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JohnnySavs posted:This is more movie chat but the Interstellar future involved crop plagues that were so pervasive that even with everyone farming (with fleets of automated equipment no less) Earth was still struggling to feed everyone. Higher prices on organic crops, and even greater prevalence of GMO crops in all likelihood.
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Mar 22, 2016 16:27
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I'd expect to see a lot more of this: http://www.gizmag.com/growing-underground-subterranean-urban-farm-london/38297/ Manhattan alone could probably support a few dozen of these, and it's not hard to imagine disused spaces turning into "squatter" versions of this setup.
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Mar 22, 2016 18:42
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Wanderer posted:I'd expect to see a lot more of this: http://www.gizmag.com/growing-underground-subterranean-urban-farm-london/38297/ I don't understand how the investment in those sorts of "farming" projects will actually be better for the climate than traditional ag can be. Like sure, LEDs use less electricity to grow plants than other lights, but traditional farms use the sun for free. They've spent $1.2M on 6,000 sq ft of growing space. For that much money you could negate the carbon impact of a larger amount of traditional ag land. That's assuming you get the underground tunnel for free of course. As soon as you start considering opportunity costs it becomes an even worse proposition for the environment.
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Mar 22, 2016 19:10
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Trabisnikof posted:I don't understand how the investment in those sorts of "farming" projects will actually be better for the climate than traditional ag can be. Like sure, LEDs use less electricity to grow plants than other lights, but traditional farms use the sun for free. I don't know that it's more environmentally friendly but economically it makes good sense to grow some crops in greenhouses - generally things that have a short shelf-life and require refrigeration. The alternative is to constantly ship refrigerators full of lettuce from the other side of the planet which is also energy intensive. It's not like wheat where a ship can fill up a bunch of silos and then London is tied over for a while - you have to constantly resupply and that's more expensive and inefficient. Of course it's a silly way to grow cereals, grain, corn etc. which is where we get most of our calories but it does have a place.
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Mar 22, 2016 19:30
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Anosmoman posted:I don't know that it's more environmentally friendly but economically it makes good sense to grow some crops in greenhouses - generally things that have a short shelf-life and require refrigeration. The alternative is to constantly ship refrigerators full of lettuce from the other side of the planet which is also energy intensive. It's not like wheat where a ship can fill up a bunch of silos and then London is tied over for a while - you have to constantly resupply and that's more expensive and inefficient. I agree greenhouses make sense, I didn't really make clear I consider them traditional ag. Underground greenhouses seem to make little sense to me outside of high-end produce in cold climate cities. So I bet that the tunnel farms are a big hit with the London chefs, but I'm not sure if it is realistically scalable outside of that niche.
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Mar 22, 2016 19:34
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The most important thing there is that it increases the raw area that you can use for farming. One very important question we have is what to do with our land, which is a limited resource. This rock is only so big and only so much of it can be used to grow food. This is why there's push for urban farms; less travel time for produce means less energy expenditure to feed the cities. More importantly cities are paved. That land can't be used to grow food. So if you can grow food on top of or under buildings then you've both increased land area and reduced the need to move poo poo. This also has the benefit of reducing the amount of traffic into and around the city. I figure that sort of thing is expensive now but will get cheaper in the future.
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Mar 22, 2016 19:35
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Transportation of goods isn't really that big of a cost though. Like there's a reason why China ships out a whole bunch of food to the rest of the world, and why it would probably do so even if the cost of shipping tripled. You'd probably spend more money in the long run just developing the infrastructure for the systems and in the end you're going to only be able to grow a very small (relatively) amount of food.
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Mar 22, 2016 19:37
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The most important thing there is that it increases the raw area that you can use for farming. One very important question we have is what to do with our land, which is a limited resource. This rock is only so big and only so much of it can be used to grow food. But I think the cost per acre of arable land added by urban farming that doesn't use natural light is far more than it costs to remediate or improve existing farmland. This just reminds me of the "diy carbon sequestration system" that relied on liter plastic bottles. If you have excesss plastic bottles and solar power then it might break even on carbon, but if you buy a single bottle you might not have otherwise, you undo all the value of the system. So maybe they can be good for climate as long as they're using entirely wasted space, but as soon as we build a single new building because the urban led-lit farm is occupying the old factory, all the carbon benefits are undone. The combined square footage of all the usable abandoned tunnels in the world is a fraction of total ag needs. Besides, we should grow mushrooms in there rather than "microgreens" for garnish.
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Mar 22, 2016 19:43
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Trabisnikof posted:I don't understand how the investment in those sorts of "farming" projects will actually be better for the climate than traditional ag can be. Like sure, LEDs use less electricity to grow plants than other lights, but traditional farms use the sun for free. Ultimately it's something like vertical farming (except underground), which lets you substitute energy for land use. Potentially a good idea, but only if rolled out on a meaningful scale supported by Full
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Mar 22, 2016 19:46
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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You guys are funny. The impact on the first world isn't just going to be high food prices, it's going to be war and social shocks the likes of which we haven't seen in centuries. The hell going down in the middle east? That didn't start due to a sudden pressing need for Democratic revolution, it started because the worst drought in a thousand years has been ravaging the region since the late 1990s and that caused an explosion of radicalism. Sudan? Darfur? Look at all that drought. You think weather patterns disrupting fragile crops are just going to drive the cauliflower prices up? No, it's going to cause unprecedented mass migrations, like the one currently going down in Europe. It's going to cause clashes of culture that flare into violence, like Europe. You think we won't see the bad effects of climate collapse in our lifetimes? We already are, go read the news, it's only a matter of time before that shitshow comes to every shore.
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Mar 22, 2016 20:26
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Rime posted:You guys are funny. The impact on the first world isn't just going to be high food prices, it's going to be war and social shocks the likes of which we haven't seen in centuries. Related: that James Hansen paper suggesting that the ice sheet melt-global warming feedback loop is non-linear just made it through peer review. You know, the one that said we might want to prepare for 2-5 meter sea level rise by the end of the century.
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Mar 22, 2016 20:32
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Rime posted:You guys are funny. The impact on the first world isn't just going to be high food prices, it's going to be war and social shocks the likes of which we haven't seen in centuries. I didn't know WW2 was centuries ago.
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Mar 22, 2016 20:33
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Rime posted:You think we won't see the bad effects of climate collapse in our lifetimes? We already are, go read the news, it's only a matter of time before that shitshow comes to every shore. Right, but thats not the same thing as "we will literally be like the start of Interstellar." These are problems that can theoretically be fixed and adapted to. We need to start working on how.
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Mar 22, 2016 21:11
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Trabisnikof posted:Underground greenhouses seem to make little sense to me outside of high-end produce in cold climate cities. So I bet that the tunnel farms are a big hit with the London chefs, but I'm not sure if it is realistically scalable outside of that niche. One of the big reasons why this kind of farm appeals to me is that a lot of modern cities have a bunch of spaces like London's WWII bomb bunkers that are currently unused. Manhattan is famously as deep as it is tall, with tunnels a thousand feet below ground level, and a lot of other cities have something like it, e.g. the Seattle Underground or Los Angeles's several half-finished subway stations. Right now, they're doing nothing except occasionally serving as a historical attraction. It also has the benefit of turning an unused city space into a carbon consumer, and as was said, expanding the amount of land used to produce food. With an aquaculture setup, and ideally running the power off of a solar grid or some other renewable source (you could probably power a good piece of it with a hand crank if you really had to), it's a good example of a possible, sustainable way to deal with several different problems.
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Mar 22, 2016 21:29
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Wanderer posted:One of the big reasons why this kind of farm appeals to me is that a lot of modern cities have a bunch of spaces like London's WWII bomb bunkers that are currently unused. Manhattan is famously as deep as it is tall, with tunnels a thousand feet below ground level, and a lot of other cities have something like it, e.g. the Seattle Underground or Los Angeles's several half-finished subway stations. Right now, they're doing nothing except occasionally serving as a historical attraction. The CO2 sequestration is limited to however much standing biomass the crops have. Once people have eaten and metabolised/shat out their food it goes back into the atmosphere as CO2. A few subway tunnels or cold war bunkers filled with shelves for growing lettuce can never be more than a blip. It could, however, be a good start to validating larger scale indoor farming as a concept so it can eventually be rolled out on a meaningful scale. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 21:40
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The whole thing is blips. Every running combustion engine is a blip; every moron who throws a plastic bag out the window is a blip. This is about making enough small gestures at once, not making two or three big ones, and it always was. It's not the single solution to one thing; it's a partial solution to several things.
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Mar 22, 2016 21:44
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Is this the thread where we try to feel good about the lovely half-measures that, even if they weren't just TED talk fodder or simply don't work at all, wouldn't do anything to stop what's coming?
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Mar 22, 2016 21:51
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Wanderer posted:The whole thing is blips. Every running combustion engine is a blip; every moron who throws a plastic bag out the window is a blip. This is about making enough small gestures at once, not making two or three big ones, and it always was. Maybe but that doesn't mean you get to ignore that sequestered CO2 must be stored somewhere permanently and not reused again.
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Mar 22, 2016 21:52
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Maybe we can see a single example of a proposed carbon sequestration project that, even in someone's wildest dreams, would capture a gigaton of carbon a year. Of course, that's nowhere near where we'd need to be, but let's start there.
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Mar 22, 2016 22:04
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Radbot posted:Is this the thread where we try to feel good about the lovely half-measures that, even if they weren't just TED talk fodder or simply don't work at all, wouldn't do anything to stop what's coming? You know how occasionally, some politician or another will criticize a policy on the basis that it doesn't go far enough to address an issue, and thus shouldn't be implemented at all? They always give the impression that the only solution they'd accept is some imaginary, grand gesture that solves the entire issue overnight, and it makes them look silly, because either they'd rather have the problem than even a partial solution, or they don't recognize the problem at all. Yes, the ideal, somebody-found-a-genie solution would be to restructure the grid around new-generation nuclear reactors, modernize mass transit, and move everyone into smaller, vertical urban spaces that produce much of their own food locally. That's not going to happen today, however, and so it's worth discussing the various small ways in which people are addressing the problems being brought to us by climate change, and the idea of repurposing unused urban spaces as farms is one step, especially as the technology and practices get revised. Uncle Jam posted:Maybe but that doesn't mean you get to ignore that sequestered CO2 must be stored somewhere permanently and not reused again. For that, I kind of like this: http://www.gizmag.com/c02-atmosphere-carbon-nanofibers/39015/ A lot of stories I see in the tech press right now are discussing uses for carbon nanofiber, most of which are computing-based, and pulling them out of the atmosphere could work well for it. These guys are also online in Calgary right now: http://carbonengineering.com/ Radbot posted:Maybe we can see a single example of a proposed carbon sequestration project that, even in someone's wildest dreams, would capture a gigaton of carbon a year. Of course, that's nowhere near where we'd need to be, but let's start there. Done. http://www.canadianbusiness.com/lists-and-rankings/most-innovative-companies/carbon-engineering/ Wanderer fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 22:07
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Wanderer posted:The whole thing is blips. Every running combustion engine is a blip; every moron who throws a plastic bag out the window is a blip. This is about making enough small gestures at once, not making two or three big ones, and it always was. Getting rid of a billion combustion engines is not a blip. Building ten thousand nuclear reactors is not a blip. Filling every unused subway tunnel and cold war bunker on earth that exists with lettuce growing shelves is a blip. Unless this underground farming thing leads to wider applications of indoor farming in large-scale purpose-built indoor farms it can never be more than a blip even in an unrealistic best case scenario. Radbot posted:Maybe we can see a single example of a proposed carbon sequestration project that, even in someone's wildest dreams, would capture a gigaton of carbon a year. Of course, that's nowhere near where we'd need to be, but let's start there. Reforesting half of China and Brazil. Probably multiple gigatons per year at that scale.
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Mar 22, 2016 22:12
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Wanderer posted:Done. Wow, a ton of carbon a week, and it doesn't even get sequestered. Call me when they actual start sequestering anything at literally any scale. blowfish posted:Reforesting half of China and Brazil. Probably multiple gigatons per year at that scale. I asked to see plans that are currently in the works - surely you have a link? And have you accounted for the surface albedo change of reforesting a huge amount of land that's currently occupied, let alone who would do the work, how it would be funded, or where the people that are currently ranching cattle there are supposed to go? The point isn't that I'm expecting a genie-in-a-bottle solution - it's that anything less is likely pointless.
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Mar 22, 2016 22:15
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blowfish posted:Which is how the nuclear industry started out, before going on to be mostly functional for a few decades. Just to put some numbers behind this,  http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx posted:Costs in the US are about 10% lower than the EU, but still 30% higher than in China and India, and 25% above South Korea. Nuclear doesn't have to be as expensive as it is in the US, but is that way for the litany of reasons covered by some of the knowledgeable posters in this thread. edit: also that world-nuclear link is a pro click if you want to see a detailed breakdown of nuclear costs. Phayray fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 22:20
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blowfish posted:Getting rid of a billion combustion engines is not a blip. Building ten thousand nuclear reactors is not a blip. Filling every unused subway tunnel and cold war bunker on earth that exists is a blip. Unless this underground farming thing leads to wider applications of indoor farming in large-scale purpose-built indoor farms it can never be more than a blip even in an unrealistic best case scenario. You're thinking on a macro scale, and that's a good way to go into a despair spiral. Like I said, every positive thing's a blip and every negative thing's a blip. A restaurant owner who doesn't have to truck his greens in from California is a blip; a guy who decides to walk down the block instead of driving a few miles is a blip. A brand-new waste-recycling nuclear power plant is a lot of blips. Hell, this is going far afield. I was talking about LED-based urban farming or something like it as a possible reaction to climate change reducing arable land. As a carbon-capture reaction, it'd have a (small, indirect) impact but isn't a solution. blowfish posted:Reforesting half of China and Brazil. Probably multiple gigatons per year at that scale. There's also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall
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Mar 22, 2016 22:22
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Radbot posted:Wow, a ton of carbon a week, and it doesn't even get sequestered. Call me when they actual start sequestering anything at literally any scale. You asked for something that would work even in a wildest-dream scenario, and I gave you one. They're working on scaling up the tech and finding uses for the calcium carbonate it's turned into. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/carbon-capture-squamish-1.3263855 There's another Still, the research is being done, with or without the government. It's an interesting field. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 23:16 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 22:31
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Wanderer posted:One of the big reasons why this kind of farm appeals to me is that a lot of modern cities have a bunch of spaces like London's WWII bomb bunkers that are currently unused. Manhattan is famously as deep as it is tall, with tunnels a thousand feet below ground level, and a lot of other cities have something like it, e.g. the Seattle Underground or Los Angeles's several half-finished subway stations. Right now, they're doing nothing except occasionally serving as a historical attraction. I agree with a lot of your goals, I just think there is better pro-climate uses for those spaces. Direct solar agriculture has such a reduced startup carbon footprint versus artificial light lit spaces. Unused but stable tunnels seem like great places for energy storage to me. Thermal mass, batteries, or even flywheels could make use of those same spaces for a less flashy but more well suited use. Being able to store hot or cold water can massively reduce energy use in cities and thermal mass storage must be sited near the use, versus ag which doesn't.
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Mar 22, 2016 22:35
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Wanderer posted:
Well, since carbon nanotubes have been shown to act identically to asbestos when they contact cells, it could be an easy fix for that overpopulation issue. 
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Mar 22, 2016 22:48
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Here's some recent articles recent talking carbon emissions need to move over, because hello methane. Enjoy your holiday weekend. Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry: Our leaders thought fracking would save our climate. They were wrong. Very wrong. By Bill McKibben Giant holes found in Siberia could be signs of a ticking climate 'time bomb' Sarah Kramer, Tech Insider
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Mar 25, 2016 15:00
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CheeseSpawn posted:Here's some recent articles recent talking carbon emissions need to move over, because hello methane. Enjoy your holiday weekend. I've been updating the OP with articles like these here and there, so thanks for these. Looking into the top one, apparently the study McKibben is primarily referring to was published in late 2013: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/50/20018.abstract (and accompanying article). So the good news is that we've known about this for 3 years. The bad news, of course, is that fracking is still on the rise. Uranium Phoenix fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Mar 26, 2016 |
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Mar 26, 2016 01:06
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Wanderer posted:You asked for something that would work even in a wildest-dream scenario, and I gave you one. They're working on scaling up the tech and finding uses for the calcium carbonate it's turned into. You'd need tens of millions of those carbonate things to do what is needed. Just as a comparison the number of Starbucks and McDonald's are in the tens of thousands.
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Mar 27, 2016 15:34
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Here's an interesting article about vertical seabed farming and its benefits. It's definitely written from the point of view of an evangelist, but this isn't the first time I've seen somebody suggest kelp farming as an oceanic filter. I want to try kelp noodles. Apparently there's one of these in the Bronx river, according to the comments, as a "pollution farm"; it isn't making food, but it's filtering the water. Uncle Jam posted:You'd need tens of millions of those carbonate things to do what is needed. Just as a comparison the number of Starbucks and McDonald's are in the tens of thousands. "We can't solve the entire problem all at once with one thing, so we'd better not do anything at all." It's a pilot project, and it's not the one magic bullet. Once you have that plus CO2 sequestered in cement plus vertical farming plus moving away from petroleum-fueled combustion engines plus non-coal power generation plus whatever else you'd like to add to the list, you start making real progress.
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Mar 27, 2016 20:35
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CheeseSpawn posted:Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry: Our leaders thought fracking would save our climate. They were wrong. Very wrong. By Bill McKibben Uh, who the gently caress thought fracking would save the climate?
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Mar 28, 2016 19:58
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Gammymajams posted:Uh, who the gently caress thought fracking would save the climate? People who believe in the invisible hand of the completely unregulated free market.
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Mar 28, 2016 20:02
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Gammymajams posted:Uh, who the gently caress thought fracking would save the climate? People who thought it would kill coal fast enough to offset natgas growth, mostly. Maybe "save" is a massive overstatement, but Coal Is Terrible.
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Mar 28, 2016 20:10
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Oh and Germany because gas can in principle buffer out spikes in electricity demand or supply in our badly organised renewable rollout (except it turns out gas plants running solely to fix cloud and wind and consumer randomness are money pits and utilities are fighting to get rid of the things again)
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Mar 28, 2016 20:20
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People don't get how deep of a pit we're in if they think gas will dig us out of it. I've seen recent modelling for my country's required abatement path to hit GHG targets and it needs everything but the kitchen sink. Gas isn't even in the energy mix.
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Mar 28, 2016 20:24
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People don't get how deep of a pit we're in, period, and they won't until they can no longer buy almonds and their leisure pursuits are entirely disrupted. 
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Mar 28, 2016 20:33
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Rime posted:People don't get how deep of a pit we're in, period, and they won't until they can no longer buy almonds and their leisure pursuits are entirely disrupted. We're getting there in the Southern United States. Louisiana is flooding yet again, the rest of the black belt is experiencing some serious agricultural disruption due to the sheer frequency of storms in the last month (and more due for Friday) during a peak part of the staple crop rotation time (it's time to burn covers and plant corn for summer harvest into soybeans). This is on top of specifically South Carolina's utterly disastrous flooding in October, a time at which (surprise) a lot of people would be planting winter wheat for summer harvest... Food is going to get much worse, and it's not just specialty crops. Gunshow Poophole fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Mar 28, 2016 |
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Mar 28, 2016 20:43
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GreyjoyBastard posted:People who thought it would kill coal fast enough to offset natgas growth, mostly. Maybe "save" is a massive overstatement, but Coal Is Terrible. It did. It really helped to cripple the coal industry in the US and the switch from coal to natural gas has reduced carbon emission equivalents from electricity in the US. Coal is that bad. It is a shame the McKibben article didn't cite any studies that have data from after the EPA's new rules on methane emissions from wells came into effect. Likewise, while the atmospheric paper he cited is really good, we have to remember that huge portions of the natural gas infrastructure is completely unrelated to fracing. So we need to make sure that as we tighten regulations on methane emissions across the lifecycle and don't ignore the huge emitters that aren't fracing related. For example, there was a really good paper recently about leaks in the Boston gas infrastructure. Apparently, cast iron pipes will leak after 100 years, who knew? Those gas lines aren't even electricity related and those leaks aren't part of the impact of natural gas for electricity.
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Mar 28, 2016 20:54
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Meanwhile, in Germany (because nuclear energy is EVIL) ...
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