Hi Dinny and others,

You may be unsurprised to know that I would be very, very happy to be proven wrong on the food sufficiency side. Yes, if proper tariffs were in place we probably could supply ourselves (and maybe even twice our current population) with fruit and veg under current climate, energy and fertlizer availability conditions. However, go to the original version of the article (with all the graphs) at the Energy Bulletin:

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/52706

and take a look at the phosphate projection! In the future it will be much more difficult to produce food than in the past. Oil and phosphate decline require a completely different societal arrangement for food production. The main effort must be to keep population as low as possible now so that, when our food production goes into decline, we have a margin to fall back on to give us time to adjust.

Best regards,

Michael

Great article Michael,
It takes a lot of energy to produce food. We will need to start a
change to a different energy source on our farms eventually.
Ultimately we will rely on horse power, but that is a long way off,
In the meantime agriculture will get priority for fuel.
However farming must change to locally grown and sold food.
This will overcome Dinny's worries.

We simply cannot afford to squander energy on building houses and
infrastructure for another 25 million people. It is just not on.

Phosphate is an urgent problem now.
In Sweden they have designed a toilet pan to capture urine with the
intention to extract the phosphorous.
Without phosphorous we all die.

There are many reasons why the population will not increase to the
extent that the government proposes, most of them related to energy.
This presupposes that China and Indonesia do not fight over occupation
rights to Australia.
Errr I am joking, err am I ?

Only one problem Bazz with locally grown food - only 6% of Australia is arable country. Locally grown food will not feed this rapidly expanding population.

Well nosg, as most of the population centres were established because
of the arable land available the transport will not be too great a problem.

Example, Sydney was able to grow because there was arable land available.
True, it has been built on, but there is still good land outside the
Sydney area.
As we will have electric trains they will serve to bring the
market garden produce to the cities and towns as they did before
trucks were so common. We will need to use coal fired power stations
to power them, unless we build nuclear power stations.
Transport will be needed in country areas to ship grain products to
the cities which is why the state governments should rebuild the
country branch lines that were abandoned to road transport.
Again politicians will only respond when we no longer have the energy
needed to rebuild the rail network.
Anyone in the trucking business should seriously look at getting out
over the next few years.
Even local use around cities will be difficult and expensive.