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0. Who publishes a book with an obviously fake name? 1. Only a small part is used for food production and none of it directly. All our food comes from photosyn

0. Who publishes a book with an obviously fake name? 1. Only a small part is used for food production and none of it directly. All our food comes from photosynthesis, that is, solar energy. 2. That only made people live longer, it didn't make them have more children. It does the opposite actually. (and BTW, sanitation is ancient, mediavel Europe was an abberation. Bronze age cities alredy had water supply, sewage systems and such.) 3. It's energy intensive, but not that intensive, it could be replaced with solar energy or natural bacteria and losses could be minimized by recycling waste. Nitrogen is a building block of cells, it's not a source of energy for them. The fixation process takes a lot of energy because nitrogen molecules in the air are hard to break. 4. Minerals, unlike fuels, aren't used up. They can be recycled forever, you only need to recover the losses. 5. Fertilizers aren't made from fossil fuels, there is no reaosn why we should stop using them. Transport storage and processing is done that way because it's more convenient or the final product is preferable. ("fresh" vs. dried or salted food)

dredmorbius 11y ago
Much of what you've written is simply false, much the rest hopelessly naive. Really, if you're interested in an intelligent discussion, educate yourself. 1. If you're referring to Smil, you're simply incorrect. As for pseudonymously publised works, there's a long tradition of that, as well as of anonymous publishing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_published_under_a_pseudonym https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_published_unde... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anonymously_published_works https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anonymously_publishe... 1. On food production: the natural rate of agriculture peaked arguably in the 19th or early 20th century. Again, what's boosted food output has largely been a transfer of plant-derived photosynthetic energy from other purposes (disease resistance, physical structure), to producing more actual foodstuffs: grain, germ, and starch. Most especially in the case of the major staple crops: wheat, maize, rice, and potatoes. Avialable arable land, topsoil, suitable climatic regions, freshwater, and fertilisers are all limiting factors. On which you might also care to refer to Leibig's Law of the Minimum. As to the topic of my coment, virtually all manufacturing, transport, and processign activities require one or more of coal, oil, or gas. Absent these, no steel, little aluminium (hydroelectric can substitute), cement, and many other materials, again, Smil addresses this in depth), no overland trucks, far more difficult overland rail, ocean cargo is restricted to sail or sail-power hybrids, and no air travel. 2. Demographic plots of population say otherwise. 3. The point isn't that nitrogen is an energy source, but that it's a fundamentally required and limiting nutrient, and that breaking those chemical bonds are precisely what requires so much energy. The initial question asked was "what changed", and that's what I've answered. Malthus didn't forsee either the chemical energy bounty of fossil fuels, or the possible addition of artificial fertilisers. Haber-Bosch reflects the combination of these factors. You'd have to both continue the 2nd, and substitute for the 1st factor. 4. Cost of mineral extraction rises precisely as a reciprocal of their concentration. Concentrations of mined ores has fallen tremendously. The problem with the "more energy makes recycling possible" argument is that many or most of those energy systems are themselves dependent on scarce mineral resources for their production, transformation to useful forms, and especially, storage. As ecologists note (Howard Odum at depth), humans, and life generally, exploit entropic gradients. These include not only energy gradients as in fossil fuels, but gradients of ore concentrations and even natural systems producing useful exploitable circumstances. 5. You're arguing a point I didn't make. It's not that fertilisers are made from fossil fuels (though in fact many are). It's that even those fertilisers which aren't critically limited by dependency of fossil-fuel based synthesis are themselves in crucially short supplies. Most notably phosphorus, though on a longer scale, even reasonably abundant potash becomes constrained (1-5 centuries). Again: life exploits entropic gradients. Humans have overcome contraints of previous gradients (a near 100% renewables regime, based on agriculture, small wind and water kinetic inputs, and small-scale extractive mining), by bootstrapping a vast enterprise of energy and minerals extraction. It's produced a one-time boon for the species. Even highly abundant mineral resources such as iron and oxygen are available to us through previous biological activity on the planet. Look up "banded iron formations" and "the great oxygenation event" for background. Humans have plowed through a billion years of iron accumulation in a couple of centuries. While not fully exhausted, future generations will have massively less rich ores to mine. If they're starting from a technological deficit on top of that, the process of re-bootstrapping civilisation will likely prove challenging. Technologies can both lead to newly avialable gradients such as coal, oil, and gas, which were less attractive earlier in that they weren't universally distributed -- easier to walk into the local woods to extract fuel than haul coal thousands, or even tens, of miles. An entire infrastructure of railways, paved highways, pipelines, shipping systems, and high-pressure or low-temperature containment were required to make these fuels vialble, a process which took much of a century to fully develop. Renewables are the energy of the future, of that I've no doubt. The question is the scale and technological scope of their utilisation. Nuclear power is the curveball, though conventional once-through uranium and plutonium designs are sufficient only for about 7-8 more decades at present levels of use. Increase the provision of electricity from them and that falls to about 6 years. Seawater extraction of uranium at 2ppm is unproven and would require vast marine structures (the marine environment is a bitch to engineer for). Breeder systems offer a longer horizon, but with massive systemic risks. Neither, of themselves, address liquid fuels, coking fuel (14% of coal consumption), or other affordances of hydrocarbons, though there are some possible options (Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis, possibly recapturing carbon from seawater among the more interesting possibilities). Even these would raise the energy cost of liquid hydrocarbons by a factor of about 80.
- PepeGomez 11y ago
  1. Maybe you're right that's alarge part of it, (but fertilizers and better land management are surely another) they have nothing to do with fossil fuels and there is no reason why they should be reversed when we stop using fossil fuels. 2. You're either made it up yourself or you're looking at made up grahps. Fertility rates dropped massively in almost all developing countries, most aren't having enough children to keep their populations stable. Most developing countries follow with some delay. 3. Nitrogen isn't a source of energy and neither it's a major energy cost for plants. Most plants don't even gather their own nitrogen, that's why they need nitrogen fertilizer. Plants that do don't need nitrogen fertilizer, because they can get as much as they need. There is absolutely no problem making fertilizer without fossil fuels. And nitrogen isn't used up, so only the losses have to be covered. 4. That's not what I said. Once a mineral is mined, it doesn't disappear until it's lost. Iron stays iron, copper stays copper, no matter how you use them. I said nothing about energy, recycling presumably needs less energy than mining most minerals anew. 5. a) No fertilizer is made from fossil fuels. 5. b) It has nothing to do with fossil fuels and it can't be compared with fossil fuels. When you burn a fossil fuel, it turns into exhaust gases and ash and it's no longer recoverable in any form as a fuel. But phosphorus stays phosphorus and potassium stays potassium. Only the losses need to be covered and at worst you will have to extract the lost minerals from the sea. But you can't ever run out of a mineral, unless you burn it in a nuclear reaction. 6. >Even highly abundant mineral resources such as iron and oxygen are available to us through previous biological activity on the planet. Look up "banded iron formations" and "the great oxygenation event" for background. Humans have plowed through a billion years of iron accumulation in a couple of centuries. These elements have always been present on Earth. These events didn't create iron reserves, on the contrary, they turned (immediatelly usable) elemental iron into oxidized iron ores that we need to turn back into their unoxidized form. 7. And don't make the mistake that fossil fuels store millions of years worth of energy, they don't. They did take millions of years to form, but they hold relatively little energy. ALL fossil fuels likely don't hold more than one week of sunlight. It's absolutely nothing. They were the first thing we happened to develop, but sunlight provides vastly higher amounts of energy. If we went the way of solar energy, energy would be so cheap by now it probably wouldn't even be metered.

dredmorbius 11y ago

Much of what you've written is simply false, much the rest hopelessly naive. Really, if you're interested in an intelligent discussion, educate yourself. 1. If you're referring to Smil, you're simply incorrect. As for pseudonymously publised works, there's a long tradition of that, as well as of anonymous publishing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaclav_Smil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_published_under_a_pseudonym https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_published_unde... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anonymously_published_works https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anonymously_publishe... 1. On food production: the natural rate of agriculture peaked arguably in the 19th or early 20th century. Again, what's boosted food output has largely been a transfer of plant-derived photosynthetic energy from other purposes (disease resistance, physical structure), to producing more actual foodstuffs: grain, germ, and starch. Most especially in the case of the major staple crops: wheat, maize, rice, and potatoes. Avialable arable land, topsoil, suitable climatic regions, freshwater, and fertilisers are all limiting factors. On which you might also care to refer to Leibig's Law of the Minimum. As to the topic of my coment, virtually all manufacturing, transport, and processign activities require one or more of coal, oil, or gas. Absent these, no steel, little aluminium (hydroelectric can substitute), cement, and many other materials, again, Smil addresses this in depth), no overland trucks, far more difficult overland rail, ocean cargo is restricted to sail or sail-power hybrids, and no air travel. 2. Demographic plots of population say otherwise. 3. The point isn't that nitrogen is an energy source, but that it's a fundamentally required and limiting nutrient, and that breaking those chemical bonds are precisely what requires so much energy. The initial question asked was "what changed", and that's what I've answered. Malthus didn't forsee either the chemical energy bounty of fossil fuels, or the possible addition of artificial fertilisers. Haber-Bosch reflects the combination of these factors. You'd have to both continue the 2nd, and substitute for the 1st factor. 4. Cost of mineral extraction rises precisely as a reciprocal of their concentration. Concentrations of mined ores has fallen tremendously. The problem with the "more energy makes recycling possible" argument is that many or most of those energy systems are themselves dependent on scarce mineral resources for their production, transformation to useful forms, and especially, storage. As ecologists note (Howard Odum at depth), humans, and life generally, exploit entropic gradients. These include not only energy gradients as in fossil fuels, but gradients of ore concentrations and even natural systems producing useful exploitable circumstances. 5. You're arguing a point I didn't make. It's not that fertilisers are made from fossil fuels (though in fact many are). It's that even those fertilisers which aren't critically limited by dependency of fossil-fuel based synthesis are themselves in crucially short supplies. Most notably phosphorus, though on a longer scale, even reasonably abundant potash becomes constrained (1-5 centuries). Again: life exploits entropic gradients. Humans have overcome contraints of previous gradients (a near 100% renewables regime, based on agriculture, small wind and water kinetic inputs, and small-scale extractive mining), by bootstrapping a vast enterprise of energy and minerals extraction. It's produced a one-time boon for the species. Even highly abundant mineral resources such as iron and oxygen are available to us through previous biological activity on the planet. Look up "banded iron formations" and "the great oxygenation event" for background. Humans have plowed through a billion years of iron accumulation in a couple of centuries. While not fully exhausted, future generations will have massively less rich ores to mine. If they're starting from a technological deficit on top of that, the process of re-bootstrapping civilisation will likely prove challenging. Technologies can both lead to newly avialable gradients such as coal, oil, and gas, which were less attractive earlier in that they weren't universally distributed -- easier to walk into the local woods to extract fuel than haul coal thousands, or even tens, of miles. An entire infrastructure of railways, paved highways, pipelines, shipping systems, and high-pressure or low-temperature containment were required to make these fuels vialble, a process which took much of a century to fully develop. Renewables are the energy of the future, of that I've no doubt. The question is the scale and technological scope of their utilisation. Nuclear power is the curveball, though conventional once-through uranium and plutonium designs are sufficient only for about 7-8 more decades at present levels of use. Increase the provision of electricity from them and that falls to about 6 years. Seawater extraction of uranium at 2ppm is unproven and would require vast marine structures (the marine environment is a bitch to engineer for). Breeder systems offer a longer horizon, but with massive systemic risks. Neither, of themselves, address liquid fuels, coking fuel (14% of coal consumption), or other affordances of hydrocarbons, though there are some possible options (Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis, possibly recapturing carbon from seawater among the more interesting possibilities). Even these would raise the energy cost of liquid hydrocarbons by a factor of about 80.

PepeGomez 11y ago
1. Maybe you're right that's alarge part of it, (but fertilizers and better land management are surely another) they have nothing to do with fossil fuels and there is no reason why they should be reversed when we stop using fossil fuels. 2. You're either made it up yourself or you're looking at made up grahps. Fertility rates dropped massively in almost all developing countries, most aren't having enough children to keep their populations stable. Most developing countries follow with some delay. 3. Nitrogen isn't a source of energy and neither it's a major energy cost for plants. Most plants don't even gather their own nitrogen, that's why they need nitrogen fertilizer. Plants that do don't need nitrogen fertilizer, because they can get as much as they need. There is absolutely no problem making fertilizer without fossil fuels. And nitrogen isn't used up, so only the losses have to be covered. 4. That's not what I said. Once a mineral is mined, it doesn't disappear until it's lost. Iron stays iron, copper stays copper, no matter how you use them. I said nothing about energy, recycling presumably needs less energy than mining most minerals anew. 5. a) No fertilizer is made from fossil fuels. 5. b) It has nothing to do with fossil fuels and it can't be compared with fossil fuels. When you burn a fossil fuel, it turns into exhaust gases and ash and it's no longer recoverable in any form as a fuel. But phosphorus stays phosphorus and potassium stays potassium. Only the losses need to be covered and at worst you will have to extract the lost minerals from the sea. But you can't ever run out of a mineral, unless you burn it in a nuclear reaction. 6. >Even highly abundant mineral resources such as iron and oxygen are available to us through previous biological activity on the planet. Look up "banded iron formations" and "the great oxygenation event" for background. Humans have plowed through a billion years of iron accumulation in a couple of centuries. These elements have always been present on Earth. These events didn't create iron reserves, on the contrary, they turned (immediatelly usable) elemental iron into oxidized iron ores that we need to turn back into their unoxidized form. 7. And don't make the mistake that fossil fuels store millions of years worth of energy, they don't. They did take millions of years to form, but they hold relatively little energy. ALL fossil fuels likely don't hold more than one week of sunlight. It's absolutely nothing. They were the first thing we happened to develop, but sunlight provides vastly higher amounts of energy. If we went the way of solar energy, energy would be so cheap by now it probably wouldn't even be metered.