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Comment by jononomo | Hacker News Reader

In my view, we should use nuclear power to desalinate seawater at scale, turn the Sahara Desert into a massive prairie, and raise a billion cattle there to help feed the world. We really need to move away from agriculture for environmental reasons, and red meat is also the most nutritious food humans can consume. We should also do the same thing in the Australian desert.

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A nonsensical project like this wouldn't be necessary if people didn't religiously stick to their unsustainable, meat based diet.

Perhaps not as nonsensical as you think, considering the Sahara used to be a much more fertile and inviting place. The desertification started around the same time humans started practising intensive agriculture. Coincidence? Maybe, but I have a strong hunch that humans are largely responsible for the way the Sahara looks today.

Is land availability really the problem we're dealing with though? There is plenty of space, but one issue is that we're using it for direct and indirect production of meat. Switch to vegetarian diets and all of a sudden that space, energy and water can be used to grow food directly, no? Parent was talking about a mega project which this would absolutely also be as well, it just sounds like a lot less work on the ground, but more work in people's heads.

The land required for industrial non-meat food production has a lot stricter requirements then grasslands. Just replacing them is not possible. In practice a lot of agricultural land is coming from cleared forests and leaves behind eroded soil which is a giant problem. You can keep cattle (or Bisons it seems) on those. With the added benefit of them actually rebuilding the topsoil.

We might actually need something like this.

edit: Then again, bisons are fucking scary. There is a great story i read a while back about the huge starting advantage Europe had vs Africa and America when it came to easy to domesticate animals. Good luck trying to survive riding a Zebra or hunting a Buffalo.

On a sidenote, there is an Island in Africa created by a river which trapped a bunch of Lions and Buffalo. Lions had to evolve to incredible dimensions to hunt successful. Search for Okavango Delta

Zebra can be tamed, but older ones bite.

Um... Methane emissions?

Alternatively a diet that's 10% meat is optimal for health and also sustainable - win win

It turns out deserts are actually a huge CO2 sink. Was surprised to learn about this as well

Fact or factoid? Should we have more des(s)erts?

What'd be bigger sink, better alternative for the health of the planet ... a desert or aforested desert?

Edit: https://www.ibtimes.com/deserts-are-key-carbon-dioxide-sinks...

"It is worth noting that, although the sink in this experiment is significant, it is … about a hundredfold less than typical sinks in young forested ecosystems not exposed to elevated carbon dioxide," Christopher Field, director of the department of global ecology at Stanford University’s Carnegie Institution for Science, told NBC News. “The bottom line is that deserts will not save us from climate change."

Thanks for the correction!

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