One problem is that economic growth has a big correlation with carbon emissions. https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/

Environmental decoupling is the notion that we can have growth and preserve nature. For now is just a myth

edit:typos

"Unless the people benefit, economic growth is a subsidy for the rich."

—Richard Falk, “Post-Mubarak Revolutionary Chances,” Al Jazeera, 22 Feb. 2011

We could avoid this number by investing in soil preservation, nitrogen fixing plants, reduce meat consumption, even in concepts like humanure.

None of these would produce as much food per area and time. Reducing total calories required by eating less meat is a different argument.

Didn't said that we can substitute industrial ammonia but it could definitely reduce it's use. Changing the way we eat it's definitely an opportunity to reduce major sources of c02 emissions.

There are ethical ways to implement it for instance give more education to women [1]. Consuming less meat should be a priority for us wealthy countries. Overpopulation is a problem but carbon inequality is much worse [2]:

" . The richest 10% of the world’s population (c.630 million people) were responsible for 52% of the cumulative carbon emissions – depleting the global carbon budget by nearly a third (31%) in those 25 years alone (see Figure 1); • The poorest 50% (c.3.1 billion people) were responsible for just 7% of cumulative emissions, and used just 4% of the available carbon budget (see Figure 1); • The richest 1% (c.63 million people) alone were responsible for 15% of cumulative emissions, and 9% of the carbon budget – twice as much as the poorest half of the world’s population (see Figure 1); • The richest 5% (c.315 million people) were responsible for over a third (37%) of the total growth in emissions (see Figure 2), while the total growth in emissions of the richest 1% was three times that of the poorest 50% "

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3073853/ [2] https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...

The story of Fritz Haber first wife is very sad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Immerwahr

>It’s a common fallacy of tech people to think that all problems are of a technical nature, and that if we could just have the right technology they would go away and we would be living in a utopia. The fact is, the problems are with human behavior and any technology created will serve to further that behavior.

I agree with you. This can be applied to the solutions we are looking to solve climate change.

Urea comes from the Harber process [1] Basically most of food fertilizer depends on fossil fuels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

In Portugal is "Sociedade do Cansaço" which translates to "fatigue society"

I agree although I would add that many of the creative jobs although technically challenging have useless or even destructive goals. Just look at the attention economy and the surveillance industry. We try not to contemplate this fact by occupying our lives to the limit and by focusing on the "how" instead of the "why". We engineers are probably the ones who do this the most.

Funny by coincidence I bought this book just a few hours ago :)

Also we could redistribute the tax as a sort of UBI. This way not only product that pollute would be more expensive, people would have the ability to say no to crappy jobs.