Posted on 09/26/2022 8:25:17 PM PDT by FarCenter
Over the last two centuries, followers of the English economist Thomas Malthus have been repeating his prediction that human-population growth would eventually outpace agricultural-productivity growth. So far, their warnings of impending mass starvation have proved wrong.
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The noted Czech-Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil has something important to say about this dramatic increase in ag productivity. In the latest of his 40-odd books, How the World Really Works, he gives the credit for it to fossil fuels.
“Saying that the increase has been the combined effect of better crop varieties, agricultural mechanization, fertilization, irrigation and crop protection correctly describes the changes in key inputs – but it still misses the fundamental explanation,” Smil maintains.
Fossil fuels, he says, have been indispensable to all of these things, from the manufacture of farm equipment to the running of farm equipment, from synthetic fertilizers to agrochemicals. In fact, Smil argues, the modern world’s “most important – and fundamentally existential – dependence on fossil fuels is their direct and indirect use in the production of food.”
To illustrate the point, Smil calculates the fossil fuel needed to get several items of food to the consumer. For a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of parts from a chicken raised in an efficient confinement operation, he concludes it’s 300-350 milliliters of crude oil – “a volume equal to almost half a bottle of wine.” For a kilogram of greenhouse tomatoes, it’s 500 milliliters of diesel fuel, or more than two cups.
According to Smil, the way agriculture has stayed ahead of population growth is through an energy conversion: the substitution of fossil fuels for human labor.
“Energy conversions are the very basis of life and evolution,” Smil writes. “Modern history can be seen as an unusually rapid sequence of transactions to new energy sources, and the modern world is the cumulative result of their conversions.”
This is where Bill Gates, and inept Red Chinese virologists, come into play.
So far, the Malthusians have been wrong. It ticks them off so badly that they had to invent Glowbull Worming to get back at cold hard reality.
Lol.. stopped reading after “fossil”… what serious scientist believes that barge. These are the same ones on the weather channel whose global warming is causing deadly hurricanes stopped their graph at 2020. Turned them off for the last time and watch fox weather, which is only marginally better. But we are traveling Monday and hurricanes are a fascinating sight from afar.
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