We can make nitrogen fertilizers just fine with the Haber Bosch process and Hydrogen electrolysis. All you need for that is water, air and electricity.
The Haber Bosch process is what we currently use… We can make hydrogen via electrolysis, but it’s a lot cheaper and easier to create it via gasification of a high carbon material like natural gas.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that it will become more expensive, and that at risk communities already have a hard time paying the current price.
There’s of course a solution, my fear is that there will be no mechanism put in place by governments to make it economical for the entire globe.
Also crop yields are perfectly suitable to feed all of the global population without using fertilizers.
That’s just untrue. “around 175 million tons of nitrogen flow into the world’s croplands every year, and about half this total becomes incorporated into cultivated plants. Synthetic fertilizers provide about 40 percent of all the nitrogen taken up by these crops. Because they furnish—directly as plants and indirectly as animal foods— about 75 percent of all nitrogen in consumed proteins (the rest comes from fish and from meat and dairy foodstuffs produced by grazing), about one third of the protein in humanity’s diet depends on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.”
just requires farmin techniques, that are not suitable for industrial farming for profit maximising companies.
The communities that are most at risk do not generally partake in industrial farming, nor do they export a lot of food.
On the contrary the current way of industrial farming destroys the yields as it erodes soils physically, chemically and biologically. If we continue farming like this for another century or two we will face severe global starvation.
Yes, we should refine the way we farm, but we are absolutely dependent on synthetic fertilizers, or at least 1/4 of the global population is. The current population is just too high for the nitrogen cycle to sustain us. There’s a reason we haven’t seen the levels of famine endemic to the period before the Haber Process, this despite a huge surge in global pop.
However if we look at the countries with the highest use of chemical fertilizers per Capita it is also countries with industrialized agriculture that focus on meat production or cash crops.
We use about half of global agricultural lands for animal feed. So the nitrogen fertilizers are not needed to sustain nutrition. They are needed to sustain the meat overconsumption in wealthy countries.
I’m sorry, but I didn’t see anything about the nitrogen cycle in the link you posted. What do you mean by “exceeding the planetary boundaries significantly”? I’m not very familiar with “planetary boundaries” as an ecological theory, and the site doesn’t seem to expand on their methodology to a significant degree, or maybe I’m just not looking at the right pages.
use about half of global agricultural lands for animal feed. So the nitrogen fertilizers are not needed to sustain nutrition. They are needed to sustain the meat overconsumption in wealthy countries.
Right… But do we actually expect that to happen? You seem to be focused on the physical possibility and the science behind the problem, when my argument has been entirely policy based.
If we had the political will, or if we were motivated as nations to help our fellow man, I wouldn’t be worried in the first place. My concern isnt that this is some unsolvable and inevitable problem, but that governments will respond to this problem in the easiest and most profitable way. By ignoring it and allowing big AG to create a natural monopoly over an artificially inflated scarcity.
You can only push so much nitrogen and phosphor into the biological cycle w.o. having grave side effects. Acidification, erosion of soil microbiomes, eutrophication of water bodies…
The current amount of fertilizers used are killing the environment and through this reducing crop yields.
The Haber Bosch process is what we currently use… We can make hydrogen via electrolysis, but it’s a lot cheaper and easier to create it via gasification of a high carbon material like natural gas.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that it will become more expensive, and that at risk communities already have a hard time paying the current price.
There’s of course a solution, my fear is that there will be no mechanism put in place by governments to make it economical for the entire globe.
That’s just untrue. “around 175 million tons of nitrogen flow into the world’s croplands every year, and about half this total becomes incorporated into cultivated plants. Synthetic fertilizers provide about 40 percent of all the nitrogen taken up by these crops. Because they furnish—directly as plants and indirectly as animal foods— about 75 percent of all nitrogen in consumed proteins (the rest comes from fish and from meat and dairy foodstuffs produced by grazing), about one third of the protein in humanity’s diet depends on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.”
The communities that are most at risk do not generally partake in industrial farming, nor do they export a lot of food.
Yes, we should refine the way we farm, but we are absolutely dependent on synthetic fertilizers, or at least 1/4 of the global population is. The current population is just too high for the nitrogen cycle to sustain us. There’s a reason we haven’t seen the levels of famine endemic to the period before the Haber Process, this despite a huge surge in global pop.
The issue with our impact on the nitrogen cycle is that it is exceeding the planetary boundaries significantly. Same for Phosphor https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
However if we look at the countries with the highest use of chemical fertilizers per Capita it is also countries with industrialized agriculture that focus on meat production or cash crops.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertilizer-per-capita
We use about half of global agricultural lands for animal feed. So the nitrogen fertilizers are not needed to sustain nutrition. They are needed to sustain the meat overconsumption in wealthy countries.
I’m sorry, but I didn’t see anything about the nitrogen cycle in the link you posted. What do you mean by “exceeding the planetary boundaries significantly”? I’m not very familiar with “planetary boundaries” as an ecological theory, and the site doesn’t seem to expand on their methodology to a significant degree, or maybe I’m just not looking at the right pages.
Right… But do we actually expect that to happen? You seem to be focused on the physical possibility and the science behind the problem, when my argument has been entirely policy based.
If we had the political will, or if we were motivated as nations to help our fellow man, I wouldn’t be worried in the first place. My concern isnt that this is some unsolvable and inevitable problem, but that governments will respond to this problem in the easiest and most profitable way. By ignoring it and allowing big AG to create a natural monopoly over an artificially inflated scarcity.
You can only push so much nitrogen and phosphor into the biological cycle w.o. having grave side effects. Acidification, erosion of soil microbiomes, eutrophication of water bodies…
The current amount of fertilizers used are killing the environment and through this reducing crop yields.