[ergwwrt]

Why do we celebrate Liebig and his dark lord successor Haber-Bosch? We do get more nitrogen but at the cost of assimilation failure back in the environment. Non-assimilated nitrogen and its volatile compounds create just the conditions for a pandemic virus to develop..

[mrfusion]

I guess go convince four billion they should never have been born because we need more nitrogen assimilation ...

[stickfigure]

Sure, we could do a rousing rendition of Monty Python's "Every Sperm Is Sacred". There's a theoretically infinite number of people who aren't being born.

On the other hand, lots of people dying of Malthusian starvation would not have been pretty.

There's probably some reasonable middle ground here.

[andrekandre]

> Non-assimilated nitrogen and its volatile compounds create just the conditions for a pandemic virus to develop..

(genuinely curious) how so?

[carapace]

Population.

Haber-Bosch converts oil into people.

The "conditions for a pandemic" are just modern global society.

(The jury is out, if over-population causes an environmental crash that kills billions, will it all have been worth it? We are victims of our own success, and have a needle to thread.)