I'm surprised by how little people understand the relationship between fossil fuels (not just energy) and global food 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.
> People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks like under a zero emissions scenario with our current nitrogen productions methods.
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!
>People don't like to talk about what the food supply looks like under a zero emissions scenario with our current nitrogen productions methods.
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.
It's also worth noting that in the first world for "food-as-it's-consumed" the share of agriculture is just 10%-20% (depending on how it's consumed) of the final value, the majority of the cost comes from processing, transportation, retail, cooking and service or delivery; so if the price of agricultural products leaving the farmer would double, the increase in total price would not be as big. Of course, the poorer consumers in third world with actual problems with food security would bear the full effect of such a price increase.
It would impact poorer consumers, though not evenly. The population facing the most food insecurity issues, subsistence farmers, would be largely unaffected, since they generally aren't using artificial fertilizer.
Absolutely true. Food inflation in the US is about the same as average inflation. We’re not paying more for food in comparison with other goods than we were a year ago.
We are evaluating the an upstream input cost and possible downstream effects. So, the consequences of high urea prices today will vividly show up sometime in the latter part of this year.
If that was true we would have seen a big spike in grain futures around September/October (when this data was published). Grain futures are up but the big spikes were in December, indicating that urea prices are not the cause.
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.
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.