People eat roughly 4lbs of food per day (assuming relatively low calorie vegetables).  Your plot gives you enough food to feed 1 person for roughly two weeks out of a year.  It’s a toy.

I’m certainly not against home gardening (I do my own), but anybody who think it is going to supply a significant fraction of their caloric intake is just kidding themselves.

Those Community Gardens only make financial sense because they’re run on donated land.  If you had to pay rent and taxes at anything close to what land in the city would normally cost they would be a massive money loser. 

That’s why we don’t put farms in the middle of cities.  They need to be out where land is cheap. 

And, once again, I suggest you watch the documentary Food, Inc. and educate yourself on why “mega-farms” are harmful.

I might be making assumptions, but I find that free-market miracle people like you point to the glories of, for example, cheap goods flooding our country via Walmart, conveniently forgetting that China is the very model of an economy that exists only through government subsidies and government backed human rights violations. It’s also easy to forget that our “free market” cheap bananas and coffee are supported by governments that murder labor organizers. “Free” depends on your perspective.

There is no guarantee that the answer to peak oil will miraculously appear simply because we need it. That’s magical thinking, isn’t it? How I can people continue to parrot that line without seeing that it is magical? I’ve seen a need for anti-gravity or time-travel technology for years now, and it hasn’t appeared.

You could be one of those people next year. Ask the people in Argentina or Greece. We cannot assume we will remain immune from future upheavals simply because we appear immune now. I say “appear” because record numbers of our population are standing invisibly in the modern equivalent of soup lines: food stamp debit cards. The wealthy countries may have the hardest time adjusting to food shortages because our populations have little resilience and so few of us are skilled at subsistence farming on small plots. The best position to be in could very well be that of a subsistence fisher or farmer in Papua New Guinea.

Also, the “system” might be working, but it is a mistake to imbue that system with a God-like benevolence that smiles upon (or even cares about) our continued comforts or dreams of moving to a techno-green wonderland. Market forces are ignorant of our hopes. Prices are skyrocketing because we don’t have enough resources to support the current petroleum-fueled way of life. As Corrosino says, this current arrangement depends on never-ending growth. I cannot imagine a smooth or graceful transition to whatever it is that is coming next.

I guess that will save on calories.  And eventually, mouths to feed. :(

Australian economist John Quiggin pointed out that in many ways what’s more relevant is oil consumption *per person*, and if you use that metric the world passed “peak oil” back around 1980 without any catastrophe:

Not sure how you can say that with a straight face when world population has grown by more than 50% since then.

Given how weak Worstall’s argument is, I don’t really see how the condescending tone of the article is justified.  Gives me a sense that Worstall is posturing rather than engaging in good-faith criticism.

Resources is a very different number. This is a combination of the unknown knowns and the known unknowns described above. For potash?“
Estimated world resources total about 250 billion tons.

At the current usage rate of 33 million tonnes a year that gives us an over 7,000 year supply. For phosphate rock?

“World resources of phosphate rock are more than 300 billion tons.
At the 190 million tonne a year usage, a 1,500 years supply.”

It’s below the lengthy excerpt.

The actual rebuttal is to point out that Worstall is counting phosphates at concentrations so low that it may never make economic sense to extract it.  He’s saying, “Look, if we invent some magical technology in the next 20 years we’ll be all set.” 

Grantham is making a more sensible case: of the phosphates whose extraction makes economic sense, 75% is held by one nation-state putting them in a great medium-term position to make a lot of money on phosphates, keeping the price of both fertilizer and food high relative to other commodities.

Anyway all of this is pretty primary stuff, common sense if you will. The scary part, is that because we have use “atrifical” means to enable continued population growth, and that because those means are mostly things that we will eventually run out of, the repercussions could be all the more dire. That is to say the organism that achieved 120% population will experiance a 20% decline before it stabalizes, whereas for example one that has 1000% population…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eKYyD14d_0

Grantham’s real case — which the “rebuttals” conveniently ignore — is that we’re entering a new era in economic history.  The last era was one of abundance in which easily accessed resources entered into a feedback loop with extraction technologies keeping supply ahead of demand with respect to all major commodities.  Grantham argues (more rigorously in the quarterly letters than in the collection of charts) that we’re seeing a fundamental change across many important commodities — that excess production is no longer keeping up with excess demand.

The more knowledgeable peak oil commentators tend to talk about slow declines rather than catastrophes.  Slow declines have a lot more historical support as well.  Such a decline wouldn’t mean mass starvation — it would mean increased rates of starvation at the margins of the world economy where starvation is already fairly common and a slowly depreciating standard of living everywhere else.  One would also expect the decline to be uneven where some populations have the resources and military might to appropriate resources more effectively than other populations.

“It’s a lot easier to understand how increasing human demand drives up prices than how human innovation increases the supply. But it does, every single year.”

The reification of technology is also a bummer. Maybe you could get over it by taking a somewhat less contemptuous view of the basic science on which it’s based.

The reification of science is a bummer. The joy of science is that it is always contingent, an endless stream of hype that touches reality, then diverges, making room for the new.

Anyhow, yeah, sure, and can I imagine you getting an aneurysm instead, please? 

His predictions were incorrect as a result of changing conditions.  This routinely happens in science.

But “incorrect” and “fake” are not synonyms, and Malthus was only “incorrect” insofar as his model made assumptions that ceased to apply several decades later.

You might as well argue Newton was “fake” for failing to account for the precession of the perihelion of Mercury.

It’s hilarious to me that you have so much faith in the power of technology to solve all earthly problems despite a deep ignorance of how science works in the first place.

He just made predictions that have failed to work out for the last two hundred odd years.

But one day!

I have much more faith in what happened yesterday happening again today than I do an ancient philosopher’s dream coming true. I guess its why I haven’t put together my Rapture Bugout kit yet.