To date it hasn't. Also to date I haven't come through on my assurance in Nov. 24ths "Jeremy Grantham "On the Road to Zero Growth" as His Co-head of Asset Allocation Does the Full Monty". I promise I'll get to it.
We have almost as many posts on Professor Smil as we do on Mr. Grantham. This is the first time they've been together. I feel very uncomfortable being on the opposite side of Mr. G on just about anything but in this case Smil is right.
From The American:
Jeremy Grantham, Starving for Facts
A column by legendary asset manager Jeremy Grantham is more suitable for the tabloids than for one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific weekly magazines.Some of our other posts on Smil:
Jeremy Grantham, a well-known presence in the financial world, recently published a World View column in the journal Nature in which he concludes that, “simply, we are running out’’ of almost all commodities whose consumption sustains modern civilization. There is nothing new about such claims, and since the emergence of a vocal global peak oil movement during the late 1990s, many other minerals have been added to the endangered list. Indeed, there is now a book called Peak Everything. What makes Grantham’s column – published under the alarmist headline “Be Persuasive. Be Brave. Be Arrested (If Necessary)” – worth noticing, and deconstructing, is that he puts his claims in terms more suitable for tabloids than for one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific weekly magazines.
His direst example is “the impending shortage of two fertilizers: phosphorus (phosphate) and potassium (potash). These two elements cannot be made, cannot be substituted, are necessary to grow all life forms, and are mined and depleted. It’s a scary set of statements…. What happens when these fertilizers run out is a question I can’t get satisfactorily answered and, believe me, I have tried.’’ Well, he could have tried just a bit harder: an Internet search would have led him, in mere seconds, to “World Phosphate Rock Reserves and Resources,” a study published in 2010 by the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
This detailed assessment of the world’s phosphate reserves (that are the part of a wider category of resources that is recoverable with existing techniques and at acceptable cost) concluded that they are adequate to produce fertilizer for the next 300 to 400 years. As with all mineral resource appraisals (be they of crude oil or rare earths), the study’s conclusions can be criticized and questioned, and the statement by the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative is perhaps the best document of that kind. But even the most conservative interpretation of IFDC’s assessment shows that phosphates have a reserve/production ratio well in excess of 100 years, higher than that of many other critical mineral resources.
Grantham could have also checked the standard, and the most often quoted, sourcebooks on the world’s mineral resources, Mineral Commodity Summaries, published annually by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). In the latest edition, he would have found that the USGS made significant revisions to its phosphate rock reserves data for Morocco, Russia, Algeria, Senegal, and Syria, and that it now puts the global reserve/production ratio at about 370 years....MORE
Energy: "The man who’s tutoring Bill Gates … "
Vaclav Smil: "The Manufacturing of Decline"
Bill Gates Reviews Vaclav Smil's "Prime Movers of Globalization: The History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines"
Oct 2010
Serious Thinking on Energy: An Interview With Dr. Vaclav Smil
Smil is one of the heavyweights in the cogitating-about-energy biz....July 2010
A Major Piece: "Why the tech revolution isn’t a template for an energy revolution"
We've been following Mr. Smil for a while. Some interesting links after the headline story, from the Financial Times' Energy Source...Vaclav Smil: "Why Jobs Is No Edison" (AAPL)
