Some of this issue is concerned with energy and food production, and that is also as good a field as any to gauge the cost of going back to the "good old times." One of the more effective fallacies of pied piper Lovins has been his assurance that halving our per capita electricity use means no more than going back to 1963, and that a return to the 1910 per capita consumption of primary energy would only mean dropping to the present British level. Apart from the fact that the figures are disgustingly misleading, as they usually are from this source (US per capita consumption in 1910 was 80% higher than in 1940), he conveniently forgets that Britain does not feed itself, let alone much of the rest of the world, as America does.
Agriculture in the US went through a revolution so stunning that the preceding 10,000 years since man first raised crops seem like unimportant pre-history. And the technical reasons for this are precisely among the no-growthers' most hated targets: the gasoline engine, the use of electricity, and energy-intensive fertilizer. In the 15 years from 1960 to 1975 (when electricity consumption roughly doubled, though no immediate cause-effect relationship is implied), production of poultry and dairy products tripled, and meat production more than doubled, for the same amount of invested labor.
As for 1910 (when 25% of the area under cultivation was used to grow feed for horses and mules), one US farmer supplied 7.1 persons with food; today he supplies 59. With a team of horses, he ploughed about 1 acre per day; with a tractor, he ploughs 35 or more. An acre of his land yielded 26 bushels of corn; today it will yield 97.
To produce the 1974 crops with 1918 technology (Dr Gavett of the USDA has calculated) would require 61 million horses and mules, which would take 20 years to breed from the 3 million now alive; it would use up half the US cropland for feeding them; it would need 27 million farm workers beyond the present 4 million; it would -
Enough! We are long past the point of no return.
Yet technology is not the only reason for the US agricultural miracle: Tractors and fertilizers are not unknown in the USSR. But American agriculture was revolutionized by free men who took their own decisions on their own land; the 80 million odd kolkhozniki are serfs of a handful of men who mismanage one sixth of the globe's land area.
They are not the only ones who think they can make the world tick. Some time ago, the Indian government decreed it would provide cheap food for "industrialization" by setting the price of grain at 50% of the world market price. So the Indian farmer, who is no dumber than the American oilman, went back to subsistence farming; and the Indian bureaucrats, who are no smarter than the oil-entitlement jugglers in Washington, are pondering the umpteenth fiasco of price controls.
None of these megalomaniacs can ever overcome the invisible hand of economic self-interest, but they can and do inflict grievous damage by obstinately trying. Mao Tse-Tung's "Great Leap Forward" a coercive retrogression to a decentralized economy very much like that advocated by Lovins - lasted only two years; but it put the country back by at least a decade.
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Vol. 6, No. 8
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 6 Issue/No.: Vol. 6, No. 8 Date: April 01, 1979 08:08 AM Title: The cost of retrogression
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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