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Comment by mlindner | Hacker News Reader

More discredited "population bomb" thinking. The earth is not heading for overpopulation and there is no shortages in food generation. We produce so much extra food that we feed it to cattle and turn it into vehicle fuel at massive scales. More so, the productivity of farmland in rich areas of the world continues to increase every year, and that productivity increase still hasn't spread to large portions of the world's crop land in poorer countries.

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.

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Agreed. People don't realize that farming uses essentially all the land not because it needs all the land, but because that's the cheapest way of producing the required amount of food. We could produce more food on less land, but that would make food more expensive. In the extreme, a greenhouse can produce 1000x as many calories per acre than dryland farming can. But a greenhouse can't produce 100,000 calories for $6 like a dryland farm can. (1 bushel of wheat is almost 100,000 calories and sells for $6).

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 article suggests that reducing food waste or trying to cut back on meat to better allocate farming would be the immediate tactic, yeah

People care too much about food waste. Food waste is a result of food being cheap. If food stops being cheap then it stops getting wasted. (And when I mean cheap I'm talking about the price its purchased at at a bulk level.)

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.

>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.

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.

> If food stops being cheap then it stops getting wasted

> If meat shortages start happening

You really think the U.S populace would just be okay with this?

If food prices went to near zero, healthcare and housing would mysteriously get more expensive until people could barely afford them even with cheap-as-salt food.

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.

If it happens gradually enough people won't notice.

Meat provides a lot of nutrition that crops do not. How about we "cut back" on manicured lawns instead? Ornamental grass is the single largest crop in the united states; and while some of it goes to compost which can be used to grow food, an estimated 8% of landfill waste in the united states is lawn clippings. When grass is put in landfill instead of compost it produces greenhouse gases (not to mention all the fuel used in lawnmowers and garbage trucks).

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.

Isn't part of agricultural productivity tied to manufacturing nitrogen fertilizers with fossil fuels though? Curious if decarbonizing will drive up the price of those.

Where do you think the nitrogen in nitrogen fertilizers comes from? The atmosphere. The key part of the Haber-Bosch process that needs to be replaced is the hydrogen, which could easily be done with on-site electrolysis if needed.

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.

>Oil use is never going to go away until it is truly gone or too expensive to pump out of the ground.

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.

There's many more uses to oil than burning it directly. Much of what is in oil ends up in a landfill (i.e. plastics).

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