We should discuss soil as much as coal (2019)
gatesnotes.com
gatesnotes.com
Then on the vein of soils, we're actually running out of arable soil. Soil erosion is a huge problem around the world and industrial farming is a large part of the problem. Farm plots are never left to fallow and replenish, all nutrients and organic matter are stripped out and replaced with liquid chemical fertilizers, that run off the fields and pollute waterways.
Not to mention, fertilizers, globally, phosphate reserves are beginning to deplete. At some point in the next 50-100 years, we'll have come close to completely running out. Industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on phosphorous.
https://foodprint.org/issues/how-industrial-agriculture-affe...
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/industrial-agricultural-polluti...
"Our food system has put the focus on short-term production and profit rather than long-term environmental sustainability. The modern agricultural system has resulted in huge increases in productivity, holding off the risk of famine in many parts of the world but, at the same time, is based on monocultures, genetically modified crops, and the intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides that undermine long-term sustainability. Food production accounts for 70 per cent of all freshwater withdrawals and 80 per cent of deforestation, while soil, the basis for global food security, is being contaminated, degraded, and eroded in many areas, resulting in long-term declines in productivity."
USCUSA isn't in love with industrial farming either (2):
"Monoculture degrades soil structure and leaves it more vulnerable to erosion, resulting in costs for soil replacement, cleanup, and lost farmland value."
Maybe major farmers aren't the most objective not most qualified group of people to assess the sustainability and [unpaid-for] externalities of their output?
(1) https://www.unccd.int/sites/default/files/documents/2017-09/...
(2) https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/hidden-costs-industrial-agr...
To be honest I don't even know how to begin sourcing the claims you are asking about. Do I need a source to tell you that over-applying fertilizer and pesticides is expensive? So much so that it is a very real risk to find yourself in a situation where the sum costs of your inputs can easily overshadow the yield of a field on a bad year? Do I need a source to say that farmers want to avoid that situation, and that those with the means invest heavily to do exactly that?
The other point, around sustainability of soil quality is one of the most common misconceptions I see on sites like this. There seems to be this idea that there's some boogeyman hiding on the 20 year horizon that we are headed towards because of our extraction from the soil. The truth is that you don't have to wait that long at all. Everyone knows a neighbor or friend of a friend that got sloppy with crop rotations, or waterway maintenance or nutrient deficiencies. Its not some unpaid externality. You don't get away with it for long – it costs you dearly when it's your own land and it only takes a few years.
It's like linking either the NRA or Everytown/Moms Demand/March For Our Lives (they rebrand a lot) "studies" on gun control.
Both have very clear objectives, and are quite happy to twist -- or sometimes outright fabricate[1]! -- data and facts.
Creationists have some of the most comprehensive bodies of work on evolution.
Doesn't mean that they are right.
The NRA is a political organization. I do not trust any data they collect, nor any studies they produce, because their job is to advocate for a specific set of policies.
Bloomberg's various anti-gun groups are political organizations. I do not trust any data they collect, nor any studies they produce, either.
For precisely the same reason.
Personally, I think that climate change is a huge problem.
But credibility is a scarce resource these days.
It's ironic because the way to build topsoil and reverse desertification (which captures carbon) is just well managed grazing.
A couple good summaries:
http://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/244566/...
https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/4472/RANGELANDS-D-13-0...
In the nonprofit sector, the term "sustainable" is a euphemism for "can keep doing it" or "financially sustainable."
If a group wants to retain it's privileges (say the banks) it can feed back 1% of its profits to buy politicians off year after year. Campaign finance spending limits just make it cheap.
Ordinary people who want to change the status quo to say, fight corruption or just simply survive the next century in the face of climate change, might expect to fight for 30 years to change the system and face the certainty of falling into despair in that time.
If anybody can find powerful allies they make it much more powerful than they can accomplish "something" even if it isn't what they set out to do.
There's no toxic fertilizer, no proprietary seeds or pesticides to sell. In fact, there's pretty much nothing that you need to raise pastured animals, other than trucks and fencing.
The market won't solve this; it's time for legislation to control the market before it wrings out everything. We live in an age now where even politicians are wringing out everything they can from a country, funneling billions to themselves and their friends, leaving the country in shambles while they retire to their private islands because hey, not their problem anymore.
They never said free/unregulated market. They just said market driven.
Markets and market forces are tools. If left unregulated they, as you pointed out, devolve into optimising for the short term and the narrow bad of monetisable effects (ie the problem of externalities).
But a regulated market is a force to be recond with, and if properly regulated, a force for a lot of good.
So you are both right. We need market solutions (as those are most effective) but within a regulated market that makes sure that market forces are pushing everyone in the direction that is good for society.
- halting deforestation as quickly and entirely as possible
- transitioning to net-neutral industrial machinery and power supplies
- preserving soil health by crop rotation etc
- increasing sequestration of atmospheric carbon and improving soil health by breeding/engineering plants for higher CO2 incorporation rates
- breeding/engineering plants for other traits like water/abiotic and pest/biotic stress resilience, reduced fertilizer and nutrient requirements, etc
- human consumption habits must transition to less energy-intensive and pollution-producing foods (typically fewer animals and more plants, although the issue is complex)
But rather than make anyone go through the rather verbose things I linked, a simple example demonstrates the point: The core of Diamond's argument is that geographical factors determined the course of world affairs between approx. 1600-1900. Not the hundreds of millennia before, nor at any point in the future, only those 300 years. That's a weird argument to make about factors that have essentially always existed and presumably always applied. Even if we accept everything uncritically, the result is a pretty terrible "grand theory" that can only justify things post-hoc.
[1] https://www.livinganthropologically.com/eric-wolf-europe-peo...
[2] https://louisproyect.org/2009/04/24/jim-blaut-on-jared-diamo...
[3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3054276
[4] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/08/03/guns-germs-an...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2vf565/myths_of... <--- Despite being reddit, it's actually credible and a good introduction to Restall's 7 myths
[6] https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2013.846490 <--- Despite being a published article, this infamous paper's commentary is on the same informal level as most of these.
- Syphilis may have a new world origin.
- The most productive crop is the potato, a crop of new world origin.
- The Inca farmed guinea pigs. These are a very viable farm animal.
- The Mapuche did not have guns, germs or steel yet, they defeated the Spanish.
- The Inca could have defeated the Spanish. They were encountered after a civil war where the nobility was purged. The Inca nobility knew how to run the empire.
Smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, whooping cough are all way scarier than syphilis.
> The most productive crop is the potato,
The thesis of Guns, Germs, and Steel was Europe's east-west orientation allowed varieties domesticated in one place to easily grow in another. If different varieties of potatoes grow differently at different latitudes (I don't know, I'm not an expert), then it doesn't really matter how productive a crop the potato is. You may also be basing this on more modern potato varieties.
> The Inca farmed guinea pigs.
Guinea pigs are pretty small. The Inca didn't have horses, only llamas. Horses were militarily very important. Look at how much trouble the Plains Indians gave the US government, relative to their numbers. They only acquired horses after Europeans came to the New World and adapted their culture and ways around them very rapidly.
> The Mapuche did not have guns, germs or steel yet, they defeated the Spanish.
After initially being defeated, acquiring guns, steel, and horses from the Spanish and then rebelling against them.[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arauco_War#Campaigns_of_Caupol...
It's worth noting that despite the east-west orientation of Eurasia, there is quite little evidence of technology and agriculture actually being shared between the Mediterranean and Chinese origins, especially if you restrict yourself to the traditional origin-of-civilization innovations such as agriculture itself, pottery, metallurgy. By contrast, the Americas show a great deal more transmission along its north-south axis, with maize (from Mesoamerica) almost completely supplanting native North American domesticants, pottery appearing to come from the Amazon rainforest, and metallurgy arriving from the Andes.
Isn't wheat itself something that spread both ways from the middle East?
Goats, sheep, pig...
Most of those come from the fertile crescent.
You mean apart from (just off the top of my head) gunpowder, paper, the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, stirrups, and pasta/noodles?
The introduction of the potato reshaped Europe and boosted European population by 25%. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xROmDsULcLE
> The Inca didn't have horses, only llamas. Horses were militarily very important.
The horse is a valuable animal given a favorable terrain. But with elevations such as the Andes, a horse is not as useful. And wheels are a similar story.
Horses were useless in the Battle of Ollantaytambo, where the Inca used terraces to their advantage, but proved very useful in the defense of Lima (a coastal city) against the forces of general Quizquiz.
> After initially being defeated, acquiring guns, steel, and horses from the Spanish and then rebelling against them.[1]
The Mapuche did not "acquire" guns or steel. They could not manufacture them, but they became aware of them and developed techniques against them.
They knew harquebuses were not waterproof, and if they would prefer to engage during rainy weather. They knew that trying to pierce through steel was ineffective, so they prefered to stun.
They also became aware of the usage of cattle and they frequently raided cattle and set structures on fire.
I think you missed the parent’s explicit point or I missed your point. The parent wasn’t saying potatoes aren’t efficient; only that they didn’t spread widely throughout the new world due to geographic factors.
As for the rest of your post, I’m really not sure what point you’re making by focusing on the Inca. Specifically what about Diamond’s thesis are you refuting? Note that I’m not partial to “Guns, Germs, and Steel”; I just want to understand the criticism better.
The Inca had a population of 10,000,000, and warehouses with surplus food that could sustain the empire for over 10 years.
The central point of his book - that there was far more geographic luck involved in European dominance than is popularly understood - holds just fine with all those points you made.
Good points though.
If you're just trying to point out that "Guns, Germs, and Steel" isn't an all inclusive guide to the rise of civilization, or that different people may have made different choices in their analysis, okay I get that too. Every book is just a single voice in the choir of a genre.
Is that what you're trying to say? That you didn't like the book?
As a historical note, anthropology originally develops in the 18th and 19th centuries as a curiosity about how the great empires (especially Britain) came to be great, and was generally intertwined with a desire to justify the rule over, enslavement of, or even extermination of lesser peoples. The notion that Western Europeans were superior to everyone else was an unquestioned axiom. It's only in the mid-20th century that this inherent racism starts to squeeze out of the field academically, but in the popular culture, it tends to still remain--and books like Guns, Germs, and Steel work against the goal of removing the racism from our humanities.
As someone who is interested in Pre-Columbian Americas, I will attest that the the history is actually quite fascinating. It really does challenge all of the traditional notions of anthropology, more so than any place in the Old World. A much better book is Charles Mann's 1491, which highlights what newer research has concluded about Pre-Columbian Americas.
That said, cherry picked or not, the conjectures they come up with (both of them), are often thought provoking and lead to additional research for me.
In relation to the reference I made to the Gate's article that crop storage is a performance enhancer for agronomic cultures, is strongly supported by 1491 as well. Mann's discussion of the development of Maize as a food crop, with its ability to be stored for long periods, gave those cultures such as the Olmec greater resiliency against drought and famine. Two conditions which ravage south Saharan Africa today.
I agree with the author, 99%.
1) Conquest was achieved with the help of local allies, sometimes in the order of hundreds of thousands.
2) A significant part of the conquest was achieved by fighting small nations one at a time rather than a unified force.
Regenerative farming restores soil as a side effect of farming more efficiently and ultimately can restore vast amounts of land with a relatively low amount of effort. There have been quite a few projects, some of which are quite large scale demonstrating this can be done. There's a bit of controversy around some of the claims but overall, there are some nice green bits of land that used to be basically desert. Whatever was done to make that so, we need more of it.
It's from Bon Appétit, where Brad goes to a ranch in Texas. Jump to 9:30 for the soil bit. It goes on for a couple of minutes.
Easy tiger, I believe they've been cancelled, in the pejorative meme sense of the term. Perhaps warranted (or not), but controversial nonetheless.
A huge chunk of our net impact on global warming and deforestation is a direct result of our food system, namely animal agriculture.
There is disagreement about just how inefficient turning an acre of corn into slabs of cow, but it should be clear that it is some fraction of the efficiency of just eating that corn as food itself.
It's true that if you feed corn to pigs most of the energy gets thermalized.
It's also true that animals can eat grass in places where the soil would dry up and blow away if you tried to grow corn.
Edit: the very first link I found puts the figure at 97% of cattle in the US coming from feedlots. https://www.thoughtco.com/feedlot-organic-and-grass-fed-beef...
There is indeed a good reason why animal food costs considerably less than human food, and why humans don't resort to eating that cheaper animal food to save money.
To me this is a bold claim. My understanding is eating plants is significantly more efficient per calorie than eating animals on a wide range of scales -- amount of water used, amount of green house gases produced, amount of land consumed. Can you please provide one common example in which a plant humans like to consume is less efficient than a domesticated animal humans like to consume?
It would be worthwhile to define efficiency here, as it can mean a lot of different things, but I'll go with the most readily available numbers that fit within the confines of your comment.
Which means calories to the amount of land consumed. Pork provides 3.5 million calories per acre. Broccoli, only two million calories per acre. For comparison, corn (again, not sweet corn) provides 15 million calories per acre. If you actually ate a corn diet, it would be very efficient, but there is a good reason why you probably don't sustain yourself on a corn diet (those who live on Doritos and sugary drinks excepted). It is not exactly great human food.
Now, that is not the greatest comparison as if you stopped eating pork, you probably wouldn't replace those calories with broccoli, but it does ultimately satisfy your question and illustrates that it is not simply a matter of all plant life always being more efficient. As you can see, corn is really efficient (and not just when it comes to land use), which provides a nice margin for the overall efficiency of animal production.
It records Pork at 672k calories per acre
https://naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/ORC00000242/PDF
EDIT: Another great quote from the PDF "The soy bean.—Soy beans lead all other crops in the production of digestible protein, exceeding corn in this respect by almost exactly 100 per cent. This crop deserves more attention in this country than it has yet received. There is no reasonable possibility of overplanting it. "
Who on earth is eating broccoli for the calories? Assuming 34 calories per 100g that would mean I would have to eat 6kg of broccoli every day to reach 2000 calories. I'm not going to exclusively eat broccoli.
Let's go with a slightly more realistic scenario: I have an absurd love for broccoli and eat 50% corn and 50% broccoli (weighted by calories). 15 million calories50% + 2 million calories50% = 8.5 million calories per acre.
As soon as someone gets less than 50% of their calories from broccoli the Pork starts to look very inefficient.
Animal meat is nowhere near as efficient as eating vegetable crops directly. It concerns me how long you've been spouting your claim with such an elementary error.
What do you mean by vegetable? It is a rather loaded term. Culinary vegetables are definitely not fed to pigs in any meaningful quantities. They are much too inefficient to even consider. If by vegetable you mean any kind of edible plant, then yes, pigs are fed mostly very-efficient-to-produce corn and soybeans.
Based on the numbers before, when you feed pigs 15 million calories of corn (1 acre), they give back 3.5 million calories of pork. If you fed pigs 2 million calories of broccoli (1 acre) then they would likely only give back 0.4 million calories of pork. But that's a really big reason why you don't normally feed pigs broccoli.
> Animal meat is nowhere near as efficient as eating vegetable crops directly
Agreed, if you are talking about the specific vegetable the animal is eating. However, vegetative efficiency varies greatly from crop to crop. If you feed animals the most efficient plants, then they can still be more efficient overall than the less efficient vegetables are alone. As before, the food the animals eat is, for all intents and purposes, not the same food that you eat. Plants that are intended to be fed to humans are generally less efficient to produce, for various reasons.
It sounds to me like he did include the crops fed to pigs in the acreage
If you took the density scale to something really absurd the pig acre efficiency would be the crop times the multiplier as that space converges eventually converges to becomes negligible and just "pig efficency * feed crop calorie/acre" effectively. Granted the effective convergence point may not be realistic without real world data but if factory farms are big enough it comes out to the same order of magnitude as brocoli about 1.5 vs 2. Of course there are a lot of other things to legitimagely object to about said arrangement but it surpringly lines up to be comparable to vegetable crops in caloric efficiency.
A more in depth answer would look at the caloric share of diets in consumption - most people don't get their bulk calories from vegetables.
> Of course there are a lot of other things to legitimagely object to about said arrangement...
The sad reality is that the density scale at pig factory farms is already well past morally objectionable territory if you are concerned at all about animal welfare. I’ve linked resources on this before and can do so again if desired, it’s horrible stuff.
Pigs are about the same as dogs in their sentience and even suitability as a pet. I don’t see how one can justify caring for a dog as a pet and also buying factory-farmed pork once they learn about it. Small farms with better living conditions are arguably more justifiable. I don’t eat animals any more, stopped for different reasons, but being aware plays a role in keeping me from going back.
Well, if you start with 15 million calories worth of corn, feed it to pigs, and you get 3.5 million calories of pork back out, the rest of the energy is exerted to keep the animal alive through its life. The second law is respected.
Meanwhile, an equivalent acreage of broccoli only provides 2 million calories, being far less efficient at converting the environment's resources into calories than corn, so it is starting from behind and never makes up for just how efficient corn really is. The second law continues to be respected.
If you fed that broccoli to pigs, you might not even get half a million calories of pork back, but that's why we don't feed pigs broccoli. Still no violation of the second law.
I am not really sure where you think the violation was meant to occur?
It was asked by a previous commenter in the thread to cherry-pick a crop that is less efficient than a cherry-picked animal. It was never meant to prove anything, only to helpfully answer the specific question asked. Trying to change the subject now does nothing to help your cause, which nobody really disagrees with in the first place. Even if you come from a heartfelt place, it is troubling that you did not take the time to read the thread before pushing your agenda. That is not the type of community HN strives to be.
So why are counting the methane from cows in isolation, while biomass is the sum of carbon released minus carbon extracted?
See "clathrate gun hypothesis", for example.
https://www.foodsource.org.uk/building-blocks/agricultural-m... claims
> it is a relatively short-lived GHG, with emissions breaking down after an average of around 10 years.
Looks like someone didn't understand what half-life means, or is being misleading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Removal_pr...
Source : https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/sites/default/files/Is%20...
It already factors in (relatively) fast breakdown, which the quoted text then attempts to double count.
Stabilization isn't some intrinsic goal.
I'm sure you can find a coal industry trade publication waving its hands just as well to shift the blame to agriculture.
> Stabilization isn't some intrinsic goal.
I think we both know this, now it is certainly easier if that's all what's needed (as opposed to some drastic reduction).
> I'm sure you can find a coal industry trade publication waving its hands just as well to shift the blame to agriculture.
Well yeah, for sure.
The fact that there's methane breaking down in the atmosphere right now does not matter at all. It's the wrong mental model.
Each kilogram of methane you emit today is as bad as 25 kilograms of carbon dioxide over the next hundred years. That's it.
The battle for global warming is going to be won or lost over the next 100 years, easily. We'll have the energy to capture our current emissions and turn back the clock by then.
>......The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon.
https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-wa...
Biomass consumes then produces CO2, which is net neutral. The concern with cows, whether it is valid at the levels it exists or not, is with methane, cows consume plants formed from atmospheric carbon dioxide but some nontrivial amount is emitted as methane which has many times more greenhouse effect.
(Not an expert, just guessing here)
That is a long-term part of it. Specifically, biomass is a lot better than fossil fuels because you are not introducing any more carbon into the long-term cycle. But it is not all about the amount of 'above ground' carbon. In the short term, what matters more is 'carbon in the atmosphere'. Here, biomass is net-zero only if either the plants being burned are re-planted (i.e. wood pellets) or the biomass would have rotted away anyway (food remains).
On the other hand, cows take up a lot of acreage that could be used to capture a lot more carbon if the fields weren't filled with just grass. Besides, the actual practice of keeping cows is quite resource intensive. And, as others have said, cows produce methane.
So everyone talks about cows?
Anyway, by bringing cows and all animals to lab grown meat and lab grown hard to grow plant based foods, it hopefully brings them to simple base ingredients.
Which means it can all be about the soil and we can concentrate way more exactly.
If only environmentalists actually wanted to push the future forward rather than destroying current things.
Skipping stupid ideas like changing what people will eat through campaigns and trying to stop home food waste or talking about cow farts.
I've noticed that changing my own diet by eliminating animal products has cut down significantly on methane production in my own gut.
My farts literally don't smell like anything at all anymore, when a small one used to clear the room with ease.
My takeaway from their argument is that eliminating cows may not be as valuable as changing how they're raised & fed.
It's true that most cattle farms are on the small-end, and have plenty of land for their cattle.
It's also true that the vast majority of cows slaughtered for meat come from just a few industrial feedlots.
Changing the way that "most" farms work might change how much methane truth A cows produce, but the vast majority of cows are truth B cows that aren't impacted by the decisions of small-time farmers.
There is not enough land on this earth to allow for free-range cattle at the rate humans consume them. The solution isn't to do it more efficiently, but to stop and do something else. Ford said people would ask for faster horses, and 100 years later we have people wanting cows that fart differently.
It's the cheeseburger you want, not another magic chemical added to the lovecraftian nightmare that is factory farming. The way to reduce the impact cows have on the environment is to reduce the number of cows bred for food.
Looking at the net carbon paints a very incomplete picture. The effect of methane is very different from CO2, you might describe methane as 30x as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2 is.
The other factor here is that agriculture drives deforestation, which releases sequestered carbon.
[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-eating-seaweed-can-help-c...
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/01/from-red-seawe...
I have some rooms I’d like to clear out.
Even if we were, net zero by 2070 (the optimistic outcome here!?) would be pointless, civilisation would be over long before then anyway.
I find all this really frustrating. It's like someone moaning they're fat and telling me about their new diet, the 1000th one this week, where they eat 20 cheese burgers a day and hope for the best. Let's get real and either do something or enjoy the ride to hell.
What are you even talking about? If you are truly worried about climate change then this hyperbole reflects poorly on your cause.
Easy for anyone not on the Indian sub-continent to say: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-3/3-4/3-4-11/figure...
Why?
Even with every worst case szenario of continous droughts and floods and loss of some islands and coastal land etc.
We could grow everything we need in (automated) greenhouses.
Only if the transistion chaos leads to all out nuclear war, but that is not really a fixed thing.
We are talking about most of bangladesh underwater and about 1 billion refugees globally in a poor scenario. Todays migration problems will pale in comparison. Many if them will die violently.
Nothing we've done so far indicates to me that we can quickly organise global rollout of hundred million automated greenhouses to people that cannot posssibly pay for them. Or to build largest damns in human history.
Even when we can afford to pay for infrastructure, in UK its taking us 40 years to build 1 line of rail, connecting two biggest cities, and its going to cost roughly as mich as the moon programm did.
Yes, that was my point.
That the current path is not shiny, I very much agree. But I just disagree to the "we are all doomed" mindset. That just reinforces the dark szenario.
We are not doomed, but yes, we have to start today acting in a serious way. And this is not really happening.
Sure, some of that happened through offshoring, but still - it's nothing to sneer at.
No doubt progress has been made, but it's a fraction of what it should be. Uk had a chance to invest in nuclear power and didn't, has poor quality housing / insulation resulting in a lot of unnecessary CO2 emissions and money wasted on heating, and has a stupid law that banned large (read: economical) wind turbines!
in the 80's Uk had a chance to invest in nuclear to become like France, almost entirely nuclear-powered. Instead the skills needed to build nuclear power-plants have been lost, and now even replacing existing few reactors is a great challenge.
The cause of fighting climate change is harmed by hyperbolic arguments like this.
It first got popular when the makers of herbicides like roundup began to advocate "no-till agriculture" which is claimed to build up carbon reserves in the soil.
We will always have claims going around that some change in soil management will sequester carbon at widely distributed sites where we can't measure it at much lower costs than not producing it to begin with (nuclear power) or sequestering it in some place where we can actually measure (inject it into a hole and measure the volume the same way you measure fuel coming out.)
That idea of spreading olvine sand on the beach is the same thing: it is so spread out you'll never prove that it worked or didn't work, but it is certain that some Enron-style trader makes money several times on it.
These sorts of scams are highly dangerous in a world where people will be attracted to "market" solutions: if there was some rule that you had to save 10 tons of carbon by replacing coal with uranium for the right to claim you saved 1 ton some other way it might be helpful.