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Comment by mertd | Hacker News Reader

In the 90s the predominant fear of overpopulation used to be that we would run out of food. Now we know not that making food is easy, but we wreck the environment along the way.

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Making specific monocrops with petroleum-based fertilizers is easy, but monocrops with petroleum-based fertilizers is not a sustainable practice if we would like to continue to live on Earth.

It's a common thought but from what I can tell it's probably not true. Natural gas is simply the cheapest and most scaled way of producing ammonia (which is the critical ingredient in fertilizer production). Apparently electrolysis could come within a factor of 2 in terms of price.

Also worth considering that passenger aviation is on the same order of magnitude in terms of CO2 emissions. Remarkable given everyone has to eat.

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

I was thinking of terms of how monocrops work: we kill everything that's living (that's more complicated than a single cell organism let's say) to plant one species, then use fertilizers to help it grow from soil that's being depleted of it's own nutrients, while also spraying it with pesticides to make sure nothing else eats it.

Seems that's not a great play, long-term.

>Also worth considering that passenger aviation is on the same order of magnitude in terms of CO2 emissions. Remarkable given everyone has to eat.

Interesting. Since I don't have to fly, I don't. (I don't drive, either).

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