Re: Sustainable UK population


Toby Kelsey wrote:
Given Peak Oil, chronic overfishing, and degrading soil; fossil-fuel farming and
fishing will go and the UK (without much to export and high transport costs)

Oil is not the only fossil fuel, coal reserves are a lot more
substantial. Coal is less convenient for many purposes but all this
really does is alter the cost of energy because you need slightly more
complex machines to process the fuel and release it.


Could someone with more agricultural expertise comment on this estimate?


In a potential doomsday scenario where society has time to adjust you
cannot assume that current farming practices or assumptions will hold.
Even in a rapid and poorly predicted crash I would at the very least
expect most pasture land to be turned over to crops suited to high
productivity on thin soils such as the humble potato.

Given the likely timescales for the exhaustion of all fossil fuels
(well over a century away IIRC) you are trying to predict the actions
of a society with technology which we cannot currently predict. For all
we know they might have ultra-dense farms of algae, or free-floating
saltwater aquaponics. Some of these potential agricultural technologies
are - in principle - sufficiently productive both to feed the current
population and to generate a surplus that can be converted to fuel.

--
Nic

.