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US quietly urges more use of Russia fertilizer to ease food crisis

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Re: US quietly urges more use of Russia fertilizer to ease food crisis

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile RUB to USD is at its highest in nearly 5 years Is that meant to demonstrate economic strength? * Russians have massive amount of brain drain. Most of tech employees have left, leaving only people extracting oil, people who turn it into fertilizer and gasoline and supporting roles. * They can't build military tech because of sanctions. Starting to use 1950s and 1960s tanks. * They've privatized and violate…

It hurts the Russian, but the Russian lived in the Soviet Union and survived the Crazy 90s. They can suffer way more than Westerns spoiled by prosperity. And the best thing - rich Russian escaping Russia end up being sanctioned, hence, many stay. Let's see who can suffer more: Westerns + accepting a global food crisis with millions of dead people in the Third world (thanks to the sanctions, NOT the war per se) or the…

> It hurts the Russian, but the Russian lived in the Soviet Union and survived the Crazy 90s. They can suffer way more than Westerns spoiled by prosperity.

From the Mongol invasions to WWII to the Soviet Union, Russians have a lot of experience with collective suffering and deprivation.

Re: US quietly urges more use of Russia fertilizer to ease food crisis

#182
post #40
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, the problem was that they didn't go 100% in on green tech.

Anyone claiming that we could be 100% non-nuclear non-CO2 is completely delusional. There are only a few tiny examples (like Greenland) that have sufficiently bizarre local sources of energy. And that’s not even taking into account plastics, fertiliser etc. The price of this delusion is being paid right now: impeding famine, energy costs exploding, Europe financing Russian war in Europe. The goal was “clean abundant…

> sufficiently bizarre local sources of energy

What's this bizarre local source of energy that Greenland has that apparently nobody else does?

There's water and fossil fuels in the rest of the world too ...

https://www.worldometers.info/electricity/greenland-electric...

Re: US quietly urges more use of Russia fertilizer to ease food crisis

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile RUB to USD is at its highest in nearly 5 years Is that meant to demonstrate economic strength? * Russians have massive amount of brain drain. Most of tech employees have left, leaving only people extracting oil, people who turn it into fertilizer and gasoline and supporting roles. * They can't build military tech because of sanctions. Starting to use 1950s and 1960s tanks. * They've privatized and violate…

> Appeasement would be a better choice? Pope Francis says Ukraine war was ‘perhaps somehow provoked’ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/14/pope-francis-u... "The pontiff warned [..] against what he said was a fairytale perception of the conflict as good versus evil" "We need to move away from the usual Little Red Riding Hood pattern, in that Little Red Riding Hood was good and the wolf was the bad one [..] so…

Well that’s a new one, is there an interpretation of red riding hood where the wolf is good?

Re: US quietly urges more use of Russia fertilizer to ease food crisis

#184
post #75
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, as a citizen of the US dependent on others growing this food on behalf of me, am fine with reduced yields and higher meat prices, to put more pressure on Russia. I also wish we'd send in the big guns to put a lot more pressure in focused places.

"Reduced yields" and "higher meat prices" is a benign way of saying "people may starve to death". What may be an inconvenience to you, a probably-rich person on the global scale, who can afford to outbid poor people when food gets short, is not necessarily just an inconvenience for others.

People do not need to starve to death. We use a ton of land to grow a ton of plants that we then feed to a ton of animals which we then feed to humans. Or we could, you know, just eat the plants. Calculations vary (a lot), but doing that could reduce global agricultural land use from 4 billion hectares to just 1.†. On top of that we're completely wasting 30-40% of the food we do produce.††

This is not to say that all meat consumption is 'inefficient'. Cattle can graze on land that is not suitable for farming, and animals generally eat more of the physical plants than we do (animals on a feedlot are often eating fibrous parts of the plant like stalks and stubble and not just the parts we humans like to eat). But there's no way around it, industrialized meat in its current form is an extraordinarily inefficient use of land and has terrible environmental consequences.

Also relevant to any discussion on fertilizer is that excessive usage basically destroys the soil. We've moved away from time-tested methods of managing crops through things like crop rotation, cover crops, promoting natural vegetation in key areas... to over-tilling, over-fertilizing, mono-cropping, and this is taking its toil on the ground we use to farm. Fertilizer is also responsible for eutrophication (nutrient pollution) which destroys local ecosystems and poisons the water. Not to mention nutrition != calories.

Fertilizer is absolutely a modern technological wonder which has allowed humanity to produce food at tremendous scale, and I would not argue that it does not have its place in farming. But the current singular focus on "more yield per hectare" is a very modern, naive approach to farming that throws out a ton of considerations, and is absolutely unecessary.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets †† https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs

Re: US quietly urges more use of Russia fertilizer to ease food crisis

#185
post #62

Meanwhile RUB to USD is at its highest in nearly 5 years. Cutting Russia off from SWIFT has only strengthened their ties to India and China. Russia is still invading Ukraine, and now we're dealing with soaring food and energy prices at home. At some point you have to consider whether this level of diplomatic incompetence is intentional.

>Russia is still invading Ukraine, and now we're dealing with soaring food and energy prices at home. For several years we bet the global economy on the idea that we could safely coexist with an aggressive dictator. That bet did not pan out. I agree with you that the least painful time to remove our dependence on Russian fuel was several years ago, but we failed to take the ample warnings and here we are in a crisis.…

No, we bet that creating closer ties economically would disincentivize aggressive behavior. It is still to be seen if that pans out, this is the greatest test of the liberal world order, but the repercussions are not seen overnight.

Re: US quietly urges more use of Russia fertilizer to ease food crisis

#186
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia could stop the bloodshed today by simply withdrawing their forces from the region. The LNR/DNR forces would surrender (they are reliant on Russia's support) and peace and stability could be achieved rapidly. The power is in their hands. It's important to remember that this war has really been going on since 2014. Eastern rebel forces were starting to crumble until Russia began offering direct military assistan…

They withdraw now and a year later theres a NATO base in Mariupol. Donbas is the location from which the Nazis launched the attack on the USSR which almost lost them WW2. Its strategic significance cant be understated. Finland and Sweden are not as important.

There's already NATO bases in the Barents Sea (and Turkey via the Black Sea) in addition along their land borders via the baltic states (minus Belarus). Their actions have also pushed Finland and Sweden into the arms of NATO.

The thing about the Cuban missile crisis is that Kennedy was able to get Russian missiles AWAY from the United States. Russia's actions are getting hardware placed closer.

And why is that? Probably because Russia will tolerate it in exchange for territorial expansion. Even after the 2014 invasion of Crimea there was open talk about how NATO was obsolete and a waste of money and effort. Russia could've probably eliminated any NATO threat without firing a single shot. It was already seen as a relic of the cold war. Instead, Russia's actions have given a renewed justification for NATO's existence.

Re: US quietly urges more use of Russia fertilizer to ease food crisis

#187
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually been pleasantly surprised at how well Biden's administration has walked the tightrope on Ukraine. And though I'm very liberal by US standards, I'm not terribly partisan when it comes to foreign policy—I think Obama's foreign policy was largely disastrous, and have a lot more good things to say about Trump's than I thought I would when his term started (admittedly, more about intentions & gestures than a…

Obama had the problem that he was a young guy who came in with big ambitious promises and good intentions but inherited a complete shitshow from his predecessor (both the wars and an economic crisis). His opposition was intransigent and did everything they could to undermine the USA for their own narrow political interest, and his party got bashed up in the 2010 midterm elections. He then let himself get pushed aroun…

Syria was the worst part, because the fallout from that was really bad. Not sure we'd have had Brexit without the extra pressure that put on Europe. Likely empowered Erdogan somewhat (doubt it made a big difference there, admittedly) and contributed to the rise of far right parties in Eastern Europe. Plus, you know, sucks for the Syrians.

Nb. what I blame him for isn't the Syrian civil war itself, but for choosing to get involved in such a way that it's dragged on indefinitely, rather than concluding it one way or the other much faster. This also contributed to destabilization and suffering in Iraq.

Continuing to allow Afghanistan to bleed for his entire 8 years while everyone at the top (and probably most folks in the middle, and at the bottom) knew no progress was, had been, or would be made was a straight-up crime (see: the Afghanistan papers).

But sure, it's hard to beat Bush II for "foreign policy fuck-ups". Dude's a legend in that regard. I wouldn't be surprised if historians in 2100 will look back at that and see it as America falling on its face at the starting line, for this century, and never really recovering.

> Trump’s foreign policy was largely symbolic and detail-free, focused on breaking up US soft power to aid Russia, symbolically opposing China to appeal to anti-Asian racists, making up nonsense about Latin American immigrants to appeal to anti-Latino racists, continuing middle East aggression (and the Muslim ban etc.) to appeal to anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racists. To the extent things went okay it was largely down to incompetence and uncoordination.

Pushing NATO members to meet their defense spending obligations ended up being damn-near prescient, even if the rest of his action on NATO was mostly bad. I'd love to see more breaking down of trade relations with China, so that part was fine by me. Lots of his rhetoric was idiotic but at the same time it was refreshing to see anyone in power talking anti-neoliberalism, for once, even if he was either too ambivalent in-fact or too incompetent to accomplish much. Withdrawing from Afghanistan was way overdue and it disgusted me that NPR ran with "it's just too hard to withdraw in more time than it took to put the same number of soldiers and same amount of equipment in-theater" bullshit, in response. All his stuff related to the Southern border was moronic, of course.

I'm not saying I think he was great—dude belongs behind bars 10x over, I'd say, including for some of his foreign policy actions. In fact, a lot of it's just that, after his predecessors, accomplishing very little was kinda an improvement.

Re: US quietly urges more use of Russia fertilizer to ease food crisis

#188
post #62

Meanwhile RUB to USD is at its highest in nearly 5 years. Cutting Russia off from SWIFT has only strengthened their ties to India and China. Russia is still invading Ukraine, and now we're dealing with soaring food and energy prices at home. At some point you have to consider whether this level of diplomatic incompetence is intentional.

> At some point you have to consider whether this level of diplomatic incompetence is intentional.

Please, enlighten us, what should be done?

Re: US quietly urges more use of Russia fertilizer to ease food crisis

#189
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah the classic "don't rattle Putin or nuclear war" defense.

What kind of moronic dismissal is that? Avoiding nuclear war should be our #1 priority. "Oh those stupid idiots are scared of nuclear war"

So Putin might nuke us and therefor we should be afraid to stand up to him and essentially let him have whatever he wants?

That's truly moronic.

Re: US quietly urges more use of Russia fertilizer to ease food crisis

#190
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, not everyone, Ukrainians knew. Sounds like you were not following the events because invasion was effectively "announced" by US Intelligence weeks before the actual declaration of war. Besides, this was not the only sign and if you know the way Putin talks and you listened to him days before the invasion (talking about Russian Empire's old glory) you'd see that he already made his mind up way before the actu…

You're arguing my point! Which is that people knew about this invasion, US intelligence knew, Ukrainians were preparing as well despite the rosy rhetoric of Zelensky.

The media and the vast majority of US pundits were saying the invasion was impossible. US intelligence was being criticized before the invasion for being alarmist.

Again, just read the news articles from January/February of this year.

It sounds like you weren't paying any attention to this in Feb and are just trying to come up with arguments to support your points.

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