>
> Are there any studies out there
> on whether we're self sufficient
> in doo-doo?
>
Yes there are. And no we're not.
Well, actually there's no specific "crap study" that I'm aware of, though it wouldn't surprise me if some earnest acolyte of HT Odum is working on an ERoEI analysis right now... Energy Returned on Excrement Invested! (boom-tish)
Hey! it's not often you get to make an energy-resources in-joke, you can hardly blame me for taking the opportunity.
But I don't want you to think that this message is just for shits and giggles... there's also some droning on about sustainability to be done. Ready?
Y'see, you can easily extrapolate from other studies as to the sustainability of converting waste matter into fuel. The energy which is derived from human and farm-animal waste cannot exceed (indeed must - by definition - be less than) the energy which could be derived from the food source which was originally transformed into that waste. Passing a piece of corn through your body, or a chicken's body doesn't actually impart it with extra energy. In fact, it depletes the energy content... the reason we eat the corn in the first place.
As it happens, our digestion process reveals (to me at least) an incredibly profound symbiosis between us and the planet we live on. The obviousness of this relationship has been stolen from us by modern sanitation (long may it continue - albeit in a form modified for sustainability). But not only does our body extract much of the energy from the vegetable matter it consumes, it also processes the waste in such a way as to render the remaining energy as a substance considered something of a delicacy to those very vegetables we're consuming. (Bear in mind that - as far as an anthropocentric energy system is concerned, it's all reduced to vegetables... beef is no more than processed grass. A meat process, if you will. Grass, in turn, can be converted into sEJ's - solar eJoules - which is the basic unit in the form of energy analysis which seems to make most sense to me).
Aaaaanyways, extricating myself from that tangent... I recently did a *very rough* calculation which suggested that the US civilian automobile fleet (i.e. excluding military, airline, commercial trucking, power generation, etc etc etc etc) would require half of all the arable land in North America planted with sugar cane (probably the best biomass for the job) to fuel it (at current rate).
And in that calculation, I constantly erred on the side of biomass. In truth, if you were to actually try to implement a sugar-cane-ethanol-as-motor-fuel policy, it would almost certainly require a lot more than half of America's arable land.
And then where will the beef cows graze?
Again it returns us to the fundamental point: Those of us at current "developed world" standards of living, are living *way* beyond our means. It's just not sustainable given how many of us there are.
And when you factor in the staggering rate of economic growth in China, it is *surely* obvious that things are headed in the wrong direction. And very quickly. Check out Kurt Vonnegut's article here:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/cold_turkey/
And as much as I respect a lot of what Lula is doing in Brazil, it makes my blood run cold when I read stories like this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/brazil/story/0,12462,1226498,00.html
Anyone who doesn't get a chill when they read that is not drawing all the implications.
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