[HN Gopher] Do We Need Another Green Revolution?
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Do We Need Another Green Revolution?
Author : mitchbob
Score : 13 points
Date : 2025-06-25 19:54 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| mitchbob wrote:
| https://archive.ph/e4nXM
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| It's probably not so much population growth that's going to
| stress agriculture, but the transition of the global poor to a
| richer western diet -- lots of meat, a wide variety of fruits &
| veg available 12 months of the year, et cetera.
| mlindner wrote:
| 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.
| nemomarx wrote:
| The article suggests that reducing food waste or trying to cut
| back on meat to better allocate farming would be the immediate
| tactic, yeah
| mlindner wrote:
| 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.
| riversflow wrote:
| > 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?
| mlindner wrote:
| If it happens gradually enough people won't notice.
| switknee wrote:
| 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.
| Tarq0n wrote:
| 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.
| mlindner wrote:
| 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.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 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.
| bradgranath wrote:
| When was the first one?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 1940 - 1970. Norman Borlaug won the Nobel peace prize for it in
| 1970. Learning about this incredible person is highly
| rewarding.
| kkfx wrote:
| The Club of Rome few days ago admit that the Smart-city is
| impossible (it consume way to much resources)
| https://www.clubofrome.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Transf...
| of course they keep insisting "we must find something else" (to
| steal private ownership). But the fact is that the Green New Deal
| works technically for single-family homes and sheds, nothing much
| bigger than that and those buildings actually use much LESS
| resources than dense areas with bigger buildings and can evolve
| as well.
|
| The new New Deal, the one technically feasible is the old
| Distributism.
|
| I can't say if it will be enough even for the current world
| population, but it's certainly much less resource intensive and
| much more efficient than the dense model needed by the
| nazi-2030's Agenda and it's the best we can do so far.
| kingstnap wrote:
| If aliens came to earth and started buying edible calories (let's
| suppose they theoretically only accept staple crops), We could
| ramp the production of edible calories on earth like mad.
|
| Production right now is completely limited by oversaturated
| demand. Which is true of so much stuff right now.
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