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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 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.
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.
I use the term "natural biofuel" for oil, coal, and gas because it's a more accurate term than "fossil fuel". Oil is not fossilised. It's also distinct from e.g. manufactured ethanol because it has been produced by nature - thus, "natural biofuel".
I do think that if you're going to talk about "unsustainability" in terms of "we're going to run out", then I think it's very fair to ask "when?" After all, the sun will run out eventually. That doesn't imply that it's wasteful to use solar energy.
On the other hand if you want to talk about costs vs benefits, that's also fine, but you do need to weigh both sides of the equation. I think the costs of natural biofuels are greatly overstated, but even granting those, they come with the benefit of... feeding 8 billion people. Seems like a very positive cost/benefit ratio to me!
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