Transcript
A tweet by some news company saying “Your bowl of rice is hurting the climate too.” It has a link to an article and a picture of a bowl of rice. It has a quote saying “Should I just die”
A tweet by some news company saying “Your bowl of rice is hurting the climate too.” It has a link to an article and a picture of a bowl of rice. It has a quote saying “Should I just die”
An extra bit of doom: nearly half of the corn (consuming a proportional amount of water, energy, and labour) produced by the USA is not eaten by humans or animals. It’s processed into bioethanol (consuming more water and energy) and fed into cars. The process is a net negative of energy, but shutting down or even scaling back the industry would lead to a massive loss of jobs and an economic suicide.
I don’t have numbers to show, so feel free to disregard.
Which is a good point to keep in mind when people claim there isn’t enough land for solar panels.
Even by extremely optimistic assumptions, bioethanol barely helps. It’s entirely a corn farming subsidy combined with oil companies pretending their product can be clean. Here’s a rundown:
https://youtu.be/F-yDKeya4SU
Oh, I have another bone to pick with those people. I know a perfect place for solar panels. Take this satellite photo of a completely random part of Kansas:
The circular irrigation system leaves the corners unused. That’s 21% of the square’s area, wasted.
(edit) I’m not a civil engineer, and I know that putting solar panels and supporting infrastructure so close to a water spray has its own problems, but that is still way too large an area over all of the arable land in North America to just leave unused.
And even if they can’t have solar, they can probably have windmills. We need a combination of the two.
It’s also worth pointing out that about half of corn and soy production is not profitable, like, most people growing it are not making a living off it, they’re breaking even at best. Most farmers in the US make the majority of their household income in jobs off of the farm.
Most farm land in the US is not cultivated to generate profit, but to maintain it’s status as “agricultural land” which excepts it from many different types of tax (or at least subjects it to a far lower rate). Making it an untaxed store of wealth. There is a reason that the largest owner of farmland in the US is bill gates. Corn and soy are grown because they are the most “hands off” crops, requiring the least amount of ongoing intervention for something that breaks even.
In all likelihood, if we shut down the ethanol program, very few people would loose their livelihoods, but there would be an economic impact in that more people farming for tax reasons would be taking a loss on that. Many might choose to sell off their lands and move that wealth in to different asset classes, which would have knock on effects.