crisis

The horror stories emerging from Zimbabwe following its economic collapse and hyperinflation may provide a glimpse of one possible future for a post-Peak Oil world. An article published today illustrates how desperate the hunger is becoming inside the country. Keep in mind that the government has taken totalitarian control of all the media and there probably many even more terrible happenings going on.

From the article:

Pets are being slaughtered for meat in shortage-stricken Zimbabwe and record numbers of animals have been surrendered to shelters or abandoned by owners no longer able to feed them, animal welfare activists say.

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said it could not feed surrendered animals or find them new homes and was being forced to kill them and destroy the corpses.

Animals, like people, are being hard hit by Zimbabwe's economic meltdown, with official inflation of more than 7,600 percent, the highest in the world. Independent estimates put real inflation closer to 25,000 percent and the International Monetary Fund has forecast it will reach 100,000 percent by the end of the year.

Just for your own personal reference, remember that dogs (and other pets) can eat a fairly varied diet (i.e. don't panic if you run out of Purina).

The staff at the Energy Bulletin put together a great article today examining the peak production rate of phosphorus. By applying the same methods used by Dr. M. King Hubbert (the man who accurately described Peak Oil in the 1950s) to phosphorus production, the authors discovered that not only had the U.S. reached its peak production in 1988, but the world had peaked in 1989!

Why is phosphorus important, you might wonder? From the Energy Bulletin article:

The current major use of phosphate is in fertilizers. Growing crops remove it and other nutrients from the soil... Most of the world's farms do not have or do not receive adequate amounts of phosphate. Feeding the world's increasing population will accelerate the rate of depletion of phosphate reserves.

and

Phosphorus may be the real bottleneck of agriculture.

Population growth was only possible because we found phosphorus deposits and cheap energy to extract, transform and transport it to farms. When we plot data of world population versus world phosphate production, we find a significant correlation.

The problem of phosphorus depletion is just one more example of the imminent crunch in resource reserves we face. I wrote about a similar concern in my Peak Salt article nearly a year ago. The difference there is that we don’t actually face a salt shortage until we face an oil shortage -- an example of a subtle but critical interaction between resources. What we in the Peak Oil community are discovering is a complex system of feedbacks and tipping points, just as the world is discovering in the issue of global warming.

Why the similarity? Because the resource extraction/consumption system is of the same type as the global climate system: chaotic. Despite the name, chaotic systems have a certain elegance and structure; however, they present severe problems when we attempt to model them.

In the next post, I will discuss the true nature of the chaotic Global Resource Crunch we’re already experiencing.

Peak Oil and global warming are enormous problems, but are still only part of a network of impending disasters -- all of which appear ready to juxtapose at the exact same instant. Between the riveting news debates over Donald Trump’s hair and the wardrobe malfunctions of Britney Spears, there recently appeared one of the most frightening (and shockingly underreported) news stories in recent memory: populations of the North American Honeybee -- the workhorse pollinator of American agriculture -- are plummeting rapidly.

As sources like CNN noted casually, pollinator species (including honeybees) have been in persistent decline for decades due to factors such as an invasive parasitic mite. But the mite is now ruled out as the cause for the current collapse -- the main suspects include commercial pesticides, genetically modified crops, or an unknown pathogen. Given the past evidence of pesticides’ effects on bees, my money lies on careless commercial operations indiscriminately spraying killer chemicals.