A staggering amount of California's water is used for alfalfa, which gets shipped to China to feed cows. In essence, we are allowing certain farmers to sell CA's water to China.
https://energyskeptic.com/2021/aquifer-decline-in-california...
https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/c...
https://revealnews.org/article/9-sobering-facts-about-califo...
There's no answer except functioning government and the general eradication of solipsistic liberal/libertarian fantasies, and that's never going to happen.
No, but it will partially compensate for impacted communities' subsequent economic precarity.
Punishing the perpetrators won’t put the water back in the same way punishing a murderer won’t bring the victim back. We don’t punish to make right. We punish to deter.
2) I try to live in such a way that I'm not a wasteful glutton who misuses communal resources.
Punishment doesn't work in this context, since it's not a repeated game. Murder is punished because everyone has the chance to do murder - it's a "repeated" game. Destroying the environment isn't.
If in the future it's decided that I made my money unethically and it needs to be redistributed, I guess I'm fine with that so long as the same standard is applied to everyone's money. I think it'll be close to a great reset, but whatever. I'm not thrilled by the idea, but it might have to happen.
Moreover the spoils of doing it once make it easier to do so again.
What possible reason is there not to take those spoils and return them to the commons from whence they were stolen?
Punishment is not a sustainable measure, it only fosters more bad motives, and rules used to justify the punishment inform malicious actors on how to not get caught (a.k.a. how to follow the letter but not the spirit).
To address the root cause, work out why bad motives exist (what compels people to violate the spirit in the first place) and eliminate those.
If the powerful bear consequences when something bad happens regardless of fault, then power will be wielded to prevent those outcomes rather than enact them. Anyone who does not wish to take that risk can dispose of their power.
However, there’s another big concept, and that is “do not fire an employee who just learned a big and expensive, to you, lesson”. Punishing people simply because they failed, especially in a complex environment with slow onboarding process, is unproductive.
Furthermore, it can sow fear, resentment and distrust. Take China, where a local official risks unpredictable punishment, up to losing their job (or worse), if they fail—such as by allowing COVID cases to happen in their locality. Unfortunately, the side-effect of it is that officials are incentivized to lie up, meaning the government may think the country is COVID-free and be unable to make informed decisions.
This is also why I think COVID lab leak event, if confirmed, should not lead to any repercussions for China in particular. Fear of said repercussions seems likely half of the reason the research is being obscured in the first place, as a result preventing the global community from making informed decisions.
So, if you don’t want such shenanigans to take place in your government (I wouldn’t), you have to agree that whichever human being you elected should be able to make mistakes to learn from them, and thus another measure of their performance should be used.
For example, repeat trend of malicious intent supported by concrete evidence could be a good one.
(And to be make things even trickier, they do not deserve the whole credit in case of any success either. The success or failure of a measure to large extent depends on the whole country and the larger context it exists in. There are situations where one can only win, and situations where losing the least is the best outcome.)
Incentives should be aligned, but I don’t think punishment is the instrument for that.
No state actor (other than arguably putin, but I'd characterise his power as individual and not derived from his role as a government agent) is as powerful as eg. rupert murdoch or peter thiel individually, and in aggregate (and in spite of not working together) the 0.01% are vastly more powerful than any state.
If 10% of the fortune 500 were confiscated and redistributed equally every time there's a pandemic or 5% of the amazon is burnt down or there is an unchecked oil spill, then the wealthy would ensure these things do not happen.
I suppose the main thing that makes rich powerful is the ability to influence government, which is only because power converts to money. If elected officials could not be influenced by rich malicious actors, those actors would lose much leverage.
The second thing is the ability to use money to secure popular support, which can hardly be eliminated unless people stop putting personal gain above true value… which is realistic in post-scarcity.
Yes! Enthusiastically, with vigor!
California is a very wealthy state and giving up some of these agricultural businesses to other states and maybe even to our poorer southern neighbors will be an overall good thing with minimal loss in tax revenues. These lands should be used to grow trees instead.
Cheap electricity will result in cheap desalination.
The sky is not falling.
madagascar has terrible famine right now, becauae there is no rain. In Syria, all crops that are not irigated have died.
current irrigation water is free. You cant use water from desalination, because it takes many tons of water to grow one kilo of food, and tens of tons of water to grow a kilo of beef. that would drive up prices more than 10x, which menas famine.
you people just don't understand the shitstirm that's coming one the crops fail on two important crop producing nations simultaneously
Since FDR came into office in 1933 the US federal government has actively been dealing with a serious food problem: tremendous agricultural surpluses.
Virtually every wealthy country, even Japan, has the same problem: too many farmers and too much food.
"We are running out! The sky is falling!" Hey, if that's what you want to yell and scream, that's your prerogative. But, as the adage goes, "Facts are stubborn things."
In terms of crop value, California is the largest agricultural producer in the USA. I'm almost certain if California were to produce zero food whatsoever, the USA could still easily produce massive agricultural surpluses.
Go read Frances Moore Lappé’s infamous "Diet for a Small Planet" which was a very famous bestselling book in 1971. It has been almost 100% debunked as inane wishful thinking.
She claimed meat production had a negative environmental impact, was wasteful, and contributed to global food scarcity. Sure, just like factories can pump rivers full of pollution, if not properly regulated, cattle producers will tend to do the same thing. The answer is good laws and proper enforcement: not requiring people to eat tofu as a main course for dinner.
Frances Moore Lappé was an unhinged "tree hugger." Don't be like her. Use your head: study the history, and look at the technology.
While you are at it, imagine wind turbines spinning in the empty wastelands of the American West, pumping water from Canada to California.
Kansas and Nebraska were part of what was known as the "Great American Desert." But then some engineers figured out how to pump water from what is now the "dying" Ogallala aquifer.
We aren't living in caves, my man, trying to fight off lions and bears with spears.
Doomers. Sheesh. You guys disgust me. Go spread your falsehoods elsewhere.
Gluttony is the cardinal sin more to blame.
Whether or not you believe the religion whose followers came up with this list, it does provide a handy way to categorize human behavior.
Technically, from what I understand, it's enough to limit alfaalfa in arid climates. The location of cow farms does not matter much after that, in terms of water usage.
What's also good is that enforcing alfaalfa regional restrictions is super easy - a satellite photo would be enough to spot a field, and there's not enough margin to have any organized crime to fight back.
However, cows have the unique ability to turn grass into protein, so if all an area can grow is grass, cows are a great way to get calories out of it. Properly allowed to graze freely, cows can be a net improvement on a particular ecology as a carbon sink (manure is an improvement to the soil), but shipping the harvested grass to feedlots is indeed an ecological disaster.
If you prefer meat then chicken is worse than eating corn but still much better than cows. We eat beef because it’s delicious and that’s it’s only advantage at scale.
People like to shit on animal farms and say that more calories could be grown with less resources with plants. That's true, but the calorie count isn't the only factor to consider. Humans need a diverse diet.
That said, with wealth comes the desire to increase meat consumption in just about every culture. We have plenty of food and land to waste a large percentage of them on cattle, the only issue is the externalities of doing so.
No, it does not.
In this context, 'grow' means 'in a usable fashion'.
Rocky, hilly soil isn't tillable, is impossible to harvest en mass, and results in poor outcomes. It's almost like you've never farmed, and are making statements based upon theory, instead of real world usage cases.
Whatever agenda you have, please stop trying to claim that all soil is good for corn.
Even beyond that, there are places corn cannot grow. Period. Ever. For example, in many parts of Canada, the season is too short for corn to mature!
Hay and other such things grow there, and such land is good for cattle too.
Anyway, preparing an area for cultivation is a one time cost. People actually grow crops in areas you consider impossible because someone already put the effort possibly thousands of years ago even if it’s not currently economically viable.
Terraces also work in hilly areas, though building them is expensive. Removing stones from fields is the origin of field stone houses and quite a few stone fences at property lines. The degree of effort required can be huge but at the extreme end people plant orchards in areas that are covered in boulders.
For places where none of that effort is worth it, lumber is still a viable crop as long as it gets enough rain.
Yes, you can grow crops anywhere, on the moon, in shipping containers, in your basement, and yes on terraces and if you spare no expense to change the land.
But all of that is silly and absurd, and not part of the context of this discussion. Some of it just is not possible in any sane fashion.
Some of the land you think is just "move a few rocks and it's fine, like people used to do" is not even remotely accurate or true. We're talking about hilly, rocky land, with 1" of topsoil (Canadian Shield), with poor soil. This land is what you throw a goat or cattle at. It's not something you import billions of dollars of topsoil per 100 acres, to make usable.
I honestly don't get your argument here.
I am explicitly not saying significant investment is economically viable, we have a vast surplus of farmland.
That said, historically people would improve land because they had a labor surplus and few options for long term investments. We are living in a world where thousands of years of such decisions has made some real changes to various landscapes. Much of Asia is covered in terraces because they preferred really flat areas for rice fields and had a huge labor surplus. That’s a legacy I think worth remembering rather than the focus on who was in charge over the course of history.
As to adding topsoil that’s closer to 10 million per 100 acres. Dirt’s very cheap in bulk though transportation long distances isn’t. Nowhere near viable when farmland is cheap and the Canadian Shield is that cold. But orders of magnitude better than you where suggesting.
Unless you do crazy things, there is more land suitable for grazing only, than not.
And doing crazy things makes zero sense in the context of this conversation, which was about how cattle are all some land is good for.
Your argument seems to boil down to "well, we could literally move mountains of dirt, or perform massive terraforming projects on useless soil!," well of course, and so what.
It doesn't make you correct, because this sort of discussion is senseless in the context we were discussing.
Take the soil example, yes it would be billions per 100 acres, because on that scale (the Canadian shield) you'd either have to desoil massive amounts of usable farmless, or start grinding rock and creating new topsoil from that... so current market prices are meaningless!
And if you were going to do that, why not just proclaim that the sahara is perfect farmland too, but of course you'd have to dig irrigation ditches, setup trillion dollar desalination plants, but hey I'm sure you'd chime in too, when someone says desert sand isn't good cropland too?!?!?
No buddy, desert isn't good for growing corn.
(I can hear you... But! But, you only have to...)
Your 50% benchmark in terms of land is really not a function of each individual acre of land on it’s own.
The southwest as a whole needs vastly more irrigation than is available, but which specific bit of land becomes farmland and which but is used to graze cattle is very arbitrary. The parts that do grow crops generally have more to do with water rights and which bits are federal land than the actual land it’s self.
Conversely a lot of US farmland is more sustainable for grazing, but the giant aquifer is a temporary solution.
Take the soil example, yes it would be billions per 100 acres, because on that scale (the Canadian shield) you'd either have to desoil massive amounts of usable farmless, or start grinding rock and creating new topsoil from that... so current market prices are meaningless!
Individual large river delta’s contain hundreds of cubic miles of soil. It’s not a limitless supply, but there is plenty of soil though not topsoil to cover 3 million square miles of the Canadian Shield.
Theres about 30 grams protein in 1000 calories of corn. There's about 90 grams in 1000 calories beef. This is because cows are very good at extracting protein.
Also, I can just let cows graze on Texas praire. I can't necessarily do that with corn.
Doesn't that mean "choose different plants" would be the more efficient / better approach there?
https://www.nutritionix.com/food/wheat/100g
Wheat 15g of protein per 100g or 329 calories. That’s 114g on a 2,500 calorie diet.
ruminants are able to digest cellulose, it's basically what they have extra stomachs for, so they can have different chemistries that are livable for the cellulose digesting bacteria
And of course it’s a moot discussion. Directly eating the seeds is vastly more efficient than cattle eating both especially when their primarily eating seeds in the US.
There is something to be said about growing animal feed on arable land to feed to animals directly although that could be used to make food that humans can digest directly instead. But you still need bio-available protein, and plants do really badly on that. If you actual compare meat to plant matter on what is actually digested and absorbed by humans to get the equivalent nutrition, you'll find that plants actually do not perform that well beyond carbs and some micro-nutrients on an efficiency basis. You still need fat, protein and the other micro-nutrients.
Animals also convert indigestible agricultural waste products from plant growing into something humans can use, meat.
The actual percentage breakdown is for land completely dependent on irrigation and land preparation. It’s not cost effective to use huge tracts of land for crops because we have such excess farmland, but maximum production would involve zero animals whatsoever.
Further, actual productivity on marginal or untended land is by definition very low. Cattle grazing on scrub that gets minimal rainfall is very expensive both in terms of effort and the energy expended by cattle to extract what little food is available while generally leading to desertification.
In terms of converting waste products, such organic material has a wide range of uses including feeding livestock. You could for example burn it for energy so calling it a waste product is very misleading.
And as it turns out, isocaloric (compared to meat) plant based protein sources offer enough protein for basically everybody.
The carbon released by the cows "emissions" is part of a carbon cycle, first captured by the grass and then released by bacteria in the cow's gut. The more grass, the more cows, the more carbon is hanging out somewhere other than the atmosphere.
https://theconversation.com/historical-photo-of-mountain-of-...
There were a lot of bisons in the americas, estimated 60 millions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison
"With a population in excess of 60 million in the late 18th century, the species was down to just 541 animals by 1889."
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2022/01-31-2022.php
"There were 91.9 million head of cattle and calves on U.S. farms as of Jan. 1, 2022"
Speaking of which: Hop Over to Kangaroo Meat: The More Sustainable Choice https://biodiversityconservationblog.wordpress.com/2013/05/1...
I know you mentioned cows, but do some research on factory farmed pigs. They're legal toxic waste sights. We need to rethink our (Western) approach to diet.
This isn't a pro-animal talking point. It's a pro-humam and pro-ecology fact.
Its the same as if i go and rip apart public street furniture and sell them as metal scrap for profit.
There's still plenty of boosters who will use fallacious arguments defending it that were just as tired hundreds of years ago.
Some people let their aspirations of greed blind them from what's clearly happening
In long term, we should understand and alleviate the origin of that chronic desire to win while others lose—however, replacing capitalism with X, depending on the degree of autocracy in X, may just obscure them instead, which seems counter to that goal.
Let's take Natchez, Mississippi. In 1850, half of America's millionaires lived there. It was the wealthiest city in the country because we richly rewarded and encouraged human enslavement.
The brightest minds had very lucrative careers in slave economics and slave labor studies and there was lots of focus on optimizing human enslavement for maximum profit.
It was the silicon valley of the 19th century and you'd have a bright and successful career if you pursued working in the slavery industry. Slave technology, slave accounting, slave management - you don't even need to directly interact, you can just make the tools.
In fact speaking of silicon valley let's talk about the first rush of San Francisco. It wasn't gold, it was whale oil in the 1830s-1850s. San Francisco was the perhaps the largest whaling port in the world as people were highly encouraged through aggressive economic incentives to go and wipe out every species of whale off the planet. And they were well on their way to success when cheaper substitutes, by pure chance, became available.
This is the problem. There's nothing "natural" about these things - they are human created systems that we have constantly redefined and had to because the base driving force is one of negligent exploitation and extraction.
We have other systems, driven by hate and violence for example, such as racism and war. We don't make peace with richly rewarding and encouraging them. We instead seek to minimize these human tendencies. We don't look kindly on war profiteers or race-baiting crowd agitators.
These things existing are as inevitable as any other human behavior, there's an angel and devil inside all of us, what we choose to reward and structure things around is a choice we can make.
We can do better than total war, we can do better than Jim Crow, and we can do better than cooking the planet with capitalism. We have to. There's no choice.
Yes, in a free society with capitalism people have more opportunities to behave this way. Yes, that’s why regulation is needed (as a stop-gap measure, not root cause treatment).
While you don’t seem to be suggesting an alternative to capitalism for some reason, I’m reasonably sure that in any of them the society would suffer from the same issues, just less visible or more localised to ruling elites (which, by the way, doesn’t mean the scale of exploitation itself would be smaller).
As abolition of slavery showed, ethical standards are evolving—and freedom is necessary for this evolution. Without freedom you are treated as an ignorant child, with decisions made for you. Made by humans who are just as fallible, with imperfect ethics, power-hungry and insecure, happy to use their positions of authority to benefit themselves, whom you’d be deemed not wise enough to elect.
capitalism is a term so vague its meaningless in a policy discussion
Neoliberalism, on the other hand, is spesifically responsible for many of the problems we are facing now.
the fact that people worship it is also a problem, we have media hosts calling large scale landlord "weath creators"
for some reason people who make ground breaking discoveries are not called wealth creators and do not become billionaires.
you have to consider who the system rewards, and who the system protects.
shumpeterianism, for exanole, is a spesific alternative that rewards those that create new technologies and where government has an active role in shaping a sustainable industrial strategy
But I also disagree with you. “The system” should not reward anyone. People create value, and people reward those who they think provide value by becoming their customers or by investing into their business.
Problems arise when this basic mechanic is abused: e.g., market participants lie about the value they create, including through concealment of side-effects (let’s drain the aquifers or dump PFAS into the river and pretend we didn’t know), use other measures than actual value when investing (line goes up so who cares if business is unethical or its business model is fundamentally flawed), etc.
Which, again, ultimately comes down to humans trying to secure themselves at the expense of others and the environment.
Could be feudalism, could be technocracy, could be replacing all limited companies with coops, could be getting rid of publically traded companies and allowing only partnerships.
> But I also disagree with you. “The system” should not reward anyone. People create value, and people reward those who they think provide value by becoming their customers or by investing into their business.
This is exactly the fantasy-land neoliberalism that got us in the shit to begin with.
It anwers none of the important questions of the day - what can be owned as intellectual property, who does it belong to, how long does it last, why is it that academic reseach is paid for by the tax payer but belong to private journals, why is it that when a company accuses someone of theft that the police investigates it at no cost to the company, but if you accuse the company of breaking the law you have to file a lawsuit at your expence.
Can you claim compensation when a company sells you a product that is 'environmentally friendly' but turns out they lied? What law breaking puts you in jail, and what law breaking just looses you money. What law breaking is prosecuted by the sate, and what lawbreaking is prosecuted in civil court by claimants.
Why is it that stock buybacks were illegal before 1982? Should they be illegal?
All of that is 'the system' and absolutely does determine who are the winners and losers.
All of your questions basically reduce to “what to do if people abuse this mechanic by disguising bad stuff as good, violating trust, hurting the environment, or such?”
Well, you can either alleviate the symptom or treat the cause.
The only way of treating the cause is working on deep-seated insecurities and psychological trauma that make humans feel motivated to secure themselves at the expense of others and the environment-to abuse this mechanic or facilitate its abuse.
The measures that prevent the abuse by restricting the agency of market participants only alleviate symptoms.
I don’t know what exactly you mean by “system”. If you are saying the current measures are insufficient, I don’t argue, they could (should) be improved. Still, any set of these measures is never the end in itself, as it doesn’t treat the root cause.
If you think restricting agency is the ultimate solution, then we will have to agree to strongly disagree on fundamentals.
As an analogy and an extreme example, pretend there is an evolutionary biologist among a group that believes in creationism.
The creationist has a very simple narrative, only takes a few words. The evolutionary biologist has a much bigger task at hand. They're starting not from an ideology but from a discipline of analysis.
That's the struggle. The neoliberal models are extremely simple to explain, they are taught to elementary school children who all understand the logic of it.
But the anthropologists and economic historians of the world have a different story to tell and they cannot be similarly summarized.
They require careful study and reflection like learning any type of discipline, such as a new programming paradigm or the implications of a new kind of data structure.
And that's my true takeaway here, the answers to your questions are as deep and rich as any other modern school of thought and like any other accurate depiction of reality, say modern physics, chemistry, or biology, there's simply no way to stuff it into 1-2 minutes of casual reading on a social news site.
I guess that's it actually. Instead of starting from an ideology we start from a discipline of analysis. Any summary I can give here will only be totalling ideology, which is what we need to get away from. People presume that any critique of the system have an alternative sweeping simplistic all-encompassing dogmatic ideology.
So this is a bad form for that kind of learning.
---
As an aside that's a major breakthrough in a problem I've been struggling with for over a decade. "this is a bad form for that kind of learning." I'm going to print that out to remember it.
You’d be amazed how far the medium of written conversation can get you. Pretty involved concepts in the sciences you mention had been explained and discussed here before.
> People presume that any critique of the system have an alternative sweeping simplistic all-encompassing dogmatic ideology.
You have so far not made an attempt to even hint at an alternative, after so many words.
Outlawing alfalfa growth in California from allocated water would not conflict with anybody's "rights". They can grow something else there that uses less water. Or (and this is something being done, in the Sacramento River delta) flood the land and collect carbon credits for sinking swamp vegetation.
Much of the farmland in the Sacramento River delta is well below river and, indeed, sea level, some over 20 feet below, behind dikes (called there "levees") which threaten to collapse in the next big earthquake, pulling in a toxic load of salt water from the bay. (This has happened more than once; the dikes are not in better shape today.) Flooding fields gradually is hoped to lead to a sustainable future for the river. Erstwhile farmers could also float solar panels and collect more revenue. Raise freshwater fish and shrimp, besides.
California agriculture north of Bakersfield does not use up quite so much water as allocation seems to indicate; the water evaporates and is blown to the Sierra Nevada mountains where much of it precipitates, and ends up in rivers again.
if there is no rain, they have no property. the idea that you can own something beyong laws of physics is amazing. it's like owning thoughts and ideas