Lindsay Tanner suggests we need high immigration to supply us with doctors and engineers. So we have to rely on the skills of developing economies to support our economy. Why can’t we train our own people to do these jobs?

I am frustrated with the political process.

I’m pleased you used food production as an example. I’m writing to suggest another aspect of food supplies if you ever get the chance to expand on this theme. It is how future limited petroleum will further impinge on them. Not the obvious examples of fuel for large tractors, harvesters, and transport vehicles, since can all (dimly) visualise electric tractors, harvesters and (less dimly) transport so long as we don’t dwell too long on where all the electricity might come from.

The thing you could focus on in another piece on food is the Haber Process. (Forgive me if the following is old hat to you: I have to take this gamble.) Without it agriculture would have wound down as mined saltpetre, and thus nitrogenous fertilisers, eg ammonium salts, were unprocurable in commercial amounts. And bingo, Malthus would have been right, then and there. With the Haber Process we can fix more and more nitrogen on demand, for as long as natural gas (supplies the hydrogen better than the original coke did) is freely available and affordable. But it has many uses, and many are competing for it. China was very keen to get its hands on $50B if it recently from WA, mostly, I gather, for the nitrogen fixation that high yield rice and wheat fields depend on.

No doubt the nitrogenous fertiliser industry would love to give up the Haber Process (because of its dependence on petroleum) and rush to something better. The problem is that nothing is on the horizon. As petroleum, liquid and gas, get more expensive, so too will affordable nitrogenous fertiliser on the scale required. Food grown using it will become more expensive, and countries that can’t afford it will see their yields go down, big time, at the very time they need more food.

What is needed is a way to isolate hydrogen on a massive scale and link it with nitrogen, also on a massive scale, without roaring through fossil fuel to do it. It is hard to be optimistic about this happening. Hydroelectrolysis, in theory, but needs truly buckets of energy, dominating its other uses.

So every time we read of petroleum supplies diminishing, we should think of the consequences of worn-out saltpetre mines that fossil fuel, plus the ingenuity of Haber (and Bosch, with whom he shared the Nobel Prize, essentially for deferring Malthus’s prediction) saved us from. And watch what agricultural yields and prices do in response to oil and gas prices, and availability.

“You do not need a large population to have high average incomes and standard of living. You only need it for a few people to be disproportionately wealthy.”

I suggest, in fact, that a large population is more likely to lower real incomes and standard of living. Yet the myth of the growth bonanza lives on. Around the world we must continue to raise the volume on logic and fact about overpopulation.

Dave Gardner
Producing the documentary
Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity