In Collapse, independent journalist Michael Ruppert argues that peak oil is here. And because petroleum is vital to so many of the pillars on which society is based—food production, infrastructure, and transportation, for example—the world is about to change.

Quoting from the feature documentary by Chris Smith, here is Ruppert explaining the role of petroleum in the production of food.

When you plant a crop now, what happens is, you’ve got an oil-powered machine that drives along and it plows. Then you drive another oil-powered machine, and it drives along and it plants.

And then you irrigate. How do you irrigate? Well, that water is pumped by pumps that are powered by electricity. And where does that electricity come from? In the United States, it is either coal or natural gas.

The next thing you do is you come along and you fertilize it. All commercial fertilizers are made from ammonia, and the feedstock for ammonia is natural gas. So you have ammonium nitrate fertilizers that are then sprayed on by another oil-powered vehicle.

Then the crop dusters come along, that are powered by oil, that spray pesticides, that are all made from petroleum.

Then when it is time to harvest the food, what do you do? You drive another oil-powered machine and you harvest it. You use another oil-powered machine to drive it to a place where it is processed. Then you wrap it up in plastic, which is oil. Then you put it in another oil-powered machine and you drive it X-number of miles to a food distribution warehouse and in an oil-powered machine to your supermarket.

The way food is grown, produced, and moved around the world today, it is an enormous waste of hydrocarbon energy which doesn’t make sense….There are 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy in every calorie of food consumed in the industrialized world.

You can follow Travis Lupick on Twitter at twitter.com/tlupick.