Rice Farmer

Is Humanity Really Going to Starve to Death in Twenty Years Because We Will Have Run Out of Potash and Phosphorus Fertilizers?

The right answer here is that Grantham and his detractors have all got it wrong. They are focusing on quantity, but it doesn't matter how much potash and phosphorus the planet has. There are two reasons for this. First, quantity is meaningless. The resources must be of sufficient quality to allow their economical extraction and processing. Second, because extraction, processing, and distribution all require energy, that energy must be sufficiently cheap and available to perform these tasks. Therefore, the question is not the amounts of these nutrients that exist, but whether they are of sufficient quality, and whether energy is cheap enough and available. There might well be 250 billion tons of potash, but I guarantee you that humanity will never recover all of it. It's surprising that these economics and investment gurus do not understand the concept of quality, and they certainly do not understand energy. This reminds one again of the fact that no one is extracting the thousands of tons of gold in the world's oceans, in spite of today's high prices. Despite the huge quantity there for the taking, the quality of the resource is too low. So here again, we can see that quality is the only thing that really matters. -- RF