By the turn of the twentieth century, the world was producing 100 million metric tones of petroleum-derived reactive nitrogen annually to grow livestock feed alone. Unsurprisingly, livestock populations are responsible for emissions of 2.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per annum, from combinations of livestock-driven deforestation, soil cultivation, land deterioration, desertification, and reactive nitrogen mobilization. Again, it is no accident that the current mode of livestock production accounts for 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions 37 percent of methane emissions, and for 64 percent of anthropogenic ammonia emissions, which generates acid rain and causes acidification of vast areas in the world. The anthropogenic disturbance of soils related to the expansion of feed-crop production in particular has far-reaching ramifications for the earth’s carbon balance, since soils are the largest reservoir of carbon, storing between 1,100 billion and 1,600 billion metric tons, compared with 560 billion metric tons contained in living vegetation and 750 billion metric tons in the atmosphere. It is estimated that pasture production–induced oxidation alone results in 100 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per annum, accompanied by 3 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions from the respiratory processes of livestock production, 86 million metric tons of methane from enteric fermentation, and 17.4 million metric tons of methane emissions from manure decomposition.44
The ecological and atmospheric impacts of industrial livestock are compounded by a global meat manufacturing system that is fully integrated into the agrochemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing systems. In the United States, 37 percent of pesticides and 50 percent of antibiotics are consumed in the livestock sector. The amounts of the chemical compounds, antibiotics, and growth hormones not assimilated by livestock and their feed crops are put back into the environment; 50 percent of synthetic nitrogen applied to crop production is released and enters downstream natural assets with far-reaching impacts on ecosystem functions. Since capital accumulation in the livestock sector and accumulation in the chemical/pharmaceutical manufacturing system have now become coterminous, the combined effects of production in the two realms will continue to have a force multiplier effect of degradation on ecosystem functions. For example, the annual global emissions of air-polluting ammonia grew from 18.8 million metric tons at the beginning of the twentieth century to 56.7 million metric tons by the 1990s and is now conservatively projected to increase to 116 million metric tons by 2050.45
Third, the livestock revolution exerts enormous pressure on the ecological relations of production relative to ever-diminishing freshwater resources. Water withdrawals are already intensively used for animals, for growing and processing animal feed crops, cleaning and cooling farm animal facilities, and for processing livestock products. As Colin Tudge has trenchantly pointed out, today’s average farmer uses 500 liters of water to grow 1 kilo of potatoes, 900 liters to grow 1 kilo of wheat, and 2,000 liters to grow 1 kilo of rice. In contrast, the same farmer uses 3,500 liters of water to raise a kilo of chicken and 100,000 liters of water to obtain a kilo of beef. In addition, the multiplication of animal farm operations will grossly interfere with the processes of hydrological circulation and regulation, making the natural replenishment of water systems difficult due to the compaction of soil, reduction in infiltration, degradation of river banks, salinization, depletion of floodplains, and the lowering of water tables.46
There is also the problem of quality. The livestock revolution will continue to compromise the integrity of the global hydrology through pollution, contamination, and eutrophication of freshwater bodies, following the insertions of animal waste, reactive nitrogen, phosphorus, pesticides, antibiotics, countless growth hormones, and other synthetic agents into natural water systems. In the United States, the livestock sector is responsible for 33 percent of the synthetic nitrogen and phosphorus load inserted into freshwater bodies, causing nitrate contamination, acidification, and eutrophication of immense proportions. The quantitative diminution and qualitative deterioration of water supplies will occur in the alarming context of the fact that, by 2025, 64 percent of human population will be living in water-stress basins, and 1.4 billion people will be living in water-scarcity regions. By 2014 two billion people were already living in river basins where they experienced water scarcity at least one month in a year.47
What all of the preceding means is that the principles of sustainable scale, efficient allocation, and social justice have long been violated by the hyper-acceleration of resource extraction and waste production. The regenerating and self-cleansing capacity of nature has been hollowed out in the past fifty years because too much raw material has been taken out of nature to keep the machine of capitalist accumulation going, and too much waste had been dumped into the environment and the atmosphere. The overextraction of forest resources compounded the erosion of the global forest ecology’s capacity to provide essential ecosystem services such as temperature regulation, carbon sequestration, rainfall generation, water purification, erosion prevention, flood control, and protection of critical habitat for countless animal species. Likewise, the loss of 50 percent of global wetlands, mangroves, estuarine and deltaic resources during the past fifty years gutted the capacity of these ecosystems to provide such essential functions as carbon sequestration, shoreline stabilization, erosion and flood control, aquifer recharges, water purification, sediment detention, chemical absorption or neutralization, and the provision of critical habitat to countless terrestrial and aquatic species. It must also be borne in mind that it is estimated that the Amazon forests pump into the atmosphere 20 billion gallons each day from their stored water of 8 trillion metric tons. This is said to be equivalent to the energy of 80,000 coal-fired super-giant power stations performing the same job every day. The Amazon basin receives half of its rainfall from its own hydrologic cycle. In the Congo basin, 75 to 95 percent of rainfall comes from recycled moisture within the basin itself.48 The natural allocative efficiency of forests as drivers of evapotranspiration, cloud formation, the hydrologic cycle, and regulation of climate is organically connected to the distributions, structures, characteristics, densities, and contiguities of forests, which determine the frequency and intensity of precipitation.
THE STRUCTURAL DILEMMA
The above broad description leads to this fundamental question: Could biofuels be produced (both first-generation and second-generation) in sufficient quantity to grease the machine of global capitalism without worsening resource depletion, environmental degradation, and atmospheric deterioration? Even though the core chapters in this book will provide the complete answer to the above question, a prefatory word is in order here. To restate the case once again, since nothing is made from nothing, it stands to reason that the throughput required to produce biofuels must come either from the diversion of food and feed crops in sufficient quantity to biofuel production or from the conversion of more and more forests, savannahs, and grasslands to cropland to grow feedstocks. There is no other option. The emergent competition