alt Hacker NewsIsaac Asimov was an early writer on this, noting that if the earth's crust was converted into biomass the limiting element was phosphorous --- look at USDA photos of food crops grown w/ and w/o fertilizer including that element for a very sobering view.
Currently, we expend up to 10 calories of petro-chemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy (depending on food) --- peak oil is still worrisome given how much of the input for fertilizers is from oil.
Sometime in the last century we crossed over from their being more weight in bony fish in the oceans than shipping tonnage to the latter predominating: https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/
My grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting was outlawed --- I worry my children will live in a time when commercial fishing is no longer feasible.
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> I worry my children will live in a time when commercial fishing is no longer feasible.
I worry that my parents lived in a time when commercial fishing was no longer feasible, but no one noticed and kept siphoning all the seafood anyway.
There is nothing special about petrochemical energy when it comes to growing food. We could run the agricultural system on other energy sources. In the US, the total fraction of energy used for agriculture is about 1%. We use more energy cooking food than growing it.
The best solution we have so far is outlawing all fishing in certain areas of the ocean. Picked well, the fish are safe there to breed and recover population numbers, and you only harvest schools that leave the exclusion zone due to crowding.
>I worry my children will live in a time when commercial fishing is no longer feasible.
We are already well into it unfortunately. I've seen enough anecdotal evidence from old fishermen that we have already depleted and disrupted the sea biomass so much that it is already changed forever.
- Old sushi chefs talking about how there are numerous fish they can no longer get at any price that were common when they were young.
- Old fishing photos show smaller and smaller "prize" catches over time.
- Old fisherman talking about how they used to fish by slapping oars at the bay then simply hand/net catching the fish types they wanted near shore.
- Old whalers talking about how they could simply go out and pick what type of large catch they wanted and bring it back. Now they can go days or weeks without a single catch of anything.