A group of 29 scientists have published an article in the prestigious Science journal arguing for the development of perennial grain crops which have been described as potentially "the biggest agricultural revolution for 10,000 years".

Currently, most grain grown around the world has to be replanted after every crop. 70% of all cropland is used for annual cereals, oilseeds and legumes. Thia consumes a lot of resources and is hard on the land.

The scientists argue that perennial grain, in addition to not needing replanting - saving farm machinery passing over and compacting the ground and reducing fuel consumption - would have a much deeper and more powerful root system than annuals. This would mean that it used water much more efficiently.

Other benefits of a deep perennial root system would be less erosion and better carbon sequestration. Perhaps most importantly, such a field might need as little as 3% of the fertiliser required by annuals. Not only are nitrate fertilizers energy-intensive to make, they are also prone to washing out of fields to pollute water supplies, kill habitats and cause other ecologcal damage.

Perennial fields would also require much less herbicide for control weeds.
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It’s an old joke - If we have more daylight then we have more sunshine so, naturally, the world will get warmer .

It seems obvious that, in reality, daylight saving will reduce our need for lighting and, therefore, our electricity consumption. So obvious, in fact, that until now it seems that nobody had bothered to test it. Now a study by the University of California Energy Institute has thrown new light on the subject.

The study examined the electricity consumption residents of southern Indiana over a period of three years by analysing some seven million monthly electricity bills.

The result: daylight savings actually increases electricity demand, instead of lessening it!

Daylight saving caused electrical demand to rise almost 1 percent each year overall - with the heaviest increase of 2-4 percent in the autumn. The cause is most likely a tradeoff between the reduced demand for lighting and a relatively small increased demand for heating and cooling. But, because heating and cooling uses much more electricity than lighting, the net effect was an overall increase in electricity consumption.

The study points out that daylight saving is practiced in 76 countries and affects around 1.6 billion people. If it really is causing needless energy consumption, stopping daylight saving could reduce greenhouse gas production and help reduce global warming.

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The stock market crash of 1929 is generally taken beginning of the Great Depression. In fact, the stock market significantly recovered within a few months. The real problems started when consumer confidence failed in the early 1930s, leading to a downward spiral in consumption, production and employment.

There have been comparisons between 1929 and the current situation but there are very significant differences - particularly in Australia.

When there is a decline in confidence, three things need to happen to boost economic activity.

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How much of the world’s energy consumption could be produced from agricultural biomass?

Currently about 14 million square kilometres of land is being cultivated. There is about another 4 million square kilometres of crop and pasture land which is not being used. If energy crops were planted on the abandoned land they could produce about 27 exajoules of energy a year - equivalent to 172 million barrels of oil or 5% of the world’s current energy use of around 500 exajoules a year. Even if all of the current agricultural land was user for energy crops, the total energy production would be only about a quarter of our total energy consumption.

While growing energy crops may make a contribution to our energy needs, it is obviously not the whole answer!

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For over 100 years up to 1970, the price of a barrel of oil was remarkably stable at between about $us21 and $us25 (adjusted for inflation). Contrary to general belief, the formation of OPEC in 1960 did not lead to an immediate increase in oil prices - in fact, prices declined throughout the sixties. What actually changed things was peak oil in Texas which occurred in about 1970.

Up to that time, the Railroad Commission of Texas, which (despite its name) regulates the Texas oil and gas industry, had limited the amount of oil that was produced in order to control prices. In March, 1971, it stopped controlling supply because there was no longer any surplus which could be held back. The effect of this was to give control to OPEC, which did have a surplus - and, in reality, to Saudi Arabia whose supplies dominated OPEC.

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Before the modern era, life expectancy was no more than 35 years and as low as 20 years in some places. By 1900, life expectancy in the United States had increased to 47 years (which is the current life expectancy in Nigeria). By 2000, it was about 77 years in the United States and more than 80 years in several countries, including Australia..

Life expectancy has increased because of better sanitation and nutrition and through medical advances. If these continue to improve, presumably life expectancy will continue to increase. As people live longer, more advances will occur in their lifetime - and they will live longer still.

World population is predicted to stabilize at around 9 billion by about 2070. But to keep the population stable, the number of births must equal the number of deaths. If we keep increasing our lifespan, we must keep reducing the birth rate.

If we ever reach the stage at which the age of death is being advanced by more than one year per year (It’s now advancing at about one year every three years), the birthrate will have to be zero to keep the size of the population stable.

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So this is the twenty-first century! It doesn’t seem to be quite what we were promised. We were supposed to have unlimited atom-powered energy - not to be running out of oil. We were supposed to be cruising about in flying cars - not getting gridlocked in traffic.

And they told us that all sorts of diseases were being eliminated - nobody mentioned aids or ebola or sars or bird flu. And what about those nasty antibiotic-resistant viruses. We were the ones supposed to be getting resistant - not the bloody germs!

And why can’t I take a trip to the Moon? That movie was set in 2001, so tripping off to the Moon should be routine and our first visit to Jupiter should be history.

Then there were those who worried that Communism would spread from Russia throughout the world. Nobody said that Moscow would end up having more capitalist billionaires than any other city.

And what would the authors of that God Is Dead issue of Time make of the rise of religious fundamentalism?

And why didn’t anyone predict climate change?

The reason is that we’re at a point of discontinuity. When people try to predict the future, they usually look at what’s been happening and assume that the same sort of thing will continue to happen. But sometimes it doesn’t. The Industrial Revolution was such a time. From the middle of the eighteenth century, new mechanical technologies produced an entirely different world to the one which would have been predicted by extrapolating the trends which were occurring in the old post-feudal agricultural economy.

("Industrial Revolution" ex Flickr)

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