No Oil, No Food
How the many converging crises lowered the prospect of keeping all 8.3 billion of us alive
Happy Earth Overshoot Day Everyone!
Yesterday, on July 30, we humans have consumed the last bit of ecological resources what Earth had the capacity to regenerate within our current calendar year of 2026. From yesterday on we are living on borrowed time—as we have been doing so every single year since 1971—drawing down the last remaining stocks of fisheries, top soils, forests, you name it in the process. At the same time we were merrily burdening the biosphere with an ever increasing amount of pollution as if there’s no tomorrow, overloading Nature’s capacity to cope. How bad could it be? Well, in case you were wondering: climate change, biodiversity loss, and extreme weather events (just to name a few symptoms of this planetary scale overshoot) are not a result of CO2 emissions alone but a direct consequence of the sum of our agricultural, mining, industrial etc. practices we call ‘modernity.’ And even if all 8.3 billion of us lived like an average Honduran or Cambodian we would still live up a year’s worth of natural resources in eleven months. Sounds sustainable? Not to me.
As a 2022 study on the topic of land use found:
“Humans have been reshaping the planet’s land for millennia by clearing wildlands to grow crops and raise livestock. As a result, humans have cleared one-third of the world’s forests and two-thirds of wild grasslands since the end of the last ice age. This has come at a huge cost to the planet’s biodiversity. In the last 50,000 years — and as humans settled in regions around the world — wild mammal biomass has declined by 85%. Expanding agriculture has been the biggest driver of the destruction of the world’s wildlands. This expansion of agricultural land has now come to an end. After millennia, we have passed the peak, and in recent years global agricultural land use has declined.”
This peak and decline in agricultural land use will have more than profound impacts down the line. And no, not because it will urge us to build more indoor farming units—an energetic, resource and pollution nightmare—but because it will accelerate the coming decline in world food production. See, we can only feed this many people (and perhaps even more) because we have access to the latest agricultural technology. But, as you will see, that assumption is about to change. The ecological footprint analysis is not a movie clip but a snapshot of the situation at the time of the analysis, a static model that reflects consumption and technology in place just then. It’s based on ‘prevailing technology and resource management practices’ and presumes access to ‘global trade’, both of which being entirely dependent on unfettered access to oil, natural gas and on freedom of navigation... So what happens when we can no longer take any of these for granted?
Combined with hotter and hotter summers, droughts, wildfires, flooding, the relentless expansion of cities and road networks, soil erosion, nutrient depletion, pollution, desertification and salt water intrusion from rising seas, the already 40% loss of farmland will most likely accelerate, eventually leading to a loss in food production capacity. And while at this point it’s nigh on impossible to predict how deep into overshoot the human race will be next year, I have a hunch that the capacity of the planet—and the techno-industrial civilization it supports—to sustain 8.3 billion people will be greatly reduced. With the wars on the Middle East and Ukraine still growing and slowly merging into one big conflagration, the drop in Earth’s carrying capacity of humans in the years ahead promises to be anything but mild.
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Food
Most of our agricultural machinery—from tractors to combined harvesters—are powered by diesel fuel, derived directly from crude oil. Lubricants, without which these machines would break down and could no longer work, are also made from oil in specialized refineries—many of them under attack as I write these lines. Phosphate and potash (key mineral ingredients to fertilizer) are mined and delivered by diesel guzzling excavators and trucks filled with hydraulic oil, and refined using sulfuric acid made from sulfur… 99% of which is also derived from crude oil, and a third of which used to come from the Middle East. Natural gas is converted into ammonia (the third component of fertilizers, providing the nitrates plants need to grow) via the Haber-Bosch process. Gas is also used in large quantities to dry corn before storage, as well as to heat hothouses and to deliver pure CO2 for the food industry.
Petrochemicals, also a byproduct of refining oil and natural gas, are used in manufacturing herbicides and pesticides, as well as the ubiquitous plastic packaging which helps to keep produce and processed food fresh, thereby greatly reducing food waste. Without these unquestionably harmful substances much of our food would be eaten by pests, rot in the field, or could not get into stores before perishing. We underestimate how airtight plastic packaging increased food safety. So did cold chains (refrigeration), consuming terawatts of electricity and coming with increased diesel fuel consumption during transport. And finally let’s not forget about the fleet of regular heavy duty trucks, locomotives and ships carrying food and a gazillion of other products around the world and into a supermarket near you.
So, even if we don’t eat oil and gas our machines and food supply chains feeding at least 4 billion of us do. No wonder food production accounts for 15% of world fossil fuel use. Without such a profligate (and growing) use of oil and natural gas we couldn’t feed this many people. Reducing the amount of natural gas and diesel fuel on the market—as the ever growing Middle Eastern and Ukraine conflict does—will thus have a direct impact on the amount of food we can grow; although with a considerable delay. Much of the food you find in stores today (except for fresh fruits and vegetables) were likely grown and harvested a year ago. And while 2025 was not a bad year overall, farmers all around the world faced severe difficulties already. Compared to this year’s troubles, though, with a lack of fertilizer, pesticides and fuel, on top of a developing super El Nino, 2025 will be considered a fantastic year... By mid-2027 all the impacts of 2026 will have their effects felt, and with continued attacks on international shipping on the Black Sea (affecting two of the largest grain exporting countries in Europe simultaneously) serious trouble looks practically baked in. Think: massive food shortages (even famine in some places), riots, the toppling of governments—just to name a few examples. And if you think all this is just hyperbole, remember how the Arab Spring of 2011 has started after a much milder food shortage / inflation than what we already see unfolding.
War
War consumes a lot of diesel and jet fuel, with military logistics relying heavily on aviation (jet fuel), and diesel fuel powering all those ships, trucks, heavy machinery or power generators. The US war machine “bombing the hell out of Iran,” and just about any country who dares to disagree, consumes 270,000 barrels of fuel on an average day—even in peacetime. The Air Force burns through approximately 2 billion gallons of aviation fuel annually, which goes up notably in wartime due to low altitude flying (during bombing runs), and due to a significant increase in airlift demand. Thus, despite record jet fuel output this summer, airline fuel costs went up sharply—so did the cost of diesel fuel (a variant of which is consumed by the Navy in large quantities).
This additional wartime consumption, of course, comes on top of an already existing fuel supply bottleneck caused by sanctions, blockades, and attacks on oil fields and refineries from Moscow, Russia to Jazan, Saudi Arabia. (Fun fact: the biggest export from the now shut 400,000 bpd Jazan refinery was ultra-low-sulfur diesel.) The Caspian pipeline carrying 1.4 million barrels of Kazakh crude to Novorossiysk a day has been shut down (again). Export volumes through Hormuz have slumped back to May levels and struggle to recover. Atlantic basin charter rates went up double-digits; war risk cover topped $10m for a single VLCC trip. Drones hit LNG ships near the Suez canal, threatening with the disruption of yet another important chokepoint. As the result of a renewed Yemen-Saudi conflict, a growing number of insurers became reluctant to cover Saudi-linked vessels, extending the Red Sea high-risk area to include Jeddah and Yanbu (where the Saudi export terminal is). Not that shippers themselves haven’t become already allergic to the idea of visiting any of these three war zones (the Black Sea, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf). Well, alongside a good chunk of world fuel supply, there goes your freedom of the seas, too.
And while crude oil buffers are low (but still holding on for now), a diesel crunch has become the biggest threat in oil markets, according to Goldman Sachs. In July, global refining throughput was 6.5 million barrels per day lower compared to July 2025, as lower Chinese run rates and the outages in the Middle East and Russia slashed fuel supply (which resulted in an extended diesel export ban till 2027 there). For diesel specifically, Goldman Sachs estimates that global exports have dropped by about 35%, or by 2.6 million barrels a day. The global impact is expected to be severe and fast:
“As refineries and fuel distributors generally operate with smaller storage buffers than upstream crude producers, any delay will disrupt delivery schedules, tighten regional inventories, and increase wholesale prices. The latter will be much faster than comparable interruptions in crude supply. Longer distances will result in vessels effectively disappearing from the available fleet for that additional period.”
In summary: war greatly reduces essential fuel availability in many ways: through increased consumption of diesel and jet fuel, via the destruction of production and storage facilities, as well as by blocking shipping lanes and making transits longer.
AI
Artificial Intelligence, or rather the massive data center build-out justified by an AI race which never was, has a great impact on food and our future prospects on this planet, too. It’s well-known that gigawatt scale data centers consume the entire output of a nuclear power plant or that they require the 24/7 electric output of several natural gas turbines burning untold amounts of this finite fossil fuel. AI’s massive water consumption is no secret either, threatening local ecosystems and irrigation water supplies for agriculture alike. Many of these water sources are also finite: collecting underground for many millennia, only to be used up in a few short decades.
What rarely gets a mention, though, is an uptick in diesel fuel and lubricant oil demand. Construction of such sites (just like the execution of many other large building projects) requires hundreds if not thousands of truckloads of building materials delivered on site and earthworks spanning the size of entire cities—all done by diesel powered trucks, cranes, excavators, bulldozers and the like. Intensive machine use, beyond consuming a lot of fuel, comes with frequent oil changes, too. Not to mention the demand generated by filling up newly built large diesel generators and gas turbines with lubricants, even as there is already a shortage of motor oil.
What’s worse these “backup” generators are not sitting there idle, either—they are often used during peak demand hours to prevent grid overload. Electricity generation from oil in the US as a result is once again on the rise, growing 28% year-over-year in 2025 based on data from the Energy Institute. With persistent gas turbine shortages and grid limitations still in place, diesel consumption from data centers will most likely continue to rise in 2026/27 as well, further reducing fuel and lubricant availability for farming applications, not to mention keeping these input costs above affordable levels.
Taken together with a lack of fertilizer, droughts and already high input costs, it’s really no wonder that America’s wheat harvest this year is set to fall to its lowest level in 150 years. US farm income is also projected to drop 0.7% despite near-record government payments, which are expected to account for nearly 29% of producers' revenue. I’m not saying that this is all due to data centers—this historic drop in wheat output is a result of a number of factors from climate change to wars. Well, as they say, the chickens are coming home to roost.
Conclusion
2026/2027 will most likely see a remarkable drop in food and agricultural input availability, massive food shortages and even famine and riots in some places. As the Middle East and Ukraine crises expand with no end in sight, the risk of a permanent loss of carrying capacity cannot be excluded either. Remember: the longer oil wells stay shut in, the lower their chance of return to full production becomes. How much oil production will be lost, and whether we will be able to return to 2025 February output levels (ever) as depletion continues to accelerate around the world, is yet to be seen.
It’s not that we will be running out of food or oil and gas—the most vital inputs to agriculture—but that the virtuous cycle of more and more cheap materials and food made available by more and more cheap fossil fuels will slowly turn into a vicious cycle, where less and less available fuel will make even less and less material extraction and food production possible. As a result, we face a gradual decline in real material output in the years ahead, threatening to end in a financial crisis and an economic depression not seen since the 1930’s.
This unfolding and ever worsening emergency is not due to a single factor, but a range of events and processes culminating in our present time. The global economy was already weak and unable to meaningfully grow since at least a decade now. Oil extraction as well as the production of metals needed for electrification (copper chief among them) face an imminent peak as energy return on investment and ore grades decline, reserves become depleted and mines and wells are retired. This timeline of shortages, dictated by geology and ecological degradation, has been greatly accelerated by war, though. Fueled by the fear of losing global hegemony and a desire to control world trade to preserve the exorbitant privilege of owning the world’s reserve currency, the conflicts started and actively supported by the US are slipping out of control.
This implies that the assumption of ‘prevailing technologies’ and ‘global trade’ can no longer be taken for granted. Without adequate oil and natural gas supplies, mineral inputs, healthy topsoils and a stable climate, the prodigious harvests supporting an unprecedented growth in human population can no longer be relied upon. This will require the recalculation of ecological footprints around the world based on locally available resources using low-tech, low energy means of extraction. And if that means, that there are no (or very little) resources left in a area that could be extracted (or used to grow plants with), than that land might simply become unable to support present population levels. Large scale migration and state collapse in these places cannot be excluded either.
Local communities will have to take their fate into their own hands: restoring wetlands, cleaning up rivers, improving nature’s ability to heal and cope… As well as (peacefully) opposing mega projects from new mines to data centers and factories. Trying to sustain what is wholly, physically and mathematically unsustainable—an economic system based on infinite material extraction on a finite planet—on the other hand, will only lead to more chaos, and an even faster decline. Just like with driving a car: when fuel is running low, the engine emitting smoke and with the wheels starting become loose, slowing down and pulling off will do you much better than pressing the pedal to the metal.
Until next time,
B
As a reader funded publication your one time and regular donations help keep this newsletter going. If you value this article or any others please share it far and wide and consider a subscription. You can also support this work by buying a virtual coffee. Thank you!
It's even worse than your chart of people fed by synthetic fertilizer shows. In the 19th century, vast deposits of bird guano, accumulated over millions of years, were mined and shipped to farms suffering from declining soil fertility. Those deposits are now gone.
The true carrying capacity of earth without synthetic fertilizer is probably well under 1 billion people. At least 7 billion people are going to die prematurely sometime this century.
Your post are always so good and informative, but knowing the nature of man and the stupidity and ignorance that seems to be on the rise, it makes me glad I’m old.