|
Not Xipe Totec but I think I can see where he's coming from. Here's some random, incomplete proposals: On the supply side: greater reliance on traditional, low-intensity, ecosystem-based forms of agriculture, e.g. the Bolivian camellones. Using better water management to make do with precipitation and glacial runoff instead of relying on more and more extraction from underground acquifers and rivers. Using better farming techniques to keep the soil fertile instead of imported fertilizer. Lots of poor countries farm cash crops on a huge industrial scale, sell them to developed countries, and use the proceeds to buy food from the developed countries. This is stupid; they should be farming for local consumption instead of propping up our addiction to coffee and chocolate. Ending EU and American subsidies to agriculture and dairy would be a good start. It doesn't help if the developing countries are doing their farming using fertilizer, seeds, and machinery purchased from the developed world. Low-intensity "primitive" farming techniques (which often make highly sophisticated use of the land and local plant and animal life) are better for the local environment, produce fewer GHG emissions, and don't give a huge cut of the profits to developed countries. Improve rural livelihoods, because rural people, particularly women, are generally more vulnerable to changes in the environment and food availability than city-dwellers. Safeguard local water supplies instead of selling them to Coke. On the demand side: Shift away from the perpetual growth of capitalism to a low/zero-growth model of sustainable consumption. This is a pretty radical idea obviously and entails giant systemic changes that will probably never happen, but it's got a surprisingly large amount of support and it's got a lot more concrete aspects than just the "full global communism overnight" strawman that you see here. It's hard to see how we're going to address climate change when maintaining growth is still an implicitly higher priority for every government and maintaining profit is a higher priority for every company. 2% global growth per year probably means we're using more physical resource throughput every year and emitting more carbon every year (this is debatable). Maybe more importantly, it represents a skewed set of priorities that treats climate change as a secondary issue to coming out with a new iPhone every year (despite rhetoric to the contrary). This turned into a rant on climate change instead of food security but they're obviously linked pretty closely, and scaling back food consumption in the developed world is a good idea for a whole lot of reasons. It's not always as simple as "take food from rich/give to poor" but the fact that we have an obesity crisis in the global North and a food security crisis in the global South points to some serious systemic issues. IMO all these suggestions are more realistic and better for the environment than massively investment in nuclear power, vertical farming and arcologies. Reading this thread I feel like some goons have taken Sim City way too seriously and think all we need to solve the world's problems is more gigantic concrete structures. Maybe the first world could achieve your techno-futurist paradise (eventually) but if you seriously think sub-Saharan Africa is going to be dotted with nuclear power plants and vertical farms within the next 50 years you're seriously misinformed. Guy DeBorgore fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Mar 19, 2015 |
#
¿
Mar 19, 2015 02:26
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 18:16 |
|
|
Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Modern agriculture has a lot of problems. Deadzones in the Gulf of Mexico. Waste. Diversion of rivers to feed thirsty desert cropland. We've learned kind of a lot about agriculture and ecology in the last few thousands years. Modern science has contributed a lot to the revitalization of "low-tech" farming techniques (I don't really know a better word). There's a very sound ecological basis for practices like intercropping with witchweed instead of using pesticides. The reason to look at primitive practices is because they had some pretty ingenious elements to them. They were developed and improved iteratively over thousands of years after all. The camellones I linked to above are based on ancient Mayan techniques- Bolivia has lots of floods which will destroy crops and wash away topsoil, but the Mayans had ways of protecting the crops from floods and preserving soil quality and even using the floodwater to irrigate during dry spells. Today floods are becoming more common thanks to deforestation and climate change, so those practices are more relevant, and much much more feasible than industrial-scale solutions because they can be implemented by poor rural farmers. Point being, we can take the good things from primitive practices without making the same mistakes they did. quote:Growth isn't sustainable they cry, ignoring the fact that cities are far more efficient in terms of resource use than rural land they idealize. You say this like you can have cities without countryside. quote:edit: How about some numbers?! Everyone loves numbers. I don't want to get too bogged down in the weeds here but comparing big numbers is not a particularly instructive way to learn about water management. It ignores little things like where the water is coming from, for example. To the indigenous community who suddenly has to share their water supply with a Coke plant it's no comfort to know that there's still vast amounts of water somewhere else in the world. But the agriculture sector also uses a shitload of water and also needs to improve water management, it's not a competition.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2015 19:21
|
|
|
Killer-of-Lawyers posted:A. Modern agriculture is an evolution of ancient agriculture, and didn't just throw away everything we learned. It's a system put forth by university academics and founded on more real data than we've had in the past. Dude, nobody is arguing against modern agriculture. quote:B. Maybe we shouldn't be farming in areas that have erosion problems, instead of trying to get everyone to be a poor rural farmer like you want them to be. It's not that I want people to be poor rural farmers, it's that they are. Literal billions of them. The agro-industrial system you love to much has had decades to do its work and, guess what? It hasn't solved poverty or food security yet. What's your plan, move them all into vertical farms in the city? What do you want to do in the intervening millenia? quote:D. Got any examples of coke plants in areas with limited water where their inclusion is leading to people going thirsty? Because if they're moving into farm land, then there's already a lot of water to go around. If they're moving into a urban area or a town, then they're bringing an actual decent sanitation system, which in places like India are sorely needed. Lastly, they're bringing jobs that are probably an improvement over poking at the ground with a stick all day to barely make enough food to feed yourself. The only reason you don't want to get bogged down in numbers is because you don't want your dogmatic beliefs challenged, because that would mean you'd have to think about the world in a manner other than 'ugg, corporation must be bad. Subsidies bad.' I seriously could not care less about finding a news story about a Coke plant somewhere so we can debate that instead.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2015 19:48
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:Subsaharan Africa and Bolivian peasants aren't the driving forces behind climate change and resource depletion though? It's developed countries. Unless you're arguing we should have everyone return to premodern living and become Bolivian peasants, stuff like nuclear power is the only way to sustain a modern way of life I do think nuclear power will be part of the solution, just not as big a part as some people on the internet seem to think. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars (trillions?) and decades of construction time to build enough nuclear power plants to shoulder a significant portion of the first world's energy burden. And what about developing countries? It's difficult to imagine the US making the switch to nuclear power in the next decade, but what about Russia? Indonesia? Mali? Even if developing countries could afford the huge upfront cost of building new plants and updating their energy infrastructure, do they have the technical and governance capacity to keep them safe and well-regulated for decades to come? If an enormous immediate investment in nuclear power plants was all it took to prevent climate change I'd be all for it, but it wouldn't even come close. For one thing we need ways to cut emissions today, not twenty years from now when our hypothetical wave of nuclear plants comes online. For another, power generation isn't the only source of emissions, or even the largest. And GHG emissions aren't the only aspect of climate change we need to be worried about. Nuclear energy, by itself, doesn't do anything for deforestation or fuel consumption or biodiversity loss or nitrification or ocean acidification. Nuclear power will not save us from having to make major lifestyle changes in the developing world, or from making major systemic changes like moving to a "zero-growth" society (scare quotes because that term can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people).
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2015 20:07
|
|
|
Killer-of-Lawyers posted:Then we move them off the farm. We should focus on developing the third world, not coming up with a stupid list of best practices for subsistence farmers. My plan is to increase production in the parts of the world where it makes sense, grow grain there, and drop it out the back of c-130's for the hungry. That's how you solve food crises. Incidentally, we're pretty food secure in the developed world, so it stands to reason that making the entire world modern and developed would do a lot for food security. Since, as we've already established, there is more than enough food being made for everyone. We just need to get it to them, and it'll be a hell of a lot easier if they're living in urban areas than if they're spread across hell and back. I think this is a very naive view of development- the wealth of the global North is owing to the success of liberal capitalism; the poverty and failures of the global South are just an unfortunate legacy of the past that can be solved through development and progress. This was the dominant view until pretty recently but I think most international development academics would disagree now. The rich North and the poor South are just two sides of the same coin. The North is rich because the South is poor. Call it "capitalism" or the "global political economy" or whatever, but there's a consistent pattern for hundreds of years of a certain group of countries enriching themselves at everyone else's expense. It's no coincidence that the rich countries today are virtually all former imperial and colonial powers. During the North's industrialization they polluted freely and in vast quantities; today, we've effectively exported our pollution to the global South, at just the time when huge global emissions cutbacks are required. During the North's development they made extensive use of protectionist measures for developing infant industries; today WTO rules make all that illegal, and Southern countries have much less leeway in terms of economic policy than their Northern counterparts. For most of history the North dictated the terms of trade and ensured that, even after the end of colonialism, they captured most of the value-added. Heavily indebted Southern countries send hundreds of billions of dollars per year in interest payments on debt to the North, maybe 10% of which flows back in the form of development aid. In terms of % of GDP, debt payments are often much much higher than the reparations Germany had to pay after WW2. This is a really broad argument that's been articulated in many different ways and I can't really do it justice here, but the point is that you can't just replicate our pattern of development in the South, nor can you copy-and-paste our economy into theirs. A closely related point is that there's no a priori reason to think that the lifestyle we enjoy in the developed world would be sustainable or even possible for everyone to enjoy, since in large part we got to where we are through a combination of (1) stepping on the backs of others and (2) borrowing against the future (e.g. burning fossil fuels). quote:So you brought coke up, and found your statement indefensible. Fantastic, we're making headway. The point with the Coke example was just that in many parts of the world, water supplies are horribly mismanaged by governments and private companies colluding together for their own benefit, at the expense of the large majority of poor/disenfranchised people who depend on that water for their livelihood. I'm guessing you agree with that claim, in which case there's no point in us squabbling over Coke. [quote] Killer-of-Lawyers posted:I don't think that I ever advocated the world only growing a few strains of crops. I advocated growing food where it's efficient to do so, and letting the rest of the world remain fallow. That doesn't mean everyone's growing the same thing, at all. Haha, you very confidently assert that, considering it's a major topic of academic debate. And as with most topics in the climate change literature, the pessimists have the preponderance of evidence- the only way we avoid disastrous climate change is if we severely cut emissions, and the only way to do *that* is to take a major hit to world GDP, unless there's some miracle technological breakthrough around the corner. I don't think 0% GDP growth should be a goal in and of itself, like some people do, but to deny that there's any tension at all between perpetual growth and addressing climate change is ridiculous. Guy DeBorgore fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Mar 20, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2015 00:31
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 18:16 |
|
|
^^^^ Maybe you cited a bunch of articles earlier in the thread but you haven't shown me any. And if you did I wouldn't read them; I do enough of that already. It's a debate forum on a comedy site, why get so academic about it? If you actually want to get caught up on the international development literature I think Amartya Sen's a good place to start.tsa posted:Science. We are on a cusp of a revolution in genetics- it doesn't get much press but the achievements made in the last decade in the field have been astounding. At any rate I'm not convinced at all this is actually a problem, or that it would be difficult to fix if it did become one. Where exactly do you think the genes in GMOs come from? Biologists aren't stringing nucleic acids together by hand, they copy them from extant species. The fewer the extant species, the smaller the genetic library we have to draw on for engineering. Wild species of potatoes, corn, and other staple crops are still out there, and they're hugely useful sources of potential new modifications to make to domesticated varieties. Which is why actual biologists are the ones crying loudest about the loss of biodiversity, not blithely shrugging it off because "we have science now, who needs nature?" as if one can substitute for the other. Guy DeBorgore fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Mar 20, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2015 00:40
|
|