Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Daily we are deluged with gloom about how we are overwhelming the Earth’s ability to sustain and support our growing numbers. Increasing population is again being hailed as the catastrophe of the century. In addition, floods and droughts are said to be leading to widespread crop loss. The erosion of topsoil is claimed to be affecting production. It is said that we are overdrawing our resources, with more people going hungry. Paul Ehrlich and the late Stephen Schneider assure us that we are way past the tipping point, that widespread starvation is unavoidable.
Is this true? Is increasing hunger inevitable for our future? Are we really going downhill? Are climate changes (natural or anthropogenic) making things worse for the poorest of the poor? Are we running out of food? Is this what we have to face?
Figure 1. The apocalyptic future envisioned by climate alarmists. Image Source
Fortunately, we have real data regarding this question. The marvelous online resource, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics database called FAOSTAT, has data on the amount of food that people have to eat.
Per capita (average per person) food consumption is a good measure of the welfare of a group of people because it is a broad-based indicator. Some kinds of measurements can be greatly skewed by a few outliers. Per capita wealth is an example. Since one person can be a million times wealthier than another person, per capita wealth can be distorted by a few wealthy individuals.
But no one can eat a million breakfasts per day. If the per capita food consumption goes up, it must perforce represent a broad-based change in the food consumption of a majority of the population. This makes it a good measure for our purposes.
The FAOSTAT database gives values for total food consumption in calories per day, as well as for protein and fat consumption in grams per day. (Fat in excess is justly maligned in the Western diet, but it is a vital component of a balanced diet, and an important dietary indicator.) Here is the change over the last fifty years:
Figure 2. Consumption of calories, protein, and fat as a global average (thin lines), and for the “LDCs”, the Least Developed Countries (thick lines) . See Appendix 1 for a list of LDCs.
To me, that simple chart represents an amazing accomplishment. What makes it amazing is that from 1960 to 2000, the world population doubled. It went from three billion to six billion. Simply to stay even, we needed to double production of all foodstuffs. We did that, we doubled global production, and more. The population in the LDCs grew even faster, it has more than tripled since 1961. But their food consumption stayed at least even until the early 1990s. And since then, food consumption has improved across the board for the LDCs.
Here’s the bad news for the doomsayers. At this moment in history, humans are better fed than at any time in the past. Ever. The rich are better fed. The middle class is better fed. The poor, and even the poorest of the poor are better fed than ever in history.
Yes, there’s still a heap of work left to do. Yes, there remain lots of real issues out there.
But while we are fighting the good fight, let’s remember that we are better fed than we have ever been, and take credit for an amazing feat. We have doubled the population and more, and yet we are better fed than ever. And in the process, we have proven, once and for all, that Malthus, Ehrlich, and their ilk were and are wrong. A larger population doesn’t necessarily mean less to eat.
Of course despite being proven wrong for the nth time, it won’t be the last we hear of the ineluctable Señor Malthus. He’s like your basic horror film villain, incapable of being killed even with a stake through the heart at a crossroads at midnight … or the last we hear of Paul Ehrlich, for that matter. He’s never been right yet, so why should he snap his unbeaten string?
APPENDIX 1: Least Developed Countries
Africa (33 countries)
Angola
Benin
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Central African Republic
Chad
Comoros
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Djibouti
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Gambia
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Lesotho
Liberia
Madagascar
Malawi
Mali
Mauritania
Mozambique
Niger
Rwanda
São Tomé and Príncipe
Senegal
Sierra Leone
Somalia
Sudan
Togo
Tanzania
Uganda
Zambia
Eurasia (10 countries)
Afghanistan
Bangladesh
Bhutan
Cambodia
East Timor
Laos
Maldives
Myanmar
Nepal
Yemen
Americas (1 country)
Haiti
Oceania (5 countries)
Kiribati
Samoa
Solomon Islands
Tuvalu
Vanuatu
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You are getting more and more ridiculous. You were exposed and denying the laws of physics is all you have to say in reply??? Because asking me to show you that there is a finite amount of food that can be grown is exactly the same as denying that the laws of physics exist. No amount of genetic engineering can get you around the fact that food is converted solar energy (for the conversion of which to happen, you need a laundry list of other things, Liebig’s law, you know) and there is a theoretical maximum of 11% conversion efficiency and you can’t go higher.
The standards of this place must be very very low of people like this are allowed to write posts and my advice is that you carefully consider who you give the tribune to speak and who you don’t if you care about you reputation
You have basic reading comprehension problems. Resources can be very abundant and populations sufficiently small for them to continue existing for a long time and not crash due to exhaustion of that resource. However, there is a fundamental principle called the Liebig’s law of the minimum (I know, why do I bother, you are going to deny its existence, if you deny the laws of physics, what else can we expect, but I am still going to try) which states the rather obvious fact that organisms and populations need a long list of things to survive and it is the factor that’s in shortest supply that limits the growth of that organisms/population. For example, you can give a plant all the sunlight, water, nitrogen, minerals etc. it needs, but if it doesn’t have any phosphorus, it isn’t going to grow at all.
Our problem is that we have greatly expanded the list of factors we critically depend on because the size of our population has grown so much and now when the ones in critically short supply deplete to the point where they can’t sustain our numbers, our numbers will crash. That’s the point of the whole argument.
P.S. Human populations have been living an inherently unsustainable lifestyle for a very long time, and local overshoots and collapses have happened dozen, perhaps hundreds of times. Easter Island remains the single best example (they had the technology to erect those huge statues, why didn’t technology bail them out of their food crisis?) but history is full of them. Agriculture is totally unsustainable the way it has been practiced by pretty much everyone – if you don’t close the nutrient cycle or don’t provide them from outside (if you happen to live on a river that carries a lot of sediments, it helps a lot), it depletes the soil of nutrients, although sometimes very slowly, or you build up salt due to irrigation and eventually yields crash and the population does too. It has happened time and time again. The difference is that this time it is global
Peak oil !!! Peak anything . . it’s a red herring and utterly meaningless.
We will use up stuff and find other stuff to use instead because we adapt continually. We adapt faster than any other living thing because of our intelligence , we use that to adapt the Earth to suit us. We grow stuff, we mine stuff, we design stuff and so our developed societies prosper and advance.
Running in parallel to our technological advance is our social development. Man is constantly upgrading the rules and structures of society and one of the biggest advances has been democracy and the rule of law. Look at all of the underdeveloped countries and they all have deficits in democracy and the rule of law (property rights).
Right now the developed world continues to underwrite bad governance by ameliorating the effects of bad governance on large parts of Earth by sending food and money. This deprives the very people they purport to be helping by disconnecting the bad politicians from the consequences of their inadequacies and so denies people the ability to replace the crap politicians with ones that will serve them better.
The CAGW crowd think we should send billions of dollars to bad governments because of perceived damage we have caused. These are the same governments that condemn their own people to poverty and misery not seen in the west since the dark ages. Where on earth is the logic in that?
Yes everything is finite ultimately as the slide into entropy is unstoppable but to pretend that man , given an enabling environment, is not able to continue to provide a better life for all in the meantime is just silly. The Earths crust is everywhere and between 10km and 100km thick. We haven’t even scratched a tiny scratch of what our bountiful planet can provide and we can do more and more with less and less impact just by using our big brains.
Don’t forget we are all approaching peak life for we all must die. Let’s not accelerate the process by trying to live in mud huts and eat grass seed in the name of “sustainability” we are much, much better than that.
Keith Battye says:
September 10, 2010 at 12:41 am
“Running in parallel to our technological advance is our social development. Man is constantly upgrading the rules and structures of society and one of the biggest advances has been democracy and the rule of law.”
That “constant upgrading” will be a problem if we do run into peak oil problems, because what it actually represents is a steady growth in the bureaucratic sectors that needs to be supported by the productive sectors, this has been able to happen because cheap energy has multiplied many fold the ability of a few individuals to produce wealth, ie produce food, build houses, roads and cars, allowing a far higher proportion of the population to be involved in making our societies “fair”.
That “constant upgrading” also represents greater complexity and less flexibility in the way our societies function, so we are now less able to adjust to a rapid decline in the availability of a resource than we would once have been, people now know their “rights” and for many their “rights” probably don’t include having to adjust to unpleasant economic realities.
>>Tenuc:
>>In 2005 nuclear power accounted for 6.3% of world’s total
>>primary energy supply.
You got a link for that?
In the UK, 92% of our energy supplies are non-electrical. That means nuclear power can only be a very small proportion. That is a fact. (chart 1.2)
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file11250.pdf
I am a supporter of nuclear power, but until it begins to power transport and heating requirements, it has a long way to go.
.
>>Espen:
>>I suggest that you inform yourself better before you spread BS the next time.
Less abuse, please.
Take a look at this league table, and tick off all the Muslim nations.
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?c=ee&v=24
See what I mean?
.
>>Berenyi
>>(The Ukraine famine) has nothing to do with Malthus, as neither the
>>Bengal famine of 1943 or the post-war German famine, when infant
>>mortality went up to a horrible 60%.
I did not say it did.
What I said was the greater the population, the easier it is to fall into famine and ruin, when something changes in the system. That change could be political, or climatic, or whatever – but if you have a huge population to feed and the supply is suddenly disrupted, you are in for a mass extinction.
Huge, dense populations are naturally more unstable and more vulnerable than smaller isolated semi-rural populations. Think about it.
.
Ralph:
Less abuse, please.
Take a look at this league table, and tick off all the Muslim nations.
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?c=ee&v=24
See what I mean?
Sigh. Please try to understand the difference between population growth and fertility rate. UAE is on top of the population growth table you link to. Do you know why? Because the UAE has world’s highest net migration rate! The fertility rate in UAE is only 2.42 according to your source (select fertility rate from the drop down menu), and 2.41 according to CIA, i.e. not that much above the 2.1 level required for a stable population.
When you’ve grasped that crucial difference, I highly recommend reading the following article which discusses the surprisingly fast falling fertility rates in large parts of the Islamic world:
http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?aid=1408
Of course, the situation is exactly the same in Yemen and the Gaza strip. People from all around the world are rushing to migrate there….
Also, it is useful to ask the question why the fertility rate is 2.41 in UAE. Does it have something to do with the migration or not? What is the fertility rate of local muslims vs. the fertility rate of non-muslim migrants?
2. Basic principles of ecology and population dynamics such as the already mentioned ecological overshoot-population collapse sequence of events. Things that have been observed hundreds and thousands of times in the wild and in the lab and are absolutely indisputable
3. That 1) and 2) apply to humans. This is the essence of the “technology will save us” mantra that gets repeated so often by economists and which the majority here have completely bought into. Yet it all really boils down to denial of 1) and 2)
You keep saying this, and it not true.
Humans no longer obey the rules of biology as they apply to other animals. We practice birth control. We ration resources. We develop new methods. We build new tools. No animal does any of these. Therefore “rules” of ecology do not apply to us – and haven’t since we started to form civil societies. Observations in the wild and lab have no bearing.
We can learn from observation though – of previous human societies. The rule we learn is that stable governments feed their people. Societies that collapse (Easter Island etc) do so because of war or political collapse. The hunger follows that.
(We also learn that societies that manufacture constant “threats” in order to force compliance to social norms are extremely dangerous.)
[i]Huge, dense populations are naturally more unstable and more vulnerable than smaller isolated semi-rural populations. Think about it.[/i]
I’ve thought about it. It’s rot. You might think it’s true. Obviously you want it to be true. But you have no actual proof.
Famine is almost always a rural phenomenon. More, it’s almost always a subsistence phenomenon.
Cities imply stored food – since you can never have a city in the first place without it. Stored food means reserves. Cities also means wealth. So you can buy food from somewhere else when local sources run short.
In order to prove me wrong, give me an example of a heavily industrialised urban society that has suffered famine in peace-time.
Funny, I used to be an avid movie buff, especially sci.fi., Fifth Dimension and all of that, and somehow that one had slipped by… had heard the term many times but just didn’t connect. Well here’s the entire movie for those who might have missed it too.
Great to see some of the old great actors!
Soylent Green :
(… CAUTION…DEFINITELY NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH…)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1296155071179146825#
Now I get your constant refs to this lately Willis. Wiki’s description just doesn’t hold up to the movie.
I really cannot see any way out of this, except, perhaps, the development of low-cost fusion power — I heard that some are strongly opposed to any such development for precisely that reason — uncontrolled ‘Blade Runner’ style overdevelopment. Of course, there are major unsolved technical problems blocking any such development. Lacking a major break-through, the situation looks bleak. Looking forward, I fully expect that people of the future will regard our time as a golden age of abundance.
But, I believe, if ever there was a situation ripe for ‘noble cause corruption’ and also regular ignoble corruption, this is it. I think we should be on the lookout for people who might try to use this as an excuse for taking unnecessary action or imposing premature population down-sizing policies.
GM says:
Of course, the situation is exactly the same in Yemen and the Gaza strip. People from all around the world are rushing to migrate there….
Of course not, but that’s also the two only places in the Arab world where the fertility rate is still extremely high. Yemen only proves the point about the demographic transitions, it’s a poor and underdeveloped country. Gaza is a real outlier, and I assume the high birth rates (they were even higher just a few years ago) there are really partly a consequence of Palestinian patriotism (i.e. political rather than religious). It’s worth noting, though, that West Bank fertility rate has dropped significantly over the last decade and is now at 3.12.
The only country which could be considered evidence for Ralph’s theory is Saudi Arabia, where large families have indeed been encouraged, but its fertility rate has dropped from 6.8 15 years ago to 3.83 now.
Spector says:
September 10, 2010 at 2:51 am (Edit)
Surely when people look at the effects of previous big ideas . . .
Removal of South American peoples from existence using disease and violence.
Selling off your countrymen into slavery.
Second attempt in the USA and Canada with the same methods.
Gassing the non us , starting with the Jews and queers, and spastics.
They haven’t worked out too well have they. The recriminations continue right up to now.
Any thoughts of a global wide attempt to remove the “non us” must surely in a democracy be stopped quite easily and readily. It just requires credible leaders to tell us to do what we know is right and why it is so.
We will a life better than the one we grew up in, and we all think our childhood was pretty good . There is no reason why our children won’t be better off than us in time and it will be in a way of their own making. We need to realize that our level of evolved civilization is based on liquid and solid fuels that do us very well. If, perhaps when, there comes a time that our current fuels run out we will either innovate or die back gradually over time following the fuel trendline. Up or down, even sideways , is a choice we are capable of taking without the screaming lies of mad seers.
Energy got us this far this quickly but we still have some way to go. We still need energy. We need cheap, reliable energy around the world. The one thing that stands out like a dog’s ball is the huge discrepancy in energy used in the first and third world. Instead of choking off energy using the absurd CO2 argument we should be providing widespread cheap energy everywhere. Along with it comes communications and the internet, TV, radio, democracy.
Coal and gas and oil in say Africa have got logistical issues but small , safe, effective energy units could be distributed easily over a road network that has been kept variably operational since colonialism ended.
It makes sense in terms of keeping habitat for fauna and flora as it won’t have to be chopped down for fuel, and you can see how it fits together.
We are all alive today so the food chain is keeping us alive. Time to raise those standard of livings to a level you might recognize. The big brains need to get going on the next big thing, compact distributed energy. The population will come off for all the reasons mentioned above, and we will have a much more stable planet.
Willis,
“Since everyone has always used non-renewable resources, by your definition we have all been in overshoot since the beginning of the Stone Age.”
LOL, thanks for that Willis – I don’t think I’ve laughed so much at a post. How pathetic these ‘overshooters’ are. So blinded by their own dogma, they defend their position by appealing to ‘laws of physics.’
Oil is the most important resource today, and it may run out – leaving aside abiotic theories, we should assume the worst. Oil makes a lot of things – in particular fertilizer – and the thrust of the overshoot argument is that when oil runs out, our ability to manufacture fertilizer goes with it.
I would argue that it is not oil which is the essential resource, but energy. As long as you have sufficient cheap energy, you can manufacture fertilizer. In essence, fertlizer is a nitrate – no more than the artificial fixing of nitrogen. As the atmosphere is composed of 78% of the stuff, there should be no shortage. With available energy, you build nitrogen fixing plants to make your fertilizers – problem solved. Same with potash – just a chemical compound of potassium. Why all the handwringing and bed wetting?
Energy will never be a problem, because of the atom. There is enough Thorium to power fission for thousands of years. Fusion is oft derided as a fantasy, but the breakthrough here may come from an unexpected direction – Inertial Electric Containment. The late Dr Bussard spent the last decade of his life on the Polywell fusion project. It is still going forward, and we should know in about another 2 years whether it is viable or not. If it is, the word ‘revolution’ wouldn’t even come close to describing its impact on the world.
Z says,
“In this age of statistics, we can demonstrate the first two (as I have done). In this age of mathematics, we can demonstrate the third (expand e^x as a Taylor series and demonstrate that it is greater than C*x as x -> infinity).”
All you have ‘proved’ is that an exponential series increases faster than an arithmetic one. That is tantamount to saying that if Malthus says population grows geometrically and food arithmetically then Malthus must be right because I can prove that an exponential series eventually overtakes a linear series.
Well, that’s a tautology. Willis has shown numerous times that Malthus was wrong when he said food grows arithmetically. It has actually grown at the same – geometric – rate as population.
The question is whether both can continue growing indefinitely (the answer is not of course). Population has grown at the same rate as food not because food somehow magically materializes out of nothing to feed an ever expanding population but because we have expanded the land we grow food on (at the expense of the ecosystems of the planet), we have used “fossil acreage” in the form of fossil fuels and fertilizers, and we have eaten our ecological capital (overfishing being the best example). Arable land is finite, fossil fuels are finite, reserves of concentrated phosphorus are finite, and if we destroy our ecological capital, it will catch up with us eventually. So there you have some very real limits to growth.
As I will not get tired of repeating, the above isn’t up for dispute, it follows directly from the laws of physics, and in the case of the impossibility of infinite growth in a finite system, from simple mathematics. If you deny that, you are , and that’s not up for dispute either.
Ralph says:
September 10, 2010 at 1:19 am
I am a supporter of nuclear power, but until it begins to power transport and heating requirements, it has a long way to go.
__________________________________________________
Nuclear already supplies the energy to run the heat pump I used to heat and A/C my home, so yes nuclear can provide heat. (I can see the nuclear plant out my window as I type)
We already know nuclear powered subs have been around for years, so how about commercial nuclear plants small enough to power a cargo ship or perhaps a train?
“John Deal, the Hyperion CEO, says that such micro nuclear reactors should cost about $25 million each. In the U.S., where people spent more energy than in other parts of the world, such a reactor should be able to deliver power to only 10,000 households, for a cost of $2,500 per home. But in developing nations, one HPM could provide enough power for 60,000 homes or more, for a cost of less than $400. This is quite reasonable if you agree with Hyperion, which states that the energy from its HPMs will cost about 10 cents/watt.
On its home page, Hyperion gives additional details about these reactors and their safety. “Small enough to be transported on a ship, truck or train, Hyperion power modules are about the size of a “hot tub” — approximately 1.5 meters wide…” http://www.zdnet.com/blog/emergingtech/a-micro-nuclear-reactor-in-your-garden/1089
Perhaps the plan is to boost the cost of oil and coal so high via tax that the cost of micro nuclear plants becomes economical to train corporations and shipping lines. We are eventually going to go nuclear. Wind, Solar, and biofuel cost more in CO2 (a measure of energy) than they will return in real life applications and the general public will figure out they have been had.
WIND POWER FRAUD: WHY WIND WON’T WORK by Charles S. Opalek, PE
(For those who do not know PE means he is a licensed Professional Mechanical Engineer and therefore is open to lawsuits.)
http://www.windpowerfraud.com/
Charles Opalek states:
“Solar pv energy has an EROEI ratio of 0.48 (www.dieoff.org/pv.htm). That is: In the lifetime of a solar pv installaton it will only return 48% of the energy that went into its manufacture, installation and operation. What a colossal waste of my electric bill dollars and taxpayer money.
Wind power is worse. It’s EROEI by my calculations is 0.29.”
http://www.smartpowercommunity.com/2010/03/petra-solar-distributed-pv-mounted-on-existing-power-pole/
“…Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Berkeley, conducted a detailed analysis of the energy input-yield ratios of producing ethanol from corn, switch grass and wood biomass as well as for producing biodiesel from soybean and sunflower plants. Their report is published in Natural Resources Research (Vol. 14:1, 65-76) …. “The United State desperately needs a liquid fuel replacement for oil in the near future,” says Pimentel, “but producing ethanol or biodiesel from plant biomass is going down the wrong road, because you use more energy to produce these fuels than you get out from the combustion of these products….” http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/july05/ethanol.toocostly.ssl.html
The back to nature – technology is evil types are now going to jump on me refuting this. Of course it is always easy to prove biofuel (or solar or wind) works, you just have to leave out some of the energy input sources.
You do not like oil/coal? Then push your government representatives toward nuclear. I can guarantee you will not like living a 13th century lifestyle for the rest of your life.
I still opt for uncorrupted and intelligent government by and for the people as the primary driver of a well-ordered, well fed and well cared-for society. Malthus is provably incorrect and I have no idea why ideologues such as the intemperate GM persist in silly revionism. Malthus and his theories are dead – leave them in the past where they bleong.
“No thanks, I’ll pass. If you disagree with one of my points, address the point. ”
Interesting you are unwilling to look at the evidence, you could at least read the abstracts.
Giant oil field decline rates and their influence on world oil production
Published in Energy Policy
Volume 37, Issue 6, June 2009, Pages 2262-2272
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2009.02.020
Abstract
The most important contributors to the world’s total oil production are the giant oil fields. Using a comprehensive database of giant oil field production, the average decline rates of the world’s giant oil fields are estimated. Separating subclasses was necessary, since there are large differences between land and offshore fields, as well as between non-OPEC and OPEC fields. The evolution of decline rates over past decades includes the impact of new technologies and production techniques and clearly shows that the average decline rate for individual giant fields is increasing with time. These factors have significant implications for the future, since the most important world oil production base – giant fields – will decline more rapidly in the future, according to our findings. Our conclusion is that the world faces an increasing oil supply challenge, as the decline in existing production is not only high now but will be increasing in the future.
Joint Opperating Environment
February 18, 2010
Government requests for the final approved document must be referred to:
United States Joint Forces Command
Pg 24:
To meet even the conservative growth rates posited in the economics section, global energy production would need to rise by 1.3% per year. By the 2030s, demand is estimated to be nearly 50% greater than today. To meet that demand, even assuming more effective conservation measures, the world would need to add roughly the equivalent of Saudi Arabia’s current energy production every seven years.
Global Oil Depletion
An assessment of the evidence for a near-term peak in global oil production
Executive Summary:
1. The mechanisms leading to a ‘peaking’ of conventional oil production are well
understood and provide identifiable constraints on its future supply at both the regional and global level.
• Oil supply is determined by a complex and interdependent mix of ‘above-ground’ and
‘below-ground’ factors and little is to be gained by emphasising one set of variables
over the other. Nevertheless, fundamental features of the conventional oil resource
Global Oil Depletion: An assessment of the evidence for a near-term peak in global oil production make it inevitable that production in a region will rise to a peak or plateau and ultimately decline. These features include the production profile of individual fields, the concentration of resources in a small number of large fields and the tendency to discover and produce these fields relatively early. This process can be modelled and the peaking of conventional oil production can be observed in an increasing number of regions around the world.
The Oil Crunch
A wake-up call for the UK economy Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security
Second report of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security (ITPOES)
February 2010
Has a nice display of graphs that counter the graphs you posted.
GM,
“The question is whether both [population and food] can continue growing indefinitely (the answer is not of course). ”
I don’t think anybody here would disagree with that. But we aren’t arguing that populations can grow indefinately. Let’s stick with the UN estimates of population peaking at about 9bn before declining. That’s a 50% increase from here – less than one more doubling.
“we have used “fossil acreage” in the form of fossil fuels and fertilizers.”
This implies that we can’t make fertlizers without fossil fuels. Explain to me why we cannot fix nitrogen from the air into nitrates as long as sufficient nuclear energy is available.
“Saying we are in overshoot has no meaning. Since it applies to everyone all the time you might as well say “we are alive”. It is true, but meaningless. ”
There are regions that are in overshoot. We send food aid to African countries. Regardless of the reason, if they cannot produce enough of their own food, they are in overshoot. Cuba, the bastion of sustainability, has to import 80% of it’s food or they will starve. They are in overshoot. Temporate regions, like Russia, Canada, the upper US states, have to have food imported from around the world to maintain the food supply. They are in overshoot.
All of those local areas that are reliant on food importation because it is physically impossible for them to grow their own food locally are being kept from starvation because of oil — transporting food.
Once oil goes into terminal decline, most of the planet’s population will be beyond the carrying capacity of their region.
“This implies that we can’t make fertlizers without fossil fuels. Explain to me why we cannot fix nitrogen from the air into nitrates as long as sufficient nuclear energy is available.”
It has to do with net energy. Net energy is everything. Sure it is very likely that we can produce nitrates from the N2 in the air. But at what costs? How much time and process is there to do that? Can it be done in the quantities (volume) required? Potash is the easiest cheapest way to fix nitrogen, which is why countries like China are buying up as much of it around the world as they can, often out bidding the US.
The other question is, can such process go from experimentation to mass production in a short enough time? How many nuke plants would be needed to make the volume required?
It’s easy to throw suggestions out, it gets much more difficult to actually put it in place. Example, the USDE wants 20% of power from wind by 2030, just 20 years from now. Sounds reasonable until you discover that they would have produce wind turbines at a rate of 16% per year, which in the last year would mean 550 turbines PER DAY being built for a total of 1.5 MILLION turbines. Then it no longers looks viable. Same with your suggestion. Work out the details of how it would have to be achieved.
Because sufficient nuclear energy isn’t available and the projected time of its availability is a few decades after it’s too late (in the best case scenario)