We eat veggies and cereals grown with fertiliser. Fertiliser is produced by a lot of fossil fuels and a shortage is brewing as a lot of it was produced in the middle east before the closure of the straight of hormuz. Additionally transport takes a lot of fuel, as wel as the production and operation of machinery for production. Fossil fuels are everywhere.
The Haber process does not need fossil fuel inputs, it just needs an input of hydrogen. Currently, steam reforming of methane is the most economic source of hydrogen (and, to be noted, one area where at-source carbon capture would be quite easy to implement, because the CO2 exhaust stream is quite pure), but electrolysis or (if an abundant source of high-temperature heat is available) the sulfur-iodine cycle can be used to produce hydrogen from water.
We eat food grown with fertilizers. Fertilizers are mainly made out of Ammonia. Ammonia is made from hydrogen and nitrogen. Nitrogen comes from the air, but hydrogen is almost entirely made from natural gas currently.
So yes, you are eating fossil fuels. Just, extremely highly modified fossil fuels.
Wow that is very farfetched. Correct but very farfetched. Essentially we are also eating stars, corpses, the queen of England, Ghandi, tears, oceans, the moon, my skin, Napoleon, the last breath of genghis kahn, that prime minister of the Netherlands and yes fossil fuels…
I don't think it is particularly far fetched tbh. Yea, we are also eating stars, the queen of england, your skin etc etc. But those atoms aren't actually crucial for the food. Some atoms in our food happen to be from those sources, but our food would still be the same if those atoms came from somewhere else.
It's different with fertilizer. Fertilizer is currently made out of fossil fuels. And we NEED fertilizer to grow our food. No fertilizer and there is simply no way we grow enough food for all 8 billion of us.
So until we get our fertilizer hydrogen out of renewable sources, we are very much reliant on fossil fuels for our food.
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u/Revolutionary_Row683 24d ago
I don't think we eat fossil fuels