David Nemerson invites to the following discussion. You are more than welcome to become engaged through a comment below.
I got in a debate yesterday about the role that fossil fuels played in the explosion in the size of the human population and material economy since the early 1800s. My thesis was the expansion from 1 to 7.4 billion humans and the much larger increase in the material economy are a direct result of the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels, mediated mostly through chemical fertilizer and mechanized farming.
My adversary offered:I absolutely believe we could have supported 7.4 billion on non fossil fuel based agriculture. And the population explosion was primarily due to non-fossil fuel requisite advances in disease control that occurred during the 20th Century.I’m curious what folks here think. And any good references that address this issue? Obviously, sanitation and antibiotics are important proximate causes, but they are proximate in my mind.Thanks.
Though the issues are a bit intertwined, I agree with you David, but I don’t see exactly how to prove it. Jean
Organic agriculture actually uses for crops, maybe, one quarter (to one half) of the productive area of commercial cropping. And then the yield, of that smaller cropped area, is one third to one half per acre of crop.
So IMHO it will be naive to assume that we could have food security without modern agriculture.
That said, if it could be feasible to change diets (human preferences), we might be able to get by on half of current agricultural output. But bear in mind the years when organic requires four times as much land and only yields one third as much (on the quarter that is in crop).
So, in my view, the best option for a small footprint and wilderness is to use the best available inputs, as well as working hard on our diets.
On historical causes, I think that modern agriculture (higher yields/abundant supply) preceded lower mortality? (but I might be wrong here?)
Thanks Robert. So, what kicked this off was this somewhat odd paper in PNAS: Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/31/9511.full
Here are the first couple of sentences from the Abstract:
Earth is a chemical battery where, over evolutionary time with a trickle-charge of photosynthesis using solar energy, billions of tons of living biomass were stored in forests and other ecosystems and in vast reserves of fossil fuels. In just the last few hundred years, humans extracted exploitable energy from these living and fossilized biomass fuels to build the modern industrial-technological-informational economy, to grow our population to more than 7 billion, and to transform the biogeochemical cycles and biodiversity of the earth.
I have seen this basic idea elsewhere.
Here’s a thought experiment: All vegetation decays in the atmosphere to CO2 and always has. No fossil fuels exist on planet Earth. What is the population today?