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It was a glib response to Rime. Anyway, wrt agriculture, it's a distribution problem not a production problem.
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Sep 7, 2017 03:23
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Rime posted:Humanity will not survive if we keep feeding 10 Billion+ people, so I don't see what your point is. The 2 Billion or whomever that survive can learn to do without fresh corn in March. We'll get along fine feeding >10 billion people. Even if there were significant pressures (there won't be) we could just switch 20% of our cereals production from livestock feed to food for human consumption and make up the gap easily.
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Sep 7, 2017 05:32
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Really, people need to recognize that these Hitlerite visions of "cleansing" the earth of billions of surplus humans are complete horseshit. They've been being proved wrong over and over again in the past two centuries since Malthus penned them. They have absolutely no basis in reality and are just a racist conspiracy theory akin to "white genocide" or the Protocols.
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Sep 7, 2017 05:51
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Heliogabalos posted:subsistence farming is a lovely, stupid industrial myth and while it exists it only exists because chemical fertilizer magnates ruined incomprehensible swathes of southern hemispheric soil in the 60s due to the promises of artificial nitrates. Humans have farmed properly for millenia and have consistently gotten extremely wealthy from it, and still do, and can, when done properly. Subsistence farming is a last ditch response to, the environment has been stripped of calories, nutrients, wandering herds, etc, and all I have are these stored seeds from last year and no means of funding going somewhere else, and it is always because a government, army, dictator or industrialist supremely hosed the population over. Uhhhh. Citation loving needed.
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Sep 7, 2017 09:15
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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shrike82 posted:It was a glib response to Rime. Anyway, wrt agriculture, it's a distribution problem not a production problem. In the most simple terms, yes. But do you really want subsaharan Africa to be completely dependant on shipments of surplus EU milk and grain (beep boop maximum efficiency reached)?
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Sep 7, 2017 09:16
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That's a false dichotomy.
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Sep 7, 2017 09:28
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Thug Lessons posted:Really, people need to recognize that these Hitlerite visions of "cleansing" the earth of billions of surplus humans are complete horseshit. They've been being proved wrong over and over again in the past two centuries since Malthus penned them. They have absolutely no basis in reality and are just a racist conspiracy theory akin to "white genocide" or the Protocols. I've disagreed with many of of your posts in this and other threads, but you are absolutely 100% correct about this.
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Sep 7, 2017 11:03
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FourLeaf posted:I've disagreed with many of of your posts in this and other threads, but you are absolutely 100% correct about this. Good. Once you've accepted that the rest will follow.
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Sep 7, 2017 11:32
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I thought the 10 billion will not survive argument was based on distribution issues? Like how the heck are we going to move all that food around as fuel gets more and more expensive, equatorial regions become uninhabitable for longer and longer periods of high summer, infrastructure buckles under migration, etc etc. Oh and fertilizer gets more expensive and the soil runs out in like 60-80 harvests in a lot of places or something?
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Sep 7, 2017 11:40
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The Groper posted:I thought the 10 billion will not survive argument was based on distribution issues? Like how the heck are we going to move all that food around as fuel gets more and more expensive, equatorial regions become uninhabitable for longer and longer periods of high summer, infrastructure buckles under migration, etc etc. Oh and fertilizer gets more expensive and the soil runs out in like 60-80 harvests in a lot of places or something? There are plenty of reasons to be worried about food security. I could add a whole host to your list. Check out what happens to crop yields under 5C warming scenario with massive season temperature variation; it's scary, and the apparent inability to breed resistant varieties is even scarier. But at the end of the day you still can't actually predict the future, and you certainly can't just extrapolate these trends outward and create a realistic prediction of if and when famine will occur. Paul Ehrlich had plenty of good reasons back in 1968 when he wrote The Population Bomb, predicting megadeath famines starting in the 1970s, (and in fact those reasons have significant overlap with the ones you're listing here), but he ended up being spectacularly wrong because he didn't account for human innovation and adaptation. Today's doomsters share the same flaw.
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Sep 7, 2017 12:10
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Also, lack of crop diversity, just prime for a plague or two to seriously threaten food security while any other number of issues are going on. This is a bit like MAD: the fact that we didn't gently caress ourselves over in an orgy of thermonuclear destruction doesn't mean the threat wasn't there, or even that it's gone now. It's impossible to predict when and if they'll come to pass, but there are nevertheless clear and present dangers to the vast system we call "the world as we know it". Normalcy bias is a bitch, but one should take care not to veer too far into  territory either.
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Sep 7, 2017 12:35
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no plague will touch my bumper crop of mulga wattle
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Sep 7, 2017 12:36
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Ah, so we innovate our way out of the problems innovation generated, forever.
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Sep 7, 2017 12:36
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shrike82 posted:That's a false dichotomy. Yeah we could eliminate world hunger or whatever if the amount of food produced by agriculture were evenly distributed but at the moment much of the surplus we could redistribute is produced in developed countries so a simplistic "  it's a redistribution problem not a production problem " answer would lead to dependency of semiarid shitholes on the benevolence of America and Europe (or their ability to pay, depending on the capitalism level).suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 12:44 on Sep 7, 2017 |
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Sep 7, 2017 12:41
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What windmill are you tilting at?
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Sep 7, 2017 12:42
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A workable solution would involve redistributing the means of production, not just the product.
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Sep 7, 2017 12:44
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and redistributing the means of distribution in a distribution revolution
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Sep 7, 2017 12:48
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blowfish posted:A workable solution would involve redistributing the means of production, not just the product. "Establish a socialist world government" seems like a very productive and practical approach to addressing our current issues related to climate change.
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Sep 7, 2017 12:52
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a socialist world government would be beautiful but we can't even figure out how to run the united nations, it's a tightrope with complete toothlessness on one side and international tyranny on the other
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Sep 7, 2017 12:55
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the old ceremony posted:a socialist world government would be beautiful but we can't even figure out how to run the united nations, it's a tightrope with complete toothlessness on one side and international tyranny on the other Actually if you'll just read this pamphlet...
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Sep 7, 2017 12:57
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Mechafunkzilla posted:"Establish a socialist world government" seems like a very productive and practical approach to addressing our current issues related to climate change. Well, duh. But even if full world communism/socialism now is unlikely to spontaneously occur, we should still encourage and help poorer countries with food security issues to do sustainable intensification.
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Sep 7, 2017 12:58
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"sustainable intensification"
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Sep 7, 2017 13:01
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shrike82 posted:"sustainable intensification" Yes. It's a big topic in conservation you know. It involves breeding/GM-ing plants to be more efficient resource users, be more resistant to adverse conditions, invest more resources in the harvested bits than into leaves etc. as well as managing land use so you can achieve high yields without wasting too many resources or completely loving your environment.
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Sep 7, 2017 13:04
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The Groper posted:Ah, so we innovate our way out of the problems innovation generated, forever. Yes. That is the history of human civilization.
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Sep 7, 2017 13:08
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blowfish posted:Yes. It's a big topic in conservation you know. It involves breeding/GM-ing plants to be more efficient resource users, be more resistant to adverse conditions, invest more resources in the harvested bits than into leaves etc. as well as managing land use so you can achieve high yields without wasting too many resources or completely loving your environment.
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Sep 7, 2017 13:16
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Thug Lessons posted:There are plenty of reasons to be worried about food security. I could add a whole host to your list. Check out what happens to crop yields under 5C warming scenario with massive season temperature variation; it's scary, and the apparent inability to breed resistant varieties is even scarier. But at the end of the day you still can't actually predict the future, and you certainly can't just extrapolate these trends outward and create a realistic prediction of if and when famine will occur. Paul Ehrlich had plenty of good reasons back in 1968 when he wrote The Population Bomb, predicting megadeath famines starting in the 1970s, (and in fact those reasons have significant overlap with the ones you're listing here), but he ended up being spectacularly wrong because he didn't account for human innovation and adaptation. Today's doomsters share the same flaw. There's of course the heavy dependence on fossil fuels in agriculture, both in machinery and logistics/production as well as fertilizer, of which the artificial variety is going to suffer from very significant price hikes and shortages if phosphates become less available (AKA "peak phosphate") and the natural variety will become correspondingly more expensive. All of agriculture will start suffering from logistics challenges and rising costs, and this goes both ways: Farms don't only produce, they also need a shitton (heh) of stuff delivered to actually function, since very few farms are completely self-sufficient. The problem of climate change, as mentioned, will cause some real challenges and there's an actual possibility of catastrophic loss of harvests skyrocketing prices. It would be kinda unprecedented, but then a lot of disasters are until they happen. Humans don't deal with food shortages... well. Of course, predicting the future on this is hard, but given the challenges we seem to be racing towards and the massive loss of effective farm land/destabilized conditions advanced global warming will force on us, I say there's a real threat to food security, yes. Luckily, we have coal mine jobs to save us.
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Sep 7, 2017 13:18
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Nice piece of fish posted:Luckily, we have
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Sep 7, 2017 13:26
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Nice piece of fish posted:There's of course the heavy dependence on fossil fuels in agriculture, both in machinery and logistics/production as well as fertilizer, of which the artificial variety is going to suffer from very significant price hikes and shortages if phosphates become less available (AKA "peak phosphate") and the natural variety will become correspondingly more expensive. This debate by the way is why you can walk into a serious climate policy discussion and listen to doctorates and politicians literally discuss the merits of cow poo poo.
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Sep 7, 2017 13:32
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Nice piece of fish posted:There's of course the heavy dependence on fossil fuels in agriculture, both in machinery and logistics/production as well as fertilizer, of which the artificial variety is going to suffer from very significant price hikes and shortages if phosphates become less available (AKA "peak phosphate") and the natural variety will become correspondingly more expensive. There is no "peak phosphate". Like every other peak mineral scare, (with the possible exception of oil), it's a myth born out of ignorance of geologic science and a massive underestimation of human ingenuity. quote:Most of the phosphorus used in fertilizer comes from phosphate rock, a finite resource formed over millions of years in the earth’s crust. Ninety percent of the world’s mined phosphate rock is used in agriculture and food production, mostly as fertilizer, less as animal feed and food additives. When experts debate peak phosphorus, what they are usually debating is how long the phosphate rock reserves, i.e. the resources that can economically be extracted, will hold out. You may be right, however, that we need fossil fuel inputs to continue expanding agricultural productivity to meet the needs of a growing world. But if that's the case we'll simply keep using them, not voluntarily starve the world to death. Luckily fossil fuel inputs in agriculture are not a major source of emissions Thug Lessons fucked around with this message at 13:38 on Sep 7, 2017 |
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Sep 7, 2017 13:35
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MiddleOne posted:This debate by the way is why you can walk into a serious climate policy discussion and listen to doctorates and politicians literally discuss the merits of cow poo poo. Hooray for slurry? Of course, it's hard to imagine the enviro-friendly solution of gigantic slurry pits everywhere. Maybe it'd give that Mike Rowe fellow something to do.
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Sep 7, 2017 13:36
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Thug Lessons posted:There is no "peak phosphate". Like every other peak mineral scare, (with the possible exception of oil), it's a myth born out of ignorance of geologic science and a massive underestimation of human ingenuity. Yeah, well, here's hoping. It's good to hope for the best but prepare for the worst, though.
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Sep 7, 2017 13:37
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Nice piece of fish posted:Hooray for slurry? Of course, it's hard to imagine the enviro-friendly solution of gigantic slurry pits everywhere. Maybe it'd give that Mike Rowe fellow something to do. Won't make our poo poo situation any shittier
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Sep 7, 2017 13:38
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Nice piece of fish posted:Yeah, well, here's hoping. It's good to hope for the best but prepare for the worst, though. Maybe it is. However we have limited resources to devote to solving the world's problems, and we should devote as much as possible to real ones, like the 3 million people who are already starving to death every year, instead of completely specious ones like peak mineral scares and the coming Rapture.
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Sep 7, 2017 13:41
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shrike82 posted:It was a glib response to Rime. Anyway, wrt agriculture, it's a distribution problem not a production problem. It's a production problem locally, and that's what matters because the distribution problem is one we already have and are not fixing, so there's zero reason to believe it'll get any better in the future when the costs involved (economic, political, social) will be higher. And that's really the end-all argument about food security, and how millions will die because of it. As far as industrialized nations are concerned, they aren't going to be facing starvation barring a catastrophic collapse of production or their own economies, but increased food prices will certainly put the squeeze on the living standards of the lower class.
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Sep 7, 2017 13:50
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MiddleOne posted:Won't make our poo poo situation any shittier Not poo poo! Energy!
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Sep 7, 2017 13:55
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Not to mention how we've been sabotaging large swaths of the third-worlds capability to be self-sufficient on food by forcing every economy not large enough, or politically valuable enough to resist, to specialize in whatever cash-crops we want and can't make ourselves.
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Sep 7, 2017 13:58
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MiddleOne posted:Not to mention how we've been sabotaging large swaths of the third-worlds capability to be self-sufficient on food by forcing every economy not large enough, or politically valuable enough to resist, to specialize in whatever cash-crops we want and can't make ourselves. You make this sound like a very bad thing but actually it is a very good thing, at least in terms of food security. Those international agricultural sales drive economic growth which is re-invested back into the local economy, through a process known as capitalism. The end result is greater yields and food security for the nations in question.
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Sep 7, 2017 14:10
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Lol
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Sep 7, 2017 14:13
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Look at the horrible imperialists destroying the third world's capacity to feed itself
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Sep 7, 2017 14:16
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Thug Lessons posted:Really, people need to recognize that these Hitlerite visions of "cleansing" the earth of billions of surplus humans are complete horseshit. They've been being proved wrong over and over again in the past two centuries since Malthus penned them. They have absolutely no basis in reality and are just a racist conspiracy theory akin to "white genocide" or the Protocols. You're an idiot and the only one unironically talking about racial genocide in this thread
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Sep 7, 2017 14:38
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