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This is already the case, but now everyone complains about food waste. Can't win!
Food waste you mean carbon sequestration? Do your part, don’t eat that tart!
But seriously is anyone really complaining about food waste? I personally haven’t really heard that.
People complain about food waste, and though they have a point, I think it's ultimately a trivial problem. Food being wasted us a byproduct of our civilization producing so much food so cheaply that we can afford to waste it. But, to bring the subject back to malaria vaccines, I am not worried about future generations having so many malaria vaccines that they can afford to fill landfills with them.
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People complain about it all the time where I live, and it is actually a real environmental issue. I know that I feel bad whenever I waste food, for one. That said it isn't like there are many people championing food waste, so there's not much of a debate.
How is food waste an environmental issue? It's all biodegradable organics.
Modern industrial and petroleum-based agriculture is absurdly wasteful. For every calorie of energy the modern agricultural system produces, 13 calories were spent growing it and distributing it ( https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/food/us-food-system-factsheet - this data is somewhat old but if you have better I'd love to see it ). Historical farming methods tended to have ratios like 1:5-10 as opposed to 13:1, but nobody really notices that we're technically massively less efficient at turning energy into food due to the abundance of energy provided by fossil fuels. We're currently expending those fossil fuels at breakneck speeds, and in many cases using farming methods that contribute to environmental degradation and loss of soil quality as well. It'd be dishonest to just shove those costs into the energy equation, but I think there's a real and serious issue there that a lot of people have spent a lot of time talking about.
Industrial agriculture is actually a tremendously bad deal when you look at the level of raw energy we put into the system and what we get out of it when compared to other options, and food wastage is made worse because the costs of that waste are magnified by the sheer inefficiency of the system that produced it. Sure, an apple you throw away because it had a worm in it or went off isn't that big of a deal, but when that apple was produced by the modern day industrial system of agriculture you're wasting a lot more energy than you were in the past.
Finally, a lot of food is wasted for reasons that a lot of people don't like (corporate profitability, aesthetics, etc). I believe you live in Australia - if you're interested in learning more on that particular aspect, I recommend checking out The War on Waste https://iview.abc.net.au/video/DO1624H001S00
(edited solely for spacing/readability)
I don't really see the problem here. Like, why is the energy input/output ratio the relevant metric? Obviously modern agriculture is going to involve more energy usage since we now have tractors and stuff and we didn't use to. But that's also why we are now able to feed 8 billion people. Energy is there to be used - and what's a better use for it than feeding the world?
I don't believe there is another viable option to "industrial agriculture" when it comes to producing the amount of food we need. And if your problem is that it uses natural biofuels, I don't agree, but that's an argument for getting the required energy from other sources rather than for scrapping all the combine harvesters.
Sustainability is the biggest one. Energy is one of the most fundamental building blocks of human society and existence, and the way we spend and manage it is extremely important. To use a financial metaphor, spending more than you earn is not usually considered a solid strategy for improving your financial conditions for the future. Our current farming habits are spending accumulated energy rather than helping to collect it, and this is a deadly serious concern over the long term. Of course, it isn't the only issue - modern industrial farming practices are bad for the soil and planet in a huge number of ways. Some of them are more local, like the decline in soil quality and damage caused by excessive pesticide usage. Some of them are bigger issues which only show up as problems later on - like the excessive usage of antibiotics used to help animals grow, which are currently contributing to the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. These problems are all solvable, yes, but solving problems takes time, energy and attention.
Yes, and there's nothing wrong with tractors existing. But as has been pointed out, they're not really the biggest contributor to these issues.
And this is actually a big fucking problem now that we're spending energy to create food rather than generating it. Currently, we're only able to support that number of people by drawing down on a limited resource which does not renew itself on any timescale relevant to human lives (it takes a long time to make fossil fuels!). On a societal level, the discovery and utilisation of fossil fuels was the equivalent of a massive lottery win - a huge, one-off windfall of useful, usable energy. If you're incredibly rich, you can afford to spend far more than you make - for a while. But when you get a whole bunch of dependents reliant upon those resources, what happens when you run out?
There's a very glib saying associated with sustainability practices - "What cannot be sustained, won't be." Right now, the population we have is unsustainable, only made possible because we are drawing down on the fossil-fuels that were formed over millions of years. Those fossil fuels won't last forever, and we currently have no adequate replacement for them when they become uneconomical to extract (people tend to get the easiest-to-extract resources first, leaving the harder-to-utilise ones for later). We haven't just got an unsustainable system of food production, our system of food production produces negative externalities and degrades the environment in ways that will make future agriculture more difficult.
Building AGI(unless you're Big Yud). Setting up sustainable and renewable power sources. Leaving a useful inheritance for those who come after us. Space exploration. Scientific research. Sustaining industrial civilisation over a longer timescale, giving us more potential opportunities to find useful things and giving us more time for technological (and cultural) development. Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that we need to keep human numbers down in total, but that our current population bump should have been stretched out through time so that the growth could happen in a more sustainable and enduring way.
You're correct! There isn't another viable alternative to industrial agriculture, and there isn't a way to produce the amount of food we need. This doesn't mean that Demeter is going to descend from the sky in a cloud of smoke and give us a sustainable, energy-positive farming method that doesn't require fossil fuels. It means that people are going to needlessly, pointlessly starve to death when more prudent management of our natural resources could have let them live longer and more satisfying lives. You don't need a crystal ball to predict what happens when a population outgrows the carrying capacity of their environment - you can see it happen all the time in nature, and it isn't particularly pleasant to go through.
The malthusian long term could be 5 billion years. All those problems were supposed to be insurmountable centuries ago, but the carrying capacity of the earth has only grown exponentially. Tech beats nominally diminishing resources every time. The EROIE of the past was irrelevant, they had no idea what a lump of coal, a vial of kerosene, a handful of uranium ore, could do.
My reply to concerns like this has been consistent over time - where's the energy source that powers modern industrial civilisation once we run out of fossil fuels? Renewables and environmentally friendly forms of energy generation, as nice as they are, can't do it. Nuclear fusion has been 20 years away from being economical for the past 60 years, and there isn't a single nuclear power plant generating power at a profit without substantial government assistance anywhere in the world. You're right that the EROEI of the past isn't really relevant here, but the reason why it is brought up is in contrast to the negative EROEI of the present. Previously, making food meant that there was more net energy available to humans - now it means that there is less. We're eating the civilizational seed corn already. When the fundamental basis of your society is energy positive, your society is substantially more sustainable. We're currently consuming our savings faster than we can earn, and just hoping that we find a payday that can prop us up longer. There's no guarantee that that payday will ever arrive.
If you actually go and look at history, you are not going to see a slow but exponential ramp up towards progress and complexity. You'll see a series of rises followed by falls - the progress of science did actually go into reverse at multiple points in history, and we're looking at the sort of trends and conditions that very reliably precede moments like that. Earth's true carrying capacity is unknowable and constant, but if you're judging based on what humans can do, we have actually gone backwards several times (Bronze-age collapse, collapse of Rome, etc).
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Seems way too soon to worry about natural biofuel use being "unsustainable". We have centuries worth of coal left.
I don't think time is a good way of measuring resources like this, because there's so much variability in future patterns of consumption. How much of that stored coal is uneconomical to extract, and how much more of it will be burned to make up for shortfalls elsewhere? Fossil fuel usage also contributes to pollution and environmental damage, and while you can ignore those costs on a corporate balance sheet (or at a country level, for a while) they eventually come home to roost and show up elsewhere. Rising sea levels are going to require an awful lot of energy expenditure to deal with, for example, and they're already starting to show up. The problems and costs associated with fossil fuels aren't far off in the future - they're already here, and they show no sign of going into reverse.
I also wasn't talking about biofuels at all, assuming you're using the term technically as distinct from fossil fuels. Nobody cares about biofuels because they're largely wastes of energy - why burn 13 calories of energy to make 1 calorie of food which then gets converted into fuel and hits efficiency again? You can get a bit of return from working with used cooking oil, but that's not exactly the sort of energy base you can power an industrial civilisation with.
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According to the chart, the lion's share of this modern energy expense on food is storage, services, transportation and processing. But do we not save energy on the convenience? It makes some sense that we spend more calories on growing food because we use few people and many machines, as opposed to 90% of people plowing their own (or not exactly their own, but details) share of a field. But is the freed manpower accounted for?
Uh, no. We waste copious amounts of food making sure that you can get whatever you want no matter the season/location of origin. "Storage, services, transportation and processing" ARE the convenience!
No. Why would it be? Do you account for how many horses are no longer required to carry people long distances when working out the economics of cars?
No, because I'm not a horse.
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At the Malthusian limit, the amount of non-solar energy put into food is equal to the energy necessary to sustain every human being (all of whom are working directly or indirectly to produce that food), and that is equal to the amount of solar energy put into the food times all the efficiencies involved minus wastage. Humanity has often been near there.. so yeah, the freed manpower is absolutely enormous.
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