Farming and its search for new sources of fertilisers is the solution to global warming.
Farming has two functions. The first is to produce food and everyone sees that. The second is less understood but, quite definitively, is to recycle wastes on a global scale. Politicians, worldwide, need to understand that “rewilding” will accelerate the decline of food security, but conservation, built on recycling wastes, will maintain wildlife and human survival.
Fertilisers, particularly Nitrogen fertilisers, have a high energy cost and are not going to be getting lower priced now or in the foreseeable future. One tonne of Nitrogen nutrient (that’s 3 tonnes of ammonium nitrate) takes 21,000 kWh (make no mistake – twenty-one thousand “units”) of electricity to manufacture and deliver. (That is in a modern and efficient USA factory. Some production factories, according to World Bank figures, are up to 20 times less efficient!) So, fertilisers are not ever going to be low cost again. However, farming can safely recycle all the current global production of wastes and fill the fertiliser gap.