Every winter, Delhi and much of the Indo-Gangetic Plain disappear beneath a toxic haze. We know to blame cars, factories, construction, weather and geography. But there is an invisible contributor: nitrogen. In The Nitrogen Bomb, journalist Jacob Koshy reveals how the air’s most abundant gas that has sustained human civilization has also created an environmental crisis hiding in plain sight. Nitrogen changes form and
feeds us all, but it also pollutes our rivers and groundwater, damages ecosystems, fills our lungs with particulate matter and abets global warming.
From being the mysterious source of plant nourishment since the dawn of agriculture and the invention of the Haber–Bosch process for making synthetic fertilizer to the Green Revolution, fertilizer subsidies, minimum support price (MSP) politics, the farm laws, the latest nano-urea push and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, nitrogen occupies an important place in the world. Koshy follows nitrogen through the laboratories, farms, factories and political battles that have shaped modern India and the world, explaining a global crisis that we have not yet begun to reckon with.
Part science, part history and part political investigation, The Nitrogen Bomb tells a startling story about the element that arrives as manna and settles as smog.