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Three-quarters of the total insect population lost in protected nature reserves
Since 1989, in 63 nature reserves in Germany the total biomass of flying insects has decreased by more than 75 percent. This decrease has long been suspected but has turned out to be more severe than previously thought. Ecologists from Radboud University together with German and English colleagues published these findings in the scientific journal PLOS ONE [open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0185809] [DX] on October 18th.
In recent years, it became clear that the numbers of many types of insects such as butterflies and bees were declining in Western Europe and North America. "However, the fact that flying insects are decreasing at such a high rate in such a large area is an even more alarming discovery," states Hans de Kroon, project leader at Radboud University.
Entomologists (insect researchers) in Krefeld, Germany, led by Martin Sorg and Heinz Schwan, collected data over the past 27 years in 63 different places within nature reserves across Germany. Flying insects were trapped in so called malaise traps and the total biomass was then weighed and compared. The researchers from Nijmegen, Germany and England have now been able to analyse this treasure trove of data for the first time.
Also at CNN.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @02:53AM (14 children)
You're right - or you would have been in, say, 1940.
We're pretty much out of guano reserves by now. We're reaching the point where our biggest phosphate mines are getting harder to run at current rates of return (and here I'm speaking about the planet, not the USA) and availability of deposits is waning.
Yup, peak phosphate. It's here, it's real, and it's a problem today.
But sure, let's stipulate that there are other minerals that we can exploit that will give us more of the P in our NPK; they're higher energy and harder to refine, which even at the rate of dollars per kilo starts to really affect the cost of food.
It was nice while it lasted, eh?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday October 21 2017, @04:03AM (13 children)
You seem to be implying that I'm not right any more. This report [usaid.gov], for example, reports about a century's worth of phosphate reserves and three to five centuries worth in addition in "resources" (see tables 6 and 7). That's from a few years ago.
Peak phosphate like all the other peak whatevers ignores human technological progress.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 21 2017, @06:21AM (12 children)
*sigh*
OK, let's first break this down in terms of reserves vs resources.
Resources are things we know are there. You can point a finger at a map and say "There be phosphates!" but that statement has no bearing on their recoverability, the energy costs of their recoverability, or the financial costs of their recoverability. It's like saying that the moon is there, without making any statement regarding the availability of regolith supplements at Whole Foods.
Reserves are things that we know that we can feasibly extract at a given price. This is a much smaller amount.
Now, I'm actually familiar with the document that you point out. Yes, they did a study. That's cute. Now take a closer look at the assumptions behind that study, and then another look at their assumptions. First off, they assume current usage levels. As farming practices modernise across huge swathes of the third world, especially in concert with efforts to increase intensive farming in the hopes of saving wild jungle and so on, they demand more ... wait for it ... phosphorus! Among other fertilisers. In other words, new buyers are entering the market as a matter of current worldwide policy right now and there's no prospect of them leaving the market or reducing their demands, as the world population continues to grow, desertification and other soil issues continue to be problems, and countries are deciding that food security really matters after looking at what's happening in southern africa (hi, Zimbabwe!) so that they are building policies to support it.
Furthermore, the authors are quite explicit about the idea that yes, reserves will expand as prices rise - but the implication is that prices do in fact rise, in real terms. And they will, because the demand for food is highly inelastic. They also go on and point out that phosphate rock is a limited resource, and not renewable. They helpfully point out that the long run trend of production is upwards, even though the short run trend is relatively steady.
The situation is ultimately the analogous to that of oil: it doesn't matter if you have an infinite supply of phosphate rock, if it sells at a hundred dollars an ounce. It might as well be on mars. It's irrelevant at that point for agricultural purposes. Now you talk about things on a 100 year timescale, but apparently you don't realise that agricultural planning and projection is a long run affair, with thirty year horizons being common. On that scale, 100 years is pretty darned close, and that means that we have a problem now. Their projections of US production alone are definitely downward over the course of a small number of decades.
By all means stick your fingers in your ears and sing yourself soothing songs about advanced technology. Try to ignore, while you're doing so, that at best you're expanding to an increased percentage of resources turning into reserves at a given price, and a large part of why resources in the case of oil turned to reserves was precisely shifts in price - and lots of speculators lots their shirts when the saudi princes decided to open their taps wide, and the price dropped back again. But pumping oil harder turns out to have much the same effect as digging phosphate faster; you're exhausting what there is faster. What happens when the flow tapers off? The prices rise, and until those prices rise, the resources don't turn into the next set of reserves.
But hey, I like fairy tales too.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday October 22 2017, @04:11AM (11 children)
Phosphate on the other hand is a renewable resource.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 22 2017, @04:31AM (10 children)
You're right. As technology shifts, so do reserves.
However, there's nothing on the horizon that promises a revolution in chemistry that changes the kinds of rocks that prompt that sort of re-evaluation of reserves versus resources. Is it hypothetically possible? Sure. In the same sense that it's totally possible that we'll get a cure for the common cold next year. As a dream, it's lovely. As a foundation for planning, it's insane. In fact, the refining itself is so well understood that the chances of major shifts, as opposed to minor incremental improvements, on that front are minute.
But even so, let's pretend that somehow you are a miracle-worker of legend in the world of chemistry. You, yes you, figure out a way to make phosphate reserves so massively greater at current prices that it works out to a doubling. Congratulations, you've just moved the horizon out, at current usage rates (itself a problematic assumption) a grand total of another century.
Congratulations. The problem has totally failed to disappear, just slighly shift. In fact, so slightly that at expected usage increases with the third world ramping up its consumption, food prices are likely to move upwards on that factor alone (not even considering the energy density of nitrogenous fertilisers and delivery problems there) within our lifetimes.
Oh, and phosphates are renewable. Congratulations! Yup, with the right kind of structure, with the right kind of refinement from the right kind of resources (such as recapture from oceans) you could totally go and recapture so much runoff. However, without a gargantuan investment of energy and infrastructure, your rate of renewal is pathetically far beneath the world's current usage rate. This is precisely why we pretty much ran out of guano way back when. Technically, it's still available, but in actual fact it's a minute part of the current market. There is no current system available to recycle phosphate in the ecosystem that fast, on that scale.
TL;DR: Scale matters.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 23 2017, @01:24AM (9 children)
Peak phosphorus is another non-problem from the people who have been predicting energy and resource shortages for decades with a considerable failure record over that time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @04:10PM (8 children)
You say: "a) there are centuries of phosphorus at current usage rates with no real change in usage rate expected over the next few centuries"
Wrong.
- As I pointed out earlier, usage of modern fertilisers is spreading throughout the world, often with official encouragement, as governments seek internal food security.
- The long run is a distinct climb, even if the short run is a jagged graph, something pointed out directly by the exact document that you highlighted.
- Again, from the exact document you chose to point out, the amount at current usage rates isn't centuries; it's one century. If that.
- The best, most easily accessible sources are already being exhausted (again, from the document that you chose).
As for your assertion that "people who have been predicting energy and resource shortages for decades with a considerable failure record over that time" would you care to explain in the light of that how we reached highs in fuel costs a few years back (thus turning resources into reserves), how the big producers realised that they were in trouble when the rest of the world started scraping and searching for oil, opened their floodgates as wide as they damn well could in the hopes of staving off the loss of their dominant position, and the expected increased pace of exhaustion in their own reserves in any other terms? Something about the rosicrucians and the eternal battle for the temple of Solomon?
While you're at it, you can explain why we're in such a position that extracting tar sands, at eye-watering expense and frustrating energy inefficiency of extraction, is somehow justifiable in your happy world of all-you-can-drink oil? Then you can translate that into phosphorus for an encore.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday October 23 2017, @07:06PM (7 children)
Plus the several centuries of resources which would eventually become reserves. Let us also keep in mind that we haven't had much cause to go looking for phosphorus. There are probably orders of magnitude more hiding in the sea beds, for example.
You explained well enough on your own. We have via the technology of fracking an example of resources becoming reserves which took considerable intervention by conventional producers with declining reserves to temporarily disrupt. That's an example of why the doom and gloom is exaggerated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @05:28PM (6 children)
"Plus the several centuries of resources which would eventually become reserves."
Sure. Great. Fantastic. Again, the problem isn't that all the phosphate will disappear in a puff of smoke, but that the price will rise. Oh no! The price rises! Why does that matter? Because farmers will charge more where they used it, and produce less where they didn't. It's a direct line to worldwide communal food stress. And, again, it doesn't matter if it's all-you-can-eat phosphorama in Phosphate City, if it goes for cocaine-level prices. At that point it's irrelevant to agricultural industry.
To put it another way, if you kick out one of the legs of Borlaug's green revolution, you have a big, big problem.
"Let us also keep in mind that we haven't had much cause to go looking for phosphorus."
Incorrect. We've had huge efforts to go and find lots of phosphate wherever we could, and while those efforts could be extended, and details added, we have pretty good maps of phosphate resources.
"There are probably orders of magnitude more hiding in the sea beds, for example."
... which brings us right back to costs of recovery and refining. There is nothing on the seabed, or under it, that is going to be as cheap to extract and transport as an open cast mine. Great. So just maybe it will be technically viable, and maybe we will - or some kind of algae-based system, or something like that, but none of them promise to be viable without greatly increased prices. This means that we're back in the world of food stresses.
... and this is a win in your world?
"We have via the technology of fracking an example of resources becoming reserves which took considerable intervention by conventional producers with declining reserves to temporarily disrupt."
Fracking is precisely illustrative of the problem of rising prices and societal shifts, because it is energy expensive, technologically expensive and makes a relatively small move in terms of resources versus reserves. In the world of oil we're in a world of diminishing returns and have been for a long time. The exact same pattern promises to play out in phosphates.
If you look at the price and supply graphs over the time, you can actually see how prices were gradually edging up, until fracking (which was a known technology, not a sudden development) became justifiable. Then various big players in OPEC got scared, and decided to undercut the frackers by pushing as hard as they could. On the consumer side, great! Prices dropped, people smiled, and several of the frackers lost their shirts, but absolutely nothing about that contradicted for even a moment the idea that conventional supplies are stretched, and that the price is set to rise again, and soon. Similarly, in the world of phosphates, while the timeline is a bit further in the future, there's no reason whatsoever to believe that similar scenarios will not play out.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 24 2017, @10:40PM (5 children)
Even if we do absolutely nothing to innovate, and human population continues to climb, that's at least centuries away. Something else will blow up first.
To summarize, here's the problems with your arguments:
1) It ignores human innovation. The world of 1900 would be completely unable to support seven and a half billion people. We can do so with considerable margin. Technology changes the game. In particular, even though chemistry is hard, there's plenty of evidence to indicate that we can figure out our future supply problems.
2) Phosphorus just isn't that scarce. The traditional sources (such as guano) are cheaper, but once you get past them, it's still quite plentiful.
3) Phosphorus is cheap (phosphate rock is around $100 per ton [gbminerals.com] (third by mass phosphate)) and the several centuries of resources is still fairly cheap. In comparison, the primary component of fertilizer (almost an order of magnitude [gov.ab.ca], see figure 2, more used than phosphorus), nitrogen-bearing chemicals like urea and ammonia are on the order of $500 per ton [agriculture.com] (up to around 50% nitrogen by mass). That means among other things that phosphorus is not scarce enough yet to warrant extensive innovation and even a large increase in the cost isn't going to affect the overall cost of fertilizer that much.
4) Adjusted for inflation, oil still is hanging around the same price it was back in the mid 1970s [huffingtonpost.com]. Innovation has not only kept the supply of oil running, it has kept it running at pretty much the same price it was 40 years ago (despite predictions to the contrary). No sign of peak oil there. My view is that we'll see a similar phenomenon with phosphorus prices. What is considered expensive to extract now, will turn out not to be that expensive, once we've bothered to learn how to do it.
Thus, there isn't a case here to be concerned about peak phosphorus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @04:58AM (4 children)
The point wasn't that phosphates would be level with cocaine in the market. It was a hypothetical to point out that the price does matter. At best, you could try to say that until it's that expensive, it doesn't matter. Turns out, this would be incorrect because of a set of complex factors. The first is the uptake rate of potassium per crop. You can look it up, but it's scores to hundreds of pounds per year, per acre, depending on the crop involved. Right now, that's cheap and easy to obtain in bulk. As the supply gets tighter, it will still be easy, but a bit less cheap. Then gradually less cheap. This means that you either produce less (inefficiencies based on malnourished plants, or fallow periods, or some other compromise in agronomy) or you spend more on your fertilisers. OK, so the next factor is that farming is a commodity game, with high capital inputs (and consequently high finance costs) and very thin margins. This doesn't apply to ultra-niche vegan organic fair trade heritage quinoa stuff, but for most produce and most farmers, the margin is key. Even dollars per acre add up fast, and farmers are gambling that they will have a bumper crop while everyone else's crops fail, so that they make out like bandits at sale. If that doesn't happen, they're skating along on margins that make Walmart look like Apple.
Now, that's all cool, but who cares? Turns out, lots of people care. Pretty much everybody who eats cares. If farmers start producing less because they're seeking that extra percentage of efficiency, and prices rise because input costs rise, and because demand isn't reducing but supply is starting to get iffy (check out the fluctuations in prices of commodities in flood or drought years, for example) then consumers get cranky. Financially-stressed consumers get desperate, and you have problems. Remember that everyone along the supply chain has a percentage margin to maintain, and a minute change at the production end has a multiplier effect on the point of sale costs.
The result of all this, without even looking at the phosphate supply (or nitrates, or potash) issues is the simple observation that if farmers sneeze, people who eat catch a cold, in economic terms.
Yes! You're right! Humans have innovated! Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution has staved off global famine! Huzzah!
Err, except for the part where the foundations of that green revolution are wobbling because besides all the crop breeding and agronomic improvements and water management depended also upon a lavish supply of intelligently applied fertilisers. In fact, fertilisers that have limited supplies, or limited rates of renewal. This is precisely why this is a problem. The mere fact that technology led us in a direction doesn't mean that that road continues forever. The whole problem is that we don't have a replacement for phosphates in our soil, in terms of what they do for growing plants.
Now it's all very well to bow your head at the altar of the holy Edison, and have faith that we will continue to magic our way out of limitations in supply, but there's a difference between hope and magical thinking. Right now we're pretty much scooping phosphates out of the ground, doing fairly simple refining and shipping it off. The cost difference between that and even fairly modest advances is highly unlikely to be positive, to say the least. In fact, we're on track to run out the clock on that particular strategy before our years start with a 21, given long run increases in phosphate usage, which means that some of that tasty technological innovation will happen soon, on the planning timescale, with a resulting rise in prices.
The traditional sources are basically gone, in the sense that we can't just ship a backhoe to some island and load a bulk carrier. We've played that game and it's done.
The problem with alternative sources of phosphorus aren't that they don't work, or can't be made to work, but that they are more expensive and harder to extract in the same way that it's harder and more expensive to go fracking for tight oil than it is to tap a texas tea gusher. This is why even the simple fact that they are there, doesn't mean that we skip all of the ill effects of tightening supplies. It's like comparing fresh water from a river with fresh water from desalination plants. Both are fresh water, both are useful, but one is massively more expensive than the other.
No. No, no, no. Read again. The reserves are that cheaply extractable. Not the resources. Go back to previous posts, and that document that you linked, and read with care and attention about reserves and how they differ from resources. It matters. Some of the resources are questionably extractable at all, some are very easy. The ones that are really easy and cheap qualify as reserves. As for the problem with nitrogenous compounds, you're right - and they're largely dependent for their creation on petrochemical energy sources, so that's a different problem. But at best, that makes the problem worse, not better, if both N and P are rising in price at the same time. It would be less of a problem (though still a problem) if it were only one, but it's both. So hey, agricultural economics is fun, right? And, again, look back at the problem that it's not just supply pushing the price, but demand as well. That demand isn't sinking. Unless you care to look at the very short run, it's not even particularly stationary. It's rising. Demand and supply are combining to push prices here. Lots of leftists for some reason want to deny that that could be an issue in the same breath as they're desperately trying to push third world agriculture into the twentieth century because of things like food security issues. Ignoring that must take some massive feats of cognitive dissonance.
Read again the above posts on why oil is at its current price. There's an artificially driven spike in supply from countries driving their horses as hard as they can, to the point that their own engineers have publically grumbled about being able to keep it up (side-eye to Saudi Arabia here) in combination with other people who have sunk vast resources into tapping tight oil, shale gas and so on, and are keeping it up on the theory that they need to at least pay the interest on their loans, and waiting for the other saudi shoe to drop in terms of supply. If this hadn't happened, we'd have been way above $4 at the pump, instead of bumping along at '70s * inflation factor. Not that the '70s were a wild time of forgettably cheap fuel, mind you. Compare them to the mid-'90s...
Tonight? No.
Tomorrow? No.
On the timescale of agricultural planning? Very much, yes. You need to think in terms of how farms are structured, the infrastructure that you build, the water management choices you make. A decade is a short time in farming.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 25 2017, @03:55PM (3 children)
You are arguing circularly here. You haven't established that there is or will be a phosphate problem and hence, your claim that the green revolution is "wobbling" because of that phosphate problem is in error.
You're just not getting it. Turning resources into reserves is not just a developed world thing. Saudi Arabia can do that as well and keep its gravy train going longer than expected.
Further, my point behind the oil example is that it's not following the peak resource model at all. And as a result, defenders of that model have to keep making excuses like you did above. Phosphates aren't any different. It doesn't make any sense to speak of present day costs of extracting future phosphorus resources, when human innovation will reduce those costs in the future just as they did for oil resources of the past 50 years. Let us keep in mind that the same arguments you made now, were made back in the 1970s. And they failed hard since because new reserves were created to replace the old ones that were depleted.
Show there's a problem first.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @09:23PM (2 children)
Starting with the basics, here...
First: Mineral phosphates are a limited, non-renewable resource. (Reference the exact same study that you linked above.)
Second: Every crop taken off a given field removes some phosphates from that field. (Feel free to google this. Unless you think the magic phosphate fairy blesses crops, in which case I can't help you.)
Third: We presently do not have any kind of phosphate cycle in place with any kind of volume to compare with the rate at which we are extracting phosphates and using them on fields. (If we did, we wouldn't bother with mining for the stuff.)
Fourth: As a result of the three foregoing positions, we are exhausting phosphate on which our agricultural productivity rests. Unless the third proposition is somehow replaced with a high speed closed phosphate loop, analogous to the water cycle, we will run up hard against a fundamental, chemistry-based wall, beyond which natural replenishment rates are our best available rate - and that brings us back to productivity rates last seen (in the western world) in the nineteenth century. If that.
Fifth: Even before we hit the wall, we are running down available resources in approximate order of accessibility. Current reserves hit the market at low, bulk commodity prices.
Sixth: Current non-reserve resources are in many cases not as bioavailable as current reserves. This advances the need for refinement from relatively crude bulk management into the realm of industrial-scale chemical engineering. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but it takes more energy, more capital, and more inputs. Regardless of advances, the comparative advantage in price terms lies with the more bioavailable sources.
Seventh: Current non-reserve resources are in many cases not as physically available as current reserves. Whether that means deep mining, oceanic extractions or complex management of the environment such as nearby river flows, all of these raise the cost of extraction. Regardless of advances, the comparative advantage in price terms lies with the more physically available sources.
Eighth: Even stipulating that presently ill-defined advances occur, that might reduce some of the costs of extraction, logistics and refinement, we have no guarantees of when those advances will be available, nor of how big a difference they might make. The most confidently expected changes are incremental, such as the putative benefits of moving heavy machinery to hybrid powerplants, and the net results are marginal.
Ninth: As a result of factors 6 through 8, absent a technological black swan, future reserves are likely to be created by price rises (reference the same study that you linked above) rather than capability shifts. These price rises will be necessary to reflect increased costs of extraction, refinement and the logistics surrounding both of those factors, without which exploiting those resources would be uneconomical.
Tenth: Net world demand trends are upwards, driven by both regional and international politics. Short run demands are clearly affected by exogenous events and business cycle concerns, but the general trend is clearly upward and has been for decades. This means that straightforward current-usage analyses are over-optimistic in terms of current reserve lifespans.
Eleventh: For the time being, world population is trending clearly upwards. This, over and above policy demands on the parts of governments and NGO groups, will raise demand for food. Sheer supply and demand factors suggest that the long run price trend for food articles will rise, unless the production pushes mentioned in factor 10 increase supply to meet that. This motivates increases in demand for phosphates.
Twelfth: Increased demand for phosphates as per current long run trends (see factor 10), motivated to continue as per factor 11, strongly suggest that phosphate commodity prices are unlikely to drop unless extraction increases massively, and in fact are set to increase modestly at least. This will reduce some supply constraints as per factor 9, but still place a price floor for phosphates as availability drops and extraction costs ratchet upwards. As the constraints become greater with incrementally less available resources requiring higher prices to justify extraction, purchasers will be faced with the question of how much they want that phosphorus.
Thirteenth: At some point (combined with other price and land stresses) phosphorus becomes notionally too expensive to justify. Even if there are phosphate resources left, and regardless of the size or scope of those resources, at that point we run into the wall as far as agriculture is concerned, as per factor 4.
Fourteenth: Regardless of other factors, such as nitrogen, potash, calcium and so on, some of which bid fair to create problems before we run down plausible phosphate reserves, we have a clear clock running on the future of agriculture as we know it, based on phosphorus availability.
Fifteenth: The most optimistic estimate is that we have reserves to last a hundred years at current usage rates (as per the document you linked). However, there is no reason to believe that those rates will remain constant, and in fact there's plenty of reason to believe that structural sources of demand are driving higher usage (note factors 11 and 10). While it's equally problematic to simply do linear extrapolation on the long run demand curve, even a conservative basis for estimate would place the current reserves at offering us a window closer to seventy than a hundred years.
Sixteenth: It is well recognised at this point that food security, food stresses and the cost of access to food are major drivers of instability. Studies on recent events in Tunisia, Libya and Venezuela all tell the same story.
Seventeenth: Agriculture is a capital-intensive, bulk commodity industry. This means that margins are thin, returns are low, and even minor incremental costs get passed on rather than swallowed.
Eighteenth: Agriculture is a primary production industry, that supplies a wide range of secondary and (indirectly) tertiary and service industries. Agricultural cost increases affect much of the real economy indirectly.
Nineteenth: Agriculture is an industry with a long planning horizon, owing to the thin margins and the need to show a return on capital. This is a consequence of factor 17. This means that disruptions decades in advance are a planning concern today.
Twentieth: Combining factors 4, 9, 12, 15, 16 and 19, we have a picture of an industry with a foreseeable, medium term problem, well within the planning horizon, with knock-on effects that affect economic and social stability.
Now, you're at liberty to say that this isn't a problem because technology is magic, or because a few decades aren't really in the planning horizon, or because you'll be dead by then, or because other problems are bigger and more immediate, and who cares? That's fine. That's on you. But to people actually engaged in this kind of planning? Yeah, it's a problem. So I guess you're welcome to your opinion, just don't expect it to get a lot of respect in agricultural economic circles.
See above. Yeah, I put your quotes out of order. Deal with it.
I get it just fine. Turning resources into reserves is global. That is entirely consistent with everything I've said, I've never denied it and if you'd bothered to raise that question I'd have vigorously asserted that it is global. Saudi Arabia's gravy train has some flex in it - well, that was understood. They've played games with their rates before, and will doubtless do so again. However, there's not a thing about this that contradicts peak oil. Peak oil is simply the observation that your supply on any given source ramps up, peaks, and then tails off. Funnily enough, because of the way these curves add up, that's more or less what the total supply does as well. It doesn't predict any kind of catastrophic event that will bring all the things crashing down to a grinding halt in the grime and dust of a failed civilisation; it's more like saying that yeah, we'll run out, but long before we run out it'll get harder and harder and more and more expensive. Sure, Saudi Arabia can try to undercut their supply competition, and can ride that pony as hard as possible for geopolitical reasons, but that pony's legs run out when they start to run short.
I guess you could be one of the replenishment mindset - do you think that oil replenishes itself on some sort of ongoing basis? I knew a pilot who thought that oil was the planet's blood, and that Gaia creates more for us all the time. In that case, the peak oil concept is refuted.
Part of the problem with leaning on the idea of technological advances pushing out the envelope of reserves is that they give you diminishing returns. For example, fracking takes a lot of energy, and your net returns of energy are therefore lower than the headline value of what comes up the pipe. Moreover, at each incremental rise in the price or improvement in technology, you don't convert the whole world into reserves, but only a small slice. Taking this back to phosphates, it's not as if we don't know how to extract more phosphates; it's just not worth it at current prices. And the easy answer is: raise the prices! But at that point, we're back to the results of doing so. And this is why it's a problem for the green revolution; we can feed the world, for a bit, but it will get harder unless we completely change the phosphate cycle. As long as we have ample energy, nitrates won't be a huge problem (what the hell, let's pretend energy is infinite ...) but at some point, you either need to find a way of recapturing phosphate runoff, or you're going to have crops that just can't grow faster than seagulls shit on them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 26 2017, @03:40AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 28 2017, @06:54PM
Got it. The miraculous power of innovation is specifically guaranteed to produce an eternal availability of low-cost phosphorus, so planning for a reduction in availability is insane.
So glad you clarified that for the benighted heathens.