It's worth noting that Fritz Haber is also credited with the development of chemical warfare, being one of the leaders in the deployment of chlorine gas during the 1st world war. His life is an interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

He was reported on by Radiolab in an episode about the good and bad that people do: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/180092-the-bad-show/

There is a good book called the Alchemy of Air that goes into this quite a bit.

Reminds me of Thomas Midgley.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

I wanted to upvote what you said because you contributed a very positive, affirming, knowledge bit about the Haber process, but then you decided to end it on such a divisive negative note:

> And it's guys like Steve jobs that get called innovators! Absolute nonsense!

There are an infinite number of reasonable ways to measure innovation, and there are so many metrics by which "guys LIKE Steve Jobs"(whatever that means) come out on top.

From a humanitarian perspective, Fritz Haber ended up creating a process that helped us take huge steps forward as a collective species.

We can acknowledge that without putting down other innovators.

We can ALL be acknowledged for our innovation.

> From a humanitarian perspective, Fritz Haber ended up creating a process that helped us take huge steps forward as a collective species.

It also made possible the industrial production of dynamite and other conventional explosives, and you could say it's why WW2 dwarfed WW1 in terms of destructive power. Point is, it's not a one-sided issue as you say.

Explosives are pretty useful for construction, though.

If Apple hadn't come out with the iPhone there were a dozen other companies that were working on similar products and today we would have something else iPhone-ish. Without Steve Jobs the inventors of the iPhone, such as Tony Fadell, would have probably done similar work for some other CEO.

You can apply that argument to every single discovery, innovation, and development of humankind. Well, maybe not to the discovery of America, as it was sheer dumb luck. But in any case "someone else would have done it eventually" is an empty argument.

    > Without that invention 40% of
    > the world could not exist[...]

What's the source for that 40% number? I'm skeptical of such claims because usually they're only narrowly focused on, in this case, how much of current agriculture would be sustainable without fertilizer assuming current land usage and prices.

But of course if we didn't have fertilizer we would have never ended up with the current system, and e.g. meats would be a lot more expensive since they take more land to raise than vegetables, which would be in harder competition with them due to higher prices on land.

This is likely similar to claims that "in N years we'll run out of fossil fuels". No, in N years we'll run out of areas that are currently economical to mine for fossil fuels, but at that point prices will rise and new fields will open up.

To be pedantic, in N years we will run out of fossil fuels - or at least, fossil fuels that deliver positive EROEI. In the 1950s, petroleum was recovered at roughly 100:1 EROEI. Today, the Canadian tar sands are about 3.5:1, and they're profitable. The good oil is already long gone.

Peak oil is a matter of when, not if. It is not an infinite resource. The interesting (and worrisome) question to me is if we'll be able to convert the transportation grid to predominantly electric (and thus powerable by solar/wind) before we hit a global peak and start losing maximum recoverable oil at 3-10%/year, which will cause intense price spikes and resource wars, due to inelastic demand.

The good oil is not already long gone.

There are massive areas off US coasts with proven reserves that are legally untouched (CA moratorium after Santa Barbara spill only allows for marginal/incremental pumping). In the time between those reserves being shut off and now, the economics of retrieving that oil changed completely, and there is now a ton of "easy oil" off the california coast.

Nobody's arguing that oil is not an infinite resource, but I can point to a single location that contains immense amounts of easily tappable oil.

While the original motivation for the CA moratorium was ecological, these days it's (implicitly) economic. All CA has to do is wait until the price spikes start happening, and dribble out oil at very high prices while hoping there isn't another Deepwater Horizon.

fwiw, I did a little investigation. Total California offshore resources are estimated 4-6B bbls, mostly heavy oil. Contrast this with the 71B bbls estimated remaining in Saudi Arabia's Ghawar field (after almost 70 years of production!). There are dozens of fields in production throughout the world that are larger, many an order of magnitude larger, with better quality oil and far less risk.

(I can't tell if you're an expert in gas/oil, or not. I work with a lot of people from the gas/oil industry, so I'm not an expert per se, but I do read a lot about the industry).

The proven reserves for California are based on historic estimates, they haven't been thoroughly re-evaluated, and were based on previous extraction technologies (before side-drilling etc). The current position of my friends who do oil/gas analysis is that California proven reserve estimates are at least 1 order of magnitude below reality mainly because people aren't actively looking because of the moratorium.

That doesn't change the heavy vs light oil problem, though (probably). Heavy oil is harder to pump, harder to handle, and more costly to refine.

The point of all this is that California's offshore fields aren't all that special, and they aren't "easy oil". If they were, any environmentalist resistance would have been defeated long ago.

> with better quality oil and far less risk.

I know you said this in reference to Californian oil, but it also applies to Saudi oil. The number of dollars paid isn’t the only cost of using that oil.

Well, that's true of fossil fuel in general. There's a significant political and environmental cost, and those costs are both increasing. Oil fields belong to whomever owns the guns surrounding them, and the money goes to the kinds of social projects preferred by the kind of people who put guns around oil wells.

> while hoping there isn't another Deepwater Horizon.

At least install an effective blow-out protector.

Offshore drilling in an earthquake zone is not "easy oil". It's a disaster waiting to happen. I do agree that, if we are desperate, we will use it anyway. But I don't think that's good or healthy or responsible.

offshore drilling in an earthquake zone is an engineering job. it's done all the time, costs a bit more, but doesn't dramatically increase risk.

Even if your definition of "oil left" is when EROEI hits 1:1, that still doesn't mean we're out of oil, since there's applications for oil that don't involve extracting energy for it. So it'll continue to be mined even when we're losing energy by doing so.

Now, I probably should have picked a better comparison, since oil really is zero-sum in ways that needing to grow more food isn't.

The point is that in an alternate universe where agriculture was 40% less efficient it doesn't follow that there would be 40% fewer people. Rather, more of the gross world product would be spent on agriculture, since there's a lot you can do to throw more money at the problem to increase yields, and pricing would do a lot to increase the efficiency.

Well, sure. Earth's population has grown roughly 100% in the past 50 years, largely due to the advances of Green Revolution agriculture. This isn't just nitrogen fixing. It's advances in mechanization, transportation, finance, preservation techniques, and more. All of those things would have happened (more or less) even without fixed fertilizer.

I disagree with the idea that there'd be proportionally less meat, for a couple of reasons. First, a lot of grazing-animal meat (beef, basically) comes from land that is unviable for plowing or other vegetation farming. Second, in the absence of inexpensive chemical fertilizer, manure would be a much more important fixer, just like it has been for thousands of years.

What's really going to bake your noodle is, when I worked as an advisor for a major Silicon Valley venture capital group, I learned: most SV VCs don't want to invest in biotech because it takes 10-15 years before you get any feedback on your investment's quality (and most of the time, it's just "they went out of business."), while in tech, you just give $1M to 20 companies, one of them hits the billion dollar jackpot in a year.

Your western imperial biases are showing.

China was doing pretty well for itself for millennia with intensive terracing and silt harvesting. They have fields that have been under cultivation for four thousand years. We can barely manage four hundred.

And pre Columbian California was agrofoerstry from sea to foothills with seasonal migrations.

Without anhydrous ammonia we would have a diet much higher in legumes and lower in staple starch, which is probably killing us anyway. A more efficient source of high fructose corn syrup doesn’t inspire confidence in our future.

Corn still uses far too much water for us to sustain indefinitely.

[Edit] We would also be using more perennial crops, which don't have to build up an entire plant from seed every year. More efficient, as long as your form of civilization does not involve moving into new areas every ten years.

Current populations are orders of magnitude higher than they were when the techniques you mentioned were used. This has nothing to do with western bias.

No. There are less than 3 times as many people in China today versus 1900, when the techniques I mentioned were still prevalent.

Before the introduction of western diseases, North America had a much larger population than we are taught in our Manifest Destiny classes. It's fair to say that the population here is about one order of magnitude greater, but if we ran the Mississippi watershed the way the Chinese managed the Yangtze [1]? Or the tribes of California? [2] We'd still be doing pretty well without anhydrous.

Again, though, we'd be eating a lot more beans. We should be eating a lot more beans. And nuts.

When Polynesians settled Hawai'i, they brought a couple dozen species with them (canoe plants) and found the Koa, a nitrogen fixing tree. When Europeans occupied Hawai'i, they brought a few more, including the monkeypod (another nitrogen fixing tree) as cattle fodder. The bean pods are high in protein.

> "However, in the soil of natural ecosystems, nitrogen occurs predominantly as proteins."[3]

Everyone talks about the magic of nitrogen in plant and soil biology, but at the end of the day, it's the protein cycle that matters. "Feed the soil, feed the plant"[4] requires polycultures instead of monocultures in order to work, but we could do it. We would have done it. George Washington Carver wanted to do it [5] but he got outmaneuvered by industrial agriculture (and structural racism). In another world without anhydrous he probably would have found more success.

Tl;dr: Things would look very, very different but not necessarily smaller - or worse - if not for chemical fertilizer, and we may have to get to that world soon if we want to keep on breathing and eating.

References:

1: Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan, F. H. King

2: Tending the Wild, M. Kat Anderson

3: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2393761/

4: Roughly any book on Permaculture

5: My Work Is That of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver

Though it is also true that we right now produce above 5000 kcal per capita according to FAO. Well above individual calorie needs. "To support our consumption" may be, but the configuration of our current consumption itself is problematic.

You can get enough calories and be still malnourished [1]. We should instead calculate how many people can be fed so that all of their dietary needs are satisfied.

The calculation should include logistics, nutritious food that can't be transported unspoiled to the people in need does little good.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition#Dietary_practices

I think the political problem far outweighs the logistical one. until the local governments in these area start respect personal, productivity, and property rights, the people will forever be suffering.

And corruption. Both on micro and macro level. Individuals, officials and politicians. When "everyone" does it, everyone deems it ok to do so as well.

Just fixing corruption would go a long way towards that goal.

The correllation between invention awareness and significance is almost completely random.

Also goes for inventor reward. Contrast Diesel and Parsons.

Smil is a world treasure. Seriously, start reading his books.

NB, I'm looking for sources showing major inventions through history (Smil is one source). Roughly by decade to about 1850, 25 years to 1600, centuries to 1250 or so, and expanding granularity to 10,000, 100k, and 1m BCE.

Needham's Science & Civilisation is another source.

I loved Smil's talk so much I ended up buying his last 5 books right after and I'm busy with Energy and Civilisation right now (Lesson being I should not be allowed access to the Kindle Store after I've had 3 glasses of wine)

But yeah I agree with you there- at the time no one (maybe apart from Edison) knew how big an impact they would have.

Daniel Yergin's The Prize gets futher into the development of the oil industry, and some of what spawned from it (industry, monopoly, antitrust, war, cartels, commodity regulation, policy (foreign, domestic, military, ...), monetary, and more.

Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power is a difficult-to-find and somewhat uneven book, but builds largely on Smil's premise (from his earlier Energy and World History) to include political and social consequences.

I've been finding institutional and media consequences and dynamics also of interest. Some reading of interest:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...

More recently: Paul Baran and Norbert Wiener.

Indeed, Haber process is the second most important invention after mankind's mastery of fire, possibly third after mastery of metalworking.

Life without it might've been possible, but we would be incomparably more reliant on cereals and natural sources of nitrogen fertilisers. And be sure, we would've still be having wars over fertile lands.

We also wouldn't have overpopulation of the scale that we do now. I agree though that the Haber process is one of the most impactful inventions ever

North American agriculture universities are the unsung heroes of the modern age. Endless quiet innovations in crop yields that have fed the exploding world population in the post world-war era.

When we run out of oil and natural gas, or at least start having substantial shocks to the supply lines, it will be an absolute Armageddon!

Just in time grocery store inventories and trucks with empty fuel tanks will starve as many people as Haberless crops.

Humanity is much more likely to suffer a huge calamity from lack of fossil fuels than it is to overcome the problem with technology.

Back during cold war, it was said that US fall into famine if the four biggest fertiliser stockpiles were to be struck/sabotaged/nuked and US will be unable to import food from abroad.

Sounds ridiculous now, but at in 60-70ies (and to lesser extend today,) US had high double digits of world's total agricultural output