Applied Philosophy

In Meat! I wrote the following:

Modern production of meat goes something like this: oil is used to grow corn, oil is used to collect and transport corn, oil is used to process corn into feed, more oil is used to distribute feed, oil is used to rear cattle, oil is used to transport cattle, more oil is used to slaughter and process meat products. From using animals as a conduct and collector of free energy the modern world has turned them into sinks that suck limited fossil energy!
Meat seems to need huge amounts of energy; unfortunately the quality of the meat seems to be in an inverse relation with the amount of energy spent on producing it.

Here is a quote to go with that:

“Another idea I’ve been toying with is the notion of having no domesticated meat animals. This was the situation in Japan until the mid-19th century, when they adopted meat production as a form of “westernization.” Japanese people ate meat, but it was all wild meat — fish, mostly, with some wild boar, deer, fowl and so forth. Nature is fantastically productive of meat when left alone, to an extent that is practically unimaginable today. When the European explorers first visited Chesapeake Bay, they found sturgeon (a freshwater fish) in superabundance, and in sizes up to 18 feet long and weighing 1800 lbs. And cod, of course. Here is a description of herring found in Virginia in 1728:

When they spawn, all streams and waters are completely filled with them, and one might believe, when he sees such terrible amounts of them, that there was as great a supply of herring as there is water. In a word, it is unbelievable, indeed, indescribable, as also incomprehensible, what quantity is found there. One must behold oneself.

You can find similar descriptions of salmon, or of buffalo upon the plains. When you think about it briefly, it makes perfect sense that the greatest abundance of meat is possible from unmolested nature, as the conversion of solar energy into meat is most direct. Scientific studies have confirmed this — that it was a far more efficienct process to have buffalo eat grasses upon the Great Plains, than it is for people to grow corn and then feed it to cows stuffed in warehouses as we do today. And so much less work. And — to the degree that hunting is fun, and fishing for 1800 lb. sturgeon is really fun — so much more fun! Of course, wild meat is much better than the hideously degraded garbage you find in stores today.”

—The Future Stinks, New World Economics

Hay & Grass

The English say ‘make hay while the sun shines’ meaning that one should take advantage of the circumstances before they change. I didn’t really understand this saying-the literal and figurative understanding that I like to have of sayings-until I saw a television program about life on an English farm circa 1620. The program explained that English farmers would cut the wild grass growing in the meadows near their farm and leave it in the sun to dry, and then they would gather the dry grass, i.e. hay, and store it in a weatherproof barn. The hay would sustain their animals-cow sheep goat-through the winter. The saying should really be ‘dry grass while the sun shines’, which makes sense by itself with no need of agricultural knowledge.

This method of providing feed is peculiar to the northern regions while those who live in lower altitudes move their animals to the valleys in the winter and to the hills and mountains in the summer, taking advantage of the different climate between high and low areas and mirroring the behaviour of wild goats.

Further south people are forced to travel hundreds of kilometres in search of pasture, adopting a nomadic lifestyle to sustain themselves in harsh arid conditions. The nomadic life is the one most like the natural state of grazing animals, who travel exceptionally long distances-whether in the savannah or the tundra-in search of their main diet: wild grass.
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Here are more graphs that I have been extracting from BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2007 (available as an MS Excel workbook on the Internet at: http://www.bp.com/statisticalreview).

Graph 10: This graph shows oil production in different parts of the world, which has experienced significant decline. It plots total US production (thousands of barrels per day-right side) and the total production of Australia, UK and Norway (thousands of barrels per day-left side) from 1965 to 2006. Read the rest of this entry »

Reading BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2007 (available as an MS Excel workbook on the Internet at: http://www.bp.com/statisticalreview), I was forced to convert the raw data into graphs to make any sense of them; this post contains these graphs.The graphs are presented without any conclusions or arguments, just an explanation of the data.

Graph 1: First we start with the price of oil. Two prices are plotted ($-left side) one for nominal price and the other inflation-adjusted price from 1861 to 2006.
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