It takes fossil fuels to grow them.
Most of the work I do to prepare a field to plant in melons is done with a big green John Deere tractor. It uses diesel fuel. I sit on a tractor seat to operate it, and it feels like driving a truck.
The work with small equipment is a very different experience. Melons are planted in spaced "hills" about 30 inches apart, positioned in rows. The solid-looking rows in the June photos below are plants that have grown together.
I switch from using a large tractor to a small tiller to get in between the plants to control weeds and keep the soil loose. Melons grow fast. There is a lot of change in a short time. Notice the size of the plants and the color of the adjacent barley field in less than a month.
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| May 31 |
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| June 23 |
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| June 29 |
The machine in the photo below is just like mine, except that it is new and shiny. Mine is well-used. Notice the tilling attachment at the back. Eighteen tines rotate rapidly when the gear is engaged, clearing a 20 inch path. The tiller grinds the ground, making it easy for the shallow and delicate melon roots to spread out. Melons are not good competitors against weeds, so the farmer needs to control weeds. The tiller does a faster and better job than hand hoeing. The Honda motor starts on the second or third pull at the beginning of the year and the first pull thereafter. I don't baby the tiller, but I only use ethanol-free gasoline. Ethanol gums up carburetors in small engines.
The machine teaches me something. It sends an unmistakable, wordless message that gasoline is very, very concentrated energy. The power imbedded in gasoline is normally invisible in the everyday life of Americans. Gasoline flows unseen from filling station underground tank to the pump through the hose into one's car tank. Our attention is on the transaction; less on the reality that we are putting chemical energy into a machine. The power it takes to move a two-ton vehicle 70 miles an hour is reduced to a simple awareness that the car uses gasoline and it travels a certain number of miles per gallon. When driving, our minds are on the destination and traffic, not on the fact that thousands of explosions are happening in the engine compartment.
Operating this tiller is entirely different. One sees the gasoline one puts into the half-gallon tank as one pours it. The machine is loud. One hears the cylinders firing: rata-rata-rata-rata, faster than one can say it. When one engages the gears for the tilling blades, one sees grinding right at one's feet. The handlebars vibrate. The rear of the machine bounces if one hits a rock. One imagines fury when the throttle is turned up and the blades turn and relentlessly grind. It kicks up dust if the top of the soil is dry. Sometimes dirt clods fly off to the sides. One sees, feels, and hears work being done, work that would be so hard and tedious to do with a spade or hoe. Gasoline made all that happen. So much work for so little gasoline.
There is a political point to this. I respect gasoline. I respect fossil fuels. I see up close and firsthand what they can do. Long term, I understand they fit into a bigger narrative. They are changing the earth's atmosphere, which is a huge big-picture problem. Another narrative is that fossil fuels are being phased out as people look for new energy sources. I participate in that. I have converted my chain saw and leaf blower to battery power. I drive a hybrid car. I put in a reservation for an electric Ford pickup truck.
There is another narrative in the here-and-now that I want to share: Diesel and gasoline will be around a long time because they are really useful.
People I generally agree with on politics criticize fossil fuels and the companies that sell it. I have an unpopular point of view on this. I decided that it will take four blog posts to make my point.
This post is the first of the four: If people are going to eat healthy food then they ought to know what makes it possible--fossil fuels.
Tomorrow: Who is more guilty? Me for wanting Chevron's ethanol-free gasoline or them for selling it?
The day after: I discuss the investment merit of owning fossil fuel companies, both for income and as an inflation hedge.
The day after that: Socially responsible investing. Let's identify some good-conscience investments.
17 comments:
Using a tiller to turn the earth compared to a shovel is the difference between night and day. Thank God for modern technology and the many benefits it brings. Food costs a fraction of my income. 200 years ago food was one’s income. Life really is better, easier. Plus we live twice as long because we are not wrecking our body trying to eat.
Think of it this way. Gasoline is a way of storing energy, like a battery. 150 years ago your tractor was steam powered using a coal or wood boiler. Electricity is also stored in batteries. Batteries are improving and will, hopefully soon, enable electric vehicles and tools to be ubiquitous.
This leaves the electricity generation problem. We are surrounded by more potential than we ever will need. It's just a matter of inventing the technology to tap into it. Solar cells point the way. Their efficiency is improving as well.
So it's a matter of when, not if. In the meantime the best strategy is conservation to try to slow down the harm to the environment. The real political issue is convincing first world economies to scale back the waste and adopt more environmentally sustainable lifestyles.
The biggest users of fossil fuels are armies. Let's start there.
CO2 moves through our environment in a cycle. There are emissions, like from Peter‘s Toto tiller, and uptake, like when a tree grows and pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere to create wood. There is lots of talk about reducing emissions, and not that much about increasing uptake.
Ocean fertilization with soluble iron, for instance, could pull mass quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere. The growth of plankton is limited by the amount of iron in seawater. When plankton grow, they pull CO2 out of the water to build their calcium carbonate skeletons. When they die, those skeletons fall to the ocean floor and become limestone. This biological mechanism could vastly increase the uptake side of the CO2 cycle. Many environmentalists, of course, are opposed to something like this because what they really want is to return society and the world to its “Garden of Eden state“ of the 1750s. Even experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of this possibility are opposed.
But as Peter tells us, fossil fuels have an energy density and practicality that is unlikely to be matched in any foreseeable future. We might be able to mitigate global warming by increasing the uptake side of the CO2 cycle, but I t’s quite obvious to me that we are never going to be willing to reduce CO2 emissions enough to achieve that goal. Hardly anyone wants to live in the harsh, puritanical, and poverty-stricken world advocated by climate scolds like Greta Thunberg.
Peter could have summarized his essay by saying, “They can have my fossil fuel powered rototiller when they pry its handles from my cold, dead, fingers.“.
:-)
I’m not at all sure (reality notwithstanding) that scolding isn’t the main narrative here. As in so many other fora.
And if the Oregon experience (eg Cylvia Hayes et al) proves out, “climate change mitigation” will entail and enrich more grift than anything prior in history.
Just saying.
We currently depend on fossil fuels because that’s what we have developed. However, the pollution they produce has become an existential threat. There are alternatives, but we need to invest in developing them.
In a single hour, the amount of power from the sun that strikes the earth is more than the entire world consumes in a year. Solar panels are only a primitive start. If we were to take climate change as seriously as we did 9/11, we could soon learn how to harness, store and distribute energy in a way that would eventually meet all our needs.
Pete sounds like a cigarette smoker trying to rationalize a habit that will kill him.
"It provides jobs for Minute Market employees."
The problem is that so many, including here and in industries, deny the causes of climate change.
It's just like we've seen throughout history, with tobacco companies disputing the health effects and addictiveness of their products, and paint/lead companies doing the same.
Privatize profits while all of us pay for the harm.
We could use nuclear power to generate all the electricity we need.
But there is still the energy density problem. A cubic foot of gasoline holds far more energy than any currently conceivable battery of that size. Peter’s rototiller experience would not be improved by adding a 3 cubic foot 100 pound battery to his machine.
All the numbers you need:
Stored energy in fuel is considerable: gasoline is the champion at 47.5 MJ/kg and 34.6 MJ/liter; the gasoline in a fully fueled car has the same energy content as a thousand sticks of dynamite. A lithium-ion battery pack has about 0.3 MJ/kg and about 0.4 MJ/liter (Chevy VOLT). Gasoline thus has about 100 times the energy density of a lithium-ion battery. This difference in energy density is partially mitigated by the very high efficiency of an electric motor in converting energy stored in the battery to making the car move: it is typically 60-80 percent efficient. The efficiency of an internal combustion engine in converting the energy stored in gasoline to making the car move is typically 15 percent (EPA 2012). With the ratio about 5, a battery with an energy storage density 1/5 of that of gasoline would have the same range as a gasoline-powered car. We are not even close to this at present.
link
The problem with nuclear, other than disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima, is the nuclear waste. There is simply no safe way to dispose of something that remains so deadly for so long, and the world is already storing 400,000 metric tons of it. Calling it 'clean' energy is the height of cynicism.
“We could use nuclear power to generate all the electricity we need.”
A conversation that should be had. An exploration into the waste issue that should be made.
I was first convinced of this by Richard Rhodes, who wrote a book on the Manhattan Project.
You don’t need to “dispose” of nuclear waste. All you need to do is keep an eye on it. “Dispose” is rhetoric designed to make the issue seem impossible to solve.
We currently store nuclear waste in casks at the reactors that produce it. There have been no problems with this.
Michael T:
"We currently store nuclear waste in casks at the reactors that produce it. There have been no problems with this."
You should let the scientists at Hanford know that, because they've spent over three decades trying to clean up an imaginary radioactive mess.
Regarding "mistakes were made" and "poor decisions"
I'm will Sally, it's worth looking into all methods to provide our energy needs now and into the future. Nuclear and fossil fuels should not be dismissed. Solar, wind, and hydro are also part of that search for future energy needs.
No source of energy is without problems. We are problem solvers, and we sometimes learn from our mistakes.
Mike,
Hanford is what was done in an emergency/urgent basis for the Manhattan Project and early years of the Cold War, at a time when much less was known about radiation danger and there was much less environmental concern. They literally poured radioactive liquid waste directly on the ground to get rid of it.
You can’t judge the current cask storage by what was carelessly (by modern standards) done in the 1940s and 1950s.
Yucca Mountain would have been fine if not for irrational fears stoked by environmental extremists.
Worth reading
https://theecologist.org/2015/feb/05/false-solution-nuclear-power-not-low-carbon
I know you love your fresh melons but i gotta say the genetically modified ones aren't bad. The texture is good, not mealy like peaches, pears and nectarines and they're sweet. I cut them up vac seal them, throw in freezer and they're good for making cantaloupe shakes in the middle of the night vs eating a pie.
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