What bothers me in articles like this is that no one mentions that ammonia is not produced with natural gas. It’s produced with HYDROGEN.
The cheapest source of hydrogen is usually steam reforming of natural gas. (But this wasn’t the case until about 1950 when steam reforming became cheap and widespread. Before that, cheap hydroelectricity-produced green hydrogen was common for nitrogen fertilizer production.)
Not mentioning this means that the average person who reads the news (including the typical politician and HN reader) has the mistaken notion that fossil fuels are essential for making fertilizer.
My 2cents: Two consequences (which kind of go in opposite directions) of this are:
1) You really think we need to push hydrogen cars right now when we’re not even producing a significant amount of green hydrogen for fertilizer? Unlike the electric grid (which is 40% clean already in the US), almost no hydrogen for ammonia is made with clean electricity.
2) This should provide impetus for locally produced green hydrogen efforts as food security, insulation from fossil fuel price swings. (Blue hydrogen doesn’t have that advantage since it’s still fossil fuel based and is worse in other ways.)
>the mistaken notion that fossil fuels are essential for making fertilizer
I think the correct statement is that fossil fuels are the cheapest way of making fertilizer, and that any other (known) way is currently much more expensive. Therefore raising the price of fossil fuels does raise the price of fertilizer. This is pretty incontrovertible.
No, we use hydrogen to make ammonia. That hydrogen is grey hydrogen from fossil fuels usually, but the actual Haber process does not use any hydrocarbons. Using hydrogen to make ammonia is therefore not a new process. It literally IS the process we use today.
An analogy would be an article on hydrogen fuel cell cars that never once used the word “hydrogen” in it.
In the case of the plant pictured in the article, the hydrogen is produced on site from methane. So, at least in that case, from the factory perspective, it is a methane in, ammonia + CO2 out. [1] I don't know how common it is for factories to do both processes at the same site, but that would explain why the article frames it that way.
But beyond that, I think the parent comment is just saying that the price of the hydrogen plays a big role in the availability and price of fertilizer. Even with the current increases in price, it is not profitable to manufacture ammonia using green hydrogen at current market prices.
From the factory perspective, 1 Joule of hydrogen produces more ammonia than 1 Joule of natural gas AND you get to avoid the steam reforming equipment, saving capital & maintenance cost.
And in Europe, at the moment natural gas prices are so high that green hydrogen is now competitive. BUT that’s beside the point.
I really think you are trying to obfuscate the issue here.
We "usually" make the hydrogen from fossil fuels because this is by far the cheapest way to make it, so if we raise the price of fossil fuels, the fertilizer becomes more expensive. And man, you are twisting and turning in order to obscure this fact.
No, I’m not. Again, by not mentioning that ammonia is made from hydrogen (and not mentioning that ammonia is by far the largest use of hydrogen today and also that almost all hydrogen is made with fossil fuels now but not historically), we are obfuscating multiple things. It seems implied that ammonia based fertilizers actually need hydrocarbons in particular (which isn’t true historically, technically, or in the future, BUT you’ll have many Degrowther types argue we have to use fossil fuels for fertilizer) AND it makes it easy to exaggerate the benefit of hydrogen cars (or the “hydrogen economy”) because it becomes unclear that hydrogen is actually by far made from fossil fuels. It’s not a simple consequence.
(Finally, green hydrogen is currently competitive with grey and blue hydrogen in Europe due to high gas prices at the moment, but that’s totally beside the point.)
We usually make electricity from coal, because its so cheap... as long as you ignore the pollution and death that it causes.
An insistence on how "cheap" it is to make fertilizer from natural gas, without taking into accoint fugitive methan emmisions, the fossil fuel used for the heat, and the CO2 released as an intrinsic part of the process seems the more obvious, at at this point preictable and boring, attempt to distort reality.
Turns out we make twice as much electricity in the US from natural gas than from coal, and we use about as much nuclear power as we do coal for electricity (and nuclear is equal to about all the hydro, wind, solar, and geothermal we use). This is another thing I think people aren’t aware has changed. ~80% of our electricity in the US is made without coal.
(But globally is another story, and this doesn’t really affect your overall point.)
The reduction in coal in the US and several other countries has been mostly driven by people internalising those externalities, often via a carbon price mechanism, but also by banning or limiting specific types of pollution.
It would probably still be "cheaper" without those. Luckily sanity has, somewhat, prevailed and costs that were being imposed on others in the country were also considered.
>That hydrogen is grey hydrogen from fossil fuels usually, but the actual Haber process does not use any hydrocarbons. Using hydrogen to make ammonia is therefore not a new process. It literally IS the process we use today.
It seems like this grey hydrogen still ultimately comes from fossil fuels. It might be further up the chain, so to speak, but it's still dependant on them. No? So doesn't the statement that raising fossil fuel prices raise fertilizer prices true then?
Yes, true in the narrow sense, but it’s misleading, I think, or at least it’s avoiding a really good opportunity to educate people about the role of hydrogen in our industrial processes.
I don’t think it’s irrelevant minutiae. By not mentioning hydrogen but mentioning by natural gas, you reinforce the mistaken impression people have that the process we use to make fertilizers requires fossil fuels in particular. It actually uses hydrogen, which historically was, technically can be (and is today on a modest scale), and in the future likely will be made using electricity.
It also avoids context that the Hydrogen Economy is something we have today, but it’s almost all fossil fuel reliant. So a hydrogen car or hydrogen heating or whatever is not intrinsically fossil-free, not even close.
And ammonia is actually a really good use of hydrogen as the actual process itself uses hydrogen, so unlike for heating, where a Joule of hydrogen gives you the same as a Joule of natural gas for heat, a Joule of hydrogen gives you more ammonia than a Joule of natural gas would. AND you can avoid the capital cost of the on-site steam reforming.
Anyway, I just think such articles should say something like “Fertilizer production, in which nitrogen from the atmosphere is fixed by combining it with hydrogen, is the largest industrial use of hydrogen—almost all of which is today produced on-site from fossil fuels like natural gas.”
Or even just “nitrogen fertilizer, which uses hydrogen usually made from natural gas…”
The idea that hydrogen is largely green but fertilizer intrinsically requires hydrocarbons are two really common misconceptions that we could easily fix by just mentioning “hydrogen” in these news articles.
Good question. 3kg of hydrogen makes about 17kg of ammonia. One bushel of corn requires about 0.8 pounds of ammonia.
A bushel of corn weighs about 56 pounds and a pound of corn has about 1566 kilocalories.
Grey hydrogen is about $2/kg (more in Europe right now, about $5/kg not counting CO2 tax), and green hydrogen is about $3-6/kg, depending on your electricity costs.
So one kg of hydrogen produces about 1,367,000 kilocalories, or about 683 days’ worth if you ate just 2000kilocalories of field corn per day. :) A price difference of $1-4/kg for hydrogen means
less than 1¢/day… of course that’s only if you eat just corn at the bottom of the food chain and use efficient agricultural practices… also, everyone gets a cut on the way…
This is truly one of the more interesting HN comments I've read recently. I'm actually surprised how little H goes into a bushel of corn. This really makes the potential future energy tech even more exciting.
Keep in mind that’s for state of the art practices. In much of the world, productivity of food production is an order of magnitude less (corn is pretty much the most productive modern staple crop), and a bushel of corn produces about 6.7 pounds of beef, which is an order of magnitude fewer Calories than the corn you started with. Plus there is food wastage. With inefficient processes, the cost could be two orders of magnitude higher!
So the increase in actual food prices could be far greater than just one cent per day.
>Yes, but how much does this impact the total retail cost of the food we eat? Would it be a difference of 2%, or a difference of 200%?
As with everything else in the food supply the difference will be felt at the bottom first.
Whole Foods stuff has plenty of margin (obviously "plenty" is relative, this is a thin margin industry) to absorb a small increase. Those bottom dollar Walmart tomatoes that have to get here from Argentina and need to be sold for bottom dollar? Yeah there's no space in the margin, those have to go up in price proportional to inputs.
Yes, this is interesting because it's not the haber process!
Very exciting stuff, and drastically changing the transportation costs gives them a good niche so they can build a foothold without having to go toe-to-toe with the existing natural gas derived Haber process, which has the benefit of already being highly optimized.
Electrolytic hydrogen production scales poorly. Cost aside, the additional electricity required to replace methane-derived hydrogen is completely infeasible for the foreseeable future.
Just because we can produce almost any chemistry with electricity does not imply that we have remotely enough spare power generation capacity to make it feasible. Too many proposals for green industrial chemistry implicitly assume that we have several terawatts of green power generation just lying around, which is manifestly not the case nor are we likely to have that kind of extra capacity on any timeframe that matters.
I'm not certain that is actually correct. The biggest steel maker here in Sweden is in early stages of replacing coal with hydrogen in their new production chains they are building, based on wind power. The really good part is that it is a consumption of electricity that is pretty resilient against varying production volumes, which make it pretty ideal for renewables.
The same logic could very well work with fertilizer.
I don't think you are understanding the differences in scale. Ammonia is produced in truly massive quantities, it is one of the highest volume industrial chemicals produced. It is transported around the world in pipelines. The amount of hydrogen used to make steel is a rounding error by comparison.
Making hydrogen via electrolysis requires 50 MWh per ton. Manufacturing ammonia requires tens of millions of tons of hydrogen every year.
Right, about 40 megatons of hydrogen to produce all the nitrogen fertilizer. About 270GW average electrical power (67% HHV efficient hydrogen electrolysis, not counting liquefaction or compression).
BUT ammonia is a global commodity that can be and is distributed all over the world, so that means you can produce it wherever clean energy is cheapest. Chile has excellent wind AND excellent solar (best in the world), meaning you can operate electrolysis at higher capacity factor, and it has sea ports. So there are plans for big green ammonia projects being built there. https://renewablesnow.com/news/engie-enaex-plan-green-hydrog...
But it can also just provide food security by being a local source of fertilizer that is independent of global logistical constraints or fluctuations in availability of natural gas.
It’s also potentially an alternative mechanism for hydrogen storage. Some ships already run on ammonia, and you can run tractors (etc) on it as well without the extreme challenges in storage that compressed or liquid hydrogen have (its somewhere between LNG and propane when it comes to storage difficulty). However, it’s probably not a great consumer fuel due to toxicity.
Of course it’s not correct. I have no idea why people speak so confidently about electrolysis not being “scalable” when, in fact, that used to be pretty much the primary way of making hydrogen for ammonia.
Also, the US used to double electricity generation every decade. If something needs a bit more electricity, there’s no “scaling” argument why we can’t just produce more electricity. It costs money, of course, but there’s no part of it that isn’t “scalable.”
The amount of electricity required to generate an equivalent amount of hydrogen for ammonia production by electrolysis is 1.5-2 PWh annually. That significantly exceeds all wind power generation globally, even assuming we could dedicate it entirely to making ammonia, which of course we can't because we need to keep the lights on.
I also don't think you understand what it means to run an industrial plant at that scale or the logistics (pipelines and such) implied, particularly when the power source is so diffuse. You keep using the words "scalability" but it isn't clear you understand what that actually means in this context.
If you are interested in this stuff, perhaps you should study chemical engineering. The feasibility issues will be more intuitive.
2 PWh is not really a challenge other than scaling it up. We have many orders of magnitude more wind and solar energy that the world needs. Water won't run out either, especially when you realize that salt water can be used for this process.
Does it scale poorly for any reason other than current availability of electricity?
The growth of PV has been pretty close to exponential since ‘92, with the current (nameplate) capacity estimated to be just short of 1 terawatt and a doubling time of 2.2 years, so I think we will have a few terawatts on a relevant timescale.
It actually scales extremely well. Based on DoE studies I’ve read, Hydrogen electrolysis systems that are larger tend to have lower specific capital costs and usually operate at higher efficiency than smaller plants. We also used to double electricity production every decade before demand for electricity plateaued. Sometimes people just say things on the Internet that are wrong.
More specifically, Bitcoin consumes about 10GW average. To make all nitrogen fertilizer with electrolytes hydrogen would require about 270GW average. It’s nowhere close.
Ok, but most fertilizer production uses natural gas to supply the hydrogen and fossil fuels of one sort or another to bring everything up to temperature. So, why should this article go out and say, 'well theoretically we could obtain hydrogen some other way...'.
Haber-Bosch is slightly exothermic.
The turbomachinery for doing the pressure-swing product condensing in the loop might have too high losses to get by without external power supply, though.
Well, the reaction needs a compressor, followed by a pipe reactor loaded with catalyst, followed by an expander, followed by an ammonia droplet seperator/condenser.
That result is then fed back to the input along with more educts, and side-products are siphoned off slowly to prevent their accumulation.
The expander is there because you increase the percentage of ammonia that will condense by both lowering the temperature and lowering the pressure, which an ideal expander is very good at.
You'd prefer if that expander can power the compressor, with this setup being essentially a gas turbine with exhaust rebreathing and the combustion chamber replaced with a giant tube reactor filled with catalyst.
3) It is fine with a slightly uneven production of hydrogen as it only means you have to build up a buffer of it for sustained usage. This means it is ideal for hydrogen produced by wind and solar power.
And many people are dumb. The Haber process is one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind. A majority of people alive today can directly trace their very existence to the food production yield increases from artificial fertilizer. It's estimated that 50% of the nitrogen in the average human comes from the Haber process.
Now I'm not going to try to pretend there are absolutely no downsides. Runoff from fields is a huge issue. But when you advocate for large scale returns to "natural" farming, you're taking a position that leads directly to ecofacism and genocide though famine. Or at least a radical restructuring of the global economy where much greater sections of land and the labor force would be required to be farmers.
In order to not downplay how much of an issue artificial fertilizer is in term of runoff, practically every fresh water lake in western countries have become poisoned. The whole Baltic Sea is turning into dead zone where even bacteria have a hard time surviving, and in many countries that have a coast, both humans and animals can't be in the water during long parts of the year for the risk of getting poisoned. If you have one ocean area where you test nuclear bombs, and the other where you have "normal" amount of runoff from artificial fertilizer, the nuclear bomb site will be healthier and have more diverse ecological environment.
We might not want to ban the stuff, but we need to start demanding that farming is a closed loop in term of artificial fertilizers.
If you dive in the coast of the Baltic Sea from may and for the rest of the year, this is what you will likely see: (https://www.azotelibrary.com/en/image/Omr%C3%A5de-med-syrebr...). Similar for most lakes, except the color is then only black and brown.
Miles and miles of grey, black and green mass of death.
> But when you advocate for large scale returns to "natural" farming, you're taking a position that leads directly to ecofacism and genocide though famine. Or at least a radical restructuring of the global economy where much greater sections of land and the labor force would be required to be farmers.
Actually I am designing an open source farming robot focused on regenerative agriculture so that everyone can move to automated regenerative agriculture in an affordable way. Honestly I really think you are talking a big game without really knowing what you are saying.
very cool, i am going to check this out. we are converting our own yard to small scale farm / aquaponic system, and automating it is something i would love to do!
Your take is very opinionated but doesn’t seem to include any helpful solutions.
Habitat and environment is more important than profit margin because we are a super apex predator and rely on the planet’s eco system to survive…not just thrive.
Genocide through famine occurred in India when the British exported Indian cotton and tobacco and turning fields of grain into cash crops. It was not ‘eco fascism’ but colonialism that caused it.
Fertilizer run off, deadzones and poisoning of our water tables is just one side effect of Big Ag.
Long supply chains and cold supply chains and an animal based diet has caused more famine (not to mention food waste amongst the wealthy) than ecological focus on Ag. Not to mention an overpopulated planet that has long since crossed carrying capacity. Perhaps temper your hot takes with relevant inputs?
Indeed. All new iron ore reduction plants built in the last few decades in the US have used syngas (a mixture of hydrogen and CO) made with natural gas for reducing the iron ore to iron metal, NOT coal/coke. These plants use about 50% hydrogen already, that amount can be increased modestly at existing plants with almost no modifications, and with significant modifications that can handle over 90% hydrogen. “Midrex” is one proprietary version of this Direct Reduced Iron (DRI) process.
I think few people (unless they’re actually in the industry) are aware that all new iron ore plants in the US use natural gas, NOT coal.
Not mentioning this means that the average person who reads the news (including the typical politician and HN reader) has the mistaken notion that fossil fuels are essential for making fertilizer.
But it's true - currently this is how fertilizer is made. Maybe there will be a large scale source of hydrogen in the future, but currently it comes from fossil fuels.
You don't need to worry about politicians getting incorrect knowledge from the news, they get that knowledge directly from industry.
> Maybe there will be a large scale source of hydrogen in the future, but currently it comes from fossil fuels.
No, see, this is again the misunderstanding I’m talking about. Ammonia is made with hydrogen, period. The “large scale source of hydrogen” exists today. It is steam reforming of natural gas, and before that it was electrolysis of water.
This is the misunderstanding I'm talking about: "steam reforming of natural gas", is the same as "fossil fuels". If you're going to rely on some future development where the hydrogen doesn't come from fossil fuels, then you can also declare that gasoline and diesel are not fossil fuels since non-fossil fuel sources exist for both.
I mean, there’s lots of green hydrogen production in California right now. Clean electric synthesis of hydrocarbons is most certainly possible but a lot more expensive, complex, and inefficient, and I’m not aware of any place you can just buy it, unlike green hydrogen in places like California. Hydrogen electrolysis used to be the dominant method of making ammonia hydrogen. Hydrogen electrolysis is simple enough there’s a Kiwi Co tutorial on how to do it with household items: https://www.kiwico.com/diy/stem/quick-easy-experiments/split...
Hydrogen allows you to skip steps in the typical ammonia plant. Synthesized gasoline is just a huge cost increase, almost an order of magnitude larger than that for clean ammonia.
Can you define that statement a bit more? What do you mean by clean?
If you're going off of the industry terms, that 40% includes natural gas, and is probably mostly natural gas. Which means cracking natural gas into hydrogen isn't any more or less polluting.
Nuclear, wind, hydro, and geothermal (and maybe some biomass) produce about 40% of the electricity in the US. And yeah, if we’re just using grid electricity at the current electricity mix to make hydrogen, we’re not any better off than using steam reforming. That’s a very valid point. But it’s relatively straightforward to decarbonize the grid. Just build more solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear and keep what we’ve already got running. Retire coal ASAP.
Hydrogen is bound in both compounds - you need to expand energy to extract it.
As in our oxidizing atmosphere natural gas is a source of (chemical) energy, you can burn it to provide the energy needed to extract the hydrogen. This is the steam reforming reaction.
Since water is not a source of energy, you need to add (expensive) electrical energy in order to extract the hydrogen. This is the electrolysis reaction.
The cost of industrial chemistry is largely the amount of energy required to produce a ton of chemical. There are different ways to make any chemical all of which have different cost structures depending on the application.
Making hydrogen from water is extremely electricity intensive, around 50 MWh per ton. Even aluminum production from ore, which is famously electricity intensive, only requires a small fraction of the energy input that hydrogen requires when produced this way.
Making hydrogen from methane has a more expensive feedstock (methane versus water) but requires vastly less energy which makes it much cheaper overall. I would guess that methane feedstock also requires a less expensive plant per ton of production capacity, which would also lower costs.
May be depending on Natural gas for everything in the name of climate change fighting isn't such a good goal. Now not only is coal not fully out, nuclear is dead/dying and solar, wind unreliable or unplanned for interms of integration into the grid and support of peak load.
Overall a perfect showcase of why activism in a lot of things end up hurting more than helping. And of course all this before whether we know or care how 'green' the renewables are in the first place as the equipment it self needs to be manufactured/mined/produced. Its the recycling debacle all over again.
Or maybe it's we've been warning about this for 50+ years now and the fruit is coming to bear.
I'm not sure if it's what you meant, but your post just reeks of "Lets keep doing the things we always did because it was so much better then", while discounting the massive amounts of damage we were doing then.
On the other hand, poster has a point, if it weren't for the likes of Jane Fonda and company who take up a cause without understanding it just for political points, leads us to where we are now. There is no reason we could not be where France is in terms of nuclear power.
This is on those activists who blindly followed anti-nuke dogmatism. Thanks guys and gals.
This is why the public should by and large disregard opinions by celebrities who have no expertise in what they are advocating.
I think the engineering and decision making at Three Mile Island had a much bigger impact on the current state of nuclear power in the US than Jane Fonda.
Only because Jane Fonda used it as a tool to promote her anti-nuke activism. The atmospheric release was insignificant but she scared Americans away from nuclear-generated power.
She could have used her activism to promote better processes for example, or incremental improvements rather than kill the industry.
Within 12 days of the movie Jane Fonda made about nuclear power, the biggest accident in the USA occurred. Within 10 years, we had Chernobyl.
Blaming the lack of nuclear power on a celebrity for her activism and not the fact that decision makers saw the results of real catastrophic failure seems wrong. Sure, Jane Fonda didn’t help nuclear energy. But we should have started by never letting any of the major nuclear failures happen. If we can’t do that, we should work on solving that problem and not blaming critics.
And in the meantime we continued to use fossil fuels.
TMI had little to no impact on the environment and public.
Chernobyl was the result of a corrupt political system which skimped on safety (e.g., no containment building/vessel) because of costs—something that isn't present in any developed country.
That leaves Fukushima.
I'll take the low odds of maybe one incident in 60+ years of industry over the certainty of climate change. And I say this as someone who lives 50km from a nuclear power plant.
If the impact of the coal industry wasn't so gradual but was released in a sudden event every 10-20 years, we would outlaw coal mining, with prison times for anyone who burns it. But with the impact being diffuse in time and space, we don't really mind. It's the same effect as nobody caring that deaths from car crashes in the US increased by 3000 people between 2019 and 2020, but kill 3000 people at once and it's a tragedy that will be remembered for decades.
Our skewed perception of threats is maybe one of the most destructive psychological quirks of humanity. It makes fighting gradual events like climate change or disease outbreaks incredibly difficult.
We should make nuclear safer and learn from the accidents that have occured in the past, but at the same time we have to accept some risk of we are to generate power. If we build a hydroelectric dam, we know there is a risk of overflow, cracking and flooding. That is just a fact dealing with the extreme amount of energy stored in water that is elevated.
We should make sure that maintenance is handled with the understanding of the human lives depending on it, and managers and politicians need to respect the powerful natural forces of both water and nuclear bonds. That said, stopping to use either in favor of fossil fuels is bad for the planet and bad for the people living on it. Living near a nuclear plants or downstream of a hydroelectric power plants is preferable compared to living near a fossil fueled power plants, and its the role of advocates, learned people and politicians to inform the public of this fact.
Critics should be held to blame for misleading the population, just as politicians should be when they chose to build fossil fueled power plants in favor of safer technologies.
We probably get a Chernobyl worth of premature deaths every year from hydrocarbon-fired power plants that would otherwise have been replaced by nuclear plants. Only nobody cares because it doesn't look all cool and dramatic and scary on the news.
Fonda et al. have blood on their hands, albeit invisible blood. The best kind, I guess.
Wondering where we would stand if we had dumped all the funding and subsidies that went into nuclear fission and fusion research and into coal subsidies into solar panels.
Guessing dependency on oil and gas would be much much lower which also frees up a large chunk of the military budget.
Definitely a hero for getting a generation of kids into science with the science guy, but if anti-nuke then definitely wrong about nuclear, and his newer stuff is kind of weird and less interesting.
The recycling movement was green washing from the petro chemical industry to shift responsibility of trash from the industry to individuals. It was a failure by design and never meant to create a closed loop of production and consumption [0].
You are correct by pointing out the intermittency of some renewable sources of energy. These are constraints of the technology that have engineering solutions.
I don’t think activists are to blame for what we see. They are a convenient scapegoat. Think about who would benefit from having us all sit quietly at home waiting for our leadership to make the right decisions for us.
I understand the sentiment. But problem is every new generation thinks they are the only revolutionaries to have suddenly discovered activism. For previous to previous generation it was about stopping wars and killing nuclear power. For the current generation (Greta T) it is climate change and inaction by politicians. Next generation it will be something else. It's like every one below 30 thinks they are the only ones who were ever below 30.
Meanwhile neither the wars have stopped nor did the climate change. It is easy to say that is because no one is doing enough and everyone should be an activist. But then if everyone is continuously doing activisty thingies, they are not even expounding the same ideas or even worried about the same things. The result is meaningless placard holding protests and pulling in a million directions. It's difficult to take anyone to take the climate activists seriously when on one hand they say we are heading towards catastrophe and at the same time say Eww to nuclear.
Or we could live less energy dense lives, take the bus, grow more vegetarian food closer to our homes (food gardens, no suburban lawns!) quit building homes in places that are hostile to humans, etc etc etc.
Nuclear Energy powered electric cars only cuts emissions by about 50%, we need a lot more than that. You have an easy solution to a complex problem -- you're as bad as any activist you're bad mouthing now.
> It's difficult to take anyone to take the climate activists seriously when on one hand they say we are heading towards catastrophe and at the same time say Eww to nuclear.
I think for some of us, it's less about 'eww' and more about how foolish is it have near active fault lines or below sea level (like Fukushima, SONGS, Dablo Canyon etc...) where they KNEW it was an issue but did nothing about it. I've lived through the cluster** that was SONGS refurbishment, and eventual decommissioning, it's not something I'd want anyone to have to go through and it was only possible an unmonitored effluence event (typical for that time in 2011) that coincided with the Fukushima disaster.
I've come around the idea that I'm less anti-nuclear and more anti-20th Century Nuclear and it's headlong methods that was backed by GE and it's American Century at all costs type of thinking. Because for years we've been told Thorium reactors were the stopgap between Fusion which was always 'just around the corner' by Nuclear proponents, while many anti-nuclear people (like myself) were helping install PV, smart meters and volunteering where ever possible to decentralize the power grid in order to avoid what has happened in the last 2-3 years in CA with it's repeated outages due to climate change.
I've lived in an anti-nuclear border town in Germany along Alsace, where the roofs are covered in state subsidized PV (it's where I got my first experience with installing it) which is still a net importer of French electricity so I'm well aware of the hypocrisy in some of these cases; what I'm afraid is that with agencies like the NRC and it's poor storage solutions (pay to bury in NV, until they refuse and we have leave it on site in decommissioned plants) it's more a repulsion towards the lack of insight when it comes to regulating and maintaining these plants.
Just Solar alone is a larger part of the energy market share than nuclear from SONGS and DC combined in CA at it's peak [0], and they are having to turn off production (foolish decision) due to having a larger supply than demand. What I think is needed is an entire paradigm shift as to what and how to utilize the energy sources we do have, and consider Nuclear an option of last resort due to the heavy costs, time, and resources it requires. But it should be an option where coal, gas, or other harmful sources are being used and cannot be recaptured. CA is not one of these places given it's wide array of solar, wind and hopefully soon wave energy like in Scotalnd.
TL; DR: I take your general point to be that people are stupid for having a diverse set of activist activities. I think this idea is very wrong. I've addressed a few lines in your comment trying to show the following:
1. That you've overstated the extent to which activism has been ineffective.
2. That your post doesn't have a valid logical structure (in the syllogistic logic sense) and you're not justifying your claims with evidence.
3. That the mathematics of learning combined with the complexity of reality lead to a situation wherein the diversity of ideas and agendas which you're opposing is our chief advantage and the entire reason that we're smarter than other species.
The first two points are suggestive that you might want to question your own confidence in your statements or re-word to better support your case.
The third though is a direct refutation of the core idea.
Getting into things:
> Meanwhile neither the wars have stopped nor did the climate change.
Yes, there have been wars that have been stopped. To use an example, we are not currently at war with Vietnam. Moreover, there are events like the destruction of the ozone layer which have been stopped. There are currently tax breaks and incentives designed to encourage our market forces to adopt renewable energy. You're trying to make the case that activism is ineffective, but nuclear power adoption isn't widespread as many wish in part due to activism. Slavery isn't legal anymore, but once was. Civil rights are more universally applied than they were in formed years as well. I'm certain there are more examples of activist success.
> But problem is every new generation thinks they are the only revolutionaries to have suddenly discovered activism.
You seem like you are claiming that new generations are so stupid they know nothing at all about history pertaining to the activities they engage in. but it isn't true hat modern activists don't know about other activists. Modern activists have attended history classes and activist activities, when popular, are more likely to be covered in history classes than events which weren't noteworthy. Education has become more common, not less common, as time has gone on. Moreover, when people are effective, they generally have learned from others. Since former activism is a potential source of learning, effective activists are almost certain to have learned lessons from former efforts.
Notice that my first sentence made a claim. Then my following sentences provided justification for that claim. Contrast that with your own post. Lets move to your next sentence:
> For previous to previous generation it was about stopping wars and killing nuclear power.
This point doesn't logically follow your previous point. Your previous point made the case that you consider activists to be stupid. This statement doesn't build credibility for that claim by providing evidence. It instead switches to a new topic. That new topic, summarized without any sentiment attached is: different people at different times cared about different things.
It is perfectly reasonable for different people to care about different things. This is all the more true when you consider you don't even need to have different people in order to have different cares. Time alone is sufficient. Even over the course of a single day time alone can make a person care about different things: a person in the morning cares about getting up out of bed, but the person in the evening flip flops and now cares about getting into bed. Time, even over the course of the day, can completely invert desires. So how much more so is it appropriate for time over the course of a generation to lead to different desires? Especially when the person who is doing the desiring is different?
> The result is meaningless placard holding protests and pulling in a million directions.
You've failed to establish a link between different people wanting different things and the results of that being a bad thing rather than a good thing. There are many many reasons to expect that different people wanting different things is good.
In ML an ensemble of models which are good for different reasons tends to outperform any single model in the ensemble. This reality of mathematics isn't just a reality of mathematics, but manifests in practical ways. There is a phenomenon known to statisticians and referred to as the wisdom of crowds wherein groups of diverse people giving an estimate of an unknown quantity like the number of jelly beans in a jar have a better estimate than any one person. The practical consequence of this most people will see very frequently is that top-performing organizations often prioritize diversity.
But let's dig deeper, because you're just wrong here, and I want to drill down into the math so you can see that you're wrong.
There is a tension when learning: you have to get data in order to learn but you also have to do the thing that is in your best interest. In literature you'll find this discussed in the context of multi-armed bandit problems. This core tension is discussed in terms of explore versus exploit tradeoffs. Our best ML systems like MuZero are explicitly designed so as to balance these twin concerns.
Reality is incredibly complicated. From a logistics perspective it isn't actually possible for a single person to fully explore the solution space. There is a fundamental need to trade off against exploration and exploitation, but the complexity of the world is so exceedingly vast that it isn't actually tractable to do this for a single individual.
Since we have to explore and we have to exploit, but we also don't have the capacity to explore everything ourselves we should therefore be very unintelligent. Except we aren't, because we are social. While one person explores one area, another person explores a different area, and the sum of our knowledge is now better than it was before even though we both took different actions because we update our update functions such that the next explorer gets a new plan to build off.
So rather than diversity being an example of nothing get done it's actually absolutely essential and one of the most defining and important aspects of what makes humans more intelligent than other species.
You make a lot of bold statements. Care to provide some sources?
Your sentiment, without providing sources actually sounds a lot like the talking points of lobby groups fighting against the increased usage of renewable energy.
Just one example to counter your "arguments" is the there are currently 50 nuclear reactors Being under construction world wide. With nuclear energy capacity increasing [1].
>Just one example to counter your "arguments" is the there are currently 50 nuclear reactors Being under construction world wide. With nuclear energy capacity increasing [1].
nuclear capacity increasing doesn't necessarily contradict the parent's claim that "nuclear is dead/dying". Nuclear power can be growing in absolute terms, but be falling in relative terms.
I just provided one source against a string of claims right out of the playbook from the conservative anti global warming lobby.
If this makes me a "funny" one, I gladly am. I don't like dealing with people throwing out unsubstantiated claims or dismissing others with ad hominems.
Btw. you could just provide a counter argument (I would be open to that in a empirical discussion) but you chose to do a counter question showing you actually have no interest in rational, fact based discussion culture.
To quote numbers:
Between 2013 and 2025, 14 nuclear plants are slated to shut down. As of July 2018, there are 99 operational plants in the country.[1]
I wasn't able to quickly find the number of reactors that compromise said plants.
But from a purely nationalistic perspective you are right. The US actually looses reactors. But I stated World wide numbers. I don't care about the US loosing reactors. I was looking at it from a global perspective and just providing one counter point to someone stating unsubstantiated stuff.
Btw. themain reason for the US not building new reactors in the same amount they are shutting down others seems to be economic, though. Other sources of energy are nowadays way cheaper to produce and atomic seems to have lost the status of cash cow for the industry. [1]
I would say that characterizing the supply/demand mismatch caused by a once in a century pandemic as a showcase of why activism is often bad is not a very well considered perspective.
6 months from now if fertilizer prices are essentially normal and food supplies are just fine will you reconsider this view?
There weren't any more Chernobyls, though. Getting rid of nuclear technology because RMBK reactors were badly designed makes about as much sense as getting rid of civilian jet planes because early British Comets fell out of the sky with many casualties. There is no progress without problems.
What happend since then? Fukushima, and Fukushima killed fewer people than a highway car pile-up.
Radiation poisoning has a long tail, so it hard to calculate how many were killed by cancer and for how long. It doesn't mean that we easily discard long-term safety when talking about nuclear power.
No one rational wants to discard long-term nuclear safety, much less easily...
My worry is that we have swung collectively towards the very opposite, towards a demand for unrealistical level of one hundred per cent safety, unparalleled in any other modern activity (flights, medicine, construction, food...)
That is fine as long as you are willing to submit to a democratic process in the end.
Choosing your mode of transport is completely up to you as an individual, but power infrastructure is a common good and individual people should not be able to veto projects.
> I have no car, I don't fly on planes, I don't want to have a nuclear station near to me.
Even though you don't fly, a plane can still fall on you.
Wait! Hear me out -- in the entire history of the country, there have been a total of 13 fatalities as a result of accidents in nuclear plants in the U.S.[1], whereas aircraft falling from the sky killed:
* 23 people in Wichita when a B-52 stratofortress crashed into their homes in 1965 [2]
* 22 people died (including 12 children) when an F-86 Sabre crashed into a car and then slammed into an ice cream parlor in Sacramento in 1972 [3]
* 15 died when a DC-9 collided with a Piper mid-air and then slammed into a residential neighborhood in Cerritos, CA in 1986 [5]
* 13 died in 1967 in New Orleans when a DC-8 crashed into a private homes and a motel [6]
* 12 died in Evansville, Indiana when a C-130 crashed into the parking lot of JoJo's restaurant in 1992 [7]
* 10 people in an office building in Chicago in 1920 (but that was a dirigible)[8]
* 9 people on a freeway in Georgia 1977[9]
* 9 people in their homes in Chicago in 1959[10]
* 8 people in their homes in New Orleans in 1982[11]
* 7 people in their homes in New Jersey in 1972[12]
* 7 people in their homes in San Diego in 1978[13]
* 6 people in homes or parks in New York in 1960[14]
* 6 people in Miami in 1960 [15]
* 5 people in their homes in Queens in 2001 [16]
* 5 people in their homes in Minneapolis in 1956 [17]
* 4 people in an apartment building in New Jersey [18]
* 4 people on a bridge in D.C. in 1982 [19]
* 4 people in their homes in San Diego in 2008 [20]
* 4 people in their homes in Yorba Linda in 2019 [21]
* 3 people in a church in the San Fernando Valley in 1957 [22]
* 3 people in their homes in North Hollywood in 1962 [23]
* 3 people (two decapitated by helicopter blades and one crushed by aforementioned helicopter) in Hollywood in 1982 [24]
* 3 people who were attending a flight safety conference died when a cessna crashed into the conference building in Wichita in 2014 [25]
* 3 people in their homes in Gaithersburg, Maryland in 2014 [26]
* 2 people in a house in Minneapolist in 1950 [27]
* 2 people in their house died when a 737 crashed into a residential neighborhood in 1972 [28]
* 2 people in a trailer park died when a DC-10 crashed into them in 1979 [29]
* 2 people in car died when an MD-82 crashed into them in Michigan in 1987 [30]
* 2 people killed when a prop plane crashed into their home in New Jersey in 2013 [31]
And many, many other examples. So you see, not only is nuclear power safer than flying, it's much safer than being on the ground as well!
People in New Orleans still give directions by means of that 1982 crash site (i.e., a guy I wanted to buy a bike from told me, "turn left where the plane had taken out all those houses..."). I had to regretfully inform him that I was a) not alive then and b) did not know where it came down now that everything had been rebuilt.
Methane is the chemical feedstock for making fertilizer, being the primary source of hydrogen in large-scale industrial chemistry. There are no economical substitutes at scale. You can't replace it with unreliable electricity because it is not being primarily used as an energy source.
If methane becomes expensive, many ordinary things you might not expect will also become expensive. It is not helpful to naively make policy while oblivious to the consequences.
Well, last time I checked, methane wasn't expensive by policy. We simply don't have enough of it.
You can have a much smoother transition if you make it expensive by policy before it runs out. But no, short-sighted people will complain all the way until they kill their jobs and throw everybody into a crisis.
Banning sales of gas heaters, stoves, etc in homes would help I think. Maybe part of 1T spending should be ripping out leaking methane pipes feeding to almost every home.
> There is no reason fertilizers can't be made with unreliable solar and wind and carbon capture.
Yes there is. It's not just a matter of needing to use energy, natural gas itself it part of the process for making fertilizer.
"Nitrogen is a key component of most synthetic fertilizers. It is made by combining the nitrogen in the air with hydrogen in methane to produce ammonia (NH3). The ammonia is then used to create other forms of nitrogen including ammonium nitrate and urea (ammonia + CO2).
Natural gas is used to provide the methane and a heat source for the process."
You can't just replace that process with 'solar and wind'.
I actually didn't realize this myself until I started reading Countdown by Alan Weisman recently, about overpopulation, where he went over this process because it's the only reason why we're able to support and feed so many people today, is because we discovered this process for creating synthetic fertilizer and we're making so much of it today.
The Haber Process for making nitrogen fertilizer uses HYDROGEN as the feedstock for making ammonia, NOT methane! Natural gas steam reforming is just the cheapest source of hydrogen (usually), but before about 1950, we used electricity (usually from cheap renewables like hydro) to make hydrogen for ammonia. Easy peasy with wind and solar!
Yeah I just read a couple other articles and you're right. I was about to delete my post actually, when I saw you responded to it.
It does seem like most places don't currently have the infrastructure in place to do proper green hydrogen though, since only 0.1 percent of hydrogen produced as of Jan 2021 could be considered green hydrogen.[1]
So I don't think it's quite as 'easy peasy' as you're suggesting, probably a lot of money has to be invested and infrastructure has to be built to support it, but sure, I'm all for doing that.
Like most climate change things, it is relatively easy-peasy from a technical standpoint (as the other commenter noted, this is how we used to do it in the olden days).
It's just hard to build a thriving business around that when your competitor can dump CO2 into the atmosphere for free and leave someone else to pick up the tab.
Once the competitor starts using his profits to buy politicians and fake scientists it gets really complicated, but making lots of fertilizer with renewable energy is not only technically easy, it's actually one of the things that will help the uptake of renewable energy globally.
We will be seeing a lot more of these in the future. By making fertilizer out of air, water, and sun, a lot of places could gain more independence too.
There is a reason we don't often use electrolysis for hydrogen production -- it scales poorly and is expensive. Scaling that up several orders of magnitude is not a realistic option.
This is true of most electrolytic industrial chemistry, for example the hydroxides used in many carbon capture schemes. What works for the small-scale needs of today for industrial chemistry are not intrinsically scalable. In software terms, industrial chemistry is not "embarrassingly parallel" for reasons that are not immediately obvious to the layman, so scaling is hard.
That’s simply not true. Electrolysis scales JUST fine (the process for making aluminum is much the same although occurs at often higher temperature, and we used to use electrolysis for ammonia’s hydrogen). We just don’t do it because steam reforming is usually cheaper. Simple as that.
Hydrogen use 4x the amount of electricity per ton as aluminum, and that assumes you are not recycling aluminum. It is orders of magnitude less if it is recycled, which most aluminum production is. You'll need to come up with a less specious example than aluminum if you want to be credible.
We also produce significantly more hydrogen than aluminum in any case.
I’m not sure why you consider that “specious.” Aluminum requires less electricity per ton because hydrogen is the least dense element. Per mole, hydrogen uses less electricity than aluminum. :)
And we don’t produce massively more hydrogen than aluminum. Global primary aluminum production is ~64 million tonnes per year. Hydrogen for ammonia production (which is the majority of hydrogen I think) is about 40 million tonnes per year out of about 75 million tonnes total pure hydrogen. Certainly the same order of magnitude.
But again, this is missing the point. Before around 1950 (when steam reforming became widely available), hydrogen for ammonia fertilizer was produced commonly by electrolysis, often using cheap hydroelectric power. It was done at massive scale and only stopped because steam reforming happened to be cheaper.
And what is your point, here, by saying we make more aluminum than hydrogen? “We can’t credibly do things that are any different, even if just different by degree, than what we happen to do right now.”?
in Maryland where I farm, there has been a surplus of chicken litter on the eastern shore. Good for farmers there, but moving it around is expensive. I get litter from an egg operation near Gettysburg. It used to be free but now is $10/ton. I just bought 5 truck loads (120 tons), cost me $700 per load. I expect that price to go up. On-road diesel just hit $4.00/gal in our area which puts off-road prices over $3.00/gal. Input costs are getting to the point where there is no net profit in raising a crop.
But you are also experiencing the best commodity prices of your lifetime, right?
For me personally up in the Canadian prairies if wheat stays at $12 a bushel it is just not a big deal if urea is $1100/mt, even at 8 or 9 dollars a bushel an average crop will be much more profitable than a few seasons ago.
Most crops are drowning in nitrogen and lacking in other trace nutrients. There is an attitude about soil health that you can just drown the plants in the fundamentals and they’ll thrive, but soil science is advancing rapidly and the state of the art in soil testing is changing dramatically.
Check out this episode of Asymmetry with Ian Hunter to get a sense of what’s happening at the cutting edge of agroecology: https://overcast.fm/+Ld7nKIGYo
There is growing evidence that healthy soil, full of worms, bacteria and humous is the result of a symbiotic relationship between grazing animals and grass crops.
Like how the Great Plains sequestered gigatons of "carbon" in massive soil deposits.
Too bad anyone who claims such things may be true is considered a Heretic.
I hope it is apocalyptic.
We shouldn’t be growing so much poor quality subsidies. GMO corn, soybeans, and wheat are extremely poor quality, overproduced, bad for health and artificially abundant, so they destroy a lot of the crops, and sell it overseas to prevent the market from crashing due to supply as it naturally would. They did this with milk so farmers would make more money if they resold milk on the market. The results of subsidies is extremely detrimental to the environment.
>American farmers have purposefully poured out more than 43 million gallons’ worth of milk due to an excessively abundant supply of the dairy product in the county.
GMOs are not interently bad, but the US crops are less nutritionally dense and have worst effects on health. They’re bred to be hardy and easy to transport, not for taste, nutrition or quality, mostly just volume and resistance to disease and pesticides.
It seems like many GMO crops can actually have more (or in some cases just different?) Nutrients. In any case, it would a balance of some sort-- 20% increase in crop yields would more than offset 10% reduction in nutrients. Though I have no idea what the actual balance is.
Won’t the non GMO crops be selectively bred for the same qualities?
BigAgri is never going to sell their farms back to the families and start selling Organic Heirlooom Beets to the factory farms for feed. GMO is just a diversion
Not always, but for staple crops I can't think of one that isn't. Sure you can say they don't need to use GMOs in a bad way but that is not what bears out in reality. Here is selective breeding against the same qualities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_Candy_grapes
We need to rethink how we plant and sustain agriculture over long term. Ie a shift from mono crop fertiziler to sustainable multi crop robotic weed control.
This is an advantage of smaller-scale organic growing operations: the nitrogen gets recycled. Yes, it means we'd need more people involved in agriculture again, but there are benefits for the climate and for resilience. India has been showing the way here with high rice yields using organic methods.
> This is an advantage of smaller-scale organic growing operations: the nitrogen gets recycled. Yes, it means we'd need more people involved in agriculture again
A lot of Gen Z, and many younger millennials are completely disgusted with Society and would leap at opting out for a period of time or for good. I think we should as a Society should offset and subsidize this cohort with cheap loans on land, seed, and equipment for sustainable, organic, and regenerative farms as a viable way to take on climate change.
As a person who did it as well (mid-millennial) for a period of my adult life it taught me so much and to be honest it paid dividends in just about every industry I've ever worked in: Automotive, Tech, Ag, Health Sciences. And it enriched my life in ways I'm still only finding out as I grow older.
> India has been showing the way here with high rice yields using organic methods.
While I think India is going through some (much needed) progress with it's recent protests against introducing cheaper alternatives that undercut the farmers in unfair pricing wars, India is seriously one of the worst examples of Ag practices.
Whether it was the the wide-use of BT cotton seed and dependence on Monsanto inputs that led to wide spread misery and suicide, or the horrible generational debt system(s). It's hard to think how Vandana Shiva's vision of food sovereignty could ever take hold when the Indian political class is intent on upholding the caste system by marginalizing the people who grows their food.
I wonder if his has moved any green ammonia plans forward. There's been a rash of announcements recently but they mostly refer to plants phasing in over the next few years. High and volatile gas prices is a really strong driver of moves to renewables generally as the predictability of renewable generation reduces the finance risk and so brings costs down.
Very little recovery is possible unless we separate urine streams at their source. Once mixed with the rest of the wastewater very little N is recoverable as has to go through the process and gets recovered in the sludge stage as struvite, etc. Phosphorus, OTOH, is more recoverable per unit.
Take a look at (PDF on Google): Nitrogen Recovery from Wastewater: Possibilities, Competition with Other Resources, and Adaptation Pathways
Jan Peter van der Hoek 1,2,* , Rogier Duijff 1 and Otto Reinstra 2
The most promising mature technologies that can be incorporated into existing wastewater treatment plants include struvite precipitation, the treatment of digester reject water by air stripping, vacuum membrane filtration, hydrophobic membrane filtration, and treatment of air from thermal sludge drying, resulting respectively in 1.1%, 24%, 75%, 75%, and 2.1% nitrogen recovery for the specific case wastewater treatment plant Amsterdam-West.
The effects on sustainability were limited. Higher nitrogen recovery (60%) could be realized by separate urine collection, but this requires a completely new infrastructure for wastewater
collection and treatment.
I suspect most of the pharmaceuticals in sewage have a pretty short half life in that environment. Maybe the biggest problem would be the antibiotics that could impact beneficial bacteria in the soils. Not sure how long those survive in a composting situation where the temperatures get up to 170F.
I didn't watch the entire 2h30 video but it looks like one of the typical "perma-culture" ideas. I think these ideas have merit but there are some points I have issue with.
Usually, the forest is used as an example. Forests are indeed highly "optimized" and full of life, but they are also mostly closed systems. What is produced by the forest is consumed by the forest. We don't want a closed system, we want a system we can tap into and feed our million-people cities. I don't know what such a thing will look like, but most likely not a forest.
The other, more specific issue is about nitrogen. Half of the nitrogen in our body comes from artificial fertilizers, extracted from atmospheric nitrogen using the Haber-Bosch process. If we stop using artificial fertilizers, how are we going to get that nitrogen?
We are almost 8 billion and counting. We are stretching the limits of what nature is capable of. And I refuse solutions that involve limiting population (i.e. genocide), or make our life miserable. Can perma-cluture (or similar ideas) achieve that? I like the idea of a more integrated system (less monoculture), how to do it with reasonable manpower is an open question though, but I also think that artificial fertilizers are a necessity at that point.
India has been doing quite well with organic methods for growing rice that produce very competitive yields [1]. Yes, it is more labor intensive, but from a climate-change perspective and a resilience perspective (much less dependence on petrochemicals) it has some big advantages.
> If we stop using artificial fertilizers, how are we going to get that nitrogen?
Many legume crops are able to capture their own nitrogen from the atmosphere by using bacterial symbionts. Crop rotations with legume crops are one way we already take advantage of this. Genetic engineering could allow more types of crops to form symbiotic relationships with these bacteria.
>What is produced by the forest is consumed by the forest. We don't want a closed system, we want a system we can tap into and feed our million-people cities.
I'm increasingly of the mind that humans viewing themselves as apart from the biosphere, rather than an element within it, is a flawed mindset wholly responsible for our current predicament. It seems unlikely that digging ourselves deeper into that hole will bring about a positive outcome for humankind or the natural world on which we have always depended.
The foundation of human civilization since the discovery of agriculture is about setting us apart from the biosphere. We stopped being hunter gatherers and made nature work for us.
The biosphere will always be a resource we exploit. Yes we are part of it, but as true as it might be, it is not very helpful. I think it is more important to think of nature as a kind of machine that you have to maintain. Kind of like a car engine: regular oil change, proper fuel, make sure parts stay clean, don't red zone and let it cool when it needs to. Otherwise your car will not get you where you want to go.
Composting a humanure mix in sealed enclosures with a regulated exhaust would produce relatively high nitrogen compost. Deliver this locally to growing crops in a just-in-time manner for less nitrogen loss. However, it's hard to see this happening on any meaningful scale, with regard to the current trajectory of modern civilization, especially in the cities.
> I refuse solutions that involve limiting population (i.e. genocide), or make our life miserable
We are between a rock (these kinds of extreme solutions) and a hard place (allowing current trends to continue because there are no clear solutions which can be counted on due to corruption/greed/short-term-thinking, which aren't going away).
I see no way around anticipating increasing chaos for the foreseeable future. If you care about the long term health of yourself and your community/family, you should probably be looking for a region with plentiful local resources and inhospitable terrain.
> And I refuse solutions that involve limiting population (i.e. genocide),
What's your limit on population growth? When we all have one square meter of space? Is that when it should stop? I'm really curious to know where you draw the line.
you can certainly refuse to accept attempts to reduce population growth without equating it to genocide. they are clearly different both practically and morally.
I recently found out what the "AIM for Climate" initiative is from the US State Department press release, regarding COP26. The solution proposed by America apparently is "climate ready crops" aka "genetically modified crops from Monsanto etc"
I am honestly disgusted with the repetitive greed from western corporate interests on this Industrial AG topic. I do not trust one word of this news item, to start.
Climate Ready crops could also be crops genetically engineered (not genetically modified, there is a distinction) to be more resilient towards a warmer world or specific threats of a region. Look at SCUBA Rice as an example of rice more resistant flooding. We risk drier climates & an increase in heatwaves to threaten our food supply.
Industrial AG is a problem though. Sadly Monsanto will no doubt take advantage of this initiative. There are other regenerative ag techniques that would make our farms more climate resilient but they require large upfront capital costs and policy incentives aren’t there yet in the US. these practices are also a good solution to reduce our reliance on nitrogen fertilizer
Yeah, that is ridiculous. Especially with auditors going after nearby farms when seeds that can reproduce end up on other farms in small quantities through purely natural mechanisms.
I can imagine a future dystopia where the food supply collapses due to all the crops being sterile for reproduction and then some plant disease wipes them out.
Billionaire (AU$27B+) and former CEO of Fortescue Metals Groups Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest was recently in the news here in Australia with plants to build ammonia plants here in Tasmania and Queensland.
Tasmania has a lot of hydro electricity, but Hydro Tasmania claimed not to have any surplus supply to power the proposed plant because it's all presently being used by mineral processors Nyrstar and Temco.
Let's say someone who was able, and able to keep it quiet, was ordering the production of large amounts of new explosives... would that make a noticeable dent in the raw nitrates markets?
It would be an absolutely negligible quantity compared to agricultural use.
There is nothing mysterious going on here, natural gas ramped down and is ramping up too late to meet the demand and as it is challenging to store it is very vulnerable to production/consumption mismatches.
I wonder if there will really be a long-term shortage. It’s a lot easier to ship tons of fertilizer vs. shipping natural gas. How much additional capacity is there in the U.S.?
Grass seed has also seen wild shortages + price increases this year, mostly due to droughts hitting the northwest and driving yields incredibly low this year.
Is there a way to make money out of this crisis? Say buying corn future or even fertilizer future? I don’t understand derivatives and future market very well but simply buying fertilizer company stocks do not sound like a good idea since most investors look earning (EPS) and projected guidance which with increased price hike do not look promising.
> Prices are rising so quickly that, by early October fertilizer futures at CME Group were witnessing prices hit and exceed pre-financial crisis 2008 levels.
the global economy so inter-dependent that it's scary. We have a cascading failure that could now create famine, which would result in a feedback loop that makes everything even worse. All of this basically stems from a few weeks of true hard lockdown.
will be interesting to see how governments handle the balance of efficiency vs redundancy in the future
> All of this basically stems from a few weeks of true hard lockdown.
I'm sorry, but that's just bullshit. The best comparison scenario we have is Sweden, which closely resembles it's neighbors in terms of temperature, society, households. They didn't do any lockdowns, just recommended people not to gather too much; Denmark, Norway and Finland all went through multiple lockdowns. The economic downturn seen in Sweden is comparable to the one in its neighbours, even without stringent restrictions.
Brazil also didn't do any lockdowns and their economy indicators are far from great.
you missed my point entirely, because China locked down the entire global supply chain got messed up because of how interconnected it is. Bottlenecks in a few places have had impacts that will last for years moving forward
But not every supply chain depends on China. The issue discussed in the article, elevated gas prices causing fertiliser manufacturers in Europe and the US to stop production, has little to do with China's lockdown.
I have a growing feeling that the dream of globalization is becoming a nightmare: shortage of natural resources, the difference in buy-power, the rize of global monopolies that are unstoppable... it's creating a greater gap and establishing even greater power dynamics.
I don't discard the benefits as well, like economic growth, ease of travel, etc... but I start to wonder if it's balanced at all.
Famine would be a choice though, not an inevitable consequence of fertilizer availability. Crops can be shifted to legumes, and away from livestock production, we spend a lot of calories on preference these days.
You clearly know very little about agriculture. Beef cattle actually graze many hundreds of thousands of acres of land that could not realistically be converted to legume production.
Please do not cross into personal attack on HN, no matter how little someone else knows or you feel they know.
Your comment would be fine without the first sentence, and even better if you had added one or two sentences more to explain why it could not realistically be converted to legume production.
Edit: having looked at your comment history, it's painfully clear that you're using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's the line at which we ban accounts*, regardless of what they're battling for, so I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I agree, grandparent comment is pretty brash while also being substantively wrong.
Most of our meat in the US comes from factory farms.
> 70.4 percent of cows, 98.3 percent of pigs, 99.8 percent of turkeys, 98.2 percent of egg-laying hens, and over 99.9 percent of chickens raised for meat come from factory farms.
I think the fundamental problem is that legislation preventing cartels and "guilds" in the base industry, making top of the chain industry where the money is at, where the niche company more or less has monopoly by the nature of being niche or by controlling distribution/marketplace.
So base industry is put out of business in e.g. Europe and North America and stays in protectionist countries, making them overly dependent on foreign industry.
Greater custom duty should probably solve some of the unstable base industry situation.
You don't have to go all in Hanseatic. Just have high enough customs that local industries can compete with industries that e.g. take advantage of child labor (clothing) or industries in areas that lack environmental protection laws/costs.
Also, open price fixing could be legalized to move bargain power to manufacturing of base products.
Two weeks to slow the spread… that didn’t really do much and has just caused cascading problems that have caused innumerable other health effects.
For example, imagine many lower class families eating less healthy because food is more expensive. Or smoking more to reduce stress. Lockdowns look a lot less effective when external damage is considered at this point.
It's still introducing trapped carbon from underground back into the atmosphere. And most plants we fertilize are very quickly converted back into CO2 from being eaten by animals(including ourselves).
For a long term assessment of our predicament , Tom Murphy's
book 'Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet' is a must read:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m
A must read for an assessment of our predicament is "Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet' by physicist Tom Murphy of UCSD
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m
In your case it's only viable because you can use it domestically with very little processing (or processing done with free labor). I suspect doing it on an industrial scale will quickly see costs rise for transportation and processing. A sibling comment says that corn fertilization costs $120/acre. Even at double the cost, I doubt the whole pipeline of collection to industrial composting, can be anywhere competitive.
The truth likely falls the other way. Low grade compost is taxpayer subsidized in the us as it's mass yard and other nature waste. In cities with decent food waste programs the quality increases
And if you're a farm manager, the "chafe" and waste are "free", have no transportation costs, etc. In some jurisdictions the "chafe" has already printed money via crop rotation / wild grass subsides.
Perhaps not. Maxerickson pointed out production could be shifted away from meat to legumes in the event of serious shortages. Seems right in line with climate goals.
Good luck growing legumes on the acreage currently used for beef production… you can hardly walk much less tractor incredible expanses of this land. Beef cattle very efficiently convert the grasses on these lands into healthy, nutritious food for humans.
It’s terrifying to realize how many of the people trying to influence food production have little if any practical knowledge of how farming actually works. People are going to starve to death en mass if your ilk have your way.
That is, admittedly, a lot higher than I was expecting! But 70% is still a sizeable majority. Moving the entire industry to grassland feeding would likely result in a fundamental upwards shift in how beef is priced, one that I suspect the GP would be unwilling to accept.
The cheapest source of hydrogen is usually steam reforming of natural gas. (But this wasn’t the case until about 1950 when steam reforming became cheap and widespread. Before that, cheap hydroelectricity-produced green hydrogen was common for nitrogen fertilizer production.)
Not mentioning this means that the average person who reads the news (including the typical politician and HN reader) has the mistaken notion that fossil fuels are essential for making fertilizer.
My 2cents: Two consequences (which kind of go in opposite directions) of this are:
1) You really think we need to push hydrogen cars right now when we’re not even producing a significant amount of green hydrogen for fertilizer? Unlike the electric grid (which is 40% clean already in the US), almost no hydrogen for ammonia is made with clean electricity.
2) This should provide impetus for locally produced green hydrogen efforts as food security, insulation from fossil fuel price swings. (Blue hydrogen doesn’t have that advantage since it’s still fossil fuel based and is worse in other ways.)