More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next

by Andrew McAfee

Haber won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1918 for synthesizing ammonia. Bosch and his colleague Friedrich Bergius won theirs in 1931 for “chemical high pressure methods.” Today, the Haber-Bosch process for producing fertilizer is so fundamental to human enterprise that, according to the energy analyst and author Ramez Naam, it uses about 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy. Is that energy well spent? Absolutely. Vaclav Smil, a prodigious scholar of humanity’s relationship with our planet, estimates that “the prevailing diets of 45 percent of the world’s population” depend on the Haber-Bosch process. Author Charles Mann writes, “More than three billion men, women, and children—an incomprehensively vast cloud of dreams, fears, and explorations—owe their existence to two early-twentieth-century German chemists.”