The Oil Drum

An also remember that almost every 'fuel' for man is via photons being processed in some way. (fission/fusion on earth is not a photonic dominated process)

I meant that to be a bit humorous, vtpeaknik.

However some folks believe that farming will not be adequate or viable in the future for supplying food for most people.

Some of us could develop and grow various kinds of fungus.

Welcome to mycoprotein. Welcome to Quorn. As they say on the website: "help yourself" and "it just might surprize you."

http://www.quorn.com/

And then there is meat grown in labs and edible algae, and herbal viagra. ;)

Seriously, the stuff that's out there like quorn is energy intensive, but not land intensive. Fire up the alternative energy, the nuclear power....yikes!

The more basic version of this would be cultivating mushrooms. If one could come up with a hardy mycoprotien that could be cultivated on a low energy basis, then we might have something.

Myself, I suspect that the human responses to the Bottleneck apart from technology will determine the fate of most or all of us, and right now it looks like our main focus is war.

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes just published "The Three Trillion Dollar War" about the USA's supposed Cakewalk in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One could chalk this up to the folly of Neocons and the Bush administration, but the Democrats have strongly supported these war crimes, and note that the leading candidates all do in spite of some vacuous rhetoric about getting the USA out of Iraq. (We'll pull back to Kuwait and Afghanistan and 14 permanent bases within Iraq: "Mission Accomplished!" Hah!)

The plan is war, not food. Guns, not butter. Kill off, not Die off.

Bruce Cockburn, "Indian Wars" 1990

Out in the desert where the wind never stops
A few simple people try to grow a few crops
Trying to maintain a life and a home
On land that was theirs before the Romans thought of Rome

A few dozen survivors, ragged but proud
With a few woolly sheep, under gathering cloud
It's never been easy, or free from strife
But the pulse of the land is the pulse of their life

You thought it was over but it's just like before
Will there never be an end to the Indian wars?

It's not breech-loading rifles and wholesale slaughter
It's kickbacks and thugs and diverted water
Treaties get signed and the papers change hands
But they might as well draft these agreements in sand

Noble Savage on the cinema screen
An Indian's good when he cannot be seen
And the so-called white so-called race
Digs for itself a pit of disgrace

You thought it was over but it's just like before
Will there never be an end to the Indian wars?

growing food in vats

While that might have been partially in jest, it brings up an idea which which I've been wrestling for past few days. Marginal and absolute returns to society as a whole for its operations/economy as a whole. If we've reached a point in the past few decades where growth no long improves people's lives but arguably makes those lives worse, then what would be the result of a huge economic effort to rebuild infrastructure?

Wouldn't that amount to speeding up the Titanic? If we were to grow food in vats - and society is beyond the point of diminishing returns - wouldn't that make matters worse?

The only way to get back to a good return on investment is to cut back on scale.

cfm in Gray, ME