’re looking for the apocalypse with longing, because only after the Great Strife and chaos can we have that peaceful, pastoral, clean and wonderful, enlightened, socialist/totalitarian heaven on Earth they’ve been praying and striving for over the last 150 years (wherein the object of their hatred [Man’s creative and productive longing] has finally had the life crushed out of it).
Is that about it, or have I missed something?
What Orlov and his comrades fail to consider is who’s going to be blamed for this downturn. They’ll have to get control of information, and fast, and make sure they’re the ones writing the textbooks and the history books, et al, so as not to be blamed themselves. That’s a dangerous gamble for them.