David HoAug 8, 2023
It's not fashionable to talk about consuming less as a climate solution because our economy is based on selling us crap that no one needs.
Show threadGraydonAug 8, 2023

@davidho "Climate solution" is "everybody has enough to eat after agriculture fails".

That's got three parts. First part is the abrupt cessation of all fossil carbon extraction to move the failure of agriculture as far into the future as it will go. Second is creating the post-agricultural food supply. Third is closed-loop machine culture ecology necessary to support the second.

Things are bad to the extent that they're not doing those three things. Consumption is not an applicable metric.

Show threadTitia SchuurmanAug 8, 2023
@graydon @davidho "post-agricultural food supply" was not an idea that had entered my mind, but I can see how it will be a necessity, if not everywhere then in a large part of the world, and when I think of it I can see examples already coming along. One is a Finnish start-up that is making food protein literally out of thin air, i.e. from CO2. It's still early days, but definitely interesting. And the project has attracted public funding, as it should. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods
Solar Foods - Wikipedia

Show threadGraydon

@titia @davidho That Finnish start-up is good news; thank you!

It's really difficult to find direct discussion of the agricultural consequences, I think because once you admit that this is a real risk the prefered policy line of continuing fossil carbon extraction becomes much less politically tenable.

My heuristic for awhile has been how many results are returned by searching for "potato greenhouse" with the quotes. Definitely a trend up over the last decade.

Aug 8, 2023 at 1:29pmWeb
Show threadTitia SchuurmanAug 8, 2023
@graydon @davidho On the whole, I think "lab-grown food" will go from a science fiction trope to a mainstream reality much faster than most of us think. Not that most of us would want that, either, but as long as we keep going as we do, that's where we're headed (if we're lucky).