161–170 of 253 posts
I’m surprised at the skepticism here on HN. Was everyone this skeptical / glib when the (insert technology) was useless when it was invented? Anyone seen the efficiency of a solar panel in 1970? Factory farming is a real problem to solve.
I would be surprised if some HN topic does not provoke any skepticism at all.
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>"The solutions of "everyone just needs to do " are a dime a dozen. We could solve war if everyone just stopped fighting." As evident from your (absurd) comparison you're responding to the parent from the perspective of another completely different problem. Consuming less meat and more plant-based foods, including going fully vegetarian, is absolutely within grasp for a substantial amount of people in the west.
Only if they were forced, is the point. For most it's a significant reduction in quality of life they're not going to choose.
I'm convinced that it takes a very special consumer (minority) to actually suffer a significant reduction of quality of life from being forced to give up meat.
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That was Germany, they basically financed solar energy with tax money (about 200 billion), then their industry was killed by China.
It's so strange that a mostly cloudy country at 51ºN spent so much money developing solar energy.
It was an exports/services (consulting) play. "Skating where the puck will be" and all that—become the experts with plenty of production capacity before the market per se justifies it. IIRC they made similar efforts for other renewables, like wind power. Not sure how all that's going, but I know it was regarded by many as a good move, a couple decades back when they were investing in it all.
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China is permitting 2 new coal plants a week[1]. Yet it's cow flatulence that is the problem. How people get convinced to act against their own self interest I'll never understand. [1] https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-...
Why is china being a bad actor mean we should ignore the real damage climate change is already causing? How are we supposed to stop china from building coal plants? They were leading the way with cheap renewable energy until recent economic contractions. "Someone else is lighting a fire in the building so we shouldn't try putting out this grease fire we have here" is a stupid, accelerationist take that doesn't even m…
We were also warned that even if the United States solved the problem that it wasn’t enough. People think they can convince several billion people to give up meat but replacing several thousand coal power plants is too hard…
“Local governments in China approved more new coal power in the first three months of 2023 than in the whole of 2021, according to official documents”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/24/china-ramps-up...
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You may not care about the widespread cruelty to animals in meat production, but many people do.
But you may not care about possible future when I can not grow some chicken legally for my own consuming, but I appreciate eating animals as one of the most natural and beautiful things in my life.
I want to eat meat from chickens and cows that had good, happy lives, eating the healthiest most natural form of their diet possible. I don't want lab grown meat, the concept is disgusting. As it is our food is too processed and industrial. Maybe we can focus on mixed farming instead https://www.earth.com/news/mixed-farming-could-increase-food...
I wonder who the market for lab-grown meat would be. I bet that 99% of vegetarians (myself included) and maybe 90% of meat eaters would never eat it. Meat eaters will insist on “real meat” and vegetarians don’t want any meat.
This is an expected result if you extrapolate from an early R&D stage process to a global scale, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth pursuing more sustainable routes to the mass production of animal muscle. And that’s really what the underlying goal is here - don’t fall for the false dichotomy of “farmed” vs “lab-grown” - factory farms are essentially process development labs. How efficiently can you convert land…
Not disagreeing with you, but ultimately you have to ask the question: does this make sense? And look at the "why". What are you trying to optimize?
Don't mess with food. We know what works, we've almost always made it worse: less nutritious (rolled oats instead of steel cut), less tasty (tomatoes, chicken), more vulnerable to die-out (bananas), or worse. Now you get Bill Gates and Monsanto advocating GMO / lab-grown foods for the masses. The market plan for the long-term on this is terrifying though.
Just... grow real food, eat real food.
The earth currently can produce enough food for everyone. The reason people go hungry in 2023 is because food rots on docks from government mismanagement, or goes into Dear Leader's kitchen and not those of his people, or a million other reasons that all boil down to selfishness, arrogance, or advanced forms of these same vices.
Apologies for the rant.
Or we could switch to eating plants now. We already get 82% calories and 63% proteins from plants. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets We could stay on our 1% of habitable earth, lower our agricultural footprint from 48% of land to 15%, use quarter of pesticides,…
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Chickens turn kitchen waste and other garbage into nutrient dense eggs. I raise chickens and feed them my kitchen and yard waste. They also eat bugs. Two chicken eggs can power me all day. Reason about that "trophic energy loss [gain]".
I'm not sure what your "not muh eggs!" story has anything to do with a discussion about animal ag industry and scaling meat production to global levels. For example, how much do your backyard chickens contribute to global egg consumption, and what would the egg market look like if all eggs came from chickens living like yours? That's the kind of topic going on here.