Phosphorus is integral to modern agriculture; you can’t grow anything without it. But the element is also finite; it cannot be made and cannot be substituted. As we eat ever more, demand is rising nearly twice as fast as the growth of the human population.

Scientists have suggested that production may have peaked over a decade ago and reserves will have been completely depleted by the end of this century. What happens then? We probably don’t want to find out.

We do not face some problem of peak phosphorous. That reserves might run out is only because reserves are what has been prepared for imminent usage. Or, as the US Geological Survey puts it “World resources of phosphate rock are more than 300 billion tons. There are no imminent shortages of phosphate rock” Even if there were such shortages of phosphate rock that wouldn't matter - phosphorous is, as we’ve pointed out in Nature, 0.1% of the entire lithosphere of the planet. Quite enough to be going on with. We’ve also explained this in Forbes, even at (free!) book length.

It is indeed entirely possible to have too much phosphorous in the wrong place - algal blooms and all that. But the idea that we’ve some shortage of the element either looming or even possible on anything less than multi-millennial scales is simply nonsense. It is one of these things that just is not true.

Which does open up an interesting can of worms really. If the entire political and cultural sphere is infested with such untruths then how good is government or government planning going to be? A usual hope - clearly oft dashed - about such things being that they at least start from reality.

All we’re asking for here is basic informational competence - too much, eh?