Wednesday, February 15, 2023
Natural Gas is a major source of the Fertilizers that Prevent Worse World Hunger
Half of the people on Earth are alive today thanks to nitrogenous fertilizers made of and with natural gas.
So why are governments at home and abroad scrambling to cut off humanity’s natural gas supply?
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has spent years trying to shut down the Line 5 natural gas pipeline – precipitating an international disagreement that puts the state in conflict with both the Biden administration and the Trudeau government. Other natural gas projects in the United States have been attacked, shut down, or blocked, while investment in oil and gas is also under fire.
The Dutch and Canadian governments plan to cut fertilizer usage significantly despite heavy backlash. The leadership of Sri Lanka curtailed fertilizer use – until massive crop failures helped fuel an economic crisis and a popular uprising that toppled the government.
United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently brought back the country’s moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, during an energy crisis that leaves thousands of Britons at risk of freezing to death. Meanwhile, an estimated four trillion cubic meters of natural gas sit unused under the English countryside.
Natural gas provides many well-known benefits to society, but one of the lesser-known benefits is right on your plate. Fertilizers produced using natural gas are essential in feeding the global population.
An estimated 44 percent of the world’s people were consuming food produced with nitrogen fertilizers in 2000, according to an article in Our World in Data. That percentage had risen to 48 percent by 2008. The article, which summarized findings published in Nature Geosciences by scientist and policy analyst Vaclav Smil, estimated that by 2015, three-and-a-half billion people were alive thanks to these products.
The United Nations reported in November that the eight-billionth person had been born. Extending the numbers just discussed, that means approximately four billion people are alive today thanks to nitrogen fertilizers.
How is this possible?
The Haber-Bosch process, the main method for industrial synthetic nitrogen fertilizer production, uses the nitrogen found in the atmosphere and the hydrogen from natural gas to make ammonia. “Approximately 60% of the natural gas is used as raw material,” an article in Fertilizers Europe explains, “with the remainder employed to power the synthesis process.”
The result is synthetic nitrogenous fertilizer, which, when combined with selective crop breeding and various forms of chemical protection (herbicides and pesticides), significantly improves crop yields. As Smil noted in a 2011 article for the journal World Agriculture, fertilizers and other related advances have “more than tripled the average U.S. wheat yields during the 20th century.” Smil found yield multiples of 5.8 for France and 3.8 for China. In the United States, corn yields alone “rose more than five-fold,” while rice yields in Japan “increased nearly three times.”
“By 2025 more than half of the world’s food production will depend on Haber-Bosch synthesis, and this share will keep rising for at least several more decades,” Smil explained.
That is not to say that nitrogenous fertilizers are without downsides. Critics correctly point out that fertilizer runoff from agriculture can lead to eutrophication, where the nutrients from the fertilizer runoff work too well and lead to algae buildup (known as algal blooms) on the surface of bodies of water. The algae block sunlight, killing underwater plants. When the algae die, bacteria break them down in a process which can remove oxygen from the water. These algal blooms can foster a toxic environment for the organisms that live in these bodies of water, as well as the people who wish to use them.
Another problem is the emission of nitrous oxide, a naturally occurring but powerful greenhouse gas. In 2020, nitrous oxide only made up 7% of greenhouse gas emissions. However, the warming force of each molecule is 230 times larger than CO2. On top of that, it lasts in the atmosphere for around a century – shorter than CO2, which can last centuries, but longer than methane, which only lasts around a decade.
However, while these problems should be taken into consideration, regulators should also take the benefits of nitrogenous fertilizer and the tradeoffs of anti-natural gas policy into account. Mandating reductions in fertilizer usage is not prudent. Good policy must consider environmental tradeoffs while keeping food production a priority.
This more nuanced approach is necessary, because the situation is not as bad as it is often portrayed. Nitrous oxide occurs naturally and is an important part of the nitrogen cycle. Atmospheric nitrous oxide is increasing at a limited rate, according to a paper published by the CO2 Coalition in November 2022. The doubling time for nitrous oxide in the atmosphere is described as around 400 years.
“For current growth rates, the contribution of N2O [nitrous oxide] to warming is only about 6% that of all greenhouse gases,” the authors noted, warning in their conclusion:
“To continue to feed the world’s growing population without mineral and natural fertilizers, agricultural areas would have to increase and encroach on native habitats, which could have remained untouched with rational use of fertilizer. The result would be more environmental stress, not less.”
This sentiment is echoed in a 2010 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences USA, which found that “while emissions from factors such as fertilizer production and application have increased, the net effect of higher yields has avoided emissions of up to 161 gigatons of carbon … since 1961. … Further yield improvements should therefore be prominent among efforts to reduce future GHG emissions.”
In other words, gains from higher crop yields allow more food production on less land. Yield gains balance, or outweigh, the effects of nitrous oxide added by that fertilizer use. These higher yields feed half of human life on this planet.
Knowing this, attempts to decrease fertilizer usage and production make little sense. Nitrogenous fertilizer should be the subject of a proper cost-benefit analysis. When the benefits* of using natural gas-derived fertilizers are compared with the costs of restricting their use in the name of climate mitigation, it quickly becomes clear that mandated reductions are dangerous.
There are environmental costs associated with fertilizer use. But those are more than balanced out by advantages that include one benefit governments can’t afford to ignore: Nitrogenous fertilizers enable four billion people to eat.
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The States Are the Shock Troops in the ESG Battle of 2023
One of the most important policy battles of 2023 is already happening quietly and outside of the media spotlight. Indeed, many Americans are completely unaware that it is underway. It is over the Left’s ESG (environmental, social and governance)-driven investments and their corrosive effect on the country.
Over the past two years, the Left has launched a determined campaign to advance their climate, gun-control, and abortion objectives not through legislation, but through the allocation and denial of capital.
The proponents of ESG-driven investments are using woke investment firms like BlackRock to phase out fossil fuels, weaken agriculture, hobble the firearms industry, and punish corporations that don’t support abortion. They do so by starving the offending companies of capital and insurance coverage. Worse, ESG- driven funds have waged this war on disfavored companies often without the knowledge or consent of the owners of that capital. And the Biden Administration has been supporting their efforts.
But in the first two months of 2023, a significant number of states have been fighting back. Last week, I and 23 other state attorneys general joined the Utah attorney general in suing the Biden Administration over new Department of Labor regulations that allow managers of retirement funds to consider non-financial, ideological factors when investing allocating retirees’ assets—in direct violation of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA).
State legislatures have joined the battle as well. In the past year, 17 states have introduced bills to stop the investment of state pension assets in ESG-driven funds. The 2023 legislative session is the battlefield on which most of those state efforts will succeed or fail.
On Thursday, the legislative battle in the states just hit a new level of intensity. The strongest anti-ESG bill in the country, SB 224, which I helped draft, was introduced in the Kansas Legislature.
Most of the anti-ESG bills pending in state legislatures address only the state pensions issue, which is certainly a large problem that needs to be addressed. The pensions of state workers should never by commandeered to advance a partisan agenda. ESG-driven funds usually deliver a much lower return on investment, to the detriment of the state workers whose pensions are at stake. In the past year, the ten largest ESG funds by assets have all posted double-digit losses, with eight of them underperforming the S&P 500.
But the Kansas ESG bill goes much farther. Not only does the Kansas bill prohibit the investment of state pension assets in ESG-driven funds, it also prohibits banks from using ESG criteria in denying loans to companies and prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage based on ESG considerations.
In addition to that, the Kansas bill also defends private investors against the surreptitious use of ESG factors in the management of their investments. It requires registered investment advisers to disclose to clients when their money is being invested in ESG-driven funds and requires written consent from the client before such investments can be made. This section of the Kansas bill could cause a tidal shift in investments, especially if other states follow suit and enact similar disclosure rules. Right now, billions of dollars in private assets are being invested in ESG-driven funds without the knowledge or consent of the investors.
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Cut emissions, but not at the expense of jobs and our cost of living
By TONY ABBOTT, former Prime Minister of Australia
As prime minister, I regularly affirmed that climate does change, mankind does make a contribution, and we should do whatever we reasonably can to reduce our emissions.
I’d normally add, though, that there was little point reducing emissions in ways that drove up our cost of living or just sent our emissions offshore as industrial jobs relocated to places that were less environmentally scrupulous. Because there’s little point dealing with a speculative long-term problem in ways that make short-term practical ones much worse.
It is undeniable that climate changes. It’s the cause that’s uncertain. The ice ages are good examples of a world where the climate was radically different. The Roman and Medieval warm periods, when crops could grow in Greenland, and the mini-ice age of the 1600s, when there were regular ice fairs on the Thames, are more recent examples of climate change; that was, incidentally, independent of any man-made influence. And all other things being equal, the laws of physics mean that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (such as the industrialisation-driven rise from about 300 parts per million to about 400ppm that has taken place in the past century) should tend to warm the planet.
Perhaps this has been the key factor in the average warming of up to 1C that most scientists think has happened across that time (despite some rewriting of the temperature records). Certainly, it seems to be the consensus of the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change that man-made carbon dioxide is the principal culprit, even though dissident scientists such as Richard Lindzen and Judith Curry think the atmosphere is such a complex mechanism that it’s impossible to be certain, and that other factors such as sun spot activity may play a much larger part.
I certainly think that all countries should take reasonable, proportionate and prudent steps to reduce emissions. The big question is: how much should a country such as Australia be prepared to pay to reduce our emissions given that other countries, such as China and India, will not reduce theirs in preference to strengthening their economies and that nothing Australia does on its own, with our paltry 1.3 per cent of global emissions, will make any appreciable difference.
As prime minister, I agreed that Australia should take a 26 to 28 per cent cut in emissions by 2030 to the 2015 Paris climate conference, based on official advice that this could be achieved without extra government spending, additional costs in the economy, or changes to existing policy.
At that stage, the federal government was spending about $1bn a year through a tender process to fund emissions-reducing activity such as tree planting, soil improvement and better technology (all of which made sense on other grounds too) that was obtaining credible reductions at the cost of about $15 a tonne.
While the previous Coalition government was routinely demonised as “climate-denying”, largely because I had abolished the carbon tax, which was socialism masquerading as environmentalism, as of last year Australia under the Coalition had already cut its emissions by 20 per cent from 2005 levels – compared with just 9 per cent by Canada and just 5 per cent by climate darling New Zealand.
The Coalition’s commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 – but through technology, not taxes – wasn’t enough to satisfy the climate emergency doomsters who always sought affirmations of faith in the coming climate apocalypse, ignoring the fact the commitment to net zero by a country such as New Zealand relied on excluding emissions from agriculture.
For years now, any discussion of climate policy has been poisoned by fearmongering over supposedly unique catastrophic weather, such as that creating last year’s NSW floods. While last year’s flooding in and around Lismore genuinely was unprecedented, it’s not really surprising that records do sometimes get broken.
On the Hawkesbury, where flood records at Windsor go back to 1799, the four floods of 2020-22 were matched by the five floods of 1860-61; the previous 28-year flood-free period between 1992 and 2020 was more than matched by the flood-free period between 1819 and 1857; and none of the recent floods exceeded 14m (which has been previously exceeded on nine occasions, including three since the completion of Warragamba Dam in 1960). At 13.9m, last year’s flood peak was almost 50 per cent below the all-time peak of 19.7m attained in 1867, which could hardly have had anything to do with man-made climate change.
Unsurprisingly, the Albanese government cited last year’s flood to justify its policy to cut emissions by 43 per cent by 2030, and to cut fossil-fuelled power from more than 60 per cent to under 10 per cent of the electricity grid within eight years. To achieve this, as the Energy Minister has recently admitted, requires the building of 40 large wind turbines every month, the installation of 22,000 solar panels every day and the construction of 28,000km of transmission lines between now and 2030 – all of which will have to be paid for via people’s power bills or taxes. And while (if it’s achieved) this would deliver the renewable power the government seeks, it won’t guarantee the reliable power the economy requires, especially if all the coal-fired power closes in the meantime, as is likely.
By requiring Australia’s 215 biggest emitters (many of which are also big employers) to cut their emissions by 5 per cent each year, or to buy abatement at the cost of up to $75 a tonne, the government is likely further to deindustrialise Australia. And by taking the view that all new fossil-fuel projects pose unacceptable climate risks, the government will gradually kill the coal and gas exports that currently earn more than $200bn a year in national income and deliver the tens of billions in royalty revenue needed to sustain programs such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
Driven by its emissions obsession, the government is gambling the country’s entire electricity-dependent way of life on the rapid development of green hydrogen, even though the International Energy Agency, under the most climate-optimistic of its three scenarios, expects this to be providing less than 2 per cent of global electricity by 2050.
Back in 2017, addressing a Global Warming Policy Foundation event (a speech that’s available at tonyabbott.com.au), I said the “only rational choice is to put jobs and standard of living first; to get emissions down but only as a far as we can without putting prices up. After two decades’ experience of the very modest reality of climate change but the increasingly dire consequences of the policy to deal with it, anything else would be a dereliction of duty as well as a political death wish.”
Although the Albanese government got lucky when the Coalition essentially “me-too-ed” its climate policy at last year’s election, very soon climate wishful thinking will start to crash against the reality of blackouts, not being able to make things here, and even more expensive electricity.
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Expert exposes brutal reality of owning an electric car in Australia after struggling to find a place to charge his $100k vehicle
An expert car reviewer has exposed the difficult reality of owning an electric vehicle and finding a charging station in Australia. Car expert Jonathan Ross has vented his frustration after struggling to find a place to charge a $100,000 Kia EV6 in Perth.
Ross had been driving the vehicle around and reviewing the perks and shortcomings of the electric car for his YouTube channel Ross Reviews.
He filmed his journey as he drove to four different locations before finding an adequate charging station.
He said he had been waiting for about an hour just for the vehicle's battery to reach 80 per cent after waiting in queue for the station.
'It's f***ing. It's crazy man. This is what you call clown world,' he said in a TikTok video. 'Everyone here is waiting an hour and queuing up and waiting for others to charge.'
A look of defeat was on his face as he contemplated the final cost of the recharge. 'We're still going to have to pay, you know, the same as petrol,' he said. 'Clown world.'
Mr Ross revealed that he was forced to search for a charging station after his battery levels dropped to 17 per cent. The vehicle only had enough energy to travel another 61km sending Mr Ross into a panic.
He filmed his disappointment after wasting five kilometres to drive to an inadequate charging station.
A small shelter had been built around it with a locked gate in the doorway. The shelter was only big enough to charge an electric scooter
'There's not even anything in here. Are you kidding me?' Mr Ross said. 'Are you kidding me? I don't know how you get into this.'
Social media users slammed the lack of available charging stations claiming they would not be making the switch from petrol cars anytime soon. 'I don't think Australia is ready for electric cars,' one wrote.
The 2023 Kia EV6 will set drivers back around $100,000, making it the most expensive Kia sold in Australia.
Mr Ross's review is the latest example of growing frustration shown by owners of electric vehicles who are disappointed about the lack of available charging stations.
During the Christmas holidays, Tesla drivers were forced to wait in 90-minute queues at charging stations as thousands took to the roads. Queues for charging stations were spotted nationwide, including in Victoria and NSW.
Footage showed Tesla owners aimlessly standing around their cars as they waited for their turn at a Wodonga station on the NSW/Victoria border.
Similar scenes at a Coffs Harbour charging point in northern NSW, with Teslas stretching through the carpark as drivers waited their turn to power up.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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