March 2026 Best Buys

Centuries Before Peak Oil, We Had Peak Soil

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49,997 of the men who died in the Battle of Waterloo are still missing.

In the two centuries since Napoleon made his famous last stand against the united forces of Europe in 1815, just three partial skeletons have been recovered from the Belgian battlefield along the Mont-Saint-Jean ridge.

The rest of the 50,000 casualties have mysteriously vanished from the mass graves where contemporary accounts tell us they were laid to rest. And according to archaeologist and battle historian Tony Pollard, they’ll never be found.

As Napoleon met his Waterloo, Europe was facing its own last-stand crisis: the continent was running out of usable soil. A thousand years of indiscriminate farming and deforesting had stripped the ground of nutrients, particularly nitrogen, and crops were failing across the continent. In Western Europe by the 1830s, food conditions had deteriorated so much that the people had become measurably shorter.

One good source of nitrogen, of course, is bones. The shallow graves of Waterloo proved easy pickings for “bone meal” merchants, who dug up the dead and ground their skeletons into fertilizer. Between 1823 and 1837, the value of bone imports to Britain went up from £14,000 to £250,000.

When the bones ran out, the seagulls flapped in.

Off the coast of Peru, sea birds had crapped on the island cliffs for centuries, creating mountain-like drifts of nitrogen-rich guano. Natives harvested it sparingly for fertilizer – until Britain cottoned on and began to extract and sell thousands of tons of the stuff, starting in 1841.

Quickly, the mountains of droppings dwindled, causing a series of “guano wars” during the mid to late 1800s, where Spain, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador duked it out over bird crap and lost some 18,000 men in the process.

And still, the soil got worse. Justus von Liebig, the most prominent voice in organic chemistry at that time, drew up an influential diagram of a barrel with one slat too short. His point was that all it took was a shortage in one nutrient – in this case, nitrogen – for the entire contents of the barrel to drain away permanently.

Europe had apparently reached “Peak Soil.”

Malthus Was Wrong About Peak Soil

A couple of centuries before we started “running out” of fossil fuels, it seems, we were “running out” of dirt.

Or so the Malthusians claimed.

The Malthusians – doom-and-gloom prophets of scarcity, who believe the earth has a diminishing cache of natural resources – take their name from Thomas Malthus, an influential British cleric who wrote An Essay On The Principle Of Population in 1798. Malthus believed that the earth would shortly run out of supplies for an ever-growing number of humans. His cheerful solution was that either we stop reproducing, or that we “court the return of the plague” so more of us would die off.

Malthus wasn’t the first to reach this conclusion – starting with 16^th-century scholar Giovanni Botero, a long line of ivory-tower intellectuals had been predicting doom for humanity as we got bigger and Earth got smaller. (Liebig, the soil scientist with the broken barrel, was one of them.)

To be fair, the data was on their side. Between 1200 and 1600, Europe’s population had doubled while productivity had remained flat (meaning that peasants just weren’t able to wrest any further wealth from the land). After 1600, productivity had grown a little, but not much. With the soil depletion, the remaining pool of resources was now actively diminishing.

But the trouble with Malthusians – in every age – is that they overlook a critical renewable resource: human ingenuity. As President Ronald Reagan put it so well: “There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits to the human capacity for intelligence, imagination, and wonder.”

Turned out, Malthus’ devotees were wrong about peak soil...

Just as the guano problem was getting really dire – in the early part of the 20^th century – two brilliant German scientists came up with a way to extract limitless nitrogen from the air. (They first developed the process for use in German munitions during World War I – which meant no one was sure whether to indict the scientists for war crimes or issue them a Nobel Prize.) Today, synthetic nitrogen has largely reversed the problem of soil fertility – it's reckoned that about half of the world’s population would not be alive without it.

As Porter Stansberry is fond of saying, there is no teaching, only learning.

Malthusians, though, seem to be particularly resistant to learning, and in the long run, they always end up with egg on their face. Ironically, by the time Malthus penned his Essay On The Principle Of Population, he was already dissecting an obsolete problem...

In 1776 – 22 years earlier – three events had quietly converged to create one of the great watershed moments of history: a moment that would eventually (and permanently) flip Malthus’ dire scarcity chart upside down.

That year, Adam Smith published The Wealth Of Nations... the Declaration Of Independence was signed... and the wheels of the first steam engine began to turn. Over the next 250 years, those three events – one economical, one political, one industrial – would unleash an age of prosperity utterly unmatched in world history. (Until now, that is.)

But Malthusian philosophy has surprising staying power. When it became apparent that we weren’t running out of soil... or food... or wealth... a new crop of Malthusians in the 1960s turned their attention to the next scary “peak”.

Running Out Of Oil By The 1970s

Which brings us to M. King Hubbert, father of Peak Oil. (Not the father of any actual children, because he and his wife chose not to contribute to the overpopulation of the world.) Hubbert, a member of a group called the “New Malthusians,” was a geologist with socialist leanings who was determined to find some way the earth was permanently screwed.

Hubbert started out his career during the Great Depression, claiming we were running out of available employment. In his view, industrialization had put so many people out of work that the economy would never recover, and what we really needed was an entirely new system that didn’t run on jobs or money at all. Instead, everyone would receive “energy coupons” based on the amount of energy (measured in ohms and joules) they’d expended in a day. (This proposal, known as the “electric dollar,” was roundly ridiculed in the press.)

By the 1940s, forced against his will to admit that the Depression-era economy was recovering, Hubbert turned his attention to oil. Surely we were running out of that.

In 1956, Hubbert published a paper called Nuclear Energy And The Fossil Fuels where he laid out his primary thesis: according to an elaborate mathematical model, both the United States and the world would reach peak oil production between 1965 and 1970. After that, he claimed, we’d rapidly start running dry. Hubbert’s paper caught the attention of the Carter administration, kicking off a solid decade of public panic about oil.

For a while, it actually seemed as though Hubbert might be right: in the 1970s, a severe oil shortage gripped the world and prices quadrupled, largely due to geopolitical events with Iran and Israel. But it was a short-lived peak. By the end of the decade, gas had gotten so expensive that people just stopped using it. Demand began to fall. By 1981, The New York Times reported that the world now “floats in a glut of oil.”

And ultimately – as it always does – human ingenuity stepped in with the shale fracking boom, which now offers an almost endless supply of energy, if we can just blast it out of the ground.

Undaunted, in 1983, six years before his death, Hubbert was still postulating:

We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can’t possibly happen again. You can only use oil once. You can only use metals once. Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered.

Hubbert was demonstrably wrong about oil – as it turns out, rather than one giant peak, oil is cyclical and moves in repeated peaks and troughs (as Porter himself pointed out when everyone was worried about peak oil yet again in the 1990s).

If you take away just one nugget today, let it be this one: The Malthusians are always wrong. There is no peak.... not peak soil, not peak oil... not peak anything. As long as we have our imaginations, we have an endlessly renewable resource.

Not that it takes much imagination to make money during a mini-peak in oil...

Right now we are in a temporary events-driven shortage reminiscent of the geopolitical oil crisis of the 1970s. That’s caused oil highs, which means that owning capital efficient oil stocks – like today’s top Best Buys recommendation – is currently one of the easiest ways to compound wealth.

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