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Comment by anabis | Hacker News Reader

And then, Haber–Bosch process saved the day.

I am in a more mitigation / technical solution camp.

Haber-Bosch is only a partial solution, and only for nitrogen. It is a relatively neat solution, because the entire planet is enveloped in nitrogen, and methane is readily available, for now.

Phosphorus and potassium are still problems. The primary sources for both are mines deep in the ground. We can't pull those out of the air. It looks like phosphorus is going to be a problem earlier,[0] so there are pilot programs to reclaim it from sewage. Those are going to have to scale up quickly. Eventually, potassium will also be a problem.

Technology might solve the problem, but it is not a given. It will take investment and work.

[0]https://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/does-peak-phosp...

It's apparently vaguely commercially viable to extract potassium from seawater right now, so it probably won't be a problem in the future.

(I came across several mentions of it in the course of looking at the state of phosphorus extraction; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_mining#Potash talks about mining it from the Dead Sea, but the Ocean concentration is apparently high enough to work)

As far as hydrogen, if we can get energy prices down (solar looks poised to do this), there is plenty of hydrogen available anywhere there is water.

I'd guess you'd get a boost in efficiency if brine mining were to be combined with desalinization, which also looks to be ramping up in the near future.

The article shows a timeline of 40 years - I'd think both those problems tractable in that span of time.

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that more-modern farming methods like no-till leave more silage on the ground, greatly reducing the need for the addition of Ka and P. Bulk stock crops like corn are farmed with methods that are pretty effective at removing only the kernels and leaving the silage.

Critics claim that this simply tied the oxcart to the fossil fuel train.

I'm in the middle. If we can transition beyond fossil fuels then it will work out, but if not that claim will prove true.

Perhaps it's because of seeing James Burke's "Connections" when younger, but that series gives you the feeling that advances like the Haber-Bosch process are more or less required for us to continue as a species. This casts our role as that of innovator, and if the innovation stops, then to an extent, so do we.

This causes me to have to work to understand Apocalyptic stories.

The counterexample is the influence of the Mandarins on China, which created a very stable, unchanging culture that lasted for centuries.

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