Hello HO & Gail,

First, Big Kudos to all ASPO & TOD speakers, plus the attendees of this conference.

Gail's Quote: "He expects that higher shipping costs will tend to make countries purchase goods from their closer neighbors, rather from long distances. In the case of the US, this means Mexico will sometimes have an edge over China in making goods to import."

This is a logical result when this is possible, but many Elements are geo-location flowrate-limited, thus, this geo-constraint means that long distant shipping will be inevitable, until declining FF net energy forces the shift to even smaller flowrates moved by wind-sailing ships. I have no idea on this timeframe progression.

From history, we know the Brits mined the easy 'low-hanging fruit' of Pacific guanos, then moved it back halfway around the world for UK topsoil application in the 1800s. They would have saved much energy, expense, and time if they had native resources, but Nature wasn't generous. Such is life.

Presently, the UN FAO Fertilizer Forecast projects North America[NA] to be heading into a phosphorus[P] deficit, and the latest from the USGS website echoes this trend with evidence of increasing phosphate imports from Morocco [the remaining high fruit], even with the admitted US Census Bureau data suppression.

The ASPO discussion of potentially higher crude depletion rates [10%->yikes!] plus WT's ELM thus indicates a growing strategic need to insure NA P-imports for food surplus generation, which is key to continued job specialization. IMO, this is 'right down the alley' of Asimov's Foundations of predictive collapse and directed decline using Element planning and control.

Obviously, the Pentagon is not going to reveal their future plans. Heck, I don't even know if they are looking this far ahead into the control concept of Asimovian Optimal Overshoot Decline, but I certainly hope they are reading TOD daily. Proper execution of Liebig's Law of the Minimum and Liebscher's Law of the Optimum offers many potential control scenarios going forward. Recall my earlier weblink news on the Israeli curtailment of the Element sulfur inside the Palestinian enclosures.

If a 'global black swan' occurs to severely curtail crude flowrates, we could see lots of bunker-fueled ships at anchor. The UK and Europe, due to their close proximity to Morocco, might be able to ship adequate raw phosphate rock quantities by pressing all their sailing yachts into repeated trips to and fro.

In contrast: the US and the rest of giant NA, geo-located across the 'pond' from the non-substitutable Element P, might be forced to use a few nuclear aircraft carriers for trans-Atlantic transport. Small sailing yachts would find the Atlantic's distance and notoriously foul weather impossible to safely traverse while heavily laden down with bags of phosphate rock...Logistics is all. Very expensive transport fuels would be required to move the P from NA's seaports to the far-inland arable acres for agro-application.

Pres. Clinton is now on record for promoting the closing of the US landfills to ramp O-NPK and the other Elements for recycling--I have pushed for this process, plus even more [see SpiderWebRiding in TOD archives], for some time, too. Of course, long time TOD readers of my postings already know of my advocacy for strategic reserves of I-NPK far above our present JIT levels, as greatly expanding O-NPK recycling networks cannot be done overnight, especially during a National Emergency.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?