Reducing Nitrogen Use Key To Human and Planetary Health, Study Says (yahoo.com) 91
Better management of nitrogen-rich fertilisers through alternating crops, optimising use and other measures can yield huge environmental and health benefits, but must boost food production at the same time, researchers warned Wednesday. From a report: Reducing nitrogen pollution from global croplands is a "grand challenge," the group of international researchers said in a study in Nature outlining a dozen urgently-needed reforms. The intensive use of chemical fertilisers helped fuel the four-fold expansion of the human population over the last century, and will be crucial for feeding 10 billion people by 2050.
But the bumper crops of what was once called the Green Revolution have come at a terrible cost. Today, more than half the nitrogen in fertilisers seeps into the air and water, leading to deadly pollution, soil acidification, climate change, ozone depletion and biodiversity loss. "Given the multiple health, climate and environmental impacts of reactive nitrogen, it has to be reduced in all the mediums such as air and water," lead author Baojing Gu, a professor at Zhejiang University, told AFP. The benefits of doing so far outstrip the costs, he added.
The world is naturally awash in nitrogen, which is critical for the survival of all life on Earth, especially plants. Nearly 80 percent of Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen, albeit in a gaseous form (N2) of little direct use to most organisms. It is made available to plants when microbes that live within plants or soils turn it into ammonia through biological nitrogen fixation. This process funnels some 200 million tonnes of nitrogen into the soil and oceans every year.
But the bumper crops of what was once called the Green Revolution have come at a terrible cost. Today, more than half the nitrogen in fertilisers seeps into the air and water, leading to deadly pollution, soil acidification, climate change, ozone depletion and biodiversity loss. "Given the multiple health, climate and environmental impacts of reactive nitrogen, it has to be reduced in all the mediums such as air and water," lead author Baojing Gu, a professor at Zhejiang University, told AFP. The benefits of doing so far outstrip the costs, he added.
The world is naturally awash in nitrogen, which is critical for the survival of all life on Earth, especially plants. Nearly 80 percent of Earth's atmosphere is nitrogen, albeit in a gaseous form (N2) of little direct use to most organisms. It is made available to plants when microbes that live within plants or soils turn it into ammonia through biological nitrogen fixation. This process funnels some 200 million tonnes of nitrogen into the soil and oceans every year.
In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophicall (Score:5, Insightful)
"In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong"
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022... [foreignpolicy.com]
They throttled off fertilizer in Sri Lanka and they ended up with a food shortage. [insert other events] Eventually the people revolted and stormed the capitol and took over government to restore sanity.
Are we looking to shadow Sri Lanka's success?
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Well without appropriating the farmland, where will all those immigrants be housed? Making sure they're taken care of is way more important than food or property rights.
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Uh, without food you're pretty much screwed in the "taken care of" sense. We all need to eat.
From what I understand, they understood that they were going to lose food production but believed that it would be short term and far less of a hit than actually happened.
Re:In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophic (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why you don't let politicians deal with shit that should be handled by field engineers and scientists.
If there is a potential to boost the production and lower costs as the title implies, then it should be tested in the field, certified that it actually works, then implemented in a larger scale.
Re:In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophic (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea that farmers are so stupid that they over-fertilize everything and cause this sort of problem is both ridiculous and insulting to the farmers. Fertilizer is expensive and farmers will ONLY use just enough fertilizer to get the result they need: Any more is a waste of money, and any farmer who wastes money is at serious risk of losing their livelihood. The vast majority of farmers pay close attention to the field engineers and scientists you mention, since that helps them stay afloat!
Considering that China is currently building MANY coal fired generating plants, ref: https://www.greenpeace.org/eas... [greenpeace.org] this looks a lot like propaganda intended to deflect Western attention away from the PRC's massive carbon emissions to "something else".
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Exactly.
Which is why that the real way to get em to use less fertilizer (if even possible) is to actually research ways to do so, come up with results etc.. instead of tossing some over-reacting tantrum and using the government power to enforce the nitrogen to be lowered and screw the consequences.
Sadly, way too many people think the government boot is the solution to everything, ranging from pollution to high prices and so forth
Re: In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophi (Score:1)
Maybe a system of agricultural extension services which do research, and agricultural extension agents that teach new practices to farmers.
Re:In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophic (Score:4, Informative)
yes, we're so very efficient with fertilizer.
tell that to the sealife suffocating to death in the Gulf of Mexico
https://www.nature.org/en-us/a... [nature.org]
can we continue to use fertlizer ? yes. should we pay more attention to the runoff and problems that it creates ? yes.
Here's an intelligent discussion of the situation
https://phys.org/news/2022-03-... [phys.org]
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You both have a point and are probably wrong at the same time. Farmers wasted a ton of water for years. Once water got too expensive to waste, it drove more efficient water use. If the cost of fertilizer went up 10%, farmers *might* find a way to use it more efficiently.
However, the root problem is simply too many people. Fortunately, the reproduction rate is dropping below replacement in many areas (including China). If the population starts dropping, that's going to solve a lot of ecological pro
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while first world countries don't have the mostly overpopulation problems anymore, china is still huge... but now more under control... what is the main problem now is India, with huge population and out of control birth rate and africa, with huge birth rate and with health improvement, child dead dropped a lot, creating a explosive grow
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Fertilizer is expensive and farmers will ONLY use just enough fertilizer to get the result they need
What farmers need and what the environment surrounding farms need are two different things. There is no *overuse* for a farmer. Fertiliser produces significant yield increases, but it does so at very real expense to the environment.
I don't want to go deaf, so I'm only going to turn up my music high enough to have a wicked party in my house. But I won't overdo it because I'm afraid of hearing damage.
But that volume is already significantly higher than my neighbours want to bear at 1am.
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There are a lot of giant corporate farms that don't rotate crops, grow corn, get subsidies, spray the ever-loving shit of the fields and run more corn. It is not what people think of a
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Humans, farmers included, are loss averse: the fear of a loss is stronger than a potential gain. This is exactly the internal incentive needed to over-fertilize... "I'll put on a bit more, just in case. That sunflower looks a bit sick." I'm not singling out farmers, but including the whole chain in this.
The same goes for using antibiotics: I still have the jingle in my head "antibiotics are not automatic" from the campaign to reduce the use of antibiotics in healthcare (France, mid-2000s, I think). Same mec
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> If there is a potential to boost the production and lower costs as the title implies, then it should be tested in the field, certified that it actually works, then implemented in a larger scale.
Yes, and there are projects doing just that, and these people watched in horror at what Sri Lanka was doing. It usually takes a carefully planned, location specific soil regeneration process and a gradual phasing out of fertilizer inputs. This is at least a decade long process, more if you need to maintain curre
Re:In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophic (Score:4, Informative)
That is a way to see the things, but like all stories, it is hard to tell all the story, specially if they want to make a case... that article show only what they wanted to show.
The true is that the "organic farming" switch was caused by the lack of funds to buy fertilizers and was pushed as a excuse to hide the true reason. This was the tipo of a long being build crisis by the same ruling family, were incompetent people was put in charge of things they didn't understand and avoiding unpopular, but required actions. It later totally imploded with the covid and further economic collapse on a economy that was badly needing funds.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse... [linkedin.com]
So while organic farming can wield lower productions, well planed crop rotations can offset some of it. simply stopping using fertilizers and doing the exact same agriculture will not work. Either very small agriculture, or big corporate or communist agricultural projects can do this, the first because it is low wield already and can easily rotate crops, bit corporate or communist projects can dictate the exact action needed and sustain having a portion of the land "resting" one year, as they have lots of land to compensate that. But "smaller" agriculture is harder, most can't afford having 1/3 of the land not producing (or producing much lower cost products)
So good planing is required for organic farming and more research is needed to find what are the best plants and methods to restore the land when needed.
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Sri Lanka is exactly why we don't let studies from short-sited activists determine how food should be grown..
We shouldn't be giving them mod points either.
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again, Sri Lanka had nothing to do with organic farming, it was just a green washing of a major economic problem, they had no money for fertilizers but kept doing the same agriculture... for organic farming, you need to change the way you farm, rotate crops, collect and distribute manure, etc
just stopping using fertilizers doesn't make it organic farming by magic
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The problem wasn't "organic farming", it was the enforced requirement for it with no actual planning about how to phase it in gradually and sustainably. This is the sort of thing that always happens with any forced rapid change.
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you can, but needs proper planing and change the current way of farming
not all land can produce 100% of the time the same product, you need to rotate crops and so, some years 1/3 of the land may be producing products that wield less profit
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I knew you were gonna get downmodded for that. Same with me, when I pointed out the same thing a couple of months ago.
Some people just don't wish to accept the nasty way the Real World has with messing with their Utopian Plans.
Re:In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophic (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny because in the real "real world" Sri Lanka going off fertilizers had far more to do with their desperate financial straights. The government had no money for fertilizer and to deflect from their economic mismanagement that came up with "organic farming!" so now they werent on the hook for the fertilizer anymore.
Obviously this wasnt an honest attempt at wide spread organic farming, There'd have been years of studies prior to doing anything and if results came up positive there would have been a sensible phase in. This incredibly sudden policy shift with zero planning or preparation was always destined to fail.
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Rather than throttled off, it's more like they slammed on the brakes.
No wonder there was a disaster. Idealogue are stupid.
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the Sri Lanka issue was poor planning that started with an immediate ban on all synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and a move towards all organic/no artificial fertilizers with the intent of saving $400 million, which did not happen
Of course, Sri Lanka has many other problems as well: [vox.com]
There’s no singular cause for the crisis, which had been building for years due to political corruption and right-wing authoritarian politics that weakened democracy. In April 2019, the crisis accelerated after suicide
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Are we looking to shadow Sri Lanka's success?
Sri Lanka didn't fail because of organic farming, they failed because their attempt at organic farming was woefully incompetent, poorly thought out, and poorly executed.
I saw someone get in a car accident the other day. Are you suggesting we should all get rid of our cars now because clearly we'll all die? Or maybe that guy who ran a light was a flipping moron, not unlike Rajapaksa and his "10 year" transition period which amounted to telling major farmers to go organic *RIGHT NOW*. Remember you're already
N2 is notoriously hard to crack (Score:2)
N2 is one of the most stable things in the universe. We're after all talking about a triple bond.
And as you can imagine, any N-containing compound contains quite a bit of energy considering that N would very gladly grab another N and leave whatever is stuck to it flying around and radically looking for a new partner.
So please be careful with those nitrogen-containing chemicals. They tend to be quite ... volatile [wikipedia.org].
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I dunno, in my experience, threesome often break up quickly.
Re:N2 is notoriously hard to crack (Score:4, Interesting)
Part of the volatility of Nitrogen has to do with it's rate of expansion from solid to gas when the activation energy level has been reached
But why does that make an explosion? [newscientist.com]
Thermodynamics dictates that breaking chemical bonds requires energy, while making new ones releases it. The stronger the bond being broken or made, the more energy is sucked in or released – so the overall energy produced by a reaction is a trade-off between the strength of the old bonds and the newly formed ones.
The explosiveness of nitrogen-containing compounds is driven by the huge release of energy that occurs when the nitrogen-nitrogen triple bonds form. One triple bond releases much more energy when it forms than is needed to break the three single bonds that bind the nitrogen in the starting compound. “The point is that you are breaking weaker bonds and making a very strong bond,” says Poliakoff.
A second factor makes nitrogen compounds explosive: the newly formed nitrogen molecules form a gas, which can expand very quickly and form a shock wave.
-NewScientist
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Re:Claus Schwab (Score:4, Informative)
The hell is paved with good intentions.
There's always those people that have THE SOLUTION FOR EVERYTHING, and then we almost always end up with a massive pile of corpses, because as always, one dude or a small group of people are just not capable of solving the problems for millions or billions.
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The reason he's doing it is that he and his banker friends have finished glutting on eastern europe, can't push further, and so the cogs of the "global" (read western) economy are slowl
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In the past, being very overweight was correlated with being extremely wealthy or an aristocrat. Because food was easier to get when you were rich, and the sorts of foods the rich preferred were also very unhealthy (lots of sugar, fats, none of those peasant vegetables except for those used to make wine and ale). In the modern world however, unhealthy foods are amongst the cheapest, and the poor tend to be fatter than the rich; also the rich will just hire personal trainers, the poor are likely less educa
Re:Or maybe make being Fat illegal (Score:4, Informative)
get fruit juices for the kids which are super concentrated in sugars.
You know kids aren't allowed to drink plain water, right? It has to be either sugar-laden juice or flavored sugar-laden milk.
(and even if the juice doesn't have extra added sugar it can still have as much as cocacola)
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Well it used to be you could eat an orange and get some juice and pulp from that. But in order to increase demand for oranges the industry decades ago marketed the orange juice. And you get maybe 3X oranges in a small glass. Have more than one a day and you've upped your amount of oranges per day, and it's fructose, by a large amount.
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Water is for toilets.
Crop rotation (Score:2, Insightful)
A good idea. But humans can't consume all of the crops that we could use for such a process. We will need some sort of grazing animal which can live off of them. Which we can then slaughter for its protein.
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Yeah, it's only niche crops like legumes ... hardly relevant.
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Between lentils, soy and beans they got human nutrition pretty well covered too.
I'm not a vegan, but the whole regenerative agriculture schtick is a scam. You don't need animals for anything but their tasty meat, crop rotation works just fine without them.
Climate change ??? (Score:2, Informative)
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It's almost like a practical IQ test to see how many people can be persuaded to believe such nonsense.
So far the results are deeply discouraging. Although the missing ingredient may not be intelligence so much as courage.
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Re:Climate change ??? (Score:4, Insightful)
The issue isn't with straight nitrogen. It's with nitrogen compounds: nitrogen oxides, and things like ammonia (as used in fertilizer).
Re:Climate change ??? (Score:4, Informative)
Cool, now do the percentage of fresh water that is nitrogen. Then, do the percentage in the lower Mississippi and the gulf coast where there are regular algae blooms and fish kills.
Nobody is talking about atmospheric nitrogen.
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Nitrogen is a catch-all term for a series of compounds used, not an elemental gas. Just because N2 makes up 78% of the atmosphere doesn't mean our planet could handle 1% of it being NOx - which is largely what is being discussed here. And incidentally NOx emissions are comparable to that of Methane so if 1% of the atmosphere were that we'd likely be dead.
Extractive Agriculture (Score:5, Interesting)
The issue of all the fertilizer that is created with the Haber process is a *symptom* of the larger problem of extractive agriculture. Tillage increases fertility by releasing nutrients in topsoil, but once a patch of wild (living) soil has been tilled a few times (or even once for some soil types) there's virtually nothing left alive, so nitrogen-fertilizer is added for subsequent crops on the same land to achieve the same (or higher) yields. The past century has seen a reduction in global topsoil by some 100 trillion cubic meters (or more). Exactly how much is left? We don't really know. If we keep on that same path, we definitely won't be able to feed 11+ billion people.
There is no single solution to this problem. A multi-factor approach is needed, and (fortunately) that is already happening, though, unfortunately, like so many "solutions" to large-scale problems humans come up with, it is, in some cases, being forced into place by politicians and bureaucrats without sufficient knowledge, preparation or wisdom, so there are areas where attempted solutions have made the situation worse instead of better.
There's a ticking clock there that will make "peak oil" and climate change look like relatively minor problems. Will we make it? I hope so, but it's difficult to see how with things being as they are.
Re:Extractive Agriculture (Score:4, Interesting)
The only ticking clock that is here is preventing the ascent of new Lysenkos who seek to experiment with the world's food supply.
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It's not nonsense at all. Prior to the 20th century, tillage was accomplished largely with muscle power, and was much shallower, so it didn't completely destroy the microbial communities in the soil, and only needed to feed millions, not billions. Also, crop rotation was standard practice for millennia, as was letting fields go fallow (to "recover", often with cover crops) and/or convert to grazing, otherwise the land would become infertile. The cycle of topsoil loss *did* begin in the 19th century, howe
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I agree depth of tiling can absolutely be an issue in places where the soil simply isn't deep enough (as the mentioned Lysenko found out in one case), furthermore, not replacing enough organic matter, which I guess happens when you use inorga
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Precisely! At least in the US midwest, for the past 100 years or so, typically the only thing that was tilled back into the soil (other than virgin grassland) was the previous crop (especially with corn) which seemed fine for a long time, particularly because the soil in some places was meters deep. Soil compaction by very heavy machinery is also a contributor to soil damage.
Careful tilling/plowing and soil amendment with manure/straw or other organic matter along with rotation and cover cropping is the "
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. Looking at the guy's website, I like a lot of what I'm seeing - cover crops like
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I'm less familiar with the agriculture situation in Europe, though I'm not surprised that it's less bad than it is in the Americas.
Cover cropping is a big deal. Mulching too. Leaving bare soil exposed is bad for everything. If you've ever flown over the American midwest, you've seen the giant brown patches where fertile grassland used to be. Monoculture kills. Cover cropping creates life.
Yeah, Gabe is the real deal. He talks about that: trying to get policy changed from the "top down" is impossible, b
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Canada has that too, except they call it "Canola" -- my understanding is that for the most part we shouldn't really be consuming seed oils at all, except in tiny amounts. Biofuel for the most part is insane. Arable land should be for growing food, not fuel.
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Either way, rapeseed has its own problems separate from anything else - besides erucic acid, the plants themselves contain other antinutrients and you get hunters/forresters complaining about such monocultures to no end since deer feeding on such fields have abortions and unviable younglings with liver damage.
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That definitely seems to be a thing, along with the increase in refined sugars in *everything*, around the same time they took the butter and lard out of everything and replaced it with margarine (yuck). I use butter and/or olive oil in cooking. Avocado oil is nice, but expensive, and probably not the best use of avocados. There are a few other oils that are probably OK, but it seems that we really shouldn't be eating food with a lot of added oils, except sparingly (like in baking).
Canola (LEAR) oil is p
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Wile E. Coyote yet again... (Score:3)
"The intensive use of chemical fertilisers helped fuel the four-fold expansion of the human population over the last century, and will be crucial for feeding 10 billion people by 2050.
"But the bumper crops of what was once called the Green Revolution have come at a terrible cost".
Wow. Almost half-way to an admission that the "Green Revolution" wasn't thought through, with the result that the Earth ended up with several billion more people than it can sustainably feed.
Revd. Malthus? There are some people here who would like to offer you an apology.
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How can we stop nitrogen from getting in the air? (Score:5, Funny)
It leads to so much ozone depletion (Score:2)
This is a pure and simple attempt at manufacturing artificial food shortages, with excuses made for it. And someone stands to profit, presumably the same people who profitted from starvation in Ireland and India in the past.
We are using to much nitrogen (Score:2)
Get an oxygen concentrator so you can breathe more oxygen and less nitrogen.
Who's eating what... (Score:2, Insightful)
One thing most people fail to realize is how much we grow just to feed farmed animals (who in turn inefficiently turn those carbs into yet more protein most people reading this don't even need, and of course greenhouse emissions). Humans only eat about 50% of all crops grown. The amount eaten by farmed animals varies by research, but according to this article, it's about 36%. (The rest is biofuel, etc..) Source: https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/... [vox.com]
The missing calories from animal products could easily be made
Re:Who's eating what... (Score:4, Insightful)
b) Animals process biomass that's inedible to humans and is produced alongside the edible parts, and on occasion is produced for other reasons. For instance, some kinds of weeds like clover also have nitrogen-fixing properties so you often use them in crop rotation, then feed them to animals. Same with things like corn husk. This is all a part of your 36%.
c) To follow on b) the only way you can remotely generate selfsustained agricultural cycles is by involving large herbivores in the process. This shows one of the reasons why farming is under attack - you can't make farmers totally dependent on whatever products you sell if they have other methods of providing for themselves
Bluntly, the main thing we could do for the enviroment is abolishing capitalism, because the unbelievable production wastage that only exists in order to feed more money to the rentier classes is in actual fact what's damaging the planet.
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Humans have the same digestive tract as the other primates which is basically vegetarian with some flexibility for INSECTS and a rare bit of meat.
Vegans today lack B12 because of their extremes:
- No violating their rules on rare occasion
- No eating of insects
- No eating of tons of bacteria and fungus by living like wild animals.... stop washing everything and live more like pigs and you'll get more B12.
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I believe the Chimpanzee diet is about: 96% plants, 2.5% bugs and grubs, 1.5% meat.
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Reducing population is the key (Score:1)
So I wish they would stop pushing people to have more kids. The entire economic system is just a huge ponzi scheme that depends on the population always increasing.
If we would *simply* raise standards of living for women and stop literally *paying* people to have babies, we could get the population back down below 5 billion by 2100.
The earth started degrading when we passed about 2-3 billion population. But that's going to destroy the value of a lot of real estate.
Reason to ask for more kids (Score:2)
Uh, you're acting on outdated information.
Most of the developed world, at this point, has negative population growth. The only reason we're still positive is a few developing nations. The USA is still positive, but barely. Japan is experiencing an extreme population decline - to the point that old people are dying unnoticed in greater amounts. When you're looking at a kid of a single child household, where their parents were both single children, that's a lot of grandparents looking for help from said g
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If we had 12 people, it wouldn't *matter* how destructive they were. I think you missed the point. Once we passed 2-3 billion, the earth started degrading and it's been degrading faster since then. As the pandemic showed, the earth doesn't need much of a break for the water and air to recover. Get the population back down to 3 billion with modern technology and it will recover.
Nitrate is not nitrogen (Score:3)
God this irks me. Nitrogen pollution is not a thing. Nitrate pollution is a thing. Nitric oxide pollution is a thing. They are not equivalent.
This is even worse than "organic" lettuce. Have you ever seen inorganic lettuce?
Or when some dim bulb journalist called indium a rare earth. No, it is not.
Yes my other degree is in chemistry.
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Hey man, could you give me a quick layman's breakdown of what you mean? I only have grade 11 chemistry, and even then I didn't do so hot with it, so while the words mean a -little- to me, the differences between nitrate pollution, nitric pollution, and the mythical nitrogen pollution are a bit out of my league.
Oh, and I tried inorganic lettuce when I was a kid, it tasted like plastic ;)
Fertilizer shortage == Food shortage (Score:2)
The Haber-Bosch process was invented to create nitrate fertilizer and without it, the majority of humanity would starve. If you are interested in chemistry at all especially concerning this process, read "The Alchemy Of Air". It is an excellent book on the history of the process and I could not put it down as I love the history of scientific discovery.
cyence for the masses (Score:2)
But We Need Fertilizer (Score:2)