this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Asbestos isn't widely used in brake pads any longer, California and a couple other states banned it a couple decades ago. The market demand of those states pretty much forced manufacturers to change without federal input. It looks like this bill is just making it official.
I don't really think using it as a reagent to make chlorine is very dangerous, so long as factory workers have access to proper PPE.
The largest concern I have as we move away from fossil fuels is the fact that we are super dependent on it for cheap fertilizers. Our current population exceeds the natural limitations imposed by the nitrogen cycle. As we stop fossil fuels production these fertilizers created mostly as a byproduct of refining fuel will go up in cost. Potentially moreso than poorer nations with large populations can afford to pay.
We still have to depart from fossil fuels, but I'm afraid of the consequences it will have on the global south.
We can make nitrogen fertilizers just fine with the Haber Bosch process and Hydrogen electrolysis. All you need for that is water, air and electricity.
Also crop yields are perfectly suitable to feed all of the global population without using fertilizers. It just requires farmin techniques, that are not suitable for industrial farming for profit maximising companies. On the contrary the current way of industrial farming destroys the yields as it erodes soils physically, chemically and biologically. If we continue farming like this for another century or two we will face severe global starvation.
It is all the more reason to switch both in the use of fossil fuels and the way of current agriculture sooner rather than later.
The Haber Bosch process is what we currently use...... We can make hydrogen via electrolysis, but it's a lot cheaper and easier to create it via gasification of a high carbon material like natural gas.
I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it will become more expensive, and that at risk communities already have a hard time paying the current price.
There's of course a solution, my fear is that there will be no mechanism put in place by governments to make it economical for the entire globe.
That's just untrue. "around 175 million tons of nitrogen flow into the world's croplands every year, and about half this total becomes incorporated into cultivated plants. Synthetic fertilizers provide about 40 percent of all the nitrogen taken up by these crops. Because they furnish—directly as plants and indirectly as animal foods— about 75 percent of all nitrogen in consumed proteins (the rest comes from fish and from meat and dairy foodstuffs produced by grazing), about one third of the protein in humanity's diet depends on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer."
The communities that are most at risk do not generally partake in industrial farming, nor do they export a lot of food.
Yes, we should refine the way we farm, but we are absolutely dependent on synthetic fertilizers, or at least 1/4 of the global population is. The current population is just too high for the nitrogen cycle to sustain us. There's a reason we haven't seen the levels of famine endemic to the period before the Haber Process, this despite a huge surge in global pop.
The issue with our impact on the nitrogen cycle is that it is exceeding the planetary boundaries significantly. Same for Phosphor https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
However if we look at the countries with the highest use of chemical fertilizers per Capita it is also countries with industrialized agriculture that focus on meat production or cash crops.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertilizer-per-capita
We use about half of global agricultural lands for animal feed. So the nitrogen fertilizers are not needed to sustain nutrition. They are needed to sustain the meat overconsumption in wealthy countries.
I'm sorry, but I didn't see anything about the nitrogen cycle in the link you posted. What do you mean by "exceeding the planetary boundaries significantly"? I'm not very familiar with "planetary boundaries" as an ecological theory, and the site doesn't seem to expand on their methodology to a significant degree, or maybe I'm just not looking at the right pages.
Right..... But do we actually expect that to happen? You seem to be focused on the physical possibility and the science behind the problem, when my argument has been entirely policy based.
If we had the political will, or if we were motivated as nations to help our fellow man, I wouldn't be worried in the first place. My concern isnt that this is some unsolvable and inevitable problem, but that governments will respond to this problem in the easiest and most profitable way. By ignoring it and allowing big AG to create a natural monopoly over an artificially inflated scarcity.
You can only push so much nitrogen and phosphor into the biological cycle w.o. having grave side effects. Acidification, erosion of soil microbiomes, eutrophication of water bodies...
The current amount of fertilizers used are killing the environment and through this reducing crop yields.