Its easy to forget, or never be told, that nitrogen fertilizer is necessary to keep 8 billion humanoids alive on earth through farming, there is just one teensy tiny, giant gaping issue with that.
The earth doesnt produce enough usable, or "fixed" nitrogen on its own.
Naturally speaking its produced by lightning breaking bonds of nitrogen and reacting it with oxygen in the atmosphere, producing nitric acid, raining down and fertilizing soil. Its also produced by soil microbes that produce ammonia. Neither source is constant or large enough to stand upbto all the farming necessary to keep our massive population alive.
So unfortunately, for decades, we've needed fossil fuels, which, through the Haber-Bosch process, allows us to produce ammonia as a byproduct.
Yes, we cannot phase out fossil fuels without phasing out the majority of our agriculture.
HOWEVER, there are those whobhave developed a way to nitrogen fix with just electricity that can be scaled up, and a youtuber i rather like made his own simple nitrogen fixing using an arc in a jar. Its not super efficient but its reliable and constant. Ahd when one mixes nitric acid with calcium carbonate, like limestone, eggshells etc you get calcium nitrate, the main nutrient powder in my hydroponics.
So im going to endeavor to make my own nitric acid from scratch. And if fossil fuels get phased out without us replacing haber-bosch, we may need all know how to do this~