He was reported on by Radiolab in an episode about the good and bad that people do: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/180092-the-bad-show/
> And it's guys like Steve jobs that get called innovators! Absolute nonsense!
There are an infinite number of reasonable ways to measure innovation, and there are so many metrics by which "guys LIKE Steve Jobs"(whatever that means) come out on top.
From a humanitarian perspective, Fritz Haber ended up creating a process that helped us take huge steps forward as a collective species.
We can acknowledge that without putting down other innovators.
We can ALL be acknowledged for our innovation.
It also made possible the industrial production of dynamite and other conventional explosives, and you could say it's why WW2 dwarfed WW1 in terms of destructive power. Point is, it's not a one-sided issue as you say.
> Without that invention 40% of
> the world could not exist[...]
But of course if we didn't have fertilizer we would have never ended up with the current system, and e.g. meats would be a lot more expensive since they take more land to raise than vegetables, which would be in harder competition with them due to higher prices on land.
This is likely similar to claims that "in N years we'll run out of fossil fuels". No, in N years we'll run out of areas that are currently economical to mine for fossil fuels, but at that point prices will rise and new fields will open up.
Peak oil is a matter of when, not if. It is not an infinite resource. The interesting (and worrisome) question to me is if we'll be able to convert the transportation grid to predominantly electric (and thus powerable by solar/wind) before we hit a global peak and start losing maximum recoverable oil at 3-10%/year, which will cause intense price spikes and resource wars, due to inelastic demand.
Now, I probably should have picked a better comparison, since oil really is zero-sum in ways that needing to grow more food isn't.
The point is that in an alternate universe where agriculture was 40% less efficient it doesn't follow that there would be 40% fewer people. Rather, more of the gross world product would be spent on agriculture, since there's a lot you can do to throw more money at the problem to increase yields, and pricing would do a lot to increase the efficiency.
I disagree with the idea that there'd be proportionally less meat, for a couple of reasons. First, a lot of grazing-animal meat (beef, basically) comes from land that is unviable for plowing or other vegetation farming. Second, in the absence of inexpensive chemical fertilizer, manure would be a much more important fixer, just like it has been for thousands of years.
There are massive areas off US coasts with proven reserves that are legally untouched (CA moratorium after Santa Barbara spill only allows for marginal/incremental pumping). In the time between those reserves being shut off and now, the economics of retrieving that oil changed completely, and there is now a ton of "easy oil" off the california coast.
Nobody's arguing that oil is not an infinite resource, but I can point to a single location that contains immense amounts of easily tappable oil.
While the original motivation for the CA moratorium was ecological, these days it's (implicitly) economic. All CA has to do is wait until the price spikes start happening, and dribble out oil at very high prices while hoping there isn't another Deepwater Horizon.
The proven reserves for California are based on historic estimates, they haven't been thoroughly re-evaluated, and were based on previous extraction technologies (before side-drilling etc). The current position of my friends who do oil/gas analysis is that California proven reserve estimates are at least 1 order of magnitude below reality mainly because people aren't actively looking because of the moratorium.
The point of all this is that California's offshore fields aren't all that special, and they aren't "easy oil". If they were, any environmentalist resistance would have been defeated long ago.
I know you said this in reference to Californian oil, but it also applies to Saudi oil. The number of dollars paid isn’t the only cost of using that oil.
At least install an effective blow-out protector.
China was doing pretty well for itself for millennia with intensive terracing and silt harvesting. They have fields that have been under cultivation for four thousand years. We can barely manage four hundred.
And pre Columbian California was agrofoerstry from sea to foothills with seasonal migrations.
Without anhydrous ammonia we would have a diet much higher in legumes and lower in staple starch, which is probably killing us anyway. A more efficient source of high fructose corn syrup doesn’t inspire confidence in our future.
Corn still uses far too much water for us to sustain indefinitely.
[Edit] We would also be using more perennial crops, which don't have to build up an entire plant from seed every year. More efficient, as long as your form of civilization does not involve moving into new areas every ten years.
Before the introduction of western diseases, North America had a much larger population than we are taught in our Manifest Destiny classes. It's fair to say that the population here is about one order of magnitude greater, but if we ran the Mississippi watershed the way the Chinese managed the Yangtze [1]? Or the tribes of California? [2] We'd still be doing pretty well without anhydrous.
Again, though, we'd be eating a lot more beans. We should be eating a lot more beans. And nuts.
When Polynesians settled Hawai'i, they brought a couple dozen species with them (canoe plants) and found the Koa, a nitrogen fixing tree. When Europeans occupied Hawai'i, they brought a few more, including the monkeypod (another nitrogen fixing tree) as cattle fodder. The bean pods are high in protein.
> "However, in the soil of natural ecosystems, nitrogen occurs predominantly as proteins."[3]
Everyone talks about the magic of nitrogen in plant and soil biology, but at the end of the day, it's the protein cycle that matters. "Feed the soil, feed the plant"[4] requires polycultures instead of monocultures in order to work, but we could do it. We would have done it. George Washington Carver wanted to do it [5] but he got outmaneuvered by industrial agriculture (and structural racism). In another world without anhydrous he probably would have found more success.
Tl;dr: Things would look very, very different but not necessarily smaller - or worse - if not for chemical fertilizer, and we may have to get to that world soon if we want to keep on breathing and eating.
References:
1: Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan, F. H. King
2: Tending the Wild, M. Kat Anderson
3: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2393761/
4: Roughly any book on Permaculture
5: My Work Is That of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver
The calculation should include logistics, nutritious food that can't be transported unspoiled to the people in need does little good.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition#Dietary_practices
Just fixing corruption would go a long way towards that goal.
Also goes for inventor reward. Contrast Diesel and Parsons.
Smil is a world treasure. Seriously, start reading his books.
NB, I'm looking for sources showing major inventions through history (Smil is one source). Roughly by decade to about 1850, 25 years to 1600, centuries to 1250 or so, and expanding granularity to 10,000, 100k, and 1m BCE.
Needham's Science & Civilisation is another source.
But yeah I agree with you there- at the time no one (maybe apart from Edison) knew how big an impact they would have.
Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power is a difficult-to-find and somewhat uneven book, but builds largely on Smil's premise (from his earlier Energy and World History) to include political and social consequences.
I've been finding institutional and media consequences and dynamics also of interest. Some reading of interest:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
More recently: Paul Baran and Norbert Wiener.
Life without it might've been possible, but we would be incomparably more reliant on cereals and natural sources of nitrogen fertilisers. And be sure, we would've still be having wars over fertile lands.
Just in time grocery store inventories and trucks with empty fuel tanks will starve as many people as Haberless crops.
Humanity is much more likely to suffer a huge calamity from lack of fossil fuels than it is to overcome the problem with technology.
Sounds ridiculous now, but at in 60-70ies (and to lesser extend today,) US had high double digits of world's total agricultural output