well, we tend toward "Green" things here (thanks to the influence of the Catholic church, who in the past backed communism/liberation theology, and now backs the Pope's "Green" ideas. ).
But there are problems. For example, much of our electricity here comes from hydro electric plants: And in "Tag-Init", the three months before the monsoon when it is very hot here, the water levels go down, and often we have rolling brownouts because we lack electricity (of course, everyone has back up generators, so no big problem for businesses or the middle class).
However, the idea that one can get rid of fossil fuel quickly is a pipe dream.
and I was bemused to see this twitterexchange: Patrick Moore is essentially a Greenpeace type activists telling the city raised ex bartender she is a bit clueless: there is a lot of stuff on that twitter exchange but this is the one that caught my eye:
Pompous little twit. You don’t have a plan to grow food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels, or get the food into the cities. Horses? If fossil fuels were banned every tree in the world would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating. You would bring about mass death.
well, our family grows organic brown rice, which is really healthy, but it too expensive for the poor in Manila to buy.
So let me point out the steps where fossil fuel will have to be replaced.
First: you have to prepare the rice paddies by flooding. If the rains are low, it means using an irrigation pump to flood the fields.
Then you prepare the mud by using a waterbuffalo to mix the weeds into the mud to kill them (and to rot to enrich the soil). That method of course means cowfart methane from the waterbuffalo and methane from the rotting vegetation.
But most farmers use a "hand plow" to do this heavy work nowadays (and the waterbuffalo? Erap is promoting drinking waterbuffalo milk products instead of importing them from New Zealand or China).
From the gov't site about growing rice with less labor and better yields. Discussion of wet vs dry cultivation Dry uses more chemicals but produces less methane. Discussion here.
then you have flooding and weeding: Again, you can weed by hand (we do this for organic rice) or use herbicides.
as for harvesting: you can cut by sickle, pound it to thresh the rice off of the stalk, dry it on a flat surface, and then store it.
IRRI on harvesting rice.
Harvesting rice consists of the basic operations which can be done in individual steps or in combination using a combine harvester. These include:
- Reaping - cutting the mature panicles and straw above ground
- Threshing - separating the paddy grain from the rest of cut crop
- Cleaning - removing immature, unfilled, non-grain materials
- Hauling - moving the cut crop to the threshing location
- Field drying - leaving the cut crop in the field and exposing it to the sun for drying (optional)
- Stacking/piling - temporarily storing the harvested crop in stacks or piles (optional)
- Bagging - putting the threshed grain in bags for transport and storage
Every step of rice growing now uses machinery run by petroleum or electricity.
True, in our area, we still have small farmers who cut their rice by hand, but there are modern harvesters who cut/thresh and bag in one step.
But even our farmers who harvest by hand tend to "borrow" our thresher, because that is the hard part.
good old days:
how we do it today:
and in the near future, we will see more rice harvested by machine, as is done in more affluent cultures; The machine will harvest the rice, and thresh/separate it in one step.
again, these machines use gasoline/diesel.
In our area, we still dry on the roads/vacant lots
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| A farmer dries palay in the heat of the day along Tanay main highway in Rizal province, April 23, 2018. Maria Tan, ABS-CBN News/file |
the problem? Rain. if a typhoon comes at harvest, it means often cutting not quite ripe rice, but even when it is ripe, then you have trouble drying it: You have to stand in line for the rice mill to do it using an electric drier, and of course, they dry the rice of their usual customers first.
delay in drying the rice means deterioration due to mold etc... After one typhoon a couple years ago, our electric rice drier died, and by the time we got it dried at the rice mill, it had deteriorated so much that we couldn't use it for our customers, so we had to sell it for a much lower price, and we had to buy rice from other organic growers to replace it for our customers.
Again, rice driers can use diesel/gasoline or electricity.
Most small farmers harvest their own rice and store some rice for eating, but sell the rest to the local rice merchant.
But how do you get the rice to the drier or rice mill? Usually by truck or tricycle, a motorcycle with a side cart.
The rice mill will then mill the rice. Again, this uses electricity or petroleum to run the machines.
and then you pack into bags and move it to where you sell it.
Again, this usually uses trucks (we have a pickup for small batches and a larger truck for the stacks, and here a common site is a truck full of rice sacks traveling down our narrow city streets to get to the highway).
So Manila has ten million people. Logistically, if there is no petrol to move the rice, you will have starvation.
so Mr. Moore is right:
You don’t have a plan to grow food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels, or get the food into the cities. Horses?
but we don't have a lot of horses around nowadays, so maybe we could use carts pulled by waterbuffalo... but they are also being replaced.
Maybe by bicycle powered carts? Well, at least we are flat country, but I'd hate to try to feed the folks in the mountain provinces, or places like Baguio...
Most people here buy rice at the palenke (using a tricycle) but we also have lots of small shops that sell rice and snacks all over, because even a tricycle costs money (50 cents round trip, but if you make only 3 dollars a day, it adds up, so you walk).
And of course, you need to cook rice: Most people use LPG (gas), and the poor use wood, which not only is a fire hazard but contributes to the periodic fires in our slums, the asthma in poor kids, and general air pollution.
and where do you get the wood?
So the dirty little secret is that if you got rid of machines and petroleum too quickly, there would indeed be mass starvation of the poor in the world's megacities.
If fossil fuels were banned every tree in the world would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating.
But I'd probably be safe: My husband, who had lived through the war and through the depression, promised me if I moved here to the Philippines, we'd always have rice to eat, no matter what.
ah, but we live 60 miles from Manila, and if we faced a million hungry refugees with guns and machetes, would we manage to survive? That is the question.
Hmm... maybe if the googleeyed bartender behind the green deal wants to learn about the logistics of feeding people, she can visit us. We rent rooms in above our business center for ecotourism too.
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