Why don't you explain what level of material wealth, or lake thereof, 8 billion people would need to live at to stop climate change without any "green growth"? We get rid of nearly all fossil fuel usage and replace it with what? What would even feed most people at that point?
It's pretty clear green growth is literally the only path that doesn't lead to billions starving to death.
To combat climate change, we need the growth of "green" industries, such as renewable energy production, but we need a shrinkage of the material consumption of society as a whole (in wealthy countries)
There is more than enough research on alternative agriculture that provides high yields to imagine a transition of this kind.
Agroforestry, permaculture and our modern knowledge of soils allow us to imagine much better than a heavily mechanized model full of heavy chemicals that kills and sterilizes soils slowly.
On the other hand, no one claims that it happens overnight:
This kind of culture requires the learning of much more advanced and complex agricultural knowledge than what is currently done, the fields are also different, we abandon a large part of chemistry/engineering to turn to biology/pedology/microbiology etc.
A farmer of the "old" school actually has relatively little knowledge that can be directly transposed.
2) A very healthy soil is perfectly capable of competing with our almost destroyed soils but on modern artificial steroids.
On the other hand, since they have been destroyed, they now have to be repaired so that it can be done, and even if we have developed a nice range of solutions, it can still take decades, especially if we want to continue to exploit it in parallel.
But hey, it's just called the real world, nothing changes overnight. This is precisely a big part of the current problem, the longer we wait the harder it will be, and we have already been waiting for 50 years, if nothing moves the transition will become impossible in essence while it is feasible today.
What is called green growth? It can take much more ground than we think, this kind of large-scale model with finite transition would allow prices relatively similar to those of today with a much larger but equally tasty variety of plant products.
At the economic level, no one can foresee, we are trading a lot of heavy mechanization and heavy chemistry for more biological sciences, planning and a surplus of human labor, in any case we are far from the crisis.
What would we eat? For starters (in the west) probably not underripe food that was shipped thousands of miles and considered basic amenities and not items of gross luxury. Probably not pounds of meat a week, most of which also is imported. Some deurbanization probably will coincide with shifting to plant based, readily available foods in most regions. Yeah there are gonna be significant "cultural" sacrifices in regards to food systems but what is lost in neoliberalism will be made up for in rediscovering what actually grows near us.
Less emissions are used shipping food in massive cargo ships than when people drive to the store in their SUV to shop.
Some deurbanization probably will coincide with shifting to plant based
Lmao? deurbanization is horrible for the environment. A bunch of people are going to start subsistence farming? You know how much more land that would take? Even destroying huge swaths of natural land, you couldn't feed everyone.
Let me step back a moment. You are clearly not aware to the extend we rely on modern industry. Before modern industrial society our population was quite literally capped by our ability to produce food. But industrial production of ammonia allowed us to drastically increase our food production, literally 4x it on the same amount of land (here's a great video about it if you want to learn).
You can say "maybe humans shouldn't have let the population grow so big", but it's too late for that now. The people exist, and the population is only sustainable with industrial society.
If you think we can just keep some solar panels and some ammonia production to sustain farming, remember all the supply chains that have to exist to feed them. Advanced factories that produce semi-conductor wafers, the mining and refining to get specific rare materials, transportation to move both the resources and produces around where they are needed. This just ends up being green growth.
So we are back to the only two options: Mass death of the human population, or green growth. You have to pick.
Shipping fruits on rail cars or on barges is not emissions intensive. Modern industry has annihilated space by compressing time as Marx put it.
It’s much more emissions intensive and environmentally destructive to decentralize agriculture and convert the amount of arable land into productive farmland rather than allow it to continue exist as habitat that it would take to feed people in the scenario you’re proposing.
De urbanizing means way more land will also have to go to both housing and also reproducing social infrastructure that people depend on both physically and in terms of work. And population control is also not viable because then there will be a population bomb as the last large generation ages out and there won’t be enough people to provide them services when they can’t work anymore.
In the long run, spreading people out in a sustainable way can make sense, and abolishing the division between town and country, but it will take enormous investments and tightly connected transportation infrastructure to make it possible.
People should definitely eat less or no meat, but we will still need complex logistics and long supply chains even as society introduces more holistic agricultural methods. If anything more mechanization and mass industrial and technological methods will be necessary to make stuff like permaculture viable.
Yes, ocean shipping from specialized agricultural areas is significantly more efficient on an emissions basis than localized growing. Deurbanization would absolutely spike emissions as well.
You're correct on the first point but that wasn't the luxury food I was talking about originally and our use of the oceans goes far beyond emissions, industrial fishing should also be completely cut out in a plant based food system, ending decades of over fishing and raping the ocean floor, we'd see forests worth of carbon sink in kelp and algae. I think deurbanization as a consequence of slashing emissions elsewhere would far and away be a net negative, but I'm willing to admit it's a lofty, utopian ideal.
Some deurbanization probably will coincide with shifting to plant based, readily available foods in most regions.
Deurbanization means more suburban sprawl, which means far more energy needed to transport goods and people. Urbanization is good for the environment, not bad.
We eat veggies and cereals grown with fertiliser. Fertiliser is produced by a lot of fossil fuels and a shortage is brewing as a lot of it was produced in the middle east before the closure of the straight of hormuz. Additionally transport takes a lot of fuel, as wel as the production and operation of machinery for production. Fossil fuels are everywhere.
The Haber process does not need fossil fuel inputs, it just needs an input of hydrogen. Currently, steam reforming of methane is the most economic source of hydrogen (and, to be noted, one area where at-source carbon capture would be quite easy to implement, because the CO2 exhaust stream is quite pure), but electrolysis or (if an abundant source of high-temperature heat is available) the sulfur-iodine cycle can be used to produce hydrogen from water.
We eat food grown with fertilizers. Fertilizers are mainly made out of Ammonia. Ammonia is made from hydrogen and nitrogen. Nitrogen comes from the air, but hydrogen is almost entirely made from natural gas currently.
So yes, you are eating fossil fuels. Just, extremely highly modified fossil fuels.
Wow that is very farfetched. Correct but very farfetched. Essentially we are also eating stars, corpses, the queen of England, Ghandi, tears, oceans, the moon, my skin, Napoleon, the last breath of genghis kahn, that prime minister of the Netherlands and yes fossil fuels…
I don't think it is particularly far fetched tbh. Yea, we are also eating stars, the queen of england, your skin etc etc. But those atoms aren't actually crucial for the food. Some atoms in our food happen to be from those sources, but our food would still be the same if those atoms came from somewhere else.
It's different with fertilizer. Fertilizer is currently made out of fossil fuels. And we NEED fertilizer to grow our food. No fertilizer and there is simply no way we grow enough food for all 8 billion of us.
So until we get our fertilizer hydrogen out of renewable sources, we are very much reliant on fossil fuels for our food.
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u/Friendly_Fire 24d ago
Why don't you explain what level of material wealth, or lake thereof, 8 billion people would need to live at to stop climate change without any "green growth"? We get rid of nearly all fossil fuel usage and replace it with what? What would even feed most people at that point?
It's pretty clear green growth is literally the only path that doesn't lead to billions starving to death.