Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Trading food for fuel, in a world where high food prices already affect the poor, has always seemed like a bad idea to me. If I have a choice between growing corn to fuel SUVs versus growing corn to make tortillas, to me that’s a no-brainer. I’ve known too many people for whom expensive tortillas are unobtainable tortillas to vote any other way.
Figure 1. The preferable kind of corn-field-based fuel, brought to you by a corn field in Michigan. SOURCE
As a result, I’m a long-time opponent of turning corn into fuel. I think it is a crime against the poor, made the worse by the unthinking nature of the ethanol proponents as they advocate taking food out of poor kids’ mouths.
But that’s not the only way that our monomaniacal insistence on renewable energy is taking food from the plates of the poor. For example, tropical forest has been cleared for oil-palm plantations for fuel. But even that is not what this post is about. This post is about trading food for energy in California, the breadbasket for the nation. Here’s the headline:
Fresno County judge rules in favor of I-5 solar project
Jan 03 – The Fresno Bee, Calif.
A Fresno County judge has ruled that a solar energy project along Interstate 5 can move forward despite arguments from the state farm bureau that it will eat up valuable California farmland.
The decision, which comes as good news to the state’s burgeoning solar industry, is the first handed down in the ongoing land war between solar developers seeking real estate for renewable energy and Central Valley farmers trying to protect their tillage.
While the ruling pertains only to the Fresno County project, the decision sends a message across the Valley that agriculture doesn’t necessarily reign supreme.
“I do think it gives a boost to the solar development community,” said Kristen Castanos, a partner at the law firm Stoel Rives in Sacramento who has represented energy ventures and tracked solar efforts on farmland. “This gives counties and developers a little more confidence in moving forward.” SOURCE
This is unbelievably short-sighted. The only good news is that compared to say buildings, it’s much easier to remove a solar installation and return the land to actually producing food. Not easy in either case, but easier for solar. But the good news stops there.
The bad news is, the power thus produced will be much more expensive than power from either fossil fuels or hydropower. But both fossil fuels and hydro are verboten under Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown’s plan to get 30% of all electricity from renewable sources, with “renewable” meaning “renewables other than hydro”. Thirty percent! This madness has already given us some of the highest electrical rates in the country, and we’re not even near to 30% renewable yet.
The worse news is what the dispute was about. California has a strong farmland act, called the Williamson Act. If you put your farmland under the Williamson Act, you can’t develop it, it has to stay farmland. In exchange you get various tax advantages. The important thing to note is that it is a legal contract between the State of California and the owners of the land. This is to prevent the landowner from taking the benefits and then developing the land.
In this case, the article cited above goes on to say (emphasis mine):
Superior Court Judge Donald Black found last month that Fresno County officials acted appropriately two years ago when they canceled a farm-conservation contract that allowed a solar development to proceed on ag land near Coalinga.
The California Farm Bureau Federation sued the county, alleging that the Board of Supervisors did not have the right to cancel the contract put in place under the state’s farm-friendly Williamson Act.
Black said county supervisors met Williamson Act requirements for canceling the contract.
“All parties concede the development of renewable energy is an important public interest both in the state of California and in Fresno County,” Black wrote.
I’m sorry, but there is no public interest in wildly expensive solar power. Nor should County officials be able to break a legal contract at their whim, based on some fanciful claim of a public benefit. The only people being benefitted here, above the table at least, are the owners of the project. The owners will be paid a highly inflated price for their power, which I and other ratepayers will be forced to subsidize. Expensive subsidized energy is not in the public interest in any sense.
In any case, breaking a Williamson Act contract to put in a solar installation definitely reveals the profound hypocrisy of the people behind the project and the useful idiots that support it. They’re approving massive, hideous development on prime farmland in order, they claim, to save the environment. Yeah, pave it to save it, that’s the ticket …
It also sets an extremely bad judicial precedent for future breaking of Williamson Act contracts. Since Kelo vs. New London the expansion of the “taking” powers of governments under the infinitely flexible rubric of “public interest” has ballooned unbelievably. Now we are to the point where they can even take away Williamson Act protections.
The Williamson Act is there to protect the totally irreplaceable, amazingly productive farmlands of California. The Fresno County officials are breaking the intent and spirit of the Williamson Act so that private developers can make a fortune picking the ratepayers’ pockets … and that’s supposed to be in the public interest? Spare me. For me, a kid who grew up on the good rich California earth, that’s a very sad day.
So yes. The idea that you shouldn’t allow the development of solar installations on some of the world’s finest farmland, not just any farmland but farmland legally protected under the Williamson Act, appears to be history in Californica. Infinitely stupid.
Y’know, I love the land here—the fold and break of the coastal hills dropping into the ocean; the wide valleys full of farms; the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where I grew up, towering over the Central Valley; the crazy, blazing deserts; the forests and groves full of deer and fox and mountain lion; and my own little corner where I live in the middle of a redwood forest, with a tiny triangle of the sea visible through the coastal hills. What’s not to like?
But I am roundly fed up with the government, and with the ‘lets power the world on moonbeams, we can all ride high-speed unicorns for transportation and just eat veggie-burgers’ crowd of folks that thinks losing irreplaceable farmland is a good thing in a hungry world, and thinks that hydropower is not renewable energy …
Regards to all,
w.
Zeke said @ur momisugly January 6, 2013 at 10:37 pm
You also said:
You neglect to mention that he also stimulated the first general census in Britain since the Domesday Book, thus enabling Florence Nightingale to implement much needed health reforms, inspired Darwin to write On the Origin of Species, John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy etc. Your tirade against Malthus is remarkably similar to Karl Marx’s leading me to speculate that’s where your sympathies lie.
@ur momisugly EM Smith
Thanks for that. I might even try that sprouted grain fodder trick for the pigs I intend to fatten next summer.
You wrote:
Agree except I don’t believe that intelligence/being-well-educated [delete whichever is inapplicable] has much to do with it. We in the West and increasingly the rest of the world have never been better educated and IQ has risen concomitantly with improved nutrition. Yet we still seem to make the same kinds of errors that our forebears did. As that great cynic Voltaire wrote: “History never repeats; people always do.”
@E.M.Smith wrote:
“Given that in 50 years the $US has lost about 95% of its prior value to inflation, and STILL doesn’t make the list, it gives you an idea what it takes to be thought of as ‘bad’ inflation…
I think what we have here is an existence proof that paper / fiat currencies are just a bad idea. Rather like was written into our constitution (and is now ignored…)”
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A fellow Libertarian. Cool.
Yes, eventually the Chinese will realize that it makes no sense to expend their land, labor and capital in shipping goods to America in exchange for worthless and rapidly depreciating pieces of paper (aka US$).
China will, at some point, dump their US$ holdings for whatever they can get, end their Renminbi/US$ peg, switch to a gold standard, transform from an export to a domestic oriented economy and become the next world Super Power.
When and how long this will take is anyone’s guess, but I’m thinking much sooner than later….
I’ve pretty much given up hope on the US. You’re right that the original Constitution only truly exists in some hermetically sealed display at the U.S. National Archives. It no longer serves any useful purpose in the US government other than as a rough historic reference.
When the spirit of the U.S. Constitution died, so did the greatest nation that was ever devised….
And so it goes….until it doesn’t…..
E.M.Smith
You aren’t entirely wrong about oil from fracking and other sources, but I think you are far from right. To understand why, you need to understand a bit about “oil shales”.
Oil shales, like people, come in a lot of varieties. There are some “tight” shales like the Bakken that can be fracked to release hydrocarbons. That’s real oil. It tends to be kind of expensive because it requires a lot of drilling to get a barrel and the wells deplete more rapidly than conventional wells in more permeable strata. It’s not clear that secondary recovery can get all that much additional oil from old wells in tight shales. It’s certainly possible, but let’s don’t count our btu-s before we know we can get them out of the ground. Problem is that there aren’t a whole lot of these formations. And it’s not terribly likely that more will be found. The geological column in the US is pretty well known (less so in Arctic North America).
Then there are conventional oil shales. These aren’t candidates for fracking — at least not with current technologies. Some of them can be mined and burned and some make great “road metal”. But it’s unlikely that much oil can be extracted, processed, and poured into your car. And the US actually doesn’t have that many of them.
Then there is the Green River formation. There really are huge amounts of hydrocarbons in those old lake beds. Trillions of barrels. People have been trying to exploit them for over a century. Problem is that temps underground in the area where these deposits exist never reached the “oil window” so the hydrocarbons are present as long chain hydrocarbons that don’t flow — “candle wax” if you will. Just melting the kerogen isn’t enough because the rock isn’t very permeable. One needs to frack and heat, or refine in place, or frack and use solvents, or something. Can we get enough oil out to suck in investors? For sure. Can we ever get enough oil out to have economic affect? Without putting in more btu-s than we recover? I don’t know. No one does. I wouldn’t say we will never recover those hydrocarbons, but I wouldn’t bet on doing so any time soon. With current technology, I suspect Coal to Liquid would be cheaper. Ask yourself why no one is building CTL plants in the US.
Secondary recovery? Sure. It works. It’s used. Has been for decades. BUT, it’s hardly a new concept If it were as effective as you seem to think, would the US have been importing half its petroleum needs for decades? With devastating effects on our Current Account balance BTW
Natural gas. 2100 TCF is kind of optimistic I think. Read the link I provided. About half that is “speculative”. I imagine that some of the speculative gas will turn up and flow. But “speculative” means “don’t bet against it, but don’t bet on it either”.
On the positive side. A significant use for petroleum is as a feedstock for petrochemicals and for cement production. I forget the numbers, but let’s call it 10%. There’s no reason for even the greenest of environmentalists to object to those things being produced for export in the US where there are environmental regulations with some teeth instead of overseas where there might not be (or, more likely, bribing the regulators is cheaper than complying with the regs). To a great extent, petroleum can be replaced with natural gas in those applications and coal can also be used as a feedstock. China is said to be shifting some of its limited coal production from electricity to petrochemicals. The only problem is that it takes time to deploy (and in some cases develop) the technologies.
I salute your efforts at seed preservation. I’d like to try it, but I suffer from both a brown thumb and living close to the Northern limit of agriculture. The stuff that grows here, often grows really well, but there’s not enough growing season for a lot of things.
After my last pass through the comments here, I stopped by Judith Curry’s, Climate Etc blog which I like because of Dr Curry’s generally moderate and thoughtful analyses of topics that tend to be dominated by raving lunacy at both extremes. And I found this:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/05/peak-farmland/#more-10857
Basically, these guys are arguing that we don’t really need more farmland to accommodate population growth. I’m not sure I believe that, but it’s nice to know there is a plausible case that the planet will really be able to feed its (excessive if you ask me) population through this century.
@ur momisugly EM Smith
I’ve decided that I won’t be purchasing one of those Sundrop Farms installations. I contacted a friend at Port Augusta who tells me that to date the enterprise hasn’t shown anything like a profit. Yes, it’s creating Green Jobs, recycling, desalinating, pesticide-free produce, reducing emissions of toxic CO2 and all, but there’s no surplus of income over expenditure. They say there will be in the future… I suspect from what my friend said that I will not live long enough to see it.
Given the number of bushfires that are exercising our fire brigades the last few days, it also occurs to me that while losing a field of wheat/barley/oats/poppies would be bad for the bank balance, losing several million dollars worth of infrastructure would be a complete disaster. I imagine a vegetation-free zone of of a kilometre, or so might suffice, but be pretty damned ugly.
I also just returned from watering my greenhouse where I tried to imagine how the frequently claimed much higher yields from hydroponics versus my organic fertiliser program could work. I figure the tomatoes would have to weigh several kilos each and I have never seen examples of the varieties I grow (Amish Paste & San Marzano) anywhere near that big. So it goes…
TPG, I looked into Sundrop Farms a while back (sorry, can’t find the research). It’s quite nifty technology, but it’s also a typical greenie boondoggle which has been supported by millions of dollars of taxpayer money, here and abroad. As you have pointed out, it’s not whether things are possible, it’s whether they are viable that matters. And your point about bushfires is well made – I gather that you are in Tasmania which has suffered major damage in the last few days, and where I live we are on extreme alert tomorrow, with over 100 fires now burning in NSW alone.
You wouldn’t want tens of millions of dollars worth of fancy greenhouses, desal facilities, generators, pipes etc at risk just so you can grow tomatoes in a dry location near the sea.
Zeke says: January 6, 2013 at 10:37 pm
I said, scientists cannot prophesy the future.
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prophesy? as in like climate models?
Why do you make my nose twitch?
A couple of observations: Predictions made in the late 1800 about population capacity cannot be correct except by random chance, meaning lucky guess. Too much has changed for any prediction to be accurate. Throughout history, some people have lucked out and guessed what will happen in the future and some writings have been slanted by believers to fit various viewpoints. Predictions of the future are nothing more than guesses, some with more data than others. We may be able to see a direction that we seem to be heading in, but “when” we will arrive at the conclusion and if there will be detours along the way are impossible to predict.
The seawater gardening was interesting, but the marketing terms “sustainable” “renewable” and “climate change” are huge red flags to me. Researchers would call “climate change” changes in climate or varying local weather conditions. Sustainable and renewable are ONLY marketing terms and have no associated component in reality outside of sales. Seeing all three terms says “beware” loudly.
You’re posing a false trade-off. One can use the same cob of corn to produce ethanol and feed cattle for meat.
I am starting to feel sorry for Malthus (RIP). Here is a guy who did some genuinely good work, but is dragged out of his well-deserved rest again and again because of what he got wrong. I do not know whether he deliberately touched on, or sparked, or revived, the potent (but wrong) belief that human population is no different from boom-and-bust cycles in the animal world. It was one part of his life’s work, and has been used as an excuse for everything from eugenics to mass starvation ever since.
If I were a descendant of his, I’d be embarrassed at what people say in his name. More importantly, it is a reminder to scientists that observations are excellent, recommendations may be good, but predictions are poison and should be avoided.
John F. Hultquist says: @ur momisugly January 6, 2013 at 5:51 pm
…. I have the sense that underlying some of the comments is the assumption that a complete conversion of the fleet would be easy, quick, and cheap — sort of a full blown 100% “cash for clunkers.”
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You will have to pry my 1982 diesel Pkup out of my cold dead hands…..
SAMURAI says:
January 6, 2013 at 8:21 pm
@Gail:
The reason prices for EVERYTHING are going up is that US Federal Reserve is now “PRINTING” ….
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Believe me I am well aware of that but you missed what Goldman Sachs and the rest of the financial traders were up to. This is why I keep shouting about FOOD being the next BIG FINANCIAL BUBBLE! It is the most dangerous financial bubble yet and these d&*&^m A$$… are playing with sparking revolutions as the “Arab Spring” has shown.
(I think they think they can ‘control and steer’ these revolutions BTW link and link Bill Clinton gives lectures at LSE and promotes the LSE The Third Way )
E.M.Smith says: @ur momisugly January 6, 2013 at 11:06 pm
Fodder in the form of sprouted grains and legumes can be grown…..
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The barn I took riding lessons at between 1960-1965 was feeding sprouted grains from a hydroponics set-up to their horses. The horses loved the stuff.
The Pompous Git says:
January 6, 2013 at 11:52 pm
….. Yet we still seem to make the same kinds of errors that our forebears did. As that great cynic Voltaire wrote: “History never repeats; people always do.”
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I think that is because the ‘charming’ sociopaths rise to the top in corporations and politics. The old, nice guys finish last problem.
It is why I want small local government that the average citizen can keep a close eye on. The fact that less than ten US Congressmen/Senators over a hundred year period tried to correct the US Federal Reserve System and the fact that the Top Senate Democrat [states] bankers “own” the U.S. Congress proves that point.
It is not as if Congress was not aware of the problems with fractional reserve banking, heck one of the architects of the Federal Reserve Act, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, even QUOTED this speech from Webster just AFTER the passage of the ACT at a New York City dinner speech on October 15, 1913 IV Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science #1, at 38 (Columbia University, New York (1914)).
Gail Combs says: January 7, 2013 at 8:49 am
It is why I want small local government that the average citizen can keep a close eye on.
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That is the nub of the problem. Creeping disenfranchisement by freezing the House at 435 members in 1914 or whenever. Averages out to about 700,000 constituents per rep at present and getting worse. Forget about senators, forget about reps. There’s only so many hours in the day, and “excuse me but there’s another fellow waving a wad of cash at me, gotta go.” There is a solution but it is too radical for most folks and has to do with keeping the public revenues at home instead of sending it to wash dc.
The problem is an old one:
Daniel Webster, Senator from Massachusetts in a letter to Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second Bank of the United States: “I believe that I am due a refresher”
johanna said @ur momisugly January 7, 2013 at 7:40 am
On your latter points, prediction is something scientists (and people in general) do all the time. Indeed, it is the measure of success of a scientific theory that it makes correct predictions. The logical form is as follows:
This is an invalid deduction (affirming the consequent). It is said, however, to be a valid induction. As it happens, David Hume, who first pointed out (in modern times) that there was no justification for believing that the past can be used to predict the future, was a friend of Malthus’ father. We can never know whether we have a sufficiently complete set of empirical data about the past. Nor can we know anything about what has never happened before.
Despite this, we all reason inductively (including Hume throughout his writing). Today the sun rose in the east and set in the west. Therefore, tomorrow the sun will again rise in the east and set in the west. As CD Broad put it: “induction is the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy”.
So Johanna, do you believe that tomorrow the sun will rise in the east and set in the west? I know that I do along with countless others, but we cannot justify this except by appeal to what has happened in the past (that is inductively) and that is circular reasoning.
Gail Combs said @ur momisugly January 7, 2013 at 8:49 am
Which is why I have focussed my attention on what I can achieve locally. Along with my fellow citizens, we have achieved some notable successes in countering what USians call City Hall. Which is why I don’t worry too much about the UN and its Agenda 21. It’s not that I don’t believe Agenda 21 to be evil, just that I don’t believe I could ever achieve very much in the way of practical consequence by focussing on what is happening in a distant land.
johanna said @ur momisugly January 7, 2013 at 3:23 am
Same conclusion I came to. Apropos the bushfires, yes, they have been rather more severe than usual, though happily not as bad as 1967 (yet). The authorities are now allowing vehicles out of the Tasman Peninsula and report a hundred people still unaccounted for. I shall miss the village of Dunalley…
mpainter says:
January 7, 2013 at 10:22 am
Gail Combs says: January 7, 2013 at 8:49 am
It is why I want small local government that the average citizen can keep a close eye on.
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(mpainter) That is the nub of the problem. Creeping disenfranchisement by freezing the House at 435 members in 1914 or whenever. Averages out to about 700,000 constituents per rep at present and getting worse.
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I was about to point that out but you beat me to it. They “froze” the number because the building was full. They’ll change the Constituion but they won’t add on to the building. Couple that with the fact that the Senate was supposed to represent the governments of the States rather than citizens … a downhill slope.
PS Since tax and spending bills are to originate in the House, how is it that the Senate passed the “fiscal cliff” thing before the House?
Even without these sorts of issues, there is a general war on farmers here in CA. The policy environment for ag has really gone downhill over the past 25 years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/science/earth/in-fields-and-markets-guatemalans-feels-squeeze-of-biofuel-demand.html?pagewanted=all
With its corn-based diet and proximity to the United States, Central America has long been vulnerable to economic riptides related to the United States’ corn policy. Now that the United States is using 40 percent of its crop to make biofuel, it is not surprising that tortilla prices have doubled in Guatemala, which imports nearly half of its corn.
Reality check said @ur momisugly January 7, 2013 at 7:09 am
First, the six editions of Malthus’ essay were written between 1798 and 1826, about a hundred years before what you state. Second, science proceeds by guesses (conjectures in Popper’s terminology) that are either refuted, or corroborated. All such conjectures appear to be eventually refuted to be replaced by new and better conjectures. Note that some of what Malthus wrote in the first edition of his essay was refuted and he incorporated these refutations into the later editions. The greatest changes occurred between the first and second editions, but are by no means confined to those two.
Compare this with Ehrlich who has not incorporated any valid criticisms into his writing and continues to spout the same discredited thesis apparently endlessly. I recently had the misfortune to hear him interviewed on the radio and so know this to be true.
James at 48 says:
January 7, 2013 at 2:08 pm
Even without these sorts of issues, there is a general war on farmers here in CA. The policy environment for ag has really gone downhill over the past 25 years.
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American farmers were targeted long ago by a Milner Round Table group, the Committee on Economic Development (CED). Just after World War II the CED decide to intentionally force American farmers off their land and into cities to serve as cheap (desperate) labor in corporate factories. Shades of the earlier English Parliamentary enclosure movement and Highland Clearances. I would not be surprised if that is where the idea came from.
We are seeing the same game played out again elsewhere in the world today such as in Mexico were thanks to NAFTA and Clinton’s promise of industrialization 75% of the Mexican farmers have been forced from the land in to cities. Only problem is the promised factory jobs went to China instead, again thanks to the Clinton. This is why they can not pay for the tortillas, and like the Scots they come to the USA.
AN excellent essay on the US ‘Clearances” with references: link
The USA has been run by two Rhodes-Milner kindergardens The CED and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) for a generation, though we are ‘allowed’ to think we the citizens run the country. (Clinton is a Rhodes Scholar)