A number of years ago, I watched an animated film that featured two people on a raised platform. When one of the characters moved one direction, the platform would start to tip that direction, and the other character would have to move to keep the platform from tipping over and both people from falling off.
I was reminded of this cartoon when listening to a recent story about how the move to get away from fossil fuels—which is causing anthropogenic climate change—may lead to a shortage in fertilizer in the future, which in turn could lead to food shortages, famine and other less than ideal outcomes.
Move one way, things start to shift out of balance. Move to correct, things start to shift out of balance a different way. Rinse, lather, repeat.
Sulphuric acid is important in the production of phosphate fertilizers. Phosphate itself is inert and can’t be used by plants to any great extent. But if that phosphate rock is treated with sulphuric acid, it creates things like phosphoric acid, hydrogen phosphate, ammonium and more, all of which are usable as fertilizers.
And in order to create sulphuric acid, you need sulphur. And the lion’s share of sulphur available these days is a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry. They are basically giving the sulphur away, which means that it is currently very inexpensive to make these phosphate fertilizers.
Between now and 2050, a large chunk of that fossil fuel industry will be going away, and with it, the near-free sulphur.
Experts are predicting the amount of sulphur being produced will be cut to one fifth, maybe even one tenth of the current supply.
At the same time, the global population is on the rise, meaning the demand for food is on the rise, which means the demand for fertilizers will be on the rise, which means the demand for sulphur will be on the rise.
And it’s not just farming. The process of extracting metals like cobalt and nickel for the production of batteries and electric motors—an important part of the transition away from fossil fuels—also relies on sulphuric acid for their extraction.
So what to do? Keep going the way we were going and boil like the proverbial frog in a pot, or make the change away from fossil fuels and basically destroy the food industry as it stands?
When put like that, it seems that no path forward is a good one, and indeed, it seems we are moving towards Robin Hanson’s idea of a Great Filter—where life faces some extinction level event caused by … well, now that’s the problem, innit? Because if we knew what it was caused by, we could take steps to avoid it. But lets say any sufficiently advanced civilization that has previously existed has destroyed itself … somehow. Nuclear war or climate change or genetic manipulation or Skynet or the zombie apocalypse.
Hanson says the reason we don’t see thousands of space faring civilizations is they’ve all run afoul of this “great filter”. If we can figure it out, we’ll be the first.
Which gives us a goal to aim for: don’t destroy humanity. But which path leads to total global destruction? Path A or Path B? If we look down either, we can see pretty bad outcomes at the end of the line.
But that assumes that either path is a straight line. Start down it now, and there’s no chance to get off it. And we know that isn’t the case. We are very good at changing paths when we set our minds to it.
In the late 19th century, a class of chemicals, known as chlorofluorocarbons were invented. Less than 100 years later, it was discovered they were destroying the ozone layer, and the world moved to ban the use of them.
So we are capable, as a society, of changing paths when we want to.
We are also very good at figuring things out as we go along.
The whole waste-product-of-fossil-fuel-production-being-used-to-create-fertilizer? That was something that nobody knew about 120 years ago.
But as we started to pull sulphur from gasoline, we suddenly had great piles of sulphur just kicking around that we didn’t know what to do with. And the fertilizer industry changed to incorporate this near-free resource.
Thing is, it can change again. And it’s starting to. In places facing water shortages, scientists are looking at extracting fresh water from waste water (read: the sewer). That process creates sulfides, which in turn can be used to create sulphuric acid for the farming industry.
Will that be enough? Will it be inexpensive enough to keep the cost of food production at a decent level? Who knows. That’s the thing about the future. We can look at trends, we can look at possible outcomes and we can make some guesses, but sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know.
In astrophysics, there is an issue called the three body problem. The idea is that these three bodies are pushed and pulled by different forces from both within and without the system, so that predicting the path of these bodies becomes impossible past a certain point. The system seems chaotic.
The same can be said for global economics which has thousands, maybe millions of moving parts. People have come up with ways to describe the way economics work, but typically, these models work best for predicting the past. When applied to the future they can only see a very short way ahead.
Maybe we’ll find a different source for sulphur in the future. Maybe we’ll find a different way to activate phosphate and turn it into fertilizer. Maybe we’ll find a new way to grow plants. Maybe life as we know it will come to an end.
But I doubt that last one. We as a species can be very resourceful when we need to be. And we need to be.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
