>>18782
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.
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.
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.
This is an absolutely massive story, but hardly anyone in the United States is covering it.
“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.
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…
Meanwhile, the worst multi-year megadrought in 1,200 years continues to absolutely ravage agricultural production in the western half of the United States.
“I’m standing in the middle of a cornfield that, if this was a normal year or in other words, if the corn was growing the way it was supposed to be, you wouldn’t even really be able to see me right now,” FOX Business’ Connell McShane reported from Wakefield, Nebraska. “It would be way up above my head. But now I look at this, maybe knee-high at best.”
McShane visited field after field in Wayne County and found the same short stalks with very sparse ears. Over 99% of that county is in exceptional drought.
On the west coast, we are being warned that production of tomatoes, garlic and onions will be very disappointing this year due to the drought. As a result, prices are going to go much higher in 2023.
https://archive.ph/V0SO2
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/the-era-of-cheap-food-and-cheap-gasoline-is-over/
