Peak Phosphorus

August 19, 2019

By NZB3

In these days of mainstream Slave Culture certain Core Beliefs about the world are popular. The SC’s identity depends on being cognitively enmeshed in these fallacies but you don’t have to be! The Malthusian axiom that we’re all on a sinking ship and battling it out for our own bite of a zero-sum Marxist cake is their central tenant. Slave Cultists also try to infect others with such fallacies because they sense that it will scare them into submitting or even joining with Slave Culture.

Satirist, Dan McGlashan of VJM, explores the logical consequences of accepting Slave Culture premises in his recent post. What happens if, “..the planet cannot support the level of consumption that humans are currently subjecting it to. There simply aren’t enough of the necessary resources” follows…

“The world doesn’t need hard work and production any more. Those days are over. What the world now needs are people who can restrict their consumption..Without such a great sacrifice, our planet cannot survive…The average Western beneficiary has already achieved this..”

“Like the holy ascetic men of the great Eastern religions, the Western beneficiary class..are therefore showing the way forward for the rest of humanity, and ought to be praised as spiritual masters. The rest of us need to follow..the moral superiority of the welfare recipient.”- Why Beneficiaries Are Morally Superior to Workers; VJM

It’s logical and an amusing parody of SC. Is it true?

Phosphorus Panic

New Zealand is a huge consumer of phosphorus and it has been a key to making the land fertile and raising our standard of living. (There are bad points too but we can talk about that another time.) Generations of young Kiwis built their muscles lugging 20kg Ravensdown sacks of superphosphate into the shed for later (tell me about it.) McGlashan singles phosphorus depletion (along with oil) as a main commodity the Earth is running out of.

Planet earth is made of phosphorus, it’s an element with traces all over the place. What you’ve got here is not a problem of absence of a material but a problem with getting hold of usable quantities. The Earth has not nor ever can run out of phosphorus. It’s on, in, and under our feet and we are only tapping into a tiny fraction even today. That’s geological fact. The proof that the world marketplace for phosphorus isn’t anticipating any such scarcity is in the price record.

Actually, the price of rock phosphate has come down in the last 10 years. If it were an ever-depleting resource we would expect and ever-increasing price. This is not the case, the price is stable. There was a fluctuation back in 2008 (government intervention, I’ll just bet..) but it corrected.

Economic law requires that if phosphorus is becoming more scarce then the commodity price will go up. If so, it follows that it becomes economically worthwhile to tap into more phosphorus resources in harder to get places. And, develop more efficient use of phosphorus and perhaps substitutes.

“Skyrocketing prices of important commodoties is what excites me about future possibilities. if i wanna see astroids getting mined in my lifetime i need to see some prices soar!!”

“Yeh, X commodity is running out oh no we’re all gonna die”- comment to Anarkiwi

If human ingenuity is unable to increase the supply then the price will go up and people will dial back consumption. The same way pain regulates human activity and stops us doing things that damage us, higher prices make people recoil from activities.

Major Elements in the Earth’s Crust

Phosphorus is a chemical element and the planet is filthy with it. We’re not running out in a physical sense. The concern cannot be that we’re ever going to run out of phosphorus or oil but that market signals are going to be tampered with somehow by Government…

copper 0.01%

carbon 0.03%

calcium 3.63%

hydrogen 0.14%

iron 5.00%

phosphorus 0.12%

This means that any given 1kg rock you pick up contains over a gram of phosphorus. This pertains to the outer skin of the Earth (the crust) to a depth of 40km down.

We’ve got to stop talking about this as a physics/geology problem. Never running out of phosphorus. Forget about it.

This is An Economics Problem

If the price is higher than 2006 that’s fine- that’s how we put the breaks on over-using what we have access to. It’s also how we tap in to more of it because it becomes more profitable to go where no phosphorus miner has gone before.

Now we solve some political border dispute!
Now we invent better tech and go into some inhospitable place to hunt the magic rocks
Now we improve our drilling and processing
Nw we improve our distribution and use-efficiency.
Now we stop spending so much money on luxury items like movies and video games because the price of food commands our attention..?

The can be no crisis here. Only a Government can muck this up.

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