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Comment by prmoustache | Hacker News Reader

The only way to get to carbon neutrality is to stop moving by anything but muscular or wind power. And by wind I mean sails, not wind turbine provided electricity.

We've got way enough need of electrical power for everything else, personal transportation should be done by muscle and sails assistance.

But this won't ever happen so goodbye carbon neutrality, climate is doomed and there is no way we can reverse what we have already done. The only question mark is how fast will we reach extinction of most animal species (including human) we currently know and how fast our quality of life and expectancy will degrade.

Anyone still operating a powered vehicle for personnal transportation, or considering purchasing one, be it EV or ICE, is commiting a crime against humanity and against his/her own children.

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Maybe I'm just being successfully trolled but my goodness citation heavily needed for these completely insane-sounding claims.

Muscle power is less efficient than converting sunlight with solar panels and motors into kinetic energy.

Growing plants is also significantly less efficient than synthesizing the starch directly in a bioreactor.

The true beauty of the universe is that even if all of your doomsaying pans out, life will still persist onwards.

Desires for Homo Sapiens to be the one species in all of time that never goes extinct are epitomizing selfishness.

Watch out old man, your days are numbered.

Good luck having any form of modern agriculture if you can't get the produce to the destination before it rots.

A lot of it would have to be localised.

A lot of things would have to change yes.

But saying I need a car because ... shouldn't be fixed by buying said car but by fixing the reasons we say we need it.

What about growing stuff closer to where they are going to be eaten. Yeah, it’s not great for economy of scale, but let’s tap into the 30% of food we do produce and go to waste directly.

It seems like theirs is both low hanging fruits and actual mileniums of experience we can leverage in terms of growing food and feeding people without flying the output across the globe.

Edit : I missed you mention modern agriculture. That might be the issue here, those post WW2 technics are terrible for the mid-term quality of our soils. ( we see large % decline roughly 60 years after already )

While more work intensive methods using less intrants seems to be able to produce the same amount of food. ( cf : French research on permaculture, INRA and such ) The issue with those is that you need way, way more farmers.

I see that as a opportunity to address un-employment and vocational crisis. Nothing is bullshit about a job where you grown food. It’s foundation to everything.

> What about growing stuff closer to where they are going to be eaten

You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local

Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%.

Very little food is air-freighted; it accounts for only 0.16% of food miles.

Many of the foods people assume to come by air are actually transported by boat – avocados and almonds are prime examples. Shipping one kilogram of avocados from Mexico to the United Kingdom would generate ... only around 8% of avocados’ total footprint. Even when shipped at great distances, its emissions are much less than locally-produced animal products.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

Oh, yes. Absolutely. Sorry I realized that’s I was internalizing that. I don’t eat much meat, if ever.

Great resources, too.

At this point, I think we should do both of course. Eating food that make sense, and growing it locally when it’s sensible.

For instance olive and wallnuts would replace avocado and almond in my particular location.

Well we shouldn't be able to buy Mango in Sweden for a start.

There are things we take for granted that we shouldn't, like using AC all day long to live in barely liveable places by Irish descendants standard like in Texas or Arizona.

> and there is no way we can reverse what we have already done

What about carbon capture?

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