21st Century Power is a Weblog about realizing sustainable energy infrastructure — the technologies, the economics thereof, and the political drivers.

It is dedicated to the notion that energy is the lifeblood of all economic activity on the planet — and that sustainable energy is thus critical to the survival of civilization as we know it.

My thinking on this topic has been long and deep, but (until now) fairly quiet. You won’t find much published evidence, save for here — my comments on a September 15, 2006 article, "The Energy Harvest," by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

Though I respect Friedman greatly, he was at the time holding up Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol industry as a model for the U.S., and I felt I had to respectfully point out the fatal flaw in such biofuel approaches: That they are by definition unsustainable in a world where maintaining food supplies is in fact a bigger problem than scarcity of energy:

"Very nice column, but you and many other writers hopping on the ethanol bandwagon these days need to acknowledge in future coverage that crops don’t magically grow from nowhere. They need input to develop cellulose, sugar and other nice things.

This leads to the question: What makes the crop yields at those sugarcane farms you visited so high at such a reasonable cost? It’s fertilizer, which is made from OIL.

Ethanol’s Achilles heel as an oil substitute is that when there’s no more oil, the world’s agricultural productivity is going to drop dramatically. It is being propped up at an unsustainably high level by mass use of oil-based fertilizer. So the end of oil means end of our ability to produce this amazing oil substitute in adequate quantities.

But at that point, we may well not care so much about fueling our cars, because we’ll be too busy as a global population of six billion people fighting over a food supply sufficient to feed only two or three billion!"

The world came around to my view (if tragically) 7 months later, when global food prices shot up to crisis levels, triggering hunger and riots in the developing world (April 2008). Although only a tiny percentage of the world’s arable land had been converted to biofuel crops, this new development was immediately recognized as a catalyst – and it focused unprecedented global attention on the fuel-versus-food conflict that I’d flagged.

A little aside: According to estimates recently cited by an FAO economist, 25-40 percent of the increase in food prices stemmed from biofuels, which are are expected to keep food commodity prices 10-15 percent higher than they would have been otherwise for some time to come.

Given the above, we can only imagine how these effects could be exacerbated by the longer-term problem I also pointed to: the disappearance of oil-based fertilizers and the soil productivity levels they prop up.

This story is far from over. Watch this space.