Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The reliance over the last 200 years upon fossil fuels has pushed humanity towards urb-
anization because these sources of energy tend to occur in specific places and in a concen-
trated form, which can be easily transported. There is no need to go into detail explaining
why London and Manchester expanded as a result of the 19th century coal economy in
England; or why Mexico City, Bombay, Shanghai and similar other accretions of humanity
have occurred as a result of the superior efficiency to be derived from delivering fossil fuel
energy and food to people living in concentrated settlements. The oil dependency which
herded people into towns pursues a similar dynamic to that which made it more profitable
(for some) to export 120 kilos of sheep from the uplands of northern England, than to grow
three tonnes of firewood and produce milk, meat and oats for local consumption.
Insofar as the response to global warming may involve a move back to neglected sources
of renewable energy, which can now hopefully be captured more efficiently through
devices such as wind generators, solar panels, wood burners, tide-mills and biomass gas
generators, we are faced with the question: should we bring the energy to people in towns,
or should we consider dispersing people?
options in the face of global warming. Monbiot looked at a great many alternatives for sup-
plying energy, either through centralized systems involving large power stations and the
existing grid, or through decentralized methods of energy production, such as microgen-
eration and combined heat and power. His preferred solution was a mixture, including de-
centralized microgeneration of heat and electricity using solar panels and hydrogen boilers
or fuel cells, together with grid-based electricity from fossil fuel power stations where the
carbon was extracted and buried.
I have no particular quarrel with Monbiot's conclusions about where the national grid
element of our energy supply should come from. My concern is that he reaches these con-
clusions without any wider consideration of how, in a post fossil fuel world, we are to
provide the other things that people need, the most important of which are food, water
and a way of life that people find satisfying. The newly developed DC electric grid which
Monbiot advocates magically transfers energy around the country without any transmission
losses; but the material things of life cannot be moved without transmission losses. You
cannot transport food, fibre and building materials around the country without generating
expenses which over the last century have been paid for by cheap fossil fuels. If you de-
rive all your water from a small number of sources which offer economies of scale, you
not only experience diseconomies of distribution (infrastructure costs, pumping costs and
leaks), you also run the risk of running your sources dry. And if you bring all this biomass
into the cities to maintain an urban population, then you invite various kinds of congestion
(too many vehicles, too much smoke, too much waste, too many animal diseases); and you
have to find a way of getting the biomass back out again, once it has been used, so that
