I approve of the overall message but indoor farming is kind of insane in the present day. It uses incredible amounts of energy and our scarce building materials to do something we can do much more easily outside.
Long term it might be important but I don’t think it makes sense until we solve the current energy crisis.
Initial upfront costs are heavy but you would be saving all of the transport and logistics costs for the lifetime of the facility. Aeroponics are also a lot less resource intense than growing in the dirt.
Not in energy requirements when the sun is free and electricity and lightbulbs are not.
Especially for some crops, like leafy greens. Having a semi-sterile environment can also mean pesticide-free crops. (Or at least, that’s my understanding).
Way less water use and transport costs for a superior (fresher, pesticide-free) product.
It only makes sense for some crops, though. Ain’t nobody growing watermelons or carrots in urban vertical farms.
Has anyone broken down the difference in energy between artificially creating growing conditions in the middle of cities compared to just transporting the food from where it grows easily? Trains and ships which transport most food are incredibly energy efficient per ton transported
Trains can transport one ton of goods 470 miles on one gallon of fuel and ships can transport one ton of goods 600 miles on one gallon of fuel. If a urban farm can produce one ton of food it needs to consume less than a few gallons of fuel’s worth of energy in lighting and other city-specific infrastructure in order to come out ahead of growing food where it grows best
I think it’s outweighed by the possibilities of hydroponic farming to reduce overall land (and therefore fossil fuel) use for agriculture.
Using solar panels to power artificial lighting so you can vertically stack farms directly inside cities doesn’t make any sense from a sustainability perspective.
But greenhouses in the suburbs that are tied into the city’s thermal grid and seasonal thermal energy store is the future of agriculture IMO.
By enclosing fields in greenhouses you decrease the land, water, pesticide, and fertilizer requirements, while also eliminating fertilizer runoff and the possibility of soil depletion from tilling. By tying a greenhouse into a thermal grid the greenhouse can act as a solar thermal collector in the summer while maybe even condensing the water that evaporates through the plants for reuse. Then you can use that same heat to heat homes during the winter or extend the growing season in the greenhouse even further.
https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/storage/world-s-largest-thermal-energy-storage-to-20240409
https://ag.umass.edu/greenhouse-floriculture/fact-sheets/heat-storage-for-greenhouses
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152874/a-greenhouse-boom-in-china
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150070/almerias-sea-of-greenhouses
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/netherlands-agriculture-technology/ (Yes I know they use artificial lighting in a lot of these, and yes I know a lot of the value of their agricultural exports comes from flowers, but the point is it’s another example of large scale greenhouse use. Also they do still produce quite a bit of food in a small area, in addition to the flowers.)
Oh I fully agree that greenhouses have a role to play in food production. But that’s not typically what’s meant by indoor farming. That’s a separate but related concept.
That said, you may be slightly overstating the benefits here. Greenhouses can actually be very vulnerable to pests and diseases due to the high humidity, year-round warmth, and lack of natural predators. In theory they’re isolated but in practice it’s very likely some organism you don’t want will sneak in somehow. Pollination can also be a challenge for crops that need that.
I think these challenges can be overcome but there’s a lot of work to be done on them still.
Building out more and more renewables doesn’t mean anything if emissions aren’t falling - and they aren’t. Since 2021, nearly 4 full years, the world has closed less than 1% of active coal power plants.
The buildout of renewables has arrived hand-in-hand with an increase in total energy usage. The energy mix has improved greatly in favor of renewables, tons of CO2 per KWh is way down, unfortunately we just use more KWh so total emissions are still rising.
Everything in the meme is a leading indicator for positive change, which is wonderful, but the actual change needs to materialize on a rather short timetable. Stories about happy first derivatives don’t count for much.
From your link it, for me, it seems like emissions are platooning, similar to a technological S curve. Even if China and India are growing exponentially, reduction in other countries are enough to slow down the process significantly (specially if you zoom in in the last 10 years).
It’s very hard to predict change, but I suspect the deprecation of solutions that emit lots of emissions is about to skyrocket.
We might already have reached peak carbon emissions. There’s also the thing where renewables are so much cheaper that it’s in most countries best self interest to build renewables.
The thing the world is doing now is more energy but the cheapest one is electricity so more electricity. The duck curve is an energy storage opportunity that’s being taken advantage of more and more. Things are heading in the right direction but it’s not fast enough.
The next emissions on the chopping block are household heating and cement and low-med industrial heat with more advanced heat pumps or heat pumps set up in series.
I’ve decided to become cautiously optimistic recently the more I learn about how science is advancing the renewables despite governments sometimes being in the way.
Since 2021, nearly 4 full years, the world has closed less than 1% of active coal power plants.
Closing will come later, when alternatives are widely available. What renewable energy does currently - at least here - is forcing those plants temporarily out of the market, especially during summer months and windy weather. The plants will exist and stay ready in case of need for well over a decade, maybe even two - but they will start up ever more rarely.
Technically, the deal is: we don’t have seasonal energy storage. Short term storage is being built - enough to stabilize the grid for a cold windless hour, then a day, then a week… that’s about as far as one can go with batteries and pumped hydro.
To really get the goods one has to add seasonal storage or on-demand nuclear generation. The bad news is that technologies for seasonal storage aren’t fully mature yet, while nuclear is expensive and slow to build. There’s electrolysis and methanation, there’s iron reduction, there are flow batteries of various sorts, there’s seasonal thermal storage already (a quarter step in the right direction)…
…but getting the mixture right takes time. Instead of looking at the number of closed plants, one should look at the sum of emissions. To remain hopeful, the sum should stop growing very soon.
Instead of looking at the number of closed plants, one should look at the sum of emissions
That was in the link I posted. Emissions are Currently at record highs.
Slowing growth isn’t enough; we need significant, sustained, reductions in the very near future, and negative emissions and sequestering carbon in the medium term.
None of that is happening at a scale that would inspire optimism.
Technically, the deal is: we don’t have seasonal energy storage.
Thankfully, we are actually solving this problem by just making solar panels comically cheap. We are going to solve seasonal swings in power demand by just spamming the ever-loving-hell out of solar panels. Solar is so vastly cheaper than nuclear that this is the better option.
If the panels are cheap enough, you can build enough of them to meet your needs even on a cloudy winter day. Then the rest of the year you have dirt-cheap energy. In turn, a lot of power-intensive industries can move to a seasonal model to take advantage of the nearly-free energy during the warmer months. We have a crop growing season, why not a steel smelting season, or an AI model training season?
That’s a pretty big gap to cover with spamming more panels. I would venture to guess: this approach would work up to latitude 45 or so.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/surface-solar-radiation-d_1213.html
Where I live, in midwinter, the day is 6 hours long. Over here, wind turns more heads than solar. But yes, solar is riduculously quick to install.
One technology that’s being developed that can help is high-voltage superconducting DC power, which can send power thousands of miles. So if it’s a sunless, windless day in the Northeast they can send power from the Midwest to stabilize the grid.
Also, I’m very bullish on Iron-Air batteries for long-term grid-level storage.
Is it defeatist to face the facts that we have released more carbon in 2023 than any other year? Is it defeatist to realize not only are we polluting non-stop, we are also destroying the oceans, we are destroying ecosystems and we are destroying ourselves at a rate that we can’t control? That a majority of people are content living their lives this way if it means they don’t have to make the hard choice of having and using less? We’re already well past 1°C and are not going to slowdown it seems until its too late.
CO2 emissions of the world excluding China have declined. Chinas emissions did fall in Q2 of this year.
Seriously China has economic trouble, which slows down energy demand growth. The US has run the massive inflation reduction act, which seems to be working somewhat well and Europe was hit hard by the energy crisis reducing emissions in the EU through lower consumption and faster green roll out and Russia as its fossil fuel exports fall. On top of that green technologies like solar panels, wind trubines, electric vehicles, heat pumps and so forth become cheaper all the time. It is certainly possible that we can achieve peak emissions soon.
I think it won’t matter. We have enough heat in the pipeline to wipe the surface of the Earth. Here’s a crisis report from Richard Crim saying, in essense, we done fucked up
Whoa, whoa, street-preacher.
No, it’s not defeatist to state facts. It’s what you do or say immediately after that makes the difference.
Now, we’re all feeling the same kinds of stress that would make any of us rattle on like that, and you must know you’re not alone or even in the minority with your concern. The majority of people - polls show - want to avoid or to blunt that fate we worry is coming. And with the world swinging a little conservative for a while, it’ll be even harder to make the changes now we had to make 20 years ago.
But trust in your fellow person instead of cursing them for indolents when you don’t know their situation. If you go off like this at people on the edge of moving from subsistence to again having the opportunity to join you at the protests, you may risk losing them as an ally.
Softly, softly.
I am cursing myself for being too weak to do the necessary, to give up on the unnecessary plastic junk, to give up on driving and all the industrial products that are slowly killing us in one way or another. If I can’t do it how can I preach doing what is necessary to others? I feel like a hypocrit, caught between a fossil fuel filled life of comfort and a future of hardship that I feel fully unprepared to even talk about, never mind living through
Interest in solar panels has skyrocketed, and yet at least 50% of the world population won’t stop driving ICE cars to work every day any time soon. While the ocean surface temperatures are on an exponential trajectory.
A climate catastrophy with mass deaths is inevitable. I’d be preparing instead of sugar-coating.
And after a few billion humans die, we can deploy solar panels and start living sustainably.
By the power invested in me by, well, nobody whatsoever, can I just take a minute to say, let’s all cool down a little in the comments!
There’s a lot of arguing against:
- The idea that acknowledging the tragic reality of climate change makes you defeatist
- The idea that because we have had some great advantages in green tech we can sit back and let climate change fix itself
I don’t see anyone making those arguments here though! Just lots of people concerned about climate change with different skews of how positive/negative we should feel.
Personally, I swing between powerful optimism and waking in terror at 3:00am for the future we’re hurtling towards. I’m sure other people are the same, so let’s just be friendly to the fact that other people are in different vibes to us.
There are some people working together very well right now to dismantle the climate, so let’s all remember that when we’re talking with each other.
Peace and love!
I worry that climate defeatism has become a religion, and it will be difficult to separate it from policy discussion going forward.
Things just shifted instantly from “nothing needs to be done” to “nothing can be done.”
climate defeatism has become a religion
Going outside to 90⁰ weather in October is a religion?
If the sum total of “Say no to climate defeatism” is “Don’t feel bad during the latest in a series of historic heat waves”, then you’re not arguing against defeatism. You’re arguing for denialism.
A few folks I know switched smoothly from “climate change is fake” to “maybe it’s real but there’s nothing we can do about it at this point. Might as well live it up.” Basically anything to avoid change at any level.
I think that’s the defeatism they’re talking about here, not people pointing out the issues.
A few folks I know switched
All of that is just cope, though. Speed running denialism to acceptance. The bottom line is that - individually - there’s nothing any one of us is going to do to stop Indonesia from building a new coal plant or end fracking in West Texas or stop whatever the fuck this is…
These are large scale socio-economic problems stemming from an industrial system that does not need to account for its waste byproducts. “Well, you should just believe that climate change is real but also believe its fixable” is the correct sentiment. But simple sentiment has no impact on policy.
I think that’s the defeatism they’re talking about here
I have spent my entire life hearing people in positions of authority talk about climate change and watching the institutions they lead ignore the impacts whenever a change in policy might detrimentally affect domestic economic growth rates.
That’s why my heart is filled with doomerism. Even when we know, and even when we (superficially) acknowledge we can change the policy, the folks at the controls… don’t do it.
