Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UN

In first world countries, e.g. US and Europe, the amount of food wasted is massive and if there's anybody still starving in these countries, that's not because of a food shortage.

Also the wasted food cannot be shipped to countries that need it, like Africa, without a high cost, unless you're talking about food low in nutrients, like sugar, flour or corn, that can be stored for months or years and that does nothing to help those populations, because they need proteins, they need nutrients.

So the starvation argument makes absolutely no sense.

Also I believe that in some cases a lower yield per acre should reduce the costs. If you eliminate the waste, if you make the distribution channels efficient, if you keep the soil healthy, production costs should in fact go down.

I agree. We pretend we know what we are doing, but we have no clue. It really sucks that insects eat our crops, but insects need to eat something, or they die. If they die, then whatever eats them will also die. No matter how you slice it, humans need to consume every ounce of available resources to fuel not only just our population growth, but our economic growth too. We do this by vast ecosystem destruction, replacing complex food webs with our own industrialized agriculture and production needs. Whether we use chemical pesticides or turn their homes asunder and starve them to death, or "snipe" them to death with gene drive fantasies, the result is the same: we're eliminating everything that does not participate in the cartoon food web of our own creation. This will not end well.

The problem is not of a technical nature, but of a political/social one.

> Depending on skills and technology, they are not scarce for a world population of 10 billion humans or they are scarce with a world population of 1 human.

This is very true. If organized properly we could very easily feed the 7.7 billion people that live on earth today. We could easily feed the 11 billion people that are expected to exist in about 50 years or so on earth. I do not doubt that the technological hurdles are gigantic, but the could be overcome.

Alas, I don't see that happening. Not because of the technological difficulty, but because of human stupidity or shortsightedness, our tribal instincts and the tendency towards reckless acquisition of resources that allowed our ancestors to become the dominant species on this planet in the first place.

You see, the problem is not our abilities to change the environment. The problem is our inability to change ourselves.

/If/ we all went vegan, /if/ we stopped needles, wasteful wars, /if/ we stopped consuming more than we need, /if/ ...

... then we could make it. But we don't change our behavior. We are still greedy little apes that are driven to resource acquisition to improve our social status in order to have higher reproductive success. We are reproduction machines, nothing that is changed by a few decades of wealth in some parts on earth.

It is this inability to overcome our biological imperatives that will doom us, because they prevent us from recognizing the foreigner as our sibling. And so we compete for resources, even though we've already so many resources that we die from over saturation.

So, unless all the peoples around the world start working together very soon to combat climate change, mitigate species and biomass loss, reduce the consumption of resources to a degree our planet can actually provide, I don't see how the human species will be able to survive.

It's not that we couldn't do it. It's that we're not willing to pay the cost in the /now/ to be able to survive in the /future/.

First: I had missed the part of your previous reply where you wrote that you too had downvoted my comment because of "my hubris". Unfortunately I read and replied too quickly because I had to leave. Now it is too late to correct my reply.

Second: Fortunately only few people need to introduce or enforce change to make big changes for all. Modern societies would have never happened if change was not imposed by a few on all.

Unfortunately climate change is a bad problem because it is also a political problem because appropriate technology might not be available and imposed soon enough. Politics are determined by the stupid ignorant democratic majority. Even in dictatorships like China because a dictatorship must be tolerated by the democratic majority.

Fortunately, the stupid ignorant democratic majority could die and leave the surviving elite (not a money based elite of billionaires) with a better society. Natural evolution.

IMO, relatively few humans will die because of climate change but many more other species will die out.

https://theconversation.com/capitalism-is-killing-the-worlds...

> One tweet, posted in response to the WWF publication, retorted that “we are a virus with shoes”, an attitude that hints at growing public apathy.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-deepmind-founder...

> "Either we need an exponential improvement in human behavior — less selfishness, less short-termism, more collaboration, more generosity — or we need an exponential improvement in technology."

> "If you look at current geopolitics, I don't think we're going to be getting an exponential improvement in human behavior any time soon."

> "That's why we need a quantum leap in technology like AI."

> No, rhetorical questions have expected answers.

Not necessarily, but either way the answer is not the point.

> You simply rejected answers which you did not expect and then declared your own questions "not to be answered".

Okay Dr. Mind Reader. Do you believe I didn't expect that someone could google who does organic certifications and give me links to that? Do you believe I have never heard of such a thing as organic certification, even after multiple people have pointed it out to me right here?

Once again, I don't actually expect you to answer these question. The point of the questions is to make you think. You could answer them, but you would be missing the point.

> Your idea that organic farming should be atomically definable, doesn't make nonsense bullshit out of organic agriculture and labeling - it has made nonsense of your understanding of organic agriculture.

I didn't say it should be and indeed it doesn't. I really just mentioned it, you don't even seem to disagree that it doesn't have a clearly defined meaning, so what is your problem?

Anyway, what actually makes organic farming bullshit is the fact that it's based on bullshit theories. It has no basis in science. It comes out of nonsense beliefs, like Antroposophy. What makes it marketing bullshit is the fact that "organic" is used as a label of quality, even though the practice is based on bullshit theories, just like Homeopathy, which also has certifications. The farmers following these inefficient practices often do it only for the marketing effect. I don't even see you contest that at all, so I must conclude that you actually agree with me on this. Glad we're on the same page!