It's to the point that there's serious discussion happening on just covering farmland with solar panels because there's so much excess of it and solar panels are getting cheap enough that it can be more profitable to put solar on farmland than to grow food on that farmland.
And you're not going to convince people to cut back on meat.
I also edited my post that people are considering putting solar panels on cropland because food is so cheap.
This general line of thinking is just flawed. You don't fix global warming by reducing consumption (of any form), you do it by changing the root source of how consumption is performed while continuing to increase consumption. i.e. solar panels and wind, not coal. There is no such thing as an low per-capita energy consumption rich country. Energy efficiency begets more energy usage, not less.
The same goes for meat consumption. If meat shortages start happening people will switch to more types of meat consumption (or meat product consumption) that come from more "manufactured" sources. Plant-based meat and grown meat should be going after the areas where they can replace inputs by being a cheaper product. For example, almost no one uses leather now because leather substitutes are cheaper and good enough.
> If meat shortages start happening
You really think the U.S populace would just be okay with this?
The opposite is probably true too: if food prices went up, all of a sudden health insurance companies and landlords can lower their prices just enough to keep their customers.
I'm sure the voters would still freak the f out though.
This is one of those fundamental blindingly obvious points that persistently gets forgotten in debates about supposedly reducing greenhouse problems and perceived environmental waste. I've tried to explain similar in many debates and contexts, but a curiously irrational and very pervasive mentality of punitively people to go against essentially fundamental human acquisition instincts persists.
The idea that these "marginal" spaces which exist right beside where people live, eat and work cannot be used for food production is a little silly. It used to be quite common before it was cheap to have food airlifted from 10000km away. Alternately, the "wild yard" thing provides a lot of habitat for innumerable species and helps support the bird population.
However only 1-2% of global CO2 output is from the fertilizer production industry. Oil use is never going to go away until it is truly gone or too expensive to pump out of the ground. As long as it's cheaper to use fossil fuels for chemical input stock companies elsewhere in the world from where regulations are will do so and that cheaper product will take over the market. It becomes a whack-a-mole of banning products further and further down the industrial pipeline to the point there's no way you can ban products made with fossil fuels.
The way out of this is to make competing methods cheaper. And if electricity gets cheap enough, then electrolysis sourced hydrogen becomes cheaper than fossil fuel sourced hydrogen and then your haber-bosch process will be carbon neutral.
If we burn all of the fossil fuels available to us then we have are going to have a huge problem growing crops with the resultant climate change.
But more expensive food can and has provoked severe world-wide crisis. So that's what we need the second green revolution for -- to handle increasing demand without raising prices.
You're not going to reduce food costs with vertical farming, but radical approaches to meat and meat substitutes certainly can.
The new New Deal, the one technically feasible is the old Distributism.
I can't say if it will be enough even for the current world population, but it's certainly much less resource intensive and much more efficient than the dense model needed by the nazi-2030's Agenda and it's the best we can do so far.
Production right now is completely limited by oversaturated demand. Which is true of so much stuff right now.
But the modern trends around the world is the exact opposite.
mitchbob•7mo ago