Beyond the usual concern that the total or partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz drives up the price of the stuff we put in our cars, there is a concern only slowly bubbling to public consciousness -- that it will also drive up the cost of fertilizer and accordingly of food. The traditional route for the manufacture of fertilizer is through what chemists call the Haber-Bosch process, which makes ammonia, which can be used as a fertilizer in itself or can be combined with other stuff for more elaborate fertilizers. There has been a lot of talk about moving beyond Haber-Bosch, finding alternative ways of making ammonia and growing the world's food, in part precisely because natural gas is an input, and relatedly because CO₂ is a major byproduct of that process. A move toward alternative processes is a move toward a low or net zero carbon emissions world. It is certainly possible that even a partial blockage of Hormuz will kick-start the implementation of alternatives...
More on the novel, Andrew's Brain , by Doctorow. We discover soon after the passage I quoted yesterday that the narrative voice saying "I can tell you about my friend, Andrew" is himself Andrew. He has a proclivity for speaking of himself, and I submit a proclivity for seeing himself, in the third person. This discovery has weight in the unfolding of the not-especially-narrative tale. For one of the key themes here is the relation of mind to brain, of a self to its physical stratum. And one might say that to the extent we reduce self to brain, we are trying to escape from the responsibilities of a first person point of view, into a world in which there is no subject, there is only the third person. The first chapter is the longest in the book, going 50 pages. That is one-quarter the length of the book though there are eleven chapters. That is not remarkable -- the long first chapter feels like leisurely scene setting. Anyway: as the second chapter opens we ...