The Global Economy is Really Weird

Our global economy is such a peculiar thing, particularly now that it's been shaken by America's little excursion into Iran.  Here in the United States, we're grumbling about $4.00 gas at the pump, which is over a buck more than it was a month ago.  Is it worse than the oil shock of 2008?  It is not.  Is it worse than the 1973 Arab oil embargo?  Nope.  Back then, gas prices nearly tripled.  But it's unsettling.

Elsewhere in the world, across Asia in particular, it's not a question of inconvenience, but of actual shortage.  Emergency measures have been taken in dozens of countries impacted by the conflict, countries that don't have domestic stocks upon which they can rely.  There's the real risk that they'll have to stop manufacturing things in Vietnam and Korea and Singapore, driving up costs globally.  

There are other impacts on the global economy, ones that are even more peculiar.  

In particular, I've been struck by article after article ringing the alarm bells about fertilizer prices.  In order to keep industrial farm production chugging along, you need massive amounts of nitrogenous fertilizer, which is produced by the millions of tons using fossil fuels, natural gas in particular.   A significant proportion of that product then passes through the now notorious Straits of Hormuz, and that choke point is depriving farmers all around the world of something they've come to rely on.

It gets odder, though.  In most of those articles, one specific fertilizer is mentioned, over and over again.  The name of that substance:

Urea.

Yes, that urea.  It's exactly the same stuff that comes out of our bodies when we make-a-da-pee-pee.  It's in lesser concentrations when it flows out of us, of course, and not in a conveniently transportable granular form, thank God.  

If you take your very own urine, mix it with water at an eight-to-one ratio, and apply it to your garden, you'll have basically the same impact as spraying industrial urea on a crop.  It's not at the same purity levels, admittedly, and scaling it and stabilizing it for industrial farm use would require some effort.  Were we to do that, it would not be any more complex, ultimately, than using massive industrial plants to manufacture urea (using fossil fuels) and transport it across oceans (using fossil fuels).  

So in sum: an ill-conceived war in a far off place can prevent the machine of our complex global economy from producing and transporting a fertilizer, thus threatening crop yields across the planet.   And that fertilizer is a natural by-product of every human body.

Humans, as I will often note, are so weird.