In my early and ongoing research to all things to all men I considered Mr. Borlag somehow as the demon who foisted high carb upon us all. This is far, far, from the truth.
If you come to this site looking for confirmation of what you believe to be the truth, then you need to do some more research.
I came across this guy when trawling the web for stuff relevant to my 18-year-old boy (dammit adult) learning to drive. I was looking for 'what's the best car for an 18 year old who will etc etc'.
I struck gold!
Whenever you look or hear someone who NEVER says 'um' or 'Ahh' you know you have the real deal!
I've got to go out now, but I look forward to watching this later. Sounds interesting.
Norman Borlaug was himself a bit of a paradox. He got lots of things right and a lot of things disastrously wrong. He had the best of motives and he was an incredibly driven individual who Gets Things Done. But he was also one of those people who think you can fix anything given enough technology, and the world really doesn't work like that. Agriculture doesn't work like that. He'd probably never read E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops".
OK, I'm going to demolish this guy with logic and reason. I would have felt a bit more well-disposed towards him (because he's right about several things) if he hadn't wasted 15 minutes of my time padding out his argument with snide remarks. Anyway:
- Average life expectancy was low pre-industrial-revolution for three reasons: child mortality, poor hygiene, and violence. Solving these problems had very little to do with access to energy.
- Tilling the soil is a pointless operation. It is true that many poor farmers continue to do it anyway, and that's a big reason that they are poor. This is purely a matter of ignorance; nothing to do with lack of access to tractors.
- Cooking is a trivial use of fossil fuels and is "fuel agnostic" - it's perfectly possible to build clean-burning stoves that use wood as a feedstock, for example. It's just that they're hard to obtain in crap countries. Lighting is similarly trivial, and it can be achieved most simply with a small photovoltaic installation. However I agree that a lot of people would be better off if they would just buy cans of LPG for their stoves.
- In cold countries, it's better to conserve as much heat energy within your home as possible before you burn fuels (of any kind) for heating - because while fossil fuels might be cheap, they're not free. Ask anyone with oil-fuelled central heating.
- Solar thermal is much cheaper than oil for space heating at UK latitudes. I'm not going to do the calculations here, but the difference is so large that there's literally no contest. The main issue is that homes are not designed with solar thermal in mind, so the installation cost is higher than it ought to be.
- Cheap food exists because of taxation and subsidy, not because of hydrocarbons. Yes, of course transport is an essential component here. But monocultures and CAFOs are inherently unprofitable. They simply could not exist without government support.
- Prolific food markets are not "unheard of in human history". That's complete rubbish. Most civilizations established a very effective food supply. Food might not have been dirt-cheap, but it was readily available to all but the destitute (and even the destitute had ways and means).
- The application of synthetic fertilizers, Borlaug-style, may have saved lives, but it did so by shoving a whole load of ignorance under the carpet. It was a band-aid. The same thing could have been achieved by showing people how to farm properly ... although it's debatable whether anyone would have accepted the advice fast enough to save lives. People can be incredibly stubborn even when they're starving.
- Apparently, my farm is "going backwards" because I eschew hydrocarbons. I don't like hydrocarbons because (a) they're expensive and (b) the engines they go into waste my time. They need endless maintenance. I spend more time fixing them than using them. My electric chainsaw and brushcutter, on the other hand, plug into the (portable) battery pack charged by my solar system, and therefore operate for free. My electric pumps ensure that I do not "starve to death" in the dry season - and the water is there because I have carefully constructed my farm to conserve water, by natural methods. The electric tools do not break. In fact they're a joy to use. Yes, I know, they were made using hydrocarbon energy (and plastics). I'm not suggesting we should not use hydrocarbons at all. Merely that we should value them a little more.
- Each barrel of oil does indeed represent several man-years of labour. However, the amount of solar energy falling onto one hectare in a year (at my latitude) is about 50TJ (terajoules). That's equivalent to 10,000 barrels of gasoline (refined gasoline; not crude oil). Which is quite a lot. Nature uses most of that for her own purposes, and if you try to oppose whatever she's doing, she will use it to destroy you. Far better to leverage it for productive purposes.
That's about as far as I got. John Cadogan might know a lot about autos, but he clearly knows buggerall about farming. Or "thermodynamics".
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First day of LCHF lifestyle 
Yayyyy! Target reached. 🥳🥳🥳🥳
Great results this week
Film - Fat Fiction - free on Amazon Prime
Shocked at weight gain