Urea prices increase 270% in 1 year
indexmundi.com
indexmundi.com
That is, the vast majority of nitrogen-fixation for fertilizers is done using natural gas or other petroleum product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production
The primary reason that Malthus was wrong in his predictions about population growth and food supply isn't because of "science" it's because of fossil fuels.
This wouldn't be an issue if fossil fuels were unlimited in supply and didn't have very severe externalities in their unrestricted usage.
People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks like under a zero emissions scenario with our current nitrogen productions methods.
edit: This comment getting quickly downvoted is objective evidence for my argument that "People don't like to talk about..." There's nothing controversial in this comment. In a world without fossil fuels we very likely would have seen Malthus's predictions come to be, fossil fuels are obviously a limited resource and their usage has extreme externalities.
I get that people are scared, but it's still sad to see a community of otherwise curious people start to break down when they see facts that make them uncomfortable.
I'd have to run the numbers... but offhand I'd guess it just means nitrogen gets 2.5x more expensive. (Call it 2-10x if you want some padding) That doesn't even mean food gets 2.5x more expensive, only that the percentage of costs due to nitrogen go up that much. I think this is such a non-issue.
According to some articles I’ve read targeted towards farmers [1], they are able to compensate by using less fertilizer-dependent crops. So, we can expect small price hikes and major shifts towards using soybeans in place of corn where possible.
[1] example: https://www.agriculture.com/markets/analysis/crops/fertilize...
I, for one, love to talk about zero emission food production.
It's not scary, and in fact it will be somewhat straightforward to replace our nitrogen sources with zero emission production methods.
Electricity can be used to produce ammonia in many ways. The most obvious is electrolysis of water to hydrogen, and then through the Haber process. Large scale production is already being planned, for example by Fertiberia in Spain, who will deploy many MW of electrolyzers soon. Spain's target for electrolyzers is 4GW by 2030! We couldn't even build 4GW of nuclear by 2030, but we will be able to do elecrolyzers and the solar to power them.
There is also a startup (blanking on the name) that creates ammonia on site, off grid, using high voltage in a box. This eliminates the transport cost of nitrogen, which is not insignificant. By focusing on small scale production on site a small startup can break in to a huge commodity market.
I didn't downvote your comment, but your unnecessary pessimism does not accurately reflect the future that we can see already!
Around 50% of the input is indeed from nitrogen, but it need not be derived from fossil fuels since you could source energy elsewhere and use water electrolysis derived hydrogen in the nitrogen production process. That it is currently more economical to use fossil fuels is a separate issue.
In the same way that bunker fuel powered ships are just "more economical" than transporting goods by sail powered ships.
People throw this term around like making it "less economical" to produce food is some minor detail.
Things being their current level of "economical" is what drives our global economy at the current scale it runs at. We could not have our current lifestyle using sail powered ships to transport goods from China any more than we could maintain anything like our current lifestyle if we had to produce all of our nitrogen fertilizer through electrolysis.
Making food "less economical" means mass starvation.
Robotbeat's calculations seem to show that producing all of the US's nitrogen fertilizer through electrolysis would use something like 5% of US electricity production, which would not be a major obstacle to "maintaining anything like our current lifestyle", and presumably the numbers in other countries are even better, except for the Netherlands.
I don't think there's any point in arguing if you think 5% of electricity (of which, as Robotbeat pointed out is 60% fossil fuel generated) is "not a major obstacle" while we also have to reduce/eliminate fossil fuel use in every sector. It also doesn't touch on the price increase in food production.
Where in the world is all of this extra energy going to come from if you remove fossil fuels from the equation? Robotbeat's analysis there is terrifying to me, rather than reassuring. But you can put works like "just" and "only" as modifiers to whatever you want if it makes it sound more achievable.
Increasing electricity production 5% would not mean mass starvation. China increased electricity production 5% every six months throughout the 02010s. The US did it every year in the 01960s. It's not some kind of impossible obstacle to "maintain[ing] anything like our current lifestyle".
This is the problem with our intuitions about energy, we're so used to abundant, high energy density, relatively cheap energy that we can't even get our heads around not having it.
You quote me but miss the point where I say that this is fine so long as we have unlimited fossil fuels and there are no serious externalities with fossil fuel usage.
Both of these conditions are false, but even your reasoning here is assuming these are true.
If for some non-fossil fuel related reason we had to switch to primarily electrolysis hydrogen production, then yea, we'd be fine. We haven't even come close to really solving just replacing our current energy demands with entirely renewable energy (which, even assuming perfect battery solutions, also requires growing the overall output of our grid by a factor proportional to intermittent power needs), let alone additional energy requirements that start popping up all over the place once you start removing fossil fuels.
This has been a problem that has been well studied and understood for years, but because it leads to the scary conclusion that our current way of life is unsustainable it is brushed off.
China's growth in either solar or wind generation capacity in 02020 was bigger than their growth in coal generation capacity. I haven't seen the 02021 numbers yet but I expect that their coal generation capacity growth in 02021 will turn out to have been actually negative, i.e., not growth but shrinkage, quite aside from the lower-capacity-factor crises resulting from their feud with Australia, their main coal supplier.
Quoting from my notes in Dernocua (http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua):
> Specifically, in 02020, the People’s Republic of China installed 71.7 GW of new wind capacity, 48.2 GW of new solar capacity (which was already larger than the rest of the world combined), and 38.4 GW(e) of coal capacity. Assuming typical capacity factors of 40% for wind, 25% for solar, and 60% for coal, that would add up to 23 GW average new coal, 29 GW average new wind, and 12 GW average new solar. (But China’s capacity factors are lower; see below.) New solar installations worldwide double on average every three years, which has slowed down from every two years in the 02010s. ...
> But China is a larger country than Germany. Chinese marketed energy consumption was 28 PWh/year (3.2 TW) in 02010, of which 3.9 PWh/year (440 GW) was electric. In 02019 they produced 7330 TWh electric calculated as (+ 4554 233 148 349 1270 32 405 224 113) rounded to three places. That’s 836 GW. (The 32 TWh of pumped-storage hydro may be double-counted.) In 02019 224 TWh/year (26 GW) was produced from solar and 405 TWh/year (46 GW) from wind, using 204 GW of solar capacity (capacity factor 13%) and 209 GW of wind capacity (capacity factor 22%). Also the 4554 TWh/year from coal (519.5 GW) is on a 1.041 TW basis, so their capacity factor is only 50.0%. Hopefully they’ll start installing their energy plants in more propitious places, like the Gobi, and the capacity factor will go up.
> So probably last year’s new installations of 38.4 GW (coal), 71.7 GW (wind), and 48.2 GW (solar) will produce on average 19.2 GW (coal), 16 GW (wind), and 6.3 GW (solar). The resulting 22 GW (average) of renewable energy added last year amounts to 2.6% of the total current electric energy use of China. If we assume that China’s total energy use has increased by 90% since 02010, just as their electrical energy use did by 02019, it would now be 6.1 TW, and 22 GW is 0.36% of it.
Solar energy (127 PW at Earth's surface) is far more abundant than fossil-fuel energy consumption, which has never reached more than 15 TW, 0.012% of solar energy. Historically the big problem has been that solar energy, though abundant, was expensive to gather; that problem has now been solved, and solar panels are now cheaper in the world market than either fossil fuels or fossil-fuel plants, let alone the sum of the two.
> Both of these conditions are false, but even your reasoning here is assuming these are true.
No, my reasoning is based on evidence that says it is feasible and economical to expand power generation using renewable energy. It is not assuming either "unlimited fossil fuels" or "no serious externalities with fossil fuel usage."
> We haven't even come close to really solving just replacing our current energy demands with entirely renewable energy (which, even assuming perfect battery solutions, also requires growing the overall output of our grid by a factor proportional to intermittent power needs), let alone additional energy requirements that start popping up all over the place once you start removing fossil fuels.
Let's take these one by one.
First, current renewable energy production is about 12% of world total primary energy consumption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...). More than half of this is hydro, which is, roughly speaking, not growing. The other half is solar and wind, which is growing 14% per year, which puts it on track to replace all of world total primary energy consumption in 02043.
Wind is currently much larger, and already supplies most electricity in countries like Denmark, but solar is growing about 23% per year and has now reached about 1 TW peak, 150 GW average. That means that it is currently supplying about 0.8% of total marketed energy consumption, 1/128. (Since this is all electric, the percentage for electrical energy is higher.)
Of course, when exponential growth is involved, prediction is very difficult, because sooner or later the exponential trend must stop, at which point the trend line diverges from reality by orders of magnitude. Even a small misprediction of the exponential growth rate results in misprediction by an order of magnitude after a few orders of magnitude of growth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#/media/File:PV_cum... shows that the exponential trend was a fairly consistent 36% per year over the last 30 years, so it seems to be slowing down, but it's unlikely to stop anytime soon. I've investigated the fundamentals and can't find any resource limitation or demand limitation that would prevent it.
Solar is currently on track to surpass wind around 02030, so probably we'll move to a majority-renewables energy system before the 02043 you get from extrapolating the overall non-hydro renewables growth rate.
As for the intermittency question, it doesn't affect hydrogen electrolysis (a gasometer full of hydrogen is a perfectly reasonable way to store excess energy for up to a month or two) and to the extent that intermittency is managed at the peripheries of the grid rather than the center, it doesn't require additional transmission or distribution capacity as you say either. Moreover, even needing to double transmission or distribution capacity would not be a civilization-destroying crisis; as I said, PRC has done that three times over the last ten years, and to generation capacity too.
Finally, the additional energy requirements that start popping up are basically only fixing nitrogen into ammonia, smelting steel, and plastics. All three of these are small compared to the use of fossil fuels as fuels.
This is indeed a problem that has been well studied for years, but until five years ago, we didn't know how we could scale up PV production; there was the concern that it might be physically possible but out of our technological reach, like fusion energy. That problem has now been solved, and that is why, for example, Peabody Coal went bankrupt and coal-fired power generation is globally in decline.
Our current way of life is unsustainable in many ways, but needing a lot of energy isn't one of them. We can increase our energy usage by two orders of magnitude before it starts to be a sustainability problem.
-hydrogen is not a primary energy, no accounting for energy needed to produce 1kg of H2 gas -producing ammonia from hydrogen consumes energy -producing corn from ammonia requires more embodied energy than sunlight - other fertilizers, *cides, fuel and construction industrial sized agricultural machinery.
Only measuring the chemical energy in quantity of H2 vs the dietary calories in associated corn produced is incomplete model of fossil fuels required in agricultural production.
If you are saying the urea price spike has occured in a complete isolation, like temporary specific failure of urea manufacturing , maybe its not a problem. If its one of the first noticable effects of an overall fossil fuel shortage, its going to have huge feedback effects invalidating economic models such as slowing renewable growth, making the whole economy less productive.
You might want to put a blank line between your list items so they don't come out as a single paragraph and/or format them with ·, •, or ●.
I think the urea price spike is due to a temporary collapse in natural gas production, which is indeed one of the first overall effects of reduced excess production capacity in natural gas, or shippable natural gas anyway. I don't think an overall fossil fuel shortage would slow renewable growth, though; it increases the returns to renewable generation, and renewables production is one of the sectors of the economy least dependent on fossil fuels.
I think an overall fossil fuel shortage is unlikely because coal reserves are still enormous and interconversion of different kinds of fossil fuels is lossy.
Ammonia is a highly fungible global commodity, and is commonly a means for countries with large natural gas resources to produce an easily transportable value-add product from excess natural gas. None of those countries are going to produce electrolytic ammonia because consuming natural gas is the entire point! If it wasn't being turned into ammonia, much of it would ended being vented to the atmosphere or burned off. While it doesn't look like it in isolation, a lot of industrial chemistry is actually reprocessing and finding value in the waste products of other industrial processes.
The US currently produces ~10% of the global total, but we used to import ammonia like everyone else until a glut of domestic natural gas made it cost-effective to produce our own (again, a way to consume excess natural gas). Ammonia is feedstock for a ton of cost-sensitive industrial chemistry, not just fertilizer, so costs will show up in places people might not expect.
Here's an industry-focused article that talks about growing manufacturing electrolyzer capacity and lists some recent projects for generating hydrogen with renewables:
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/12/12/sunday-read...
I feel like inherently hydrogen production via electrolysis is just not that complicated a process: it's a bottle of lyewater with some sheet metal or graphite in it connected to a DC power supply, the sort of thing you could plausibly rig up if stranded on a desert island if you happened across some metal. So I'd think that, although you can surely improve efficiency in lots of ways that increase the cost of the electrolyzer, there's some kind of electrolyzer you can make that has an optimal cost/efficiency tradeoff when you know you're going to run it at a 25% duty cycle. Maybe it isn't cost-competitive with more highly optimized always-on nuclear-powered electrolyzers, but (as the article points out) they aren't cost-competitive with steam methane reforming, either.
It's wonderful to see RMI cited as "major industry analysts" next to BloombergNEF. Nobody deserves that title more.
Chemistry is an exercise in biasing a stochastic process to produce high yields of a desired chemical. This is very sensitive to small changes in the environment e.g. temperature, pressure, pH, concentration, et al. At scale, it is impossible to have a uniform reaction environment as a matter of physics, so the objective is to get as much of the environment as close to the ideal point as possible with clever engineering and then keep the system in equilibrium around that point. This involves finding approximate solutions to vast and fiendishly intractable systems of partial differential equations, that can also be turned into a real physical plant.
If you have variable energy inputs, the system will very likely spend most of its time outside the high-yield sweet spot of its operational parameters. It also takes a long time for these systems to reach equilibrium (often hours or days). Effectively, these processes are binary -- at equilibrium or turned off -- with significant spin up and spin down times with terrible yields.
With base load power, you can have hydrogen electrolysis as part of your continuous chemistry process. A close (but not quite) drop-in for a methane reformation subsystem.
So how is variability (e.g. due to demand) often handled in real systems? They run several plants in parallel and shutdown a fraction of those plants, incurring the startup/shutdown costs. Some industrial chemistry is adequately done batch-y e.g. mining related, but most things asymptotically converge on continuous steady-state processes because there are significant economic benefits in doing so.
Hydrogen electrolysis is probably amenable to batch production without a significant loss of efficiency, though it would incur storage costs you would not have with a continuous plant. The bigger issue is that the downstream processes to which hydrogen is feedstock are unlikely to be amenable to efficient batch production. Because ammonia is produced at such exceptional scales, efficiency matters, and electrolysis is already more expensive than methane reformation.
We are a very long way from mass starvation.
[1] https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/
That's not a separate issue. That's the WHOLE issue. The first 2 words in the quote were "Modern agriculture". The point is not that there are many types of farming that can be done without using fossil fuels as an input, nor that in the future we couldn't transition away from fossil fuels for fertilizer. The point is that the output of modern agriculture would, at present, completely collapse if the energy input from fossil fuels wasn't available.
I just noticed, before these civs would be geographically separated and isolated, the demise of one, didn´t mean the demise of the other, and the people that had settled and survived, would become nomadic until settling again or something like that.
What will happen when this global civ collapses? Where would the survivors be able to go to, to persist?
Nowhere?
Dark indeed
And in more recent centuries, "collapse" is almost always synonymous with political turmoil/change while the peoples remain in place.
I think that's important too, because we're not seeing so much of a "collapse" of our global civilization, but migrations of peoples across it, and a rise in political turmoil as a second order effect.
Mars! /s, kinda
We have the science and technology to address these issues, the thing that fucks us is our political/economic/religious structures. If we collectively agreed on solving these problems we could, but unity seems to be the scarcest resource of all.
The other side of that coin, though, is that global society has introduced global risks, in terms of the amount of CO2 it is able to put into the atmosphere (which is a shared resource we all rely on), and the ability to create weapons or pathogens of global destruction due to technology.
Also, 50% of the energy does not come from fixed nitrogen. Majority is from the Sun.
Building the necessary renewable energy and ammonia plants and infrastructure is technically trivial in that we needed approximately no innovation as the tech already exists.
The scaled of the problem is immense.
Heck, you can get about halfway there just on the nuclear power plants in the US that have been shut down in the last couple decades!
(Works well with intermittent renewables, too, as hydrogen production can be throttled without much penalty.)
Or the equivalent in new renewables, if that’s your preference.
(And that’s about 10-20 new nuclear reactors, not 40. A fraction of our current nuclear fleet.)
You mean, except in a $Trillion sense. One or two demonstrator plants don't prove anything, except that the advantages are underwhelming, if they exist at all.
How do we globally get there from here? Who is made worse off? Who benefits? How long does it take?
"Exercises for the student" are not always so simple.
How would this input be "several fold less" than the energy output of the system?
Fixed nitrogen, ie ammonia (for instance), is made from gaseous nitrogen and hydrogen. 3kg of hydrogen makes 17kg of ammonia. 200 pounds of ammonia (16kg of hydrogen) will make about 250 bushels of corn. 1 bushel of corn is about 370MJ. 1kg of hydrogen is 142MJ. So 2.3GJ of hydrogen makes 92GJ of corn. That’s about 3%, not 50%.
BTW, the US produces about 17 megatonnes of ammonia per year, or 3 Megatonnes of hydrogen per year. At 60% efficiency, that would require about 22 Gigawatts of average electricity, or less than 5% of average US electricity usage. The US grid is about 40% clean, so that’s still only about 10% of US’a clean electricity usage.
US Ammonia production per year: https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/weekly/archivenew_ngwu/2021/0...
This was basically my point.
>50% from (FIXED) nitrogen is wrong, though.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was saying that 50% of the artificial energy input (i.e. excluding free sunlight to the plants) IS from the nitrogen, rather than farming equipment, transportation, etc.
Energy from gravity and radiation are contributing factors to fossil fuel production, even if the hydrocarbons broken down for use are largely photosynthetic in nature/origin, they owe their energy density that makes them a viable fuel source to factors beyond solar. Breaking that down has side effects beyond pure photosynthetic processes.
The history of ammonia production has led to a fossil fuel dependency chain. This article at resilience.org seems to include some good history: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2006-06-11/implications-f...
One of the primary processes involved in the creation of ammonia is the Haber-Bosch process, as outlined on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
The International Energy Agency provides a good summary of a technology roadmap for migration of ammonia production processes to lower-emission methods: https://www.iea.org/reports/ammonia-technology-roadmap/execu...
And finally - I've no connection with the University of Michigan but I did find this recent article about a research grant for solar-powered, energy-decentralized fertilizer production; I'm not clear on the details of the research yet but it does again re-iterate the nature of the problem and illustrates that there is effort directed towards overcoming fossil fuel dependence in this area: https://news.umich.edu/2m-to-replace-fossil-fuels-with-solar...
The primary point is that agriculture, as it is currently practiced on a large scale, is extremely dependent on non-renewable resources and the energy in those resources. It's not just natural gas used for nitrogen, it's also things like phosphate mining.
Yes, the amount of calories in the final product largely comes from the sun, but it is the energy in those (currently) petroleum products that unlocks a plant's ability to photosynthesize in the first place.
I was worried about the phosphate thing for a while since, unlike resources like copper and rare earth metals, the used phosphate mostly ends up in the oceans, not conveniently concentrated in landfills. Getting it back out of the oceans is pretty difficult.
But then I looked into it a few years back. It turns out that the absolute amount of phosphate in crustal phosphate rocks is staggeringly huge: about 0.1% of the crust is phosphorus, almost all as phosphate, conventionally measured as P₂O₅, which would thus be 142/62 of that, or about 0.2%. This works out to be on the order of 10¹⁹ kg of phosphate. World phosphate production is 53 million tonnes (https://www.fao.org/3/i6895e/i6895e.pdf), less than 10¹¹ kg, so at current consumption rates we will run out of phosphate in about 10 million years.
Given this, you might wonder why "phosphate reserves" are stated as only a few tens of billions of tonnes! The answer is that currently most phosphate minerals are unprofitable to mine because they can't compete on price with the fairly pure concentrated apatite deposits in the US, Morocco, and China. When those deposits are exhausted (probably sometime in the next few centuries), the price of phosphate will rise, unless we're mining it from the Moon or the asteroids by then. That will make it profitable to extract phosphate from less concentrated resources.
So, while it is technically true that phosphate rock is a "nonrenewable resource", the implication that we will run out before the Pyramids have crumbled into dust is not.
The bigger problem with phosphate mining is phosphogypsum, not energy consumption or running out of phosphate minerals. Detoxifying phosphogypsum is not a difficult chemistry problem, but there is a lot of it and nobody is paying to detoxify it, so it sits in waste dumps. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a red-mud-style industrial disaster or two with phosphogypsum in the next few decades.
See https://richearthinstitute.org for more.
There is a direct causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. End the former and you end the latter. And you also kill off a ton of people because the system that enables their lives will falter and starve them to death.
Higher urea prices->higher fertilizer prices->Less fertilizer demand->less food supply->more suffering via sick and hungry people->more potential for confrontation and war.
The family farm is planting a lot less corn as a result.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/even-mega-farms-are-mos...
Most farms are "family" owned but perhaps OP was trying to communicate that nowadays farm owners are rarely farm workers?
A rather small proportion of farms are singly/family owned and have a majority of the work done by that family.
Most nitrogen fertiliser is supplied via natural gas formation (Haber-Bosch process). I'm not sure if urea is HB-formulated nitrogen or comes from other sources, but this wouldn't much matter as HB-formulated ammonia is near-exact substitute for urea and would follow similar pricing patterns.
Reading at Wikipedia iforms me that:
- Urea is CO2(NH2)2.
- Production is from ammonia + carbon dioxide.
Given that natural gas prices are presently spiking, my presumption would be that urea prices are following natural gas.
We should increase the atmospheres CO2 and urea production. More food for all!
For what it's worth, no gardener or farmer is having to pump CO2 into the air because their plants are dying.
I’m asking if you can back up that claim. I guess not.
Maybe they could grow even more successfully with some kind of CO2 biodome, I don't know - but my point was that lack of CO2 is not causing problems with plants growing, but it is causing problems with our biosphere slowly dying.
If someone wants to argue "more CO2 is good for plants", they really need to provide a number for what atmospheric concentration they think is optimal, and what the costs/benefits of reaching it are. Would increasing the concentration by 10% make food 10% cheaper, for example? What sort of effects on the Earth's climate are historically associated with CO2 levels that high?
Well, that's not what's going on in the market.
This crisis is caused by a reduced supply of inputs, mostly natural gas and energy. One of the direct causes is Hurricane Ida, which had a massive impact on natural gas supplies. China has also experienced a coal shortage, and also a drought that reduced hydropower generation. Europe has done a lot to switch to renewables, but they've suffered low winds.
So no, the people who are going to hurt aren't rich Westerners, who are best positioned to ride this out. It's the poor people (mostly in the "global south") who already spend massive portions of their income on food, who will bear the brunt of this crisis.
Right now, even before this fertiliser crisis materialises, there's already been a sizeable increase in food prices there, the pandemic pushed a new wave of homelessness and food insecurity after already some bad years before Bolsonaro came to power. Coupled with higher unemployment and overall loss of competitivity of Brazilian industry there just seems nowhere to go for society... If there is another food price hike it'll very likely cause massive social strife, I really don't see a way out if this crisis materialises in next year or so.
It will be brutal for the global south.
Given US economic policy directly caused this, wrapping it in climate narrative merely post-hoc justifies that the humans who will suffer from this deserve it because of climate change, and that the humans who are positioned to weather it deserve to have their resources and land redistributed to said victims because of climate change. If I had to guess who makes those redistribution decisions, because their divine authority comes from climate change, I would say committees of appointed politically aligned experts.
On this inflationary policy issue, the climate emperor is naked.
I mean, can you really disagree with the logic of this? The richest are likely to be the ones who have consumed the most and who have thus contributed most to climate change, and also they have the most resources available to help mitigate the problems they've caused. Given that they've benefited most from society, and have the most to lose if society collapses, they should be keen to pay their fair share (i.e. in proportion to their net wealth).
You may not like "committees of appointed politically aligned experts", but if they are appointed by democratically elected representatives (and unless you can point to some experts that are free from any political alignment), I'm not sure who would be better at making decisions for how resources are distributed to solve societal problems.
(For what it's worth, I thought your earlier comment about "controlled demolition of western economies" was thought-provoking, so I upvoted it).
What started with, "hey, maybe we shouldn't litter, and maybe we should stop companies from poisoning watersheds and wrecking land," has become, "we must centrally plan all economic activity according to political exigencies," and I'm saying this has precedents that ended terribly and I don't see it working this time either.
The issue of fertilizer prices is the effect of these policies designed to orchestrate a controlled demolition of the economy, which is a necessary step to disenfranchise the specific class of smallholders and business owners who naturally resist living under the regime of a planned economy, which operates on hallucinatory narratives designed to atomize and subjugate people. It's called "de-kulakization," and it's straight playbook.
The kaleidescope of absurd narratives we see right now are designed to "neutralize" people, that is, to make them believe nothing is true and trust nothing enough to resist what this cadre of terrible people are creating. It's a trip to watch it happen in real time after only having read about it in history, and to have the opportunity to provide commentary while it's happening, but this goes so badly, if a few more people can see wtf is happening, maybe we can mitigate the consequences.
Could you give some examples of popular Western politicians currently advocating for centrally planning all economic activity?
If you stretch "all direct CO2 emissions" to mean the same as "all economic activity", and "taxing after the fact" to mean same as "centrally planning", then maybe 10% of Western politicians and voters would support what you're afraid of.
Oh yes. And alarm bells are ringing.
"I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a very low crop in the next harvest. I'm afraid we're going to have a food crisis." — Svein Tore Holsether, CEO and president Yara International. https://fortune.com/2021/11/04/energy-crisis-food-shortage-s...
"Major fertilizer producers Yara International ASA and CF Industries Holdings Inc. said soaring energy costs are forcing them to halt some output of nutrients crucial for growing crops." https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/europe-s-energy-woes...
"In the fall, soaring electricity demand led the southwestern province of Yunnan, a key phosphate producer, to order drastic production cuts by energy-hungry industries, including fertilizer." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-fertilizer-...
"Farmers in India are desperate. Trucks in South Korea had to be idled. Food prices, already high, could rise even further." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/06/business/urea-fertilizer-...
"Among farmers and ranchers, very few topics are being discussed as much as the skyrocketing cost of fertilizer and increasing concerns regarding availability." https://www.fb.org/market-intel/too-many-to-count-factors-dr...
"High fertilizer prices could exert inflationary pressures on food prices, compounding food security concerns at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change are making access to food more difficult." https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/soaring-fertilizer-pric...
"Higher farm input costs, expensive shipping and good demand provide for a grim combination... We are under La Niña conditions, the second such event in as many years, and the weather cannot be expected to be normal until Q2 2022 at the earliest." — Rabobank Outlook 2022: Hell in the Handbasket. https://research.rabobank.com/far/en/documents/842941_Raboba...
Hell in the handbasket here we come!
Ethereum 2.0 (uses proof of stake- doesn’t do energy intensive mining) can’t come soon enough for me.
The difficulty bomb and merge is set for June 2022. Could it be delayed? Sure I guess but Bitcoin has absolutely no plans to fix its energy consumption.
It's sharding that's probably never coming.
I have an honest question that I haven't seen answered anywhere, and I'm not smart enough to answer it for myself by reading papers and whatnot.
Assume whatevercoin currently uses PoW and takes X energy to mine a single coin, but would take X/100 energy to mine it under PoS.
What stops people from simply throwing the 99/100 leftover energy from X into more mining operations, rather than just being content with the one and the leftover energy?
Or put another way, if mining a single coin suddenly costs 1/100 of what it used to, why would I not just mine 100 coins now?
It just all sounds to me like what happens when there's an increase in computational power/speed/capacity/whatever in PCs. When you can process a thing ten times as fast, you don't just do one thing ten times faster; you do ten things at once.
The current PoW system turns energy directly into miner rewards.
A PoS system does not do that. You can't just throw more energy at the problem to get more rewards.
The mining effort depends simply on the reward, and the reward is calibrated to the security needed. Bitcoin is highly secure, but the security model is essentially 1:1; if the network is secured with a billion dollars of mining effort, it will cost on the order of a billion to attack it. So it's expensive.
PoS can have a better security model, maybe 1:100 against network attackers. So you can reduce mining rewards and maintain a given security level.
It's like if I paid you previously for every strawberry you bring me, and now I pay you for how old you are. Previously, for 100 strawberries I gave you $20, and now for every 20 years you are old, I give you $20/hr. Now you need far fewer strawberries to make the same amount of money, but that doesn't mean you can now make more by giving me strawberries. You have no way of converting strawberries into age.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-farmers-f...
If you want to see a profitable, productive mid sized farm, check out Polyface. Joel makes a good living while treating his land and animals well.
I'd argue that our mega-ag model is a big part of the problem, it's given us stupidly cheap corn/soy while causing a lot of health and pollution problems, and basically ruining farming as an actual profession.
The economics of farming are all fucked up, because our current farming practices have a lot of externalities that aren't priced into conventional produce, and producers who try to improve things to remove these externalities either have to take a loss versus the producers who say "fuck the future, fuck everyone who isn't me" or create new markets for their goods (which is where the whole farmer's market movement and the local food guilt thing come from).
You don't really need to be able to compete if you aren't looking for a massive exit, though. My ~150 acres (most of it rented, no less) of corn/soy/wheat provides enough for me to live off of comfortably enough. For about a month's work a year, that's wonderful in my mind.
It seems you're just getting caught up in the capital building frenzy that I talked about earlier. If you want to have the huge payday when you sell then you take on huge debt, grow to massive scale, use all of your income to service the debt and then you're sitting on a fortune at retirement. This is what attracts most people to farming, seemingly you included, which is fair.
If you are content to stay small you can avoid the debt and what the big guy is giving to the bank you can pocket and live well off of. That's where I've settled and it works fine. I won't have the huge payday later, however. It's a tradeoff.
In 2007 I invested $12,000 in a small parcel of land I found to rent, rent for the equipment I needed to do the job (along with hiring some customer operators), and lost money doing it! But then 2008 happened, sending commodity prices through the roof. I was able to turn a small profit the following year and used the proceeds to start to buy some equipment, and slowly started to grow from there.
So, some definite luck, an investment, and most importantly having family to answer questions. I think it would have been impossible for me without that wealth of knowledge to draw on.
For rent? $265-275/acre, depending on the landlord.
> Also, I assume you're not selling to a coop or other large scale buyer?
No, that's where it all goes. There is a co-op grain elevator. All of my IP soybeans go there as they pay a nice little premium. Pretty much everything else, including crusher soys, is sold to the closer-to-home commercial grain elevator.
Crops prices have priced in the increased fertilizer cost already, so it is what it is. We're used to it.
Even in this case, the farmer who are farming on their own land are under no obligation to change their way of life or farming process. Even though we know that the methods they are using may be sub-optimal and a net-negative in the long run, we simply cannot make them change it, and certainly never by labelling them negative. We can make them see the benefits, or how it plays out in the long run and help them choose a better solution but ultimately, it's them doing the choosing.
At the end, if something is really really required, then it must be the Governments making regulation. This is how it generally works (I'm not saying I like it).
Can the bad farmers continue to farm debt (primarily)? Sure, but if they're doing it to themselves we shouldn't feel bad for them, or bail them out.
People only do what a) They are taught in the first place (programming classes, reliable blogs etc.), b) Their work environment imposes on them (organizations having coding practices or standards), c) They, through some personal experiences, find out that it makes their job easier down the line, or d) It is the right thing to do.
Expecting everyone to follow (d) is out of the question and in my experience all "good" work happens via (b) i.e. rules, regulations and standards that have been enforced. If some sub-optimal choice minimizes effort while maximizing rewards, then that is not sub-optimal, at least for the individual, even though it clearly could be a sub-optimal for the collective.
What's the befit if fertilizer helps?
That it looks more natural?
It does require letting some land lie fallow to regeneration, so you need to devote more total land to agriculture, and it also requires fencing and for someone to go move the livestock to a new paddock every few days (though you save on tilling/herbicide application costs). On the plus side the unit cost of everything you produce is lower, and meat is typically much more profitable than vegetables so you've diversified.
Now myself, I like hobbyist diversions that involve growing food, but farmers don't farm because they want to have fun. They farm so they can make money. If they stop making money, or if they don't make enough, they have to go into some other line of work, and typically sell the farm to someone who does make money.
And when you're not just selling gourmet vegetables to HN hackers making $200k+ a year, you're selling generic commodities like corn and grain and soy, where the competition is fierce.
And you're selling it to a world where the poor have a hard time affording food as it is. If this can't compete with conventional fertilizer, then even if everyone switched, people would starve.
Joel is the best known example of informed, conscientious farming paying the bills, but certainly not the only one.
>as long as you're not financially dependent on planting your entire acreage every growing season.
which to me suggests that it isn't "lazy/ignorant" farmers, but rather farmers who are economically entangled in the current system.
Maybe the place to start would be objecting to i.e. Monsanto, or to producer demands such as McDonalds who require only a certain kind of potato grown under certain kinds of conditions (so all the fries look the same).
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/why-we-need-to-give-i...
Thesis -> Antithesis -> Synthesis
I'm not going to buy bug burgers nor rent my stuff.
What we should do is more population control. As a first step stop incentives for having children (Inn the Netherlands you get more child benefit per child the more you have!). It's tough for the people that want big families but we can't continue growing humanity like this.
So we shouldn't be worrying about "big families", we should be worried about voluntary self-extinction. What do you think the correct population should be for the Netherlands or Europe, and what do you suggest we do when we reach it? Obviously the current level of government benefits per child aren't enough to keep the population level stable.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NLD/netherlands/fertil...
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/EUR/europe/population-...
We have to stop viewing world problems as national issues. Just like the climate problem, we can be 'green' because we externalise a lot of our carbon problems to other countries. That's not helpful at all. It's just smart bookkeeping to keep behaving as we are.
The difference is historical and cultural inertia. Buttered cockroach could be the next big thing in Brooklyn.
There are many reasons but the second and third order effects of 'plague' have to run through the system and it would take a decade for all these things to wash through.
It is not a coincidence famine follows plague and war follows famine. The bush fires have already started if you are paying attention.
Curious what odds you assign for each outcome?
Expect things to get messy, and less predictable than they were before. The long-term trend is toward a worthless U.S. dollar and infinite stock prices, but there could be a lot of ups and downs before then.
I wonder why those events took a while to appear in the urea price?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/16/fears-for-u...
Probably because big urea producers have longer-term contracts for gas and the price hike would only occur after a set period. Chemical plants buy very little spot.
They didn't. The futures price started climbing in September.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus#Discovery
which is funny considering that economists and such are worried that mining phosphorus rock might have a limit soon:
One of the more entertaining episodes in Don Quijote is when he and Sancho are confused by the persistent loud noise made by the hammers in a fulling mill.
I wonder whether urea is recovered from waste water at water treatment plants.
Do you think most trucking operations have much more than a 5% margin in their businesses right now, or that if they did, they'd just eat such a huge increase?
[1] (warning - math required, source is in $/Mile) https://www.paragonrouting.com/en-us/blog/post/want-optimize...
Urea is made from ammonia which is made from natural gas.
The effect of this will mostly impact the agricultural sector, where it is the main component of many fertilisers.
Natural gas prices were a lot higher multiple times in the past, with no corresponding peaks in Urea prices. Just wondering if Natrual gas is the sole reason or if something else also is at play.
International Maritime Organisation - Tier III emmission certification require lowered emissions in (S)ECA areas.
Urea injection in exhaust lines convert SOx to CO2. "HUG-units" long used in greenhouses to also use the exhaust of generators used for lighting/heating as additional CO2 source. These same units are now being slapped on to seagoing vessels that of length under Class (Lloyds/Bureau Veritas etc.).
Sidenote: Service engineers and subsequent calibration tools are fully booked at this time. Good business to be had.
I wish I had access to an approximate Soviet style planning machine to simulate the outcome and time delay to cost increases. We're probably still eating the food grown with last years food and fertilizer prices.
Starting to consider doing it myself as much as possible to recoup lumber costs with reduced labor costs.
Lumber peaked at $1400, fell to $500, but now is approaching $1200 again.
Urea is a component of AdBlue which is used in modern diesel motors. There has been a shortage recently, hence the increase in price.
The other component being water.
https://www.ppclubricants.com/understanding-urea-pricing-and...
https://www.thedrive.com/news/43065/korea-is-airlifting-thou...
But still, the particulate emissions from diesel engines make them a health hazard. We really ought to phase diesel out in favor of gasoline, natural gas, and electric power.
I would like to see a shift to anaerobic sewage treatment to produce methane for fuel everywhere that humans live. I have been thinking about what it would take to convert my septic tank to an anaerobic digester for many months. I would love to replace my propane supply with methane produced from my own shit. On a larger scale I believe that my remote community could similarly replace a large portion of the imported propane with natural gas if we had an anaerobic sewage treatment plant.
https://www.veolia.com/anz/our-services/our-services/energy-...
Edit: an EPA link on digester basics
https://www.epa.gov/agstar/how-does-anaerobic-digestion-work
It seems like we’d be close to the right level of technology.
(Asking for a friend.)
I'm okay with the events that are unfolding currently.
:S