3 ms·

You're talking about the death of half the world's population: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_supported_by_synthetic_nitrogen_fertili

You're talking about the death of half the world's population: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_supported_by_synthetic_nitrogen_fertilizers,_OWID.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_sup...

woodruffw 5y ago
Cheap synthetic fertilizer is one of the single greatest inventions of the 20th century, and is singlehandedly responsible for an enormous increase in our productive capacity and quality of life. At the same time, I think this chart is misleading: it shows our ability to support the current population as it currently consumes, which includes an extraordinary amount of crop diversion towards animal feed. The GP is describing a world in which we all eat radically less meat, which is also one in which we need to use less synthetic fertilizer for all that meat's food.
- noduerme 5y ago
  But this presupposes that the inefficient diversion to animal feed would work itself out in favor of keeping everyone fed if less grain were available. Since the inefficient systems of production and consumption are already deeply entrenched in areas with the highest savings and the most buffer against instability, there's no reason to think they would be the first thing to collapse, or even that the economics might not favor keeping livestock fed over reallocating grain to humans.
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    I don't think there's any supposition of this sort in my comment: I haven't committed to any particular opinion on how we would (or whether it's politically feasible to) distribute the agricultural products that normally go into animal feed. Contemporary economic pressures, as you've correctly noted, don't help! All I've observed is that the GP's conclusion doesn't necessarily extend from the data they've presented: it's just not the case that 3.5 billion humans would have to die if we didn't use as much synthetic fertilizer as we do. We can feed the entire world with much less indirection than we currently go through.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      Fair enough, but we could only do that if there were some master plan to reallocate the land used for animal feed, the processing, the innumerable distribution systems that get food to people. Saying this is like saying there's enough energy from the sun, wind and hydro to let us go off fossil fuels. It would be true if you could wave a wand and redesign the whole system from scratch. But that observation doesn't make it any less of a crisis if the system as-is begins to break down. The trouble with a lot of these idealistic proclamations that "we have the ability ...if" is that they don't take into account the messy realities, and so the only purpose they serve is virtue-signaling. Tl;dr the only useful solutions in this will involve ways to produce or more efficiently distribute more fertilizer, not to say that we could or should get along without it.
freeflight 5y ago
As cynical as it might sound; Maybe that much population, at increasingly higher living standards, was never sustainable to begin with.

woodruffw 5y ago

Cheap synthetic fertilizer is one of the single greatest inventions of the 20th century, and is singlehandedly responsible for an enormous increase in our productive capacity and quality of life. At the same time, I think this chart is misleading: it shows our ability to support the current population as it currently consumes, which includes an extraordinary amount of crop diversion towards animal feed. The GP is describing a world in which we all eat radically less meat, which is also one in which we need to use less synthetic fertilizer for all that meat's food.

noduerme 5y ago
But this presupposes that the inefficient diversion to animal feed would work itself out in favor of keeping everyone fed if less grain were available. Since the inefficient systems of production and consumption are already deeply entrenched in areas with the highest savings and the most buffer against instability, there's no reason to think they would be the first thing to collapse, or even that the economics might not favor keeping livestock fed over reallocating grain to humans.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  I don't think there's any supposition of this sort in my comment: I haven't committed to any particular opinion on how we would (or whether it's politically feasible to) distribute the agricultural products that normally go into animal feed. Contemporary economic pressures, as you've correctly noted, don't help! All I've observed is that the GP's conclusion doesn't necessarily extend from the data they've presented: it's just not the case that 3.5 billion humans would have to die if we didn't use as much synthetic fertilizer as we do. We can feed the entire world with much less indirection than we currently go through.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    Fair enough, but we could only do that if there were some master plan to reallocate the land used for animal feed, the processing, the innumerable distribution systems that get food to people. Saying this is like saying there's enough energy from the sun, wind and hydro to let us go off fossil fuels. It would be true if you could wave a wand and redesign the whole system from scratch. But that observation doesn't make it any less of a crisis if the system as-is begins to break down. The trouble with a lot of these idealistic proclamations that "we have the ability ...if" is that they don't take into account the messy realities, and so the only purpose they serve is virtue-signaling. Tl;dr the only useful solutions in this will involve ways to produce or more efficiently distribute more fertilizer, not to say that we could or should get along without it.

freeflight 5y ago

As cynical as it might sound; Maybe that much population, at increasingly higher living standards, was never sustainable to begin with.