Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture

Concerned about food and how a world economy fueled by oil will continue to feed more than 6.5 billion people when the oil squeeze comes? I suggest you read this book. Pfeiffer, a geologist and science journalist who has been intimately involved with peak oil issues for more than ten years, provides profound insight with his analysis of how the impending peak in oil production will affect global food production. He goes into the details of how the different choices that Cuba and North Korea made, while dealing with the nearly instantaneous loss of their oil supplies when the Soviet Union broke up, radically affected the quality of life for their citizens. In the case of North Korea, their economy was shattered and millions of people died of starvation and disease. In the case of Cuba, people lost weight and made do with less, but a shift to sustainable agriculture and natural healing averted catastrophe. Cuba provides us with a glimpse of a possible future that avoids violent collapse, and provides a reasonable quality of life, in spite of having to live while consuming less energy and buying less stuff.