Well sure…since the early 20th century. But there are alternatives to using natural gas (hydrogen for one which could be produced using nuclear reactors) and there doesn’t seem to be any immediate shortage of natural gas. Quite the contrary, actually, though of course using the stuff comes at a cost to global warming and other environmental impacts.
Natural gas is used as the source of hydrogen in Haber-Bosch, but it isn’t strictly necessary. You could certainly get hydrogen by other means, such as electrolyzing water. Natural gas is used today because it’s the cheapest source. So Deeg was wrong to say ammonia isn’t made from fossil fuels - it is today - but your original question was how does one replace natural gas for making ammonia. Turns out - easily, just more expensively.
ETA: XT, you win this round…
China has a very high population density but they mostly keep public health issues under control.
I fail to see why a growing population will result in mass deaths from plague. Plague isn’t going to cause the human race to forget 200 years of medical research into public health.
Some of those links are confusing poverty and lack of infrastructure with overpopulation.
Much more expensively is not easily. The whole ‘value’ of that leg of industrial food production, with respect to being a ‘solution’ to population pressure, was in its cheapness.
UNICEF, but I made a typo. They will be 4 billion around 2100, not 2050. I got confused.
Fresh potable water in the location where it is needed for use is the most critical. Certainly you can postulate the use of desalination and an enormous distribution infrastructure powered by an endless supply of nuclear energy and/or pixie dust, but the fact is that the locations where this is most critically needed are those least able to bear the burden. Fertilizers and precursors are also critical resources. Although everyone is concerned about petroleum, the real resource wars are likely to be fought over access to clean water for irrigation and industrial use, and the demand far outstrips any credible estimate of the capacity that can be produced with desalination technology at any plausible cost.
No, my point is that the rationale for needing to go to the Moon to mine for [SUP]3[/SUP]He makes absolutely no sense despite the prevalence of this claim, just as solar power satellites to beam power to Earth receiving stations makes no economic or technical sense. We don’t have a need for large amounts of [SUP]3[/SUP]He and no expectation of being able to use this as a fuel for nuclear fusion in the foreseeable future, and if we did it would be vastly cheaper to produce it by neutron bombardment of lithium to produce tritium, which decays into [SUP]3[/SUP]He. In fact, if we had the capability to fuse D-[SUP]3[/SUP]He, we would also have the capability for D-T fusion which could be used as an energetic neutron source to breed tritium. The reason tritium production costs so much right now is because of the limited facilities dedicated for it.
Everytime someone suggests producing hydrogen from electrolysis I have to wonder about the state of our education. Yes, it is true that hydrogen and oxygen are produced by passing a current through water, which produces a mole of diatomic hydrogen for ~330 kJ/g, or about the same as a hundred 100 W incandescent bulbs burning for an hour. When you start looking at the quantities required for large scale production of fertilizer, the energy requirements become enormous for that use alone.
The resources of the planet are so bountiful in comparison to our historical population size and the environment is so forgiving, that we fail to realize that the Earth is, in fact, an essentially closed system which is fortunate to be provided with a virtually inexhaustible source of external energy which the biosphere has been storing for hundreds of millions of years in the form of fossil fuels. We’ve gorged ourselves on these resources with the assumption that the cornucopia will provide without end, and the notion that “something” will come along to replace what we’ve used up is ad hoc justification for continuing to use resources and produce waste without meter. The reality is that the lag between overusing resources and impact upon the ability to sustain a population is masked by our technological innovations in extracting previously inaccessible resources.
Stranger
These population growth charts don’t mention other population controllers.
Such as earthquakes, tsunamis, disease, etc.
The problem, at this time, is not resources. The problem is some areas (Africa) don’t have the resources for the population. They need population control, or relocation.
There MAY be 4 billion in 80 years. More likely, there will be continued economic growth that will lead to a transition away from agricultural societies (where lots of kids is an economic advantage…even in moder America, farms are exempt from some child labor laws) to a post-industrialized that incentivizes fewer kids.
What the heck are you talking about? “Africa” is huge (bigger than the US, China, India, Japan and all of Europe combined) and relatively sparsely populated-- less than half the population density of Europe. Africa has every resource that you could imagine, in abundance (though there are individual countries that are dealing with some constraints.) The real problem is that many African countries have a poor political and economic strcutures, which makes it hard to put these resources to use effeciently.
truthSeeker2 writes:
> For example, say a country stops having kids for 40 years (impossible situation but
> still). Then that country is sure to die out in next 50 years.
A much more likely problem would happen when the average number of children per woman in a country is, say, 1.0 or less. The population will soon be quite old on average. There would be too many retirees per worker to be sustainable.
Yep. The demographic chart would resemble an inverse pyramid. The same would the case even if the number of children per woman is say 1.5 (it need not be as low as 1). The same is happening in the countries that I mentioned. It would be sustainable (i guess) but the economy will likely be in recession (as is the case in Japan)
GDP of a country = its international trade + domestic consumption + investment
In a dieing population, consumption and investment (and import component of the trade) will be down, so the economy will likely be in recession.
Japan demographic (interesting) -
http://www.financialsense.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/desktop/users/u716/images/2012/japan-age-population-pyramid.jpg
truthSeeker2 writes:
> The same would the case even if the number of children per woman is say 1.5 (it
> need not be as low as 1).
I don’t think it’s unsustainable to have the births per woman be 1.5 for a few decades. Yeah, there will be more retirees per worker than there was in the mid-twentieth century, but we can live with that for a while. Obviously, it’s eventually going to be necessary to have the births per woman be exactly 2.1 over the long haul or the human race will either die out or completely fill up the Earth. At some point we’re going to have to decide how many people should live on the Earth and adjust the birth rate over the next century or so to reach that number. Furthermore, every country will have to agree on that number. In any case, as long as the average lifespan continues to increase, we’re going to have to accept that the average retirement age will have to increase.
Here’s your problem–you’re equating nuclear power with pixie dust. Desalinization is a viable solution. The cause of the problem of potable water isn’t population growth but poverty.
I misread the article on ammonia production but my point still stands: there are other resources available to make ammonia, no?
There are other ways to make ammonia, and for that matter there are ways to produce food without anhydrous ammonia fertilizer. The point is that these other ways cost more, which on a global scale changes the whole equation of population versus resources. It’s not good enough to just say, well, I’m sure technology will continue to advance, we’ll work out something new. That may be true to some extent, but to have faith that we will necessarily, always come up with new technologies that are sufficiently better than the old ones, to keep pace as the efficiency of the old ones breaks down under resource depletion and increasing costs… well, I can only call that an article of religious dogma which I do not share.
I’m not even sure what exactly you’re arguing here. My point is that as we actually use up the Earth’s crust’s natural gas supply over the next couple of centuries, we already have a way to adjust. We don’t have to invent anything new. We know how to keep making nitrogen fertilizer. It’s more expensive, and more energy intensive, to the degree that if we ran out of natural gas in the next five years, it would be a massive problem. Fortunately, we have decades of reserves and probably centuries of resources.
You missed the point, and managed to be unnecessarily snide in the process. We don’t have to assume that “something” will come along to replace what we’ve used up. We already have the technology to do everything we need to do to keep industrial agriculture alive beyond the end of fossil fuels, and decades to make it happen. Hell, decades before we have to even really think much about it.
That’s why I asked: what precious resource are we using up that can’t be replaced? I’ll agree that technology can’t come up with a solution if you can find one. Until then I’m not going to waste one brain cell worrying about overpopulation. I am much more concerned about the misplaced fear of nuclear power.