"Scarcity and Famine" by John Little' from "The Omega Shock Letter".

 

Scarcity and Famine

December 11, 2021 by John Little - OmegaShock.com

In 1909, Fritz Haber changed the world. In Europe and North America, population growth had reached the point where crop yields needed to increase, or food scarcity would become a serious problem. And, the one thing that everyone needed the most was the nitrogen component of fertilizer – more specifically, ammonia. Most of our air is nitrogen, but getting it into a form that we could use to grow food was a problem. And, this is where Fritz came in.

Because he was an expert in catalysts and the equipment for putting gasses under high pressure, he was in a unique position to mix air and hydrogen, under intense pressure and high heat to create the ammonia that we needed to create fertilizer. The German company Badische Anilin- und SodaFabrik (BASF) bought his process and assigned Carl Bosch to scale it up and make it efficient. By 1914, they were making 20 tons of ammonia per day – just in time to use it for German bombs instead of food in World War 1.

The irony is that Germany could never have done so much damage during WW1 without the Haber-Bosch Process for creating the nitrogen compounds that their bombs and bullets needed. The British Royal Navy was blocking Germany’s access to Chilean saltpeter, so this new process was all that the Kaiser needed to make a world war happen – which is proof that just because you CAN do something, doesn’t mean that you SHOULD.

FULL ARTICLE AT: https://omegashock.com/2021/12/11/scarcity-and-famine/