Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
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Climate change means global agricultural productivity has plummeted by 21% since 1960s
Oops I see Ajj has covered this from the Guardian
Two birds with one stone
Researchers have come up with a system which uses the radioactive decay heat produced by spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors to heat water.
https://www.dw.com/en/czech-researchers-develop-revolutionary-nuclear-heating-plant/a-57072924
The author calls it a dystopian farming future but some elements i believe would be beneficial to a planned socialist food strategy.
The “dystopian” “full-scale digitalization and automation of food systems” is one of the things we desperately need in order to reduce green house gas emissions. I work in this field and can see that there are some good experts working at IPES Food (who wrote the article) but I cannot see how “agroecology can help cut 75% of food systems’ GHG emissions” – not unless you murder all the cows. We need all technologies we can get our hands on, in addition to the full elimination of buying and selling – something the article sadly missed entirely.
It is a complex issue with contending viewpoints to debate and i think such policy discussions will feature prominently within a socialist society where all the options will be on the table and as you point out, without the constraints of the exchange economy limiting the answers imposed upon the participants. It is a global question and one that is all about horses for courses, what is fitting and appropriate to particular regions.
Walmart’s field to fork via scanning bar-codes certainly has much in its favour in determining the quantity and choices of food and where we distribute it but not necessarily the methods we use to produce it.
I cannot see how “agroecology can help cut 75% of food systems’ GHG emissions” – not unless you murder all the cows.
If you go to the Marxist Animalism thread you will find plenty of hotly debated posts on flexitarian V. Meat-eating V. plant-based diets
There is an interview in the current New Scientist with Mark Carney, ex Governor of the Bank of England and of the Bank of Canada, headed “Rethink capitalism to solve the climate crisis.”
His proposal is for governments to make investing in CO2-causing businesses unprofitable through taxes and other restrictions so that capital will flow out of them and, he hopes, into profitable climate-friendly businesses.
I suppose this would have some effect, but “solve” the climate crisis, I doubt it.
If ever global temperatures reach 4C above pre-industrial levels, UK scientists say a third of the vast floating platforms of ice surrounding Antarctica could be at risk of collapsing and releasing “unimaginable amounts” of water into the sea.
The findings, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggest that 4C warming could leave 34% of the area of all the Antarctic ice shelves – amounting to about half a million square kilometres – at the risk of collapse.
A green fix?
https://news.trust.org/item/20210409133327-v0t10/
The Netherlands aims to invest up to 338 million euros ($401 million) in green hydrogen projects as part of its push to meet climate goals.
Green hydrogen is extracted from water via electrolysis powered by renewable energy, theoretically releasing no carbon emissions either in its production or consumption… But the development of green hydrogen is in a very early phase, and the costs of making it are still too high to compete with fossil fuels without government subsidies.
The western USA faces a record breaking drought.
Shall we expect an exodus of climate refugees, a famine of biblical proportions with starving Americans. Nope
What we can expect is government subsidies to profit-greedy agricultural corporations to continue to grow water-greedy produce in conditions where such farming should never have started.
JanetS and myself know of Colin Todhunter’s articles from old as a critic of GMO foods where he could be accused of throwing the baby out with the bathwater although i do believe many of his reasons such as aligning domestic farming to the requirements of the global market are valid.
But here is his latest offering
Gates Unhinged: Dystopian Vision for Agrifood Must Not Succeed
There was a “relentless” intensification of the climate crisis in 2020, according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.
The coronavirus pandemic made the accelerating impacts of global heating even worse for millions of people. But the temporary dip in carbon emissions due to lockdowns had no discernible impact on atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, the WMO report said.
Last year was ranked as the hottest on record, in a tie with 2016 and 2019, despite the cooling effect of the cyclical natural climate phenomenon, La Niña. Without this, 2020 would most likely have been the hottest year yet. The decade 2011-20 was the hottest on record.
The United States’s largest coal miners’ union said Monday it would accept President Joe Biden’s plan to move away from coal and other fossil fuels in exchange for a “true energy transition” that includes thousands of jobs in renewable energy and spending on technology to make coal cleaner.
Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said ensuring jobs for displaced miners — including 7,000 coal workers who lost their jobs last year — is crucial to any infrastructure bill taken up by Congress.
“I think we need to provide a future for those people, a future for anybody that loses their job because of a transition in this country, regardless if it’s coal, oil, gas or any other industry for that matter,” Roberts said. “We talk about a ‘just transition’ all the time,” Roberts added. “I wish people would quit using that. There’s never been a just transition in the history of the United States.”
Imposs1904 has just put this item from 2001 on his blog.
It’s taken those in charge of capitalist states twenty years to realise this and begin to try to do something about.
Whatever we think of what they are doing we can no longer say that they are not doing anything at all about it. The “worst case” scenarios that are given such publicity are not going to happen.
As we expected climate proposals agreed with by governments is often playing with figures on paper.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/22/climate-crisis-emergency-earth-day
So-called “solar geoengineering” doesn’t actually modify the sun itself. Instead, it reduces incoming sunlight by other means, such as putting chemicals in the atmosphere that reflect sunlight to space. It addresses a symptom of global heating, rather than the root cause, which is human-caused increase in the atmosphere’s burden of carbon dioxide…The heating effect of carbon dioxide persists for 10,000 years or more, absent unproven technologies for scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. In contrast, the sun-dimming particles in question drop out in a year or less, meaning that if you come to rely on geoengineering for survival, you need to keep it up essentially forever. Think of it as climate methadone.
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