by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:
All of our lifestyles are about to change in a major way, but the vast majority of the population still does not understand what is coming. Throughout our entire lives, we have always been able to depend on a couple of things. There would always be cheap gasoline to fuel our vehicles and there would always be mountains of cheap food at the grocery store. No matter who was in the White House and no matter what else was going on in the world, those two things always remained the same. Unfortunately, those days are now over and they aren’t coming back.
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We have entered the greatest energy crisis that any of us have ever experienced, and it isn’t going to go away any time soon.
So you might as well get used to high gas prices. Earlier this month, brand new all-time record highs were set all over southern California…
- Los Angeles-Long Beach – $6.46 (Record high)
- Orange County – $6.42 (Record high Saturday)
- Ventura County – $6.40
- Riverside County – $6.33 (Record high)
- San Bernardino County $6.32
But that isn’t the real problem.
The real problem is with natural gas.
Thanks to the war in Ukraine, supplies of natural gas in Europe have become extremely tight, and this has pushed prices into the stratosphere.
Needless to say, this is going to greatly affect food productions in the months ahead. According to Bloomberg, over two-thirds of all fertilizer production capacity in Europe has already been shut down due to soaring natural gas costs…
Europe’s fertilizer crunch is deepening with more than two-thirds of production capacity halted by soaring gas costs, threatening farmers and consumers far beyond the region’s borders.
This is an absolutely massive story, but hardly anyone in the United States is covering it.
Global fertilizer production is going to be greatly reduced, and that is going to have very serious implications for agricultural production all over the world…
“Nitrogen plant shutdowns in Europe are not simply a problem in Europe,” she said. “Reduced supply on the scale seen this week not only raises the marginal cost of production of nitrogen fertilizers, but will also tighten the global market, putting pressure on plant nutrients’ availability in Europe and beyond.”
We’re already seeing prices elsewhere rise again. The price of the common nitrogen fertilizer urea in New Orleans rose over 20% in weekly prices Friday, the most since March, a few weeks after the war began, according to Green Markets.
I know that fertilizer may not be the most exciting topic for a lot of people, but the truth is that approximately half the global population would starve if we didn’t have any…
In fact, it’s estimated that nitrogen fertilizer now supports approximately half of the global population. In other words, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch — the pioneers of this technological breakthrough — are estimated to have enabled the lives of several billion people, who otherwise would have died prematurely, or never been born at all.
Let that paragraph sink in for a moment.
The only way we can even come close to feeding everyone on the planet is by using vast quantities of fertilizer, but now fertilizer plants all over Europe are being forced to shut down because of the price of natural gas.
As long as this global energy crisis persists, the global food crisis will also persist.
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