This month we talk about the Haber-Bosch process, Malthus, and replacement-level birthrates.
We also discuss top-heavy demographics, India's population ascension, and environmental contaminants.
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Transcript
The Haber-Bosch process was originally named for Fritz Haber, an almost comically horrible German chemist who received a 1918 Nobel Prize for this particular work, but who was also an enthusiastic murderer of human beings, later being designated the "father of chemical warfare" for developing chlorine gas, among other weapons of mass destruction.
He provided those weapons to the German military as part of his larger work in getting the German Kaiser to basically conquer the rest of Europe—he was one of ninety-three intellectuals who signed on to a manifesto essentially urging the kickoff of World War I. So, yeah, a pretty brutal, nationalistic, but anti-humanistic guy.
And that's important to note, I think, because he's better known, today, for the work that earned him that Nobel Prize, which involved converting atmospheric nitrogen—the air we breathe is mostly nitrogen, by the way—converting that nitrogen in the air we breathe into ammonia by forcing a reaction with hydrogen using a catalyst, high temperatures, and high pressure.
The outcome of this process is the synthetic production of a substance, ammonia, which is vital for, among other things, the production of synthetic fertilizer.
And while that might not seem to be a big deal to anyone but farmers, synthetic fertilizers are, currently at least, actually pretty vital to the continued existence of modern society. And it was fundamental to the creation of the world as we know it, too.
Before we had the capacity to produce ammonia in this way, and before our production capacity was scaled-up through the innovations of Carl Bosch—who is the other namesake of the Haber-Bosch process; Haber developed the process and Bosch refined it so it would work on scale, allowing gobs of ammonia to be produced in this way—before we could do this, most farmland was fertilized in traditional ways, mostly mixing waste, human and animal and otherwise, in with the soil, and then just waiting for that waste to decompose so its nutrients would be soaked up into and blended with those other soil materials.
It's possible to allow this to happen naturally, as that's basically what nature does all by itself, as things grow and die and grow and die, but agriculture is far more intensive than natural growth cycles, and thus can deplete the soil of its nutrients if we're not careful.
Some cultures developed cycles of leaving fields barren for a spell in between using them, but that's not super-feasible everywhere, especially in places where there's less land for this type of purpose: you can't just leave a whole lot of agricultural land unused most of the time if you're aiming for optimal efficiency.
Thus, we would cast our food scraps, dead animals, and fecal and urinary waste into our fields, till it together, and that would help keep the soil from going fallow much of the time, and keep the food grown in said soil from being nutritionally hollow—though it was still imperfect, as there's only so much nutrition you can work back into constantly-used soil via this method.
Synthetic fertilizers solved this problem by basically just working a lot more effectively and consistently, but in order to produce them, we needed a bunch of ammonia, which wasn't easy to refine.
A lot of this substance back in the day was derived from guano, which was mined from mountains of the stuff—guano being bird and bat excrement, by the way—and that meant finding islands where birds and bats have resided for a long time, and then harvesting the mounds of fossilized poop and then refining it into this useful chemical.
Haber's original intention in creating this stuff synthetically, by the way, was to replace naturally harvested guano was a synthetic replacement so that the German military wouldn't have to figure out how to bypass Allied blockades during the war; the Germans were running out of ammunition and explosives, and both required ammonia to work, at that point in history, and this allowed him to create an essentially endless supply of the stuff, without having to puncture the naval barriers the Allies had positioned between them and these guano-laden islands.
But the upside of this development was that we could suddenly make as much synthetic fertilizer as our factories could churn out, and that type of manufacturing can be scaled up quickly—so we had a lot of it. Enough to cover the world's fields in nutritional materials in relatively short order.
And because of this outcome, the Haber-Bosch process has at times been called the most important invention of the 20th century, because lacking the ability to churn out food in the way this process allowed, there's a very good chance the 20th century would have been a period of starvation wars and massive unrest, rather than a period of some larger-scale conflicts, but otherwise historic levels of peace, mutual respect for border sovereignty, incredible levels of technological development, and massive advances across all aspects of human rights, compared to previous eras.
What I'd like to talk about today is the human population, a recent numerical milestone, and how our modern population growth may influence what happens next.
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It's estimated that in the year 1900, back when Fritz Haber was working on his now-vital process, the human population, globally, was somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 billion people.
That's an estimate, and some sources think it was close to 1.5 billion, some posit it was somewhere in the middle, more like 1.75 billion, but we likely had somewhere thereabouts that many human beings across the whole of planet Earth just as electricity was beginning to be harnessed and deployed, the radio was becoming a thing, neon lighting was being used in Paris, and the first flight was being conducted by the Wright Brothers in Kittyhawk, North Carolina.
Not long ago, on November 15, 2022, it's estimated—using the United Nations' best-available figures and projections, that we breached the 8 billion mark: four, or maybe a bit more than four-times as many humans on the planet, going from around 2 billion to 8 billion, adding 6 billion more people, just during the period from the invention of the airplane to today.
That's boggling when you consider that it took us all of human history, ranging from a few hundred thousands years of prehistory, through all the recorded years leading up to the year 1800 to to reach one billion—so everything we have recorded evidence of, all of history ranging from peasants and serfs to migrations across the continents, to pottery to agriculture to the domestication of animals to the invention of tools and art and the creation of different governments and the renaissance and Rome and the cross-pollination of cultures across then-green and lush parts of sub-saharan Africa, and the age of exploration and industrial revolution and everything else, all of human history that we have evidence for, post-writing—it took us all the time, plus all the time during which we weren't recording anything we can read today, to eventually hit 1 billion people, globally; and that happened around the time the sewing machine, steam locomotive, typewriter, and early telephone were being invented.
It was those hundreds of thousands of years to one billion, then from 1800 to 1900, we accumulated another billion, and then we birthed and sustained another billion, taking the global population up to 3 billion, around 1960; so about a decade-and-a-half after WWII, and just 60 years after that previous milestone.
The next billion only took us about 15 years to accrue, so we hit 4 billion sometime in 1975.
We hit 5 billion in 1987, so only 12 years to reach that new milestone.
And 6 billion came in 1999, so another 12 years to churn out a billion people.
7 billion arrived around 2011; so again, 12 years to make and sustain a fresh billion people.
And then it took us a mere 11 years to tack on the additional billion that puts us where we are today, at around 8 billion people, globally.
It's estimated that around 108 billion people have ever lived on the planet, throughout all of human history, so the people living today make up about 6.5% of all humans who have ever lived—which is pretty astonishing when you think about it, when you consider how long a time-horizon we're looking at here.
Another way of juggling these numbers: the global population, today, is about 2,000-times as big as it was 12,000 years ago, at which point the global population was around 4 million, which means globally there were fewer than half as many people as there are living in London, today.
And this all happened incredibly quickly.
All of human history was defined by slow, sluggish fits-and-starts growth, but the past five hundred years was really something, and the period since WWII has been astonishing to the point of being, at times, worrying.
If you're 47 years old or older, the total global human population has doubled, or more, since you were born. That's wild, as "doubling" in this case, means 4 billion more people were added to the 4 billion that already populated the planet during that short period.
Looping back to those slow, then fast additions of each new billion human beings, though: each of those increments were accomplished in different ways, with all sorts of inventions and developments and new systems allowing various groups to grow, at times rapidly, usually because they conquered or inherited a whole lot of new land, which was required at the time to increase local population numbers, because a whole lot of agricultural real estate was required just to keep people sustained at a subsistence level.
The big boom that we saw from the mid-19th century onward, though, was the consequence of a slew of health-related developments, which has allowed people to survive childhood more frequently, live longer, and generally bounce back from a lot of ailments that previously would have killed us—antibiotics and modern antiseptic procedures popped up around this time, so a scratch or a cold was no longer a likely death-sentence—but we also began the widespread deployment of synthetic fertilizers, which allows populations, globally, to balloon dramatically in a very short period of time.
There was already a population bubble on the horizon, when Haber and Bosch were muddling around with their ammonia-making innovation, so they are generally thought to have saved as many or more lives than essentially anyone else who's ever lived—because lacking a means of making enough food to keep all those new people alive, they would have starved to death and that starvation process likely would have triggered a bunch of wars around the globe, for insufficient food resources—but the boom that came next was likely the consequence of all that available food, rather than the food sustaining people who were already being born.
So our pace of growth, from the 20th century onward, has been massively influenced by the resources we now have available, which have themselves been generated by this capacity to basically turn air into fertilizer ingredients.
This innovation, though, has a lot of downsides.
Most directly, the process of creating fertilizer in this way is heavily polluting, and though there are efforts to de-carbonize the process, it currently accounts for a single-digit percentage of all our global carbon emissions—which is a lot, because that's a portion of all the things we do that emit CO2.
This abundance of fertilizer has also resulted in agricultural approaches that overuse this material, which in turn leads to a lot of nitrogenous and other chemical-laden runoff, which has the effect of killing off aquatic life, changing the chemical composition of our streams and rivers and the mouths of oceans, and doing all kinds of messed up things to our other ecosystems, which rely upon such water.
Less-directly, more people means more consumption, and more consumption means we strip our ecosystems of resources, generate a lot of pollutants and greenhouse gases, kill each other and other living creatures—basically all the problems humanity causes, they're amplified when there are more of us.
And for a while it seemed like this process of more more more humans might continue unabated until there was no food, and maybe even not enough space or air or water left for everyone. We'd be elbow to elbow with tens of billions of other people, and that would eventually result in a war to end all wars, or we'd simply all starve to death, because the earth can't possibly generate enough sustenance for all of us.
This theorized Malthusian crisis, named after Thomas Robert Malthus, who came up with it, never manifested, and its' looking likely that it never will, as modern trends suggest that as societies become wealthier and healthier and overall better off, they tend to have fewer babies who they treat better, which then perpetuates that cycle of everyone being generally better off.
So as things stand today, we've racked up new billions at a rapid pace over the east hundred years, but that pace seems to be slowing, and though we'll likely hit somewhere between 9 and 10 billion people by the year 2050, most current projections suggest we'll top-out at around 10.5 to 11 billion by the end of the 21st century, in the year 2100, and from there it will be a downward trend, with more people dying than being born for a while.
Thus, if these trends continue and these projections prove accurate, at least, we're at an interesting moment in history where the global population is still growing, but we're looking down the barrel of a near-future downward trend, and projections that tell us this will probably be the case are based on current happenings: populations in many countries, especially the wealthiest countries, are already plateauing or decreasing. Which, well, there are pros and cons to that.
One of the major cons, which is already evident in some of those areas that have seen their growth curve level out or tip downward, is that they've got aging populations—fewer births means fewer babies, which eventually means fewer young people, and that means there will generally be more older people, from back when there were more births, and that typically means more people not involved in the economy, in production, but a whole lot of folks who still need goods and services provided for them; so the government of Japan has been struggling with how to deal with this unbalanced equation, and China's government, which is looking likely to face the same, at an even larger scale, soon, if they're not already seeing a version of it already, which is also possible, they're trying to figure out how to do the same.
The simplest solution, in a way, and one that many such governments are opting for right now, is to try to goose birth rates, sometimes by making it seem patriotic to have more kids, sometimes by providing incentives—reputational, monetary, or otherwise—to have more babies; but basically to in some way encourage folks who aren't having kids, or who are having just one or two kids, to have more than that, because the replacement rate, today, is 2.1 kids per woman in a given society if that society wants to stay at a neutral growth level; you need that many new births just to replace the number of people who die. So societies with a lower average will trend downward, population-wise, and that creates this type of age imbalance, at least at first, but it can also, over time, create issues with production and keeping the economy spinning at the same level it was, previously.
This has been a concern in countries across Europe, and in the United States, among many others.
Wealthier nations are growing less-fast than before, and they're thus less-capable, or may soon be less-capable, of keeping their economies, producing all the stuff they make, providing all the services they provide, afloat.
If you think of an economy as being one big factory, what you face, eventually, is a bunch of open positions not being filled, which can then throw the factory into disarray. So you either have to boost those numbers, maybe through more births, and maybe through immigration, which helps you while potentially causing similar issues elsewhere—but via some mechanism you have to fill those slots, or change the way you do your economy.
One way to change that economic dynamic is to introduce more automation.
In the most literal, tangible sense, this might mean replacing factory workers with robots that can accomplish the same, or better, output, subbing them in for humans who are no longer available, at least at the price the factory-owners are willing to pay, but it may also mean using smarter software that lessens the load, or creating new efficiencies that mean you need fewer hands to produce the same value, even if the shape of that value changes over time.
A raw change in population can lead to ebbs and flows in power, as well, though, and even the perception of such changes can lead to similar outcomes.
China's population is likely to shrink or already be shrinking, in part because it has elevated so many people out of poverty, and in part because of demographic, cultural, and regulatory peculiarities, but the fact that China will shrink while India is growing—India's population is actually projected to surpass China's in 2023, making India the most-populous nation on the planet—that looks good for India and less-good for China, just in terms of the raw number of hands and minds they have to throw at production, invention, and even military ambitions.
This is a very visceral sort of perception, of course, because many of the world's most powerful, wealthy nations are relatively small by population, but there's still a certain quality to quantity, as they say, and India, in the near-future at least, looks to be a beneficiary of that specific type of demographic fortune.
It won't be long before that fortune shifts elsewhere again, though, if current trends continue apace.
Sub-Saharan Africa is looking down the barrel of a population boom right now, because of their current ultra-young population, and because of how things are growing in that regard, currently.
Current projections indicate that this region will become the most-populace, replacing Southeast Asia, around 2037, and that by the late-2040s, Sub-Saharan African could be home to more than 2 billion human beings.
None of which says anything definitive about wealth or success or other sought-after metrics; population isn't destiny, and it could be that we're scrambling to reduce our populations at some point, because of consumption-tied climate concerns, because increasingly large swathes of the planet are becoming essentially uninhabitable by humans most of the time, except at great expense, and it may be that we ultimately just decide to procreate less, or the current trend of reduced fertility—the source of which we're not sure about, but which may be tied to all the contaminants, chemical but also things like micro plastics, we now have permeating all of our human and natural environments—that trend could continue and expand to the point where we just don't procreate much, which again, would come with all sorts of pros and cons, especially if that trend is unevenly divided globally, or if it happens dramatically so that regional populations are top-heavy, with an abundant older population, but far fewer young people to keep society ticking along and evolving.
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Show Notes
https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-ammonia-production-emits-CO2/97/i24
https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/haberbosch.html
https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-people-does-synthetic-fertilizer-feed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Haber_process
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
https://qz.com/how-will-aging-nations-pay-for-their-retirees-1849780533
