The article actually has four solutions at the bottom. Compared to the severity of the problem, all four solutions are surprisingly simple. Not necessarily easy, but simple and straightforward.
1. Stop using so much corn to make ethanol.
2. Stop using so much seed oil to make biodiesel.
3. Stop feeding so much food to livestock. Bonus: reducing the livestock population provides short term calories!
The third solution doesn’t make much sense since livestock consumption is mostly made up of inedible foods that we can’t eat like husks, stems, leaves, etc. of plants. Livestock is effective for up-cycling foods we can’t digest and turning it into foods that we can such as meat and dairy.
Also there is a lot of food waste in the US. Good food that is suitable for livestock…
Soooooooo "Roughage Products" which is fiber, that humans also need to eat BTW, is usually something like 25% of pelleted food. The main ingredient in pelleted food is usually digestible by humans and between 6% to 15% protein, it's like 25% to 30% depending on the pelleted food. Pound by pound going by the estimates that "eat cow advocates" use you need 12 pounds of food per pound of beef produced, if half of that is grass and half is balanced (which is about what you get for very fancy "grass fed" meat, because it's rated on % of life in grass at like 75%, but the cow eats way more when it's big), you are using around 1.5 pounds of grain per pound of beef. 12 pounds is the lowest estimate, it can go up to 20 or 22 pounds. Yeah corn and soy are less nutritious, but the reason those get planted industrially is that cows eat it. Other stuff like chickpea, rice, beans, hemp, could be grown instead of subsidized crop for cows and just feed cows grass and forage, which is better for the cows too.
In San Francisco right now there's no "entire life on farm" meat on the market. If I want to eat your "ideal cow" that eats _mostly_ inedible foods I have to buy land and raise it myself or get it alive from a farm. It's not a product one buys for human consumption. Cows in the US eat mostly human edible foods.
I don't think we had a famine in the last half century that was caused purely by production. The beauty of a working free market is that starving people are willing to pay quite a lot for cheap food, and so it's virtually impossible to starve just by being poor. The problem was always that the food couldn't get to them. I'd bet on a half-half mix of regulatory issues and fighting.
But yeah, production issues can increase price, which will create a whole lot of issues downstream - for example even if people won't literally starve, some of them won't be able to both eat and make rent. Which will predictably piss them off, and this is how you get Arab Spring as a consequence of corn ethanol.
> In San Francisco right now there's no "entire life on farm" meat on the market. If I want to eat your "ideal cow" that eats _mostly_ inedible foods I have to buy land and raise it myself or get it alive from a farm. It's not a product one buys for human consumption. Cows in the US eat mostly human edible foods.
Search for "100% grass fed beef". There are many ranches that sell it around the country, even in California. Some deliver, some sell in farmer's markets, and a few products are even available in markets like Sprouts.[1]
The fact that it's not available in most supermarkets could be fixed.
On other hand they can be grown where there is enough land and enough water... Just because parts of the world has lack of water doesn't mean there is lack everywhere. In many parts there is even enough rain.
Other factors aside, are you claiming that 100% grass fed beef is equivalent to grain finished cattle? I don't have any information to the contrary, and some do take liberties with terminology, but I'd be very interested to learn how this labeling is applied.
I see. I eat meat and I know about the issues (health wise and environmentally). I’m trending towards less, largely for health reasons.
My ideal world (in my head) is that human beings don’t interfere with animals at all (to eat, as pets, to showcase). We should interfere in only cases where it’s critical (like a natural disaster treating animals).
I haven't seen one of these that takes major factors into account. Tires and pet food contain animals. Animal by-products are used everywhere. Switching away would require replacements. Replacements would become more efficient with economy of scale, but initial switching costs will be high. Some replacements, like food for our obligate-carnivore cats, might not be possible.
Simplest example: Beyond meat is 2-4x the price of meat.
It seems pretty clear that switching away from protein sources like lamb and cows in favor of pork and chicken is carbon-positive.
There's likely an optimal level of meat consumption. Unfortunately most of our information comes from either an industry and farmers dependent on our continued meat consumption, or dishonest vegan evangelists.
Which do you suppose is the bigger problem in food information: dishonest vegans—0.5% of the US population, btw—evangelizing or the lion’s share of the meat-eating public doesn’t like to hear and acknowledge that their favorite dishes are harmful to the planet? I suspect the latter is a more widespread issue…
> Which do you suppose is the bigger problem in food information: dishonest vegans—0.5% of the US population
Being a small share of the population doesn't mean they're invisible or silent. Here on the UK my leftist self that far too often reads the Guardian, one of the biggest newspaper in the nation, there's many times a week an article advocating the vegan diet. One of the two resident recipe writers only prints vegan recipes. I'm pretty sure it's newspaper policy never to print any diet related news that's not vegan-favourable, I guess it's their way of "changing the world". It's conquered a large part of the popular opinion, even though as you suggest the percentage of actual vegans might be very small.
As a meat eater that is non indifferent to the ecological issues we're facing, and believes the vegan diet NOT to be the answer, I would appreciate a more educated and reasoned approach to a hairy question than the constant evangelizing and ignorant repetition of meat bad, vegan good.
I haven't seen a study deeply analyzing non-food uses either. I suspect though that while there will indeed be replacement costs they will be less than the costs of continuing the current system.
Michellin apparently already makes "vegan" tyres. Even for cat food, there are already vegan supplements and the science will improve. Beyond Meat being only 2x the price of killed meat is I think quite impressive when you consider how long each industry has had to optimise.
Yes switching from cows to chickens is better with regards to carbon but the problem is it's much worse with regards to animal welfare since many more animals need to be killed per kilo of meat..
There could be an optimal level of meat consumption if you just consider the environment, but it's far below what we're doing now, and given the urgent climate action that's recommended by expert scientists, it seems wise to reduce this consumption as much as possible. We're _far_ more likely to reduce too slowly than too quickly..
Solar and wind energy used to be multiple times more expensive than other more polluting methods. And yet they’re now much cheaper and going down every year.
We developed a vaccine against Covid in less than two years, which we previously thought to be impossible to do.
If we really tried, the problems you mentioned would have a sizable chance of being solved.
> There's likely an optimal level of meat consumption.
Just going to go out on a limb and say the optimal level is probably less than the typical North American or European diet... Societies that are more resource constrained eat a lot less meat.
> Societies that are more resource constrained eat a lot less meat.
They also lag the life expectancy curve by about 10 years. There are a lot of factors at play obviously, but the universal trend is richer countries have better medical care, education, and more complete diets.
There is so much livestock that while most livestock consumption is inedible foods, the rest is large reason for food shortage. The amount of land they consume takes land from grains.
>grain accounts for 13% of cattle dry feed. In 2021 China imported 28m tonnes of corn to feed its pigs,
The amount of livestock is ridiculous. 63% of mammal biomass is lifestock, 35% humans. Wild mammals are insignificant.
Please share a reference, I am not sure I understand what you mean.
The big majority of agriculture land is spend on producing fodder not husks, stems and so on. I mean an animal need calories too, yes a ruminant can digest cellulose, but the majority is soy, corn and wheat.
This makes me think of The West Wing back in 2005 with Josh and Santos arguing about whether to pander to Iowa about ethanol subsidies. Josh won, Santos pandered.
I guess if you want this to change, you've first got to stop Iowa being so ludicrously influential in the presidential election cycle.
Iowa has been doing a solid job of making the Iowa caucuses significantly less relevant all on their own. The state and its registered Dem and GOP cohorts have become much less representative of the nation as a whole over the last two decades.
The last time the winner mattered was, perhaps, Obama 2008. The contested races since have yielded the following winners: Huckabee, Santorum, Clinton, Ted Cruz, and Buttigieg/Sanders.
On one hand, food subsidies is a pillar to national food security. On the other hand, ending beef subsidies would do wonders for my vegan socialist agenda.
There is scope for substitution. About 10% of all grains are used to make biofuel; and 18% of vegetable oils go to biodiesel. Finland and Croatia have weakened mandates that require petrol to include fuel from crops. Others should follow their lead.
Though my understanding is that ethanol as a fuel additive is largely an anti-knock lead substitute. Alcohol was the originally-proposed solution, before the creation and adoption of tetraethyl lead. Apparent cost advantages drove the adoption of the latter. True costs proved somewhat greater.
My read is that the "biofuel" branding of fuel ethanol is actually a misdirection, though I don't have a good source on that.
I think it can be used for that, but it is also used to cut gasoline and therefore make a single barrel of oil go further. Normally ethanol is less than 10 percent, but I think it can be as high as 15 or 20 percent at the pump right now. Modern engines can handle it just fine, but it does slightly reduce fuel economy.
It's also an oxygenation agent, and replaces MTBE (methyl tert-butyl ether) which ... oh, also substituted for tetraethyl lead. (I thought MTBE was an anti-smog treatment.)
MTBE turned out to leach into groundwater quite readily and there was a pretty widespread outcry about it in the early aughts. Again, ethanol is a replacement (mentioned in the Wikipedia article above).
And yes, since anti-knock agents effectively slow combustion (and ethanol has lower energy-density than petroleum), net fuel efficiency is slightly reduced on a volumetric basis. Net effect remains better overall engine performance.
Depending on what state you're in in the Midwest you can sometimes get E85 gas (85% ethanol). It's always clearly marked because not all modern engines can handle that high of a concentration.
There’s a place for strategic food reserves and ethanol does a good job of maintaining excess capacity without tanking commodity prices (and thus killing future supplies)
There is a major fuel shortage so you are just robbing peter to pay Paul. Also fertiliser will be the next problem, we won't be able to grow enough to cover the loss of Russian and Ukraine exports next year. And meat as a source of protein will become a luxury for all those in power.
The western government's had to know this would happen otherwise they are grossly incompetent at their job.
If the west had had the means to project enough force to break the blockade or do anything directly in Ukraine they should have would have done so already. The losses will be unbearable for conflict adverse populations.
Europe can not survive without russian energy and so won't stop buying it, hypocrisy of the highest order. All and mean all of these bureaucractic lunatics are so far detached that I don't think they have an ounce off humanity left.
Starvation is now an inevitability. Russia have played this very very well as the west followed their own play book to the letter and the russians had counters planned for years, hording gold, setting up non USD financial systems. First round of The Game goes to Russia imo.
> Russia have played this very very well as the west followed their own play book to the letter and the russians had counters planned for years, hording gold, setting up non USD financial systems. First round of The Game goes to Russia imo.
I find this very hard to believe. Things are much worse in Russia and for Russia than they are in Europe or the United States right now, with the future looking bleak.
While the quoted poster appears to be getting their news straight from Kremlin, there is something to consider: the average russian is VERY experienced in taking abuse. We're talking about a country where around fifth of the population does not have access to indoor plumbing. Only couple of the largest cities there have living standards comparable to what average HN poster would consider livable.
This whole thing is going to cause a financial recession. More so in some regions than others. But as a citizen of a very small country bordering russia - that's okay. As long as it breaks the back of their military, and sets back their military ambitions for a good long while, there's a long list of luxuries I can live without. I want my kids to worry about global warming, not global warming and when's the next time the neighbours re-discover their imperial ambitions.
Really? can you quantify what that means, are they going hungry, short of fuel, is their currency collapsing, do they have rampant inflation? Or is just that people that got us in this mess are telling you that some how russians are suffering so much that they have to give up. Wasn't that suppose to happen immediately upon the weaponisation of the USD? When will it happen, after we all starve, after all infrastructure in Ukraine is destroyed? To believe that narrative now is beyond my imagination.
Russia's official forecasts are for inflation north of 20%, GDP down 8% in 2022, and factories are offering free plots of land so people can grow their own potatoes.
No shortage of fuel though, since they're having a hard time exporting it now. Although all industry in Russia is heavily dependent on spare parts from the West, meaning things will start breaking down quite soon.
Quite sure the whole world is at similar inflation levels, pretty sure it's about 30% considering the drop in profits from Western retailers, same revenue, massive drop in profits, the retailers took the inflationary hit but it will be passed on eventually. Just look at your fuel prices (supply issues there as well as monetary inflation).
Will this affect russia, of course, but if their level of inflation is rampant then so is the rest of the world.
Russia will likely deindustralise, but so will much of Europe, and even more so if Russia turned off the gas tomorrow. Remember this, russia could grind Europe to halt if it cut off the gas, which would be on top of an economic crisis that is already looking pretty bad. There is no alternative to the piped gas for Europe that's fact in any realistic time frame, no infrastructure plus the price would be at an extreme premium (piped gas is very cheap).
You’re missing that Russia started this with a much lower base. Increasing prices and decreasing growth for an average North American or West European would mean that they would have to go somewhere cheaper for vacation this year and slightly adjust their consumption habits. When your net monthly income is ~$500 or less you might have slightly different concerns if you see prices rising by more than 20%.
> and even more so if Russia turned off the gas tomorrow.
Energy exports are the only thing keeping the Russian currency afloat, unless they want to go into full autarky mode this would hurt them more than the west (i.e. 40% of all gas in Europe comes from Russia, which is huge 80-90% of all Russian exports are fossil fuels and metals and most go to Europe).
Nope, most Western countries have inflation in the 8% range, although as always you can quibble about what's being measured etc.
Also, Russia has already turned off the gas taps to Poland, Bulgaria and by the end of this week most likely to Finland. However, European countries can substitute (with varying degrees of pain), while it's physically impossible for Russia to export that gas elsewhere, meaning any cuts to exports hit them hard in the pocketbook.
At the end of the day, it's pretty much the world vs Russia right now, and the world will absorb the economic blows better than Russia can.
You just left about 4 billion people out of your definition of “world”. China, India, and many more counties that are not against Russia. I find that very arrogant but also reflective of where the “western world” stands right not. This arrogance and self-supremacy must be broken. And that’s what Russia is just doing.
the people that got "us" into this mess are the ones who initiated a genocidal war of territorial conquest in modern times (after repeatedly lying that they would)
not coincidentally, they are also the only ones who can get "us" out of it, by withdrawing – the Ukrainian people have seen the rape, torture, and executions that result from allowing genocidal russian troops to control a single square foot of Ukrainian land, and have concluded that death is a better fate than that which awaits surrendering it
tl;dr you're going to have a hard time convincing Ukrainians to trust russia, but you are sure welcome to try
As a side note, I find the language you are using strange. I do not know if it's my perspective of the world being different than yours, but I'll try to explain.
In my perspective, genocide is a very, very strong word. Hitler killed 6 million Jews, as he literally wanted them exterminated.
Now, crime is a crime, none should be defended nor downsized. But the primary goal behind that genocide was extermination. Do you claim that Russia is trying to exterminate Ukrainians?
Or you are using it just to point out the war crimes that the Russian army is did?
Not who you replied to, but yes, I am claiming that Russia is trying to exterminate Ukrainians.
From the (admittedly, rambling) speeches of their top command about how Ukraine is not a real country and intentional shelling of civilian structures, to mass murder of civilians being uncovered after russian forces are pushed back and abduction of children, there is no way you can call the goal of russian forces anything but extermination of a nation.
Of course, the official body count is not yet past 6 million, and UN paperwork calling it genocide is not yet signed. So yeah, you're right, it's not genocide, just murder on industrial scale.
For the sake of disclosure, I'm from Latvia, a country that shook off the russian yoke in 90s, and my own mother has chilling memories of red army acting the same animalistic way as what we hear from Ukraine today. "Bias" or "experience" - choose your own label.
Yes, russia is engaged in many actions that make clear that they are perpetrating a genocide, such as:
- literally saying Ukraine should not exist
- saying Ukrainians aren't a real people, just russians
- planning to solve "The Ukraine Question" (yes, phrased by the Kremlin just as another dictator phrased "The Jewish Question")
- planning to end Ukraine as a country and split up the land between themselves and other countries (maps have even been found among russian forces in Ukraine illustrating this)
- mass executions to rid Ukrainian land of Ukrainians (see Bucha for just 1 example)
- mass shelling of civilian targets (homes, etc.) in cities to rid Ukrainian land of Ukrainians
- destroying and stealing grain from Ukraine to starve Ukrainians (russia has a history of doing this in Ukraine, see: Holodomor)
- refusing and attacking international food aid, mefical aid, and rescue to Ukrainian civilians
- announcing Ukrainians who fled the fighting will have their property and homes given to pro-russian fighters in territory russia controls
- shooting and shelling civilians who try to evacuate
- sending Ukrainians in areas russia controls to "filtration camps" where those who show support for Ukraine are executed or forcibly deported to russia or russian controlled land
- destroying Ukrainian cultural landmarks
- forcing Ukrainians in russian controlled territory to not speak Ukrainian
the list goes longer, but russia has not at all tried to hide it, simply watch what the state propagandists and putin himself say and have said of Ukraine as a sovereign state
I am sure You have your rightful reasons for this anger, I am sure a lot of people do. I mean, even when You write 'Russia', 'Putin', You purposefully write without capital letters.
Maybe time will tell that, despite your anger, You are right. But I sure pray to God that You are not, and that it hasn't/won't come to that.
Heya, since HN is a worldwide website, I think language or locale differences may have led you to misunderstand my post.
The post actually does not contain anger, and is a well researched list of things russia actually has done and is doing.
As well, since they are facts, and not emotion, and since those facts together (even 2 or 3 of them alone, much less all of them taken together) constitute genocide, my own rightness or wrongness is irrelevant to the fact that russia is engaging in genocide.
Though Ukrainians are no doubt thankful of prayers for them in the face of russia's genocide, and your sympathy for them is no doubt appreciated, so thank you <3
Please, stop this moral high ground rhetorical hypocrisy of the highest order. The US has had no qualms about invading countries or applying sanctions that harm innocent people. There are no good guys. People will all do terrible things for "the greater good", there is no worldly greater good from these soulless bureaucratic monoliths of state hood. They will set targets and strive for them irrespective of the human cost. Nazi german showed the way with their welfare state for the German people and everyone has followed suit.
If you want to stop the russians then declare war don't sit on the side lines trying to manipulate from a safe distance using the likes of sanctions or arming militias that we once all agreed were actual German Nazi evangelists, look at the iconography it's not even in doubt.
It's not hard to convince populations to do any thing, the pandemic should have taught us all that.
Edit: For the record i'm not justifying or demonising either side, do what you got to do, but know that i don't buy any holier than thou BS from either side. But put your money where your mouth is, if Russia must be stop do then do it, declare war or park a carrier group or two in the black sea, enforce no flyzones or guarantee shipping.
Glad you think it's stupid. At least you thought about it :)
Honestly if you want to think your country is whiter than white and the Russians, Iraqis, Taliban, Gaddafi, ISIS, Iranians or whoever are the big evil and you must do whatever it takes to support stopping them being part of the world then that's up to you. But i don't support that view and find it hypocritical. I don't believe in the Liberal Idealogy nor do i see any good in a US led global hegemony and at the same time i've no connection to the Rus people so for me it's very clear that I would struggle to fight for either side.
BTW you do also know that whataboutism goes both ways because you are literally doing exactly the same thing. Frankly whataboutism is utter nonsense to hid hypocrisy.
I never said that my country hasn't done bad things.
I have protested the Tories, and I have always voted against them because I know they are bad people.
I know that the majority of people in the UK have also voted against them and their policies. Your entire point is completely nonsensical.
Where on earth did I do "whataboutism"? You literally said that people cannot be against one invasion because someone else invaded, which they were probably against as well.
this is not the U.S. opposing russia, but the world - literally the majority of all countries
the rest of your post is whataboutism that fails to justify russia's genocidal war of territorial conquest against Ukraine and Ukrainians, both of which russia believes should not exist, period
the world hears russia's farcical pretexts of "denazification" and recognizes it as a cynical ploy to preempt the obvious comparison of russia to the last country which attempted a genocidal war of territorial conquest in Europe
if you want to stop russia's genocidal war of territorial conquest in Ukraine, speak out against russia's genocidal war of territorial conquest in Ukraine
as for international aid to Ukraine, lethal and not, that is what the Ukrainian people ask for, and no amount of russian whinging and concern trolling allegedly on their behalf, or ridiculous "come at me bro"-esque macho encouragement for more countries to formally declare war, will prevent the world from answering their pleas against russia's genocidal war of territorial conquest
>Edit: For the record i'm not justifying or demonising either side
Edit: yes, that is the problem. one side is perpetrating a genocide, the other a victim of it. As Desmond Tutu said, "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor". That is your choice here.
If everyone is so united in opposition why are they still buying the oil and gas (paying in Rubles)? If they're so together why did Turkey block Sweden and Finland joining Nato. If the unifying petrodollar still binds us all why is Saudi considering Yuan. If they had any sort of plan that would save Ukrainians why is it taking months to enact?
If everyone is so united in opposition why are they still buying the oil and gas (paying in Rubles)?
Because we are dependent on it and despite opposition to Russia's war, our solidarity has limits. Limits which are a subject to internal debate and strive. Obviously you know this, which explains the other posters incredulity at the question, which is bound to be in bad faith.
If they're so together why did Turkey block Sweden and Finland joining Nato.
Probably because they see a way to get something they want. Probably not as a gesture towards Russia, since their own contribution to the war -- e.g. closing off the Black sea has been pretty effective.
Ok? That's not a word? I'm not saying the current politics are good, but that's what they are. You don't debate them by feigning ignorance like Guthur did. Pithy neologisms don't add much, either.
>If everyone is so united in opposition why are they still buying the oil and gas (paying in Rubles)?
Are you asking this in good faith, as in, you do not know, and wish to learn?
Or did you mean to say, "I think that a majority of countries are not united in opposition to russia, and I submit as evidence that russian energy sales are not zero" ?
Ah no. Maybe I'm just stupid, so please explain to me how all the European countries that are so united in solidatary with Ukraine can square the round hole of also paying Russia vast sums of money for energy?
explain to you because you do not know, and wish to learn, and thus you are asking in good faith?
or "explain", as in you think the majority of countries are not united in opposition to russia, and you would like to advance this claim?
I want to be clear here, I am all for sharing knowledge, so if you need an explanation because you don't know, and don't just plan to argue, please say so and I will share all I can, what little it may be
So you have no interest in explaining to me how EU countries (Germany etc) paying Russia for energy helps Ukraine? I'm quite serious, I don't know how paying Russia helps Ukraine, or are they not paying for energy? maybe I am ill informed.
And please don't come back with misdirection, either answer the question or lets leave it like that because it's a waste of both our time.
Not the person you were originally responding to, but I would point out that originally the statement was about if everyone is united in opposition, why are we still buying fossil fuel from Russia.
This is not the same question as how it helps Ukraine, so I would be careful throwing around the word “misdirection”.
The original responder asked twice in a row whether or not i wanted an answer when there was obviously nothing rhetorical about my questions and so that is the misdirection.
And we are now how deep in this thread without an answer to the simple question; how can a lack of EU energy embargo stand in solidarity with the sanctions and Ukraine. Please explain?
I think the original responder's concern, which I share, is that your question is really an opinion, rather than a genuine question, and that they (or I) would spend time writing a long, detailed response to what is a very complicated topic, only to be wasting our time because it would fall on the ears of someone who is not interested in listening (or reading).
I'll go for it though, and address the original question, which was 'If everyone is so united in opposition why are they still buying the oil and gas (paying in Rubles)?', although you've rephrased it as 'please explain to me how all the European countries that are so united in solidatary with Ukraine can square the round hole of also paying Russia vast sums of money for energy?', and somewhat differently asked 'I don't know how paying Russia helps Ukraine, or are they not paying for energy?'
First off, I don't think anyone would argue that this in any way helps Ukraine. Of course, paying money to Russia is not going to help Ukraine. However, Europe has been dependent on Russian oil and gas for a long time, and it is not simple to just cut that off. 40% of gas supplied to the EU comes from Russia, and almost 30% of the EU's oil.
Second, I don't think anyone anticipated that this war would last longer than a month or two. I think the expectation from the EU's side was an overwhelming show of force from Russia, regime change in Ukraine, and a quick end to hostilities. Although the EU started discussing longer term moves away from Russian gas and oil at that point, I don't think there was a sense that this could have any short term impact in terms of supporting Ukraine (or cutting off indirect support for Russia). The EU, known for being slow to react and full of bureaucracy, was able to publish a plan on 8th March, less than two weeks after the invasion. The plan is very aggressive, and targets reducing imports from Russia by two-thirds within one year. This is a major economic blow to Russia, and likely was intended to scare Russia into changing their approach in Ukraine, unsuccessfully.
Third, just stopping paying for this fuel would likely be in breach of commercial agreements. Russia and Ukraine have been at war since 2014, and the EU has not stopped paying for gas. There are legal implications to not upholding your side of a contract, although I doubt that this is a serious consideration - likely this could be thrashed out quickly.
Fourth, if we stop paying, Russia would then cease supplying oil and gas to the EU. There are a number of reasons this would be problematic. First of all, the distribution systems we currently have need to be pressurised (this is not technically quite accurate, but it's a close enough analogy I don't think it's important to get into the details). If Russia stopped supplying gas and oil to the EU, there is an overhead for the EU to keep these pipelines pressurised to avoid the whole system collapsing. So additionally to losing 20-30% of Europe's fuel supply, Europe would additionally need to divert supplies to the network rather than it being available for use by users. I wasn't able to find details on the amount of technical gas consumed by the EU and what the gap would be, but during the previous fuel crisis, the gap for gas alone was 21 million cubic metres per day, which represents 2% of the EU's total daily consumption.
Fifth, the EU is struggling with economic challenges same as the rest of the world. We have high inflation, Cost of Living is going up faster than salaries. Reducing energy supply would necessitate massive price increases on fuel bills, which is currently being seen in the UK and very poorly received. As this war seems to be settling in to become a long, drawn out conflict.
Finally (at least for this comment), from a military strategy point of view, cutting off this income now would give Russia the opportunity to develop other income streams while operating on their reserves. Waiting until Russia is deep in an economic crisis, and has burned through their war chest before cutting off their cashflow is likely to lead to more acute hardship and be a stronger bargaining chip. I'm sure Russia are currently considering this as well, but there will be a 'sweet spot', before Russia are able to develop other income streams.
sure, I have interest, IF you are able to say you are asking because you don't know and want to learn, not because you want to argue
this is not misdirection, it's giving you the opportunity to show your questions are being asked _in_good_faith_, because I don't see a point to answering a bad faith question
you've had two opportunities to do so, and both times chosen not to simply say that your objective is learning, rather than arguing. instead, you extremely conspicuously chose to deflect from such a clarification
in my experience, when someone is hiding and actively avoiding clarifying their objective in a discussion, it is because their objective in the discussion is not clarity.
tl;dr: you say you want an answer to your question, but if you think you already know the answer, then your question doesn't need another one,
and if you DON'T think you already know, it should be easy for you to just say that, and that you don't intend to argue with whoever would teach you the answer
I live ridiculously frugal in a emerging economy country. It's not that I actively look to drop out of consumption, it's just that I lifestyle seemed to settle on this way of being. My entire cost of living is probably less than the cost of ownership of my small truck back home.
I don't consume things which use corn as an ingredient. I don't use seed oils. My food is mostly wild fish (local markets.) If Russia were unleash nuclear war, I probably wouldn't get hit.
I guess I would still be screwed if there were a global food catastrophe because it would affect me somehow.
No reason for this comment other than it's strange to see that the solutions on this list wouldn't apply to me.
It would be partially offset by the higher fuel economy you'd get without ethanol in fuel.
"Ethanol contains about one-third less energy than gasoline. So, vehicles will typically go 3% to 4% fewer miles per gallon on E10 and 4% to 5% fewer on E15 than on 100% gasoline." [0]
I think Ethanol in gas is stupid and I always tank up with E0 when I can (it's available in some parts of New Hampshire... not sure about your state).
Ironically, favoring public transport (which includes a good deal of walking) and bicycling is negatively impacted by the global calorie shortage, bringing us full circle.
I would think feeding corn to a human is more energy-efficient than turning it into biofuel and burning that in an engine, although now I'm curious exactly how the two compare.
> Enclosed spaces with the general public in a still ongoing pandemic?
I'll concede that there's a point there. However - the world states with the best covid "performance" in terms of deaths/capita etc. have much better developed and widely used public transport systems.
Re 4., that's doable if the West renounces some of its existing economic sanctions against Russia, the Russians themselves have said as much recently.
It probably won't happen because the West doesn't like to see itself as being involved in the war (in a way similar to what Russia thinks about itself) and will try to resort to "Russia should unlock the blockade purely on humanitarian grounds!", which, of course, is the type of declaration which has no effect during a direct economic war (like the one the West and Russia are now waging against each other, on top of the military proxy war).
Hypothetically, if the west actually wanted to give up sanctions in return for clearing the blockade.. why, in what universe, could they possibly expect Russia to stand by its word?
Russia said for six months they were simply conducting exercises and had no intention of invading whatsoever. Why should anyone believe they would clear the blockade if sanctions lift?
> If they don't stand by their word then they can re-impose the sanctions, it's as simple as that.
That does not work with the current Russian regime. The only thing removing sanctions will do is allow them time to come up with solutions to mitigate future sanctions. They are not good-faith actors, and only use good-faith solutions to improve their leverage in future deals
For everyone who wants to downvote, go and look how well the sanctions after the 2014 invasion worked. The primary reason why the invasion of 2022 went forward was due to their confidence that they could mitigate the same style of sanctions that went into effect then
> Because at some point the West will have to sit at the negotiating table with Russia.
Do they? What does Russia have that will force them to the negotiating table? The damage to this years harvest is already done and the supply chains will likely have figured themselves out by next year
If the US accrues enough "Oh, we don't talk to _those people_, we only sanction them" world states, they will encompass enough of the world's population to make it unreasonable for third parties to obey US sanctions, which they currently tend to (because the US sanctions transitively); and enough of the world's population to do things like replace SWIFT and/or drop the USD as their main reserve currency.
(Also, there's the question of the fate of the Ukranians, but I guess you're right in that the US doesn't care enough about that to negotiate with Russia.)
I mean yea, but arguing that the US has hit that point is different than arguing that Russia in particular will have to be negotiated with. The US could always lower sanctions on other nations than Russian
this seems like nebulous FUD that attempts to downplay that one of the actors here is literally engaging in a genocide
will the world (NOT the U.S., as the opposition to Russia's genocidal war is global) accrue enough countries out of 200 or so which engage in genocidal invasions of conquest of their neighbors in the 21st century? sounds implausible
You know, the US (and people who drink its kool-aid) has been leveling several such false accusations lately, another one being about the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs. As a person whose family was decimated by genocide I'll tell you that it's quite insulting on the personal level; but beyond this - that kind of rhetoric has a "boy who cried wolf effect", and that's really bad.
You do not need the fabricated accusations to condemn Russia for war crimes and the killing of civilians in its invasion of the Ukraine.
Killing people who support an opposing faction isn't genocide either, that is just regular dictatorship terror tactics. The fact that Putin argues that Ukranians don't exist and that they all are Russians just supports that it isn't a genocide, as he doesn't intend to kill all Russians, just the "Russians" who refuse to be Russians.
Instead of calling it a genocide, call it a massacre. Russia is massacring Ukranians, nobody is arguing against that, and the world stopped accepting such behavior even in wars a long time ago. Prematurely calling it a genocide just makes people stop listening to you.
>The fact that Putin argues that Ukranians don't exist and that they all are Russians just supports that it isn't a genocide
as it turns out, the exact opposite is true. attempting to erase a people (as in "the Ukrainian people") is a pretty common aspect of genocide, and includes forcibly destroying their identity as a unique people
>Prematurely calling it a genocide just makes people stop listening to you.
then it is good that nobody has done so prematurely, as people have not stopped listening (unless you personally constitute "people" ;)
per the definition of genocide that I found on the UN's website, they are easily committing at least one of the points that defines a genocide. That is
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
I prefer to let the dronies and tankies argue their pro NATO talking points vs pro China talking points without my involvement. Most of us will have too much trouble wading through multiple state propaganda outlets to arrive at a reliable conclusion on that one.
> Because at some point the West will have to sit at the negotiating table with Russia.
The whole point is that you can't negotiate with Russia. Ukraine gave away it's nukes by negotiations and Russia isn't keeping its end of the bargain. Russia has to be defeated like the Japanese did or collapse like it tends to do from time to time.
> Because at some point the West will have to sit at the negotiating table with Russia.
I hope not. I've really taken to the idea that China should manage their connections to the West and hopefully take a lot off the top until Putin is dead.
China not being a democracy doesn't seem to be a problem when it comes to institutional stabilities for managing NK. The US has done a lot worse with some of its dictator client states.
Sure if the Russians want to have another revolution and run new elections or something that's great but trying to get Russia to do something is like pushing against a horse. Lets let China push Russia and see what happens.
What is "the west" exactly? Japan? New Zealand? Finland? Tunisia? A better term would be liberal democracies, but that wouldn't have quite the same "both sides are the same" ring to it, would it?
Russia isn't waging an economic war against anyone. A dictator tried to invade his democratic neighbour, he failed, and now the other democraties are cutting him out of their club
The Economist is cagey about the definition, but by context it works out to "America and its allies" (where "America" is "The United States of America".
The US, NATO, NORAD, ANZUS, SEATO, and specific alliances such as the US-Japan alliance, Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the Republic of Korea, and the like, would likely be included. In the context of Ukraine and this article, probably the Common Security and Defence Policy (CDSP) of the EU as well.
If you think "liberal democracies" still carries the same positive vibe across the world that it used to some years ago you are in for a big surprise.
> "both sides are the same" ring to it
They are definitely not the same, they have obviously different values. Again, Putin has said as much, he's the one fighting for a multi-polar world with multi-polar values, so to speak. I think the same holds for Xi, in China.
> If you think "liberal democracies" still carries the same positive vibe across the world that it used to some years ago you are in for a big surprise.
I mean, I agree that it doesn't carry the same positive vibes that it used to, but it still carries much better vibes than "corrupt authoritarian semi-dictatorships".
To those who might try going "muh western propaganda" on this, save your time. I am speaking as someone who grew up in one of those "corrupt authoritarian semi-dictatorships" and eventually immigrated to a "liberal democracy".
Yeah, the gaslighting cracks me up. I too escaped a former Soviet bloc country that Russia invaded in exactly the same way it is invading Ukraine right now.
I now live in one of those “horrible” western democracies where I can tell the Prime Minister that he’s an idiot to his face and the worst that’ll happen is that he’ll laugh at me in a dismissive way.
But these countries are “all the same”, right? Right?
Again, the Russians have said as much what they want. What they understand by "multi-polar world" is the US (and its allies), Russia, China, maybe India, maybe some other regional thingie, like South America/Mercosur maybe (I think by this point they're already branding the EU under "US and its allies", that wasn't always the case, especially around 2003-2005 when Germany and France were against the US intervention in Iraq).
Yes, they would want Ukraine under their sphere of influence, that one has been also made pretty clear by them ever since the USSR was broken up.
that sounds like both a bad idea, and an unrealistic idea, most of all because in that presentation russia considers itself an equal to the others in the list, which it most certainly is not, in nearly all respects
in a more generalized sense, russia actually doesn't care about any of the countries listed but itself, except insofar as it can convince those countries to support russia
the world is already multipolar, as was pointed out – look to the UN for an example of how multiple poles interact with each other in a civilized fashion – nearly 200 of them!
russia doesn't want this, all they want is domination, and the disintegration of the multipolar world that is civilized diplomacy which might unite and thus present a united front against russian domination and genocide
>”the world is already multipolar, as was pointed out – look to the UN for an example of how multiple poles interact with each other in a civilized fashion – nearly 200 of them!”
This isn’t what polarity refers to. The nations of the UN are not at all equal in terms of power and influence.
While no one would question that the United States, Russia, and China are the “poles” in this system, no one would regard any of the 190ish other nations which are far smaller and less powerful as poles.
In the UN the nations are more equal than anywhere else.
At tha General Assembly all nations are equal. And after all of the abuses of veto powers discussions to eliminate the permanent Security Council positions are once again picking up steam.
> If you think "liberal democracies" still carries the same positive vibe across the world that it used to some years ago you are in for a big surprise.
Agree, I would state it as "liberal" "democracies" - this is an opinion of course, but I think if one was to fairly but critically perform an in-depth evaluation, things are not as lovely as they are described to the masses.
> Again, Putin has said as much, he's the one fighting for a multi-polar world with multi-polar values, so to speak. I think the same holds for Xi, in China.
Great pole there! /s The West may have it's problems, but Putin is trying to resurrect the same pole that was led at one point or another by Hitler, Stalin, Mao. The world doesn't need that again.
Uhm, yes? They elected a comedian with no political experience or ties for f's sake. But I suppose that was some sort of rigged election or he's just a figurehead or something?
Uh, he's banned all opposition parties. Where's the democracy? He was a direct employee of a Ukrainian billionaire oligarch, plenty of ties, just check the Pandora Papers...
Election where major opposition parties were banned? A democratic society where 40+% of population is not allowed to use their own language? When opposition leaders get arrested? Where almost a 100 people were publicly burned alive, and still no one is punished? Where right wing extremists / neonazi paramilitaries are incorporated in an official army and given a licence to kill, as documented by OSCE multiple times in eastern part of the country? And all that happened before this war. Just that they now fight Russians doesn't mean they are democracy, they are just a useful enemy of an enemy.
And the list goes on and on, although only one of the mentioned things would be enough to consider such a country as non-democratic at least.
I think corruption and a rule of oligarch is the least problem in a country like that.
There is some speculation that the liberal democratic rumblings from Zelenski are what forced Putin to act. I have no illusions that a country with deeply rooted corruption issues like Ukraine can turn on a dime, but he was at least voicing support for the idea. If he managed to root out some of the corruption then Putin would lose the ability to puppet the state entirely, and that's a slippery slope to becoming part of Europe and being lost to Russia forever.
Another option for #4 is supplying enough long range anti-ship rockets to sink whole russian fleet in black sea. They can't bring in more ships, because turkey is blocking the entrance.
Triggering world war 3 would also help reduce the population which could reduce co2 emissions and food requirements. Killing a few birds with one stone.
That's not much different than supplying other kinds of weapons (and anti-ship missiles are on the list anyway, if not from US then from UK).
Also everybody is mostly over nuclear threat I think. When a nuclear country keeps annexing land and threatens you with nukes if you object, you have two options -- keep giving up or call the bluff (or assassinate the leadership I guess).
But there is no spin. There's either global thermonuclear war or there's nothing. If NATO isn't invading Russia, and Russia isn't invading NATO, then nothing has changed.
Does Russia want to start global thermonuclear war because they can argue a technicality that it's not their fault? No, I don't think so. They could start the war and the outcome would be the same at any time they want.
Excusing the edge case of a pathetic attempt of a land invasion of Finland or Poland or something crazy.
He's also very very scared to do anything of consequence. Look, the Ukrainian invasion was the only reckless thing he's ever done and look how it turned out.
We are talking about a country that can’t even supply proper boots to its troops. Why believe that the nuclear weapons they inherited from USSR still work?
>"those other people choose to, as they would rather vaporize than give an inch of their land to russia"
If that was the case we would have active war in Crimea in 2014.
>"if you expect them to surrender or accept less, well, you'll have to make your case to them"
Why would I make any case? I do not expect anything. It is their choice. Also I do not think the talking was about Ukraine in particular. The statement was generic.
> If that was the case we would have active war in Crimea in 2014.
Nobody believed it was happening, i.e. Ukrainians never expected having to fight Russians. Now it's completely different; Ukraine has been preparing for an escalation of the war for 8 years.
Nobody in Crimea believed it was being taken, until it was.
By that time, the Ukranian government was beheaded, whatever left of the army was demoralized. There was literally a few thousand dollars in the state's coffers. Insurgency in the east was ramping up; a few volunteer battalions were formed overnight, financed by neighborhood donations, and sent off to fight the (covert) invasion in the east. It's actually a miracle Ukraine survived in 2014, so fighting the Russian regular army (with a big Naval base) in Crimea was not on top of the list.
It's been 8 years since and no fight for Crimea. This still contradicts the original statement: "as they would rather vaporize than give an inch of their land to russia".
And I am far from blaming Ukrainians. Their government luckily had enough brain cells and had voted not to attack what Russia considers their territory and not to vaporize their nation for the sake of some hot heads's stance.
Had they decided to do so on their own before Russia's invasion then there would be no support from the West. The chance of them succeeding militarily in Crimea in that case I think would have been big fat zero.
So no, in general I do not think want people to get vaporized en masse just because somebody believes they should.
Also we might just have a case of keyboard warriors here. It is easy to be brave / stupid sitting in a safe place in front of computer screen.
>It's been 8 years since and no fight for Crimea. This still contradicts the original statement: "as they would rather vaporize than give an inch of their land to russia".
only if you believe that viewpoints and opinions and attitudes of humans never change, a ridiculous notion
>It is easy to be brave / stupid sitting in a safe place in front of computer screen.
if you don't like that that's their attitude, feel free to complain to them about it, don't attack me, the messenger, telling you how it is. after all, it is easy for you to doubt their resolve in a safe place in front of a computer screen
Ukraine doesn't have much of a merchant fleet. Most of their exports travel on foreign bottoms. And foreign ship owners are unwilling to risk entering an active conflict zone, especially because they can't obtain affordable insurance.
we can play this game all day long, but the past 2 months have clearly shown that russian conventional forces are not even close to a match for NATO combined forces*
* as long as the goal isn't to slaughter as many civilians as possible, which for russia is a strong assumption
The Russian government has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that it is not a good faith interlocutor. Nobody should take anything they say seriously.
It's almost amazing that the newspapers reprint what Putin says, as if it was something to take seriously. Without explaining to the readers that Putin is trying to manipulate them. -- They're sometimes letting themselves be a megaphone he can use, I think.
Would-be tyrant -- I'm guessing you have in mind the president in the US who didn't want to leave, after having lost the elections? (Could have made him a dictator at least, eventually, if he had succeeded. A tyrant? Hmm it means "a cruel and oppressive ruler" -- so yes, then, I'd guess it would have turned out that way. Cliffhanger ... soon 2024.) Or am I'm bad at guessing :-)
> It probably won't happen because the West doesn't like to see itself as being involved in the war (in a way similar to what Russia thinks about itself)
Ridiculous equivalency. Your boogeyman "the West" didn't attack Russia and doesn't have troops in Russia.
Running the blockade doesn't necessarily require Russian cooperation in advance. All that's required is a minesweeper, and some commanders and captains with giant balls.
Run some ships under a NATO flag to Odessa, fill them up and run them back. Russia will bluster and threaten, but I doubt they'll actually do anything. Russia is not in a strong enough position to be able to escalate. I'm not anywhere close to sure of that, Putin is definitely not completely rational. I do think it's a risk worth taking.
If they can ship the food to Odessa (presumably by truck or train), it seems like they would be able to ship it to a port in a non-blockaded foreign country instead (e.g. Turkey, Greece, Italy, Poland).
It'd take a lot of trucks and train cars to move one ship's worth of grain. Consider that highways, train lines, and ports don't necessarily have a ton of extra capacity available, for reasons of economy, that upgrading those takes time, and can be hard to finance if the situation is perceived to be temporary (so, may take significant government intervention to make it happen).
Plus, you go to all the effort and expense of doing that, then Russia hits a few important bridges on the Ukraine side of your routes, and now you're back to nearly-zero capacity.
Russia has already struck the Zatoka bridge south/west of Odessa, the best/shortest route from Odessa to Danube river and Black Sea ports in Romania.
Most of the trains in Ukraine is electric-pulled. Russia has already struck most of the railway power transforming stations. Ukraine has very limited number of diesel trains. It can't use European ones because of different wheelbase. (correction thanks to the commenter below - gauge, not wheelbase)
Russia has already stolen about 500 000 tons of wheat from Ukraine and delivered it to Assad, its ally in Syria. Russia runs very intensive propaganda campaign representing European help to Ukraine wrt. wheat export as basically Europe stealing the wheat. Its propaganda also celebrates the food prices rising in the "collective West" countries as supposed result of the sanctions, and Russia will do anything to stimulate the rise of the prices in order to foment public push against the sanctions.
> Most of the trains in Ukraine is electric-pulled. Russia has already struck most of the railway power transforming stations. Ukraine has very limited number of diesel trains. It can't use European ones because of different wheelbase.
Ok top of that, there is a gauge change when crossing over from Ukraine to the west and the infrastructure towards the west is hardly at the level required. For example, train crossings from Poland to Germany are not all electrified, so you need another change of engine.
dreamcompiler wrote: “Russia's trains had to stop at the Ukrainian border because of the gauge difference.”
There is no gauge difference between Russia and Ukraine.
In fact, even some (small) parts of Polish railways use Russian gauge - remnant of the times when Soviet raw materials were delivered in bulk to Polish metallurgic plants.
Side note: This gauge difference worked in Ukraine's favor in one respect. Russia's military logistics infrastructure is heavily train-based, but Russia's trains had to stop at the Ukrainian border because of the gauge difference. This meant they had to switch to trucks which are old and unreliable and they got bogged down in mud, which meant they had to stick to roads where they were easy for the Ukrainians to attack. And those transshipment points where the Russians had to unload all their cargo from trains and reload it onto trucks also became fat juicy targets.
Yet another example where Russia didn't think carefully enough before invading.
I read an article early in the war that specifically stated the opposite, but apparently it was wrong and now of course I can't find it. You're correct.
> It can't use European ones because of different wheelbase.
Just a quick point of clarification for anyone trying to look this up. The correct term is "gauge" (distance between the rails) instead of "wheelbase" (distance between front and rear wheels). Most European countries use tracks with a gauge of 1,435mm but Ukraine uses 1,520mm.
yep, as long as you're "good" according to Russia&Assad. Russia is weaponizing the food the way it has weaponized natural gas and oil. In some sense that is a weapon of mass destruction posed to be used in the next few years with casualties going into millions or even tens of millions ballpark if one to look at various predictions of the food price rises and shortages in the next few years.
>It means general population of the country would be fed.
Nothing indicates that. If anything, what we know about Russia and Assad allows to reasonably suspect that it is only pro-Assad regions will be fed while others will be subjected to the rising prices and shortages.
>Looks like win-win to me
That win for Russia, Assad and pro-Assad population comes at the cost of increased prices and shortages for the Middle East and Africa at least (the regions which directly imported from Ukraine), as well as rising prices across the world - all that being the direct result of the Russian war hitting availability of tens of million tons of Ukraine produced food. I.e. there were 2 alternatives - 1) tens of millions tons of Ukraine produced food would normally be available to the whole world vs. 2) Russia delivers only 500K tons to its Syrian allies. As we see Russia used military force to enforce the alternative 2).
><skipping crap about food as a weapon>
Food isn't the weapon. Using military force to intentionally create food unavailability is the weapon.
It seems like you intentionally missing the point that Russia is using its military force in Ukraine to :
1. limit the availability of the Ukraine produced food on the international market
2. put as much as possible of what is produced by Ukraine under Russian control
and thus to allow Russia to create food unavailability at will at the place and time of its choosing.
Btw, interesting parallel with Nazi Germany - it wanted to grab those fertile lands for itself and to clean them of Slavic people, and Russia similarly wants those lands for itself and to clean them of Ukrainians (and Russia has been actually succeeding at that more than Germany back then as Russia has already forced more than 12 million Ukrainians out of those lands).
It's a non-issue. The US alone can produce enough to supply the world, but we pay farmers to let fields fallow to keep prices up. Africa is full of fertile land and could be feeding the world, if we weren't actively destabilizing countries. Canada produces millions of tons, and looks like they are also growing extra.
Right? Check that one off the list (if this actually happened ... Russia cant get anything done right anymore so I dont see that grain making it anywhere).
But also, a lot of the food has been destroyed, a lot of the equipment has been destroyed in the chain of producing and delivering the food, and a lot of the people that work in that chain have been killed, displaced, or have had more pressing tasks than working in agriculture. Those problems aren't likely to be solved immediately even if new export routes are opened.
I really don’t think the USA can afford to let Ukraine fail. They are basically committed to destroying the Russian economy now, and having them lose the war in Ukraine is an important part in that.
If Russia is able to defeat Ukraine, end the war and stabilise the situation, they will be in a better position to convince countries to work around the sanctions they are facing, which would amount to an end-run around the dominanc e of the US dollar.
So this is accurate in my opinion, but you're essentially saying the quiet part out loud. You're saying the war has nothing to do with saving Ukraine, but rather protecting the hegemony of the US dollar.
I suspect if everybody understood that's what we're really concerned with, support for Ukraine would drop precipitously.
I was not suggesting the opposite, by any means. But I am not sure I agree with your statement either. I won’t even get into hunter Biden’s Ukrainian business dealings and I agree the blame is technically all on Putin, who is an evil madman, maybe even literally going insane from cancer or paranoia or something.
But flooding Ukraine with cash and weapons, with zero oversight or public debate should concern people. It all seems a bit poorly managed, something that most intelligent people now agree is the overarching theme of the current administration. Dropping buckets of cash aid and weapons — 20 billion here, 40 billion there — will probably do more than intended. It usually does. We love regime changing the world, spreading American style peace and democracy, typically with an unwarranted optimism about the outcome. Let’s hope things go better this time.
The trouble is that it is pretty damn tough to pivot from corn to some crop meant for direct human consumption. The machinery and infrastructure we have in place to grow, transport, and process corn is almost unimaginable in size.
A pivot like this would require incredible gov't subsidies and take decades.
Also, my family is from the north of Argentina, so during the holidays there during one or two weeks fresh corn was very cheap. So we ate sweet humita and spicy humita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humita, sweet corn pie and spicy corn pie, also whole fresh corns, and other stuff. We joked that we ate some dish with corn for lunch and some dish with corn for dinner for a week.
In fact reducing corn yields and switching to a different crop will save farmers
money as framers have to over supply fertilizer as they are planting corn too close together to get yields without using fertilizer i.e. corn take out more from soil than it gives back
100% on the cows, wrong on hard to grow. Growing in mass quantities is hard on the local environment (global if you count the affects from usage). Corn fed beef is bad.
Surely, we must know how to do this. I mean, we know how grass-eating ruminants break down the cellulose to obtain energy with various enzymes and whatnot. We could probably invent some kind of exo-stomach to pre-digest grass into an edible state. :)
Starch and cellulose are both glucose polymers. The only difference is the way in which the glucose units are attached to one another. Existing enzymes can only cleave one or the other. Ruminants don't actually have the necessary enzyme, but instead rely on bacteria in their stomach to do this for them.
I guess if you really wanted to, you could take cellulase in the way that people can take lactase to mitigate the effects of lactose intolerance.
How you'd actually get your stomach to brew that up into anything useful in time is anyone's guess, and what it would do to the rest of you is an exercise for the keen experimenter.
We are basically too active and too large to eat grass, even if we had lactase.
If you're in the West, it doesn't hurt to buy a couple big bags of rice from the local Indian market, and have some dried or canned beans handy, and cycle through them as you cook. A pallet of bottled water and a bag of charcoal don't hurt either. A dumb power outage or a downed wire or a tornado or something is much more likely than Red Dawn, but you'll still be happy to have all that.
I recently looked into how much rice I'd need to survive for a year. The results were fairly surprising. A kilogram of uncooked rice only provide you with about 3500 kcal, less than you'd use in 2 days of time (for the average human). So you'd need quite a lot of rice. Beans are similar, they just have more protein (not a complete protein though).
I concluded that while it is definitely advisable to have some number of days/weeks in storage, it doesn't seem feasible to store enough food to last a prolonged period of time (unless you go all-in on prepping, which has its limits). We humans are as successful as we are because we cooperate with other humans, and on our own we're pretty powerless. So fostering community might be the best way to advert crisis.
I still don't advise going in 100% on rice as beri-beri is an issue (or heavy metal issues if you go all brown rice).
A good mix of canned goods, dried goods and reliable water will help. Even in a shortage you will probably have some access, but limited access.
I strongly advise against bottled water for emergencies. It is the worst possible solution for cost/size/availability. You can buy 6 gallon aquatainers and fill them with tap water for an easy (and useful for camping) solution. Rotate every six months and you don't need secondary treatment.
Otherwise a food grade 55 gallon drum is $100 and you can fill it from your tap. You will want secondary treatment options if you plan to rotate just every 2 years, and you still need a smaller intermediary vessel.
Speak for yourself! I’m biking distance from a lake, so I’m going to focus on having enough bleach around. Bottled water is great… for bottles to do solar disinfection with. Though I guess I should really be worried about an algal bloom… ugh.
220gal IBCs should be $100 too, but maybe they’re more now.
You're forgetting about your fats. A 5 gal container of oil contains about 153,000 calories.
Every time you cook rice, beans, spit peas, lentils, etc. you put in a few tablespoons of oil or fat to keep it from boiling over, and to add flavor and calories. Each tablespoon is about 120 calories. When you make hummus, refried beans, tamales or spanish rice you generally add in a considerable amount more fats.
Right, its always a good idea to have short term reserves but it's way more important to build out local and regional resilience and a less vulnerable, more robust, diverse food supply
Rice will be full of pest insect eggs. They'll hatch after a while (smallish count of months, likely).
You've got to freeze it (to kill the eggs) and then seal it (to keep more pests from getting in) and/or add stuff that'll kill anything that hatches very fast (IIRC diatomaceous earth is popular for this)
Other grains have similar pest problems, plus if it's wheat or similar and ground into flour (not e.g. whole wheat berries), it'll get worse over time from air exposure. Anything with the germ still on/in it will go rancid after a while, and the germ's full of nutrients so you really want that part if you can keep it.
I've never seen anything like that and I've kept rice around for years as well. Do you live in a poor country where they don't have proper food protection agencies? If things like that hatched in food people bought from stores that would make the news, I've seen it in the news before so it can't happen that often.
> Do you live in a poor country where they don't have proper food protection agencies?
USA.
So, I mean, kinda.
But, unless they're irradiating or freezing your rice before it gets to the store, there are rice weevil eggs in it. They're inside the rice grains. If you've eaten much rice, you've eaten rice weevil eggs.
Probably comes from grain storage locations in warmer climates then. I can't find anyone talking about these online in my local language which is to the north, we have no native pests like these so they all only live inside houses. There are other weevils, but they are very rare and mostly comes from other sources and starts eating your bread etc, they don't come from packages you get in the store. Nobody said there is a problem storing these things long term, instead you get rid of them by getting rid of all their eggs in your kitchen.
This reminds me of something I read in Discover magazine around 20 years ago.
The gist of it was that immigrants in western Europe from various countries in Africa had developed nutritional deficiencies after immigrating. It appeared their diets were the same, perhaps better on paper, so it wasn't clear why their health was deteriorating.
It turned out that these people had diets rich in unwashed greens and vegetables, and they were likely consuming far more beneficial bacteria, insects, and minerals in their diets. They continued their mostly-vegetarian diets in Europe, but were no longer benefitting from what tended to accompany their foods before.
Not sure why I remember that. Regardless, we should all be eating dirt and weevils.
The eggs don't hatch right away, can take months or years, but most people buy rice to eat right now, not to stockpile, so it's mostly consumed before the weevils hatch. And when they do, it's just a known nuisance, not worth reporting.
I cannot find anyone talking about rice weevils in my language online, so I really doubt finding them is a common thing everywhere. If it is that impossible to get rid of them then it is probably a climate thing, they are common in your climate but not in my climate.
So the advice would be to look at local pests and how to avoid having those in your storage. We still have other kinds of weevils but they are not everywhere like you say rice weevils are, you are unlikely to have them in packages meant for humans so storing things long term is fine.
Correct—it's doable, it just takes more material and planning than "buy bag of rice, stick bag in dry place in basement". Do that, you'll be sad when you try to use it in a year or three.
The alternative is maintaining a stock but constantly drawing it down & replenishing it, but it gets difficult to maintain a substantial reserve that way, unless you already eat your "apocalypse" diet most of the time, so go through a lot of the same things you've got in storage even during normal times—say, if you already eat rice & beans 5+ dinners a week. You're capped by the rate at which you go through those things in non-emergency times. Plus it takes some planning and ongoing monitoring/inventorying, which is a non-zero amount of work.
I'd expect a couple years at least. A quick Google gives common wisdom that you still want anti-weevil measures (bay leaves in the bag, the aforementioned diatomaceous earth) with that method.
My point with that part was just that you have to do the vacuum sealing (unless you're buying a product with all this taken care of, which I'd assume is expensive) and such, at least, which means more equipment and material than simply buying sealed (but not vacuum sealed) bags at the store and putting them on a shelf. Getting grains ready for long-term storage means more than just keeping mice and bugs and water out—you've gotta worry about oxygen, and about insect eggs already present in the grain, too. Just stuff one might not think of if one were to make the wrong assumptions.
[EDIT] Incidentally, trying to store all one's calories, at least more than enough for a week or two, might not be the right idea anyway, short of a truly horrible catastrophe like nuclear war—my great-grandparents and grandparents, who lived through the depression and World War II, respectively, didn't seem to be all that in to storing lots of grain. What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables, and gardening (to grow stuff to put in the cans). Man, were they ever into canning vegetables. I'd guess that's the result of some hard lessons about how to make it through hard times—plus, just, times before modern shipping and refrigeration when food availability dropped a whole bunch in Winter.
Maybe the misunderstanding stems from a geographic difference. The rice I buy seems to come in an under a co2-atmosphere vacuum sealed bag that costs around $2 (or less on sale) per kg.
> What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables,
My grandmother did this too, after living her childhood through WW2 (in Germany), she used to have a repository of canned vegetables in the cellar. I sometimes talked to her about her rural live in the war-torn country, and she told me about soldiers, and all kinds of people, who would come by in war-time, where food was very sparse. And I think she maintained that sort of hoarding behavior throughout her life, based on the experiences she made as a child.
Interesting. Our (my part of the US) rice is mostly sold in small plastic bags (perhaps 1-2kg), or for some brands hard plastic containers; larger amounts come in either a much heavier opaque plastic bag (like pet/livestock feed, when it's not in a lined paper bag of some kind), or a thin clear plastic bag inside a rough cloth bag. If there are already-vacuum-sealed options here, I've not noticed them.
Reading some other comments, it is also possible that these bags aren't actually vacuum sealed. It is hard for me to tell how much of a barrier you need to get a good sealing, in particular to protect from rice weevils (bugs), which appear to be the biggest issue.
"What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables, and gardening (to grow stuff to put in the cans). Man, were they ever into canning vegetables."
I became aware of the world just as seasonal food availability was becoming a thing of the past—I remember significantly more seasonal variation, but only when I was pretty young—so this really stuck with me growing up. All those colorful jars lined up on shelves, all the gardening, all the boiling-of-jars, et c. All that work, and a can of the same thing was $0.29 at the store.
So I assume they all developed these super-similar habits for really great reasons. And since the ~1960s and earlier were just normally pretty similar to what a significant food shortage would probably look like now (at least in countries that will almost certainly be able to maintain adequate supplies of staples, like the US) it seems to me that might be a good first place to look. Stock up on canned veggies, worry less about the rest of it. Maybe get some chickens and plant some berry bushes (they also all loved keeping a line or two of berry bushes, and it seems like in their generations you just alway kept chickens, if you weren't smack in the middle of town)
I'm going to ramble a bit... I grew up on a farm in the actual middle of nowhere. It was a then-defunct, mid-size dairy. In it's heyday it had 300 head of Holstein being milked.
My mother, whose parents ran the dairy, and to a large extent my father, instilled this way of life on me at a young age. Growing up, we had a huge vegetable garden (they still maintain a 1/8 acre vegetable lot in their 70s, it's quite impressive, really -- and that's in addition to a 400 sq. ft. greenhouse I helped my father build and the rest of their lot that has fruit trees, berry bushes, etc.) but I was always in awe of the canning and the preserving. You grow all of this food but you only eat 20% of it fresh, canning and preserving the other 80%. But then, being so young I didn't realize that our meals consisted of vegetables/fruits that were canned or preserved years previously, of course. There was a strong communal aspect to it, too. We'd get oversupply from neighbors and/or give oversupply to neighbors.
Chickens, too. The farm had a coup. My parents had a coup (they gave it up in their late 60s -- my father grew tired of dealing with the foxes and skunks they attracted). It's something I want to do but where I live it's impossible. We're planning on a move where we can have a chicken coup and more space for growing food in general. I'd really like to preserve the heritage, as it were, and it's become more important as we start a family.
Also, I've dealt with corn and wheat weevils before. I actually did not realize that they also laid eggs on rice. I guess I assumed that it was "different" or whatever but thank you for highlighting that in other comments. I've got 50 lbs. of rice that I'm going to break down to smaller vacuum sealed bags this weekend. I've dealt with weevils at least a half of a dozen times in my past and it is not pleasant. I do not want a repeat of that mess, but especially where I live today.
If you vacuum seal it with mylar lined bags and some oxygen absorbers, it can last up to 5 years, which is a long time.
Oxygen will get through normal plastic vacuum sealing bags and ruin the taste and eventually nutritional content otherwise after a year or two. Mylar lining stops most of that and the oxygen absorber gets the rest.
The thick bags will also stop rice moths from getting through (they are able to get through most cardboard and thin plastic bags), and the lack of oxygen will stop their eggs from hatching.
I have seen rice stay without any problems for more than a year. It was dried under hot sun for hours before storing. Most likely, the extreme heat took care of the weevils and the lack of moisture had a protective effect on the rice.
They take the rice out and soak it (as in soaking, not washing) like beans before cooking. Probably for re-hydrating it.
Eek. Ideally, you don't have a bag of rice for months and months at a time, though, you have a bag of rice and once you've used up most of it, you buy a new bag of rice, etc. There is kind of an inherent assumption that the person doing this is fond of eating rice.
If you're going for shelf life I've eaten canned chili that was more than 15 years old and it was fine. Most things seem to change texture in unpleasant ways sitting in a can that long but chili doesn't. Not that it's viable to live off of in terms of calories and storage space, just an interesting observation about shelf life.
For sure. When making my emergency kit (my oldest has severe food allergies and I live in a major earthquake zone), I ran across some issues with things with high fat content though (which I believe bran might be). Unless you’re very careful with removing oxygen, the fat can go rancid after awhile (from months to years depending on the specific oils).
If you have the setup where you've got that connected and make it work, that's a great idea. The neighbors next to my building have some on their roof--it's not too different from having batteries for your radio.
I was just researching this and the new Enphase IQ8 microinverters will run without grid power. You are correct though it is common for microinverters to require grid power to operate, which seems pretty surprising!
It's usually a safety feature. If there is a downed power line and you lose grid connection, energizing your (otherwise dead) side of the downed lines could easily kill the lineman who comes to fix it.
Oh certainly it is important to have some kind of cut-off to prevent back-feeding the power lines, but I thought that would just be part of the system design.
It is! The easiest design is to require existing grid stable power and supplement it. :)
Anything else is difficult to do reliably, and would generally require some kind of smart monitoring system, electrically actuated mains rated switch (not easy, cheap or durable it turns out), additional sensors, etc.
The design we're talking about just doesn't output power unless there is an existing sine wave to follow. Pretty foolproof, since anything that provided it would also be the one responsible for electrocuting the worker.
I’m typing this from a computer I’m holding in my hand that’s more powerful than the ones used to put men on the moon. A box with three connections - grid, solar, and house (four if you have a battery) with sensors and disconnects and the smarts to not backfeed and electrocute linemen just doesn’t seem impossibly complex. Especially when we’re talking about home solar installs, which cost several thousand dollars to begin with. There’s got to be some other force at play here preventing this device, which is the most obvious way of implementing a supplementary power system connection, from being widespread.
Add in all the other stuff and an extra couple thousand to the cost of the solar installation is why it isn’t as common. Because most people don’t care enough to pay the extra amount. Some do.
If you wanted it enough to pay the extra, most electricians wouldn’t mind adding it in I’m sure.
That makes sense! I guess being new to this it is just counter intuitive to think that you could install a big solar panel system and still suffer power outages. But I see what you mean.
To the breaker on your solar (or genset) the resistance of the neighborhood is gonna look indistinguishable from a short circuit so you'll need to at least disconnect from the grid if you want to power your house. From there your next problem is that solar panels don't handle being overloaded very well so you either need a ton of them ore batteries.
Often, but not always. There are a number of ways lines can and do fail that produce high impedance, including a tree downing a service connection, breaker tripping, etc.
2. Your appliances don't like brownouts and voltage dips whenever a cloud passes overhead. Try to run a house without a power buffer and you'll burn up power controllers all over your house.
Unfortunately the battery market is extremely tight due to so many car manufacturers trying to switch to BEVs ASAP and stressing the raw materials markets. That and COVID shortages. Prices are very high and availability is usually "8-12 month waitlist".
I wonder if it’s possible to retrofit a Tesla to work as a bootleg Powerwall in tandem with residential solar - should brownouts become a common thing.
My Google-fu isn’t strong enough to find anything on the topic that isn’t on the level of “tremendously sketchy YouTube video” and I’m not about to risk my car and house experimenting off the back of that sort of thing.
I don’t know about Tesla specifically but this is a thing that some EVs can do. The new Ford F-150 lightning can do it. This is generally called vehicle to grid, vehicle to load, or bidirectional charging. A quick search shows maybe Tesla hasn’t added it yet. But here’s some details on the Ford lightning setup:
The whole reason I wanted to take up camping was to understand what I can eat in an emergency situation. Now I own a camping stove, a few fuel canisters, some boil in bag rice, and a few large cans of plain freeze dried chicken and beef. Add in the charcoal BBQ and I'll have a feast the day the power goes out.
The benefit of backpacking as a hobby is not only testing gear and learning how to use it, but also having a means/excuse to rotate through an emergency freeze-dried food supply or MREs and/or learn how to forage and hunt/prepare small game. MREs are reasonably cheap, high calorie, long lasting, and if you strip them down to essentials can be reasonable weight. They don’t last forever on the shelf, but again, camping/backpacking/kayaking can give you an excuse to cycle out the oldest stuff.
Carbs are not optional for survival. MREs are overwhelmingly carbs for a reason. Pure protein sources lack carbs. Beans and rice don't have this problem.
This is really hard, I had four 8x4 raised beds (all I could fit) for 5 years. The amount of space and time it takes to produce enough food to replace actual meals for more than just a few times in the summer is absolutely astonishing (unless you like squash all the time). I grew tomatoes, kale, squash, onions, lettuce and peppers. It tasted great, and got some salads and side dishes out of it, but that was about it. And it only yielded from July to August, I had nothing in the winter (except some canned tomatoes that were really good). It really takes a community effort to make this work. Like, plots of land that multiple people tend to. I've seen some cities do this and think it is fantastic.
You don't need a community effort or astonishingly vast land to grow potatoes :-) What I mean by that is that the choice of stuff you grow matters. Lettuce, peppers (and one might add tomatoes) won't feed you much indeed. They are however indeed interesting in small spaces when you don't expect them to feed you but to provide you nice, fresh extras.
I mean, I produce about 800 lbs of vegetables by spending 20 mn a day on it (average on 365 days, which means more at times and nothing at other times). Surely it requires more space that you had. But no motorised tool involved, no fertiliser but a tiny bit of manure (no fancy permaculture tricks either, just traditional beds), no pesticide except in case of emergency like once a year on 10% of the garden, no watering except in case of emergency again, no search of any optimisation (time, space, yield, ...). It isn't a bid deal to get a partial yet significant autonomy; it just gets harder and harder as you want to get close to 100%.
There are stuff you can keep across winter in storage without transformation, like potatoes or cereals (onions, shallot don't do bad either); and stuff that can be kept where they lie, in the ground, like parsnip, sunchoke, and a few other root vegetables; cabbage can stay too, leeks as well. (Of course, it depends on the geographical location.)
Yeah, a base of potatoes + cabbages + onions get you a long way; and they are quite versatile as far as cooking is concerned.
Agreed! I was just getting into it and trying various things. If I had grown up with family that did it I probably would have had better odds. Also, I've always wanted to try a root cellar, too, but alas, no space for that.
100%. Growing up my parents were hardcore gardeners (arguably smalltime farmers) with about 2 acres of farmland and an additional 2 acres of fruit trees. We'd eat pretty heavily out of the garden from the late spring through the fall, and would have potatoes, apples, canned/frozen goods through much of the winter... but it was an enormous amount of work. In the spring and summer basically any time that it was viable to work in the garden on the weekends or in the evenings, we were out working in the garden.
That's huge; I haven't seen anything like that, even in the deep country where I grew up, where people (farmers) almost didn't buy anything but grew and processed most of their stuff. Their gardens hardly ever went over a 1/4 of an acre, I'd say, that was already pretty large and provided for filling quite a number of jar of tomatoes and beans and stuff.
Didn't your parents sell anything?
Using 400-500 sq ft, I get enough potatoes for a family of 3. Not that potato is our only staple food, but...
2 acres was the total farmland, they would rotate which areas they used so on any given year only 30-40% of it was actually growing crops. They never sold anything that I can recall, but they loved being able to give extras away. Both of them grew up in the 50s on farms in the south. They both saw their dad have to transition away from full time farming and get a day job, but in both of their families the farm remained a big source of supplemental income that involved the whole family. Interestingly both of them were the first in their family to go to college because they didn't want to be trapped in the rural farming life. I guess they were still pretty fond of it though because after they married they decided that their dream home was a small farm, which is where I grew up.
Consider canning and fermenting some of your food. Also, grow things that can last throughout winter, such as potatoes, carrots, beets, etc. They can last in a cool dark place for months. Broccoli and Okra can be blanched and flash-frozen. Cucumbers can make pickles.
There are tons of good ideas out there about preserving your own food. But, I agree, that a small garden won't take a big bite out of your food needs. You're not trying to become self-sufficient, you're trying to lower your reliance on store-bought food.
My parents have a pear tree that came with the lot. Straggly looking creature with barely any signs of life all year, then for a month or two it produces more pears than my parents can eat for the rest of the year.
I love visiting my parents while it’s going apeshit. Crisp pears all day.
The last few years I planted I got my starts going real early in my basement and we had an early spring and I was over the moon. But I had a few cold springs that didn't warm up until June and had to replant multiple times. Rookie mistakes and bad luck. :)
-Use raised beds or Hugelkulture to increase yields.
-Use sq foot gardening to plant more in less space
-Develop a three stage compost pile. Import food waste from others in your neighborhood if needs be.
-Grow year round with cold frames
-Use cover crops to enrich soil over winter
> Use sq foot gardening to plant more in less space
5gal buckets my friend. Cheap or free if you keep a lookout or have winemaking friends. Free-$2 per bucket for food grade. Pretty much the cheapest you’ll get per gallon of plant space. But I use ours to increase our garden space onto valueless concrete surfaces.
The squirrels are generally not in it for the tomato, what they really want is the water in the tomato. A lot of people (myself included) have eliminated or reduced the problem by having a birdbath or water display near the garden.
I actually have two, but the terms of their adoption require that the full extent of the victory be confined indoors. It's a sacrifice I'm willing to make for a kneading cat-doughnut on a cold day.
These are part of a propaganda strategy to make people feel like they're "helping". They are not an effective or efficient way of improving food availability. If you enjoy gardening as a hobby, that's great, but these are not practical bulwarks against food shortages.
The economies of scale in industrial farming are insane. The ROI on a personal garden is abysmally low, except for herbs and other low-volume plants.
These are part of a propaganda strategy to make people feel like they're "helping".
Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use, which I suspect is why most people have home gardens.
A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food - especially if you do canning or otherwise preserve for winter use.
From the link in the parent post:
Fruit and vegetables harvested in these home and community plots was estimated to be 9,000,000–10,000,000 short tons (8,200,000–9,100,000 t) in 1944, an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables
> Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use
No, the effect on supply is the same.
> A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food
It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden".
> an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables
I guarantee this is some misleading bullshit statistic. They've probably selected "fresh vegetables" to mean some very small subset of industrial agriculture, like vegetables that are never canned or frozen.
>>> It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden".
This is incorrect, it takes around 1/2 an acre if it's vegetarian or 1.5 acres including chickens/ducks for meat and eggs. That's using a traditional organic farming. If you use Hydroponics (Plants grown in water with no soil) or Aeroponics (Hydroponics grown in towers) or Aquaponics (Hydroponics with aquaculture, where the fish provide both protein and the fertilizer for the plants) the yield is dramatically higher (5x-10x per sq ft) can be done year round and indoors. It's not a perfect solution, it takes knowledge to setup and run, a very small capital investment for startup, and a constant power source. That said it IS commercially viable, you can already today buy produce produced this way in almost any grocery store, and it's viable for home production. I personally have several systems running in my apartment ranging from off the shelf commercial systems (AeroGarden Back to the Roots...) to custom built aquaponics systems. On a pure dollar level it's more expensive per lb of food, no doubt but within reason I don't care about that. I grow better and fresher food and most importantly I control the supply chain.
We can and should use these kind of technologies to replace as much of the modern agriculture system as we possibly can. No of the this mentions the MASSIVE environmental improvement that switching to these systems would make, which is reason enough to do it.
> It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden".
I'm sorry, but I just can't believe that. Is that fudged to account for livestock or waste or something? A single acre is what, 40*100m? That's huge, you could feed a whole family all year on potatoes, peanuts, greens, squash etc
well, no, if you're growing for personal use you can make a notable effect on your own supply/food costs. You don't have to solve the global food shortage to benefit from a personal garden and since the global food shortage will drive up prices, the financial benefit is even greater (as long as price increases in things like fertilizer don't eat up your cost savings).
You seem to be thinking about this from a personal finance angle instead of an economy-wide production angle.
It doesn't matter if a piece of corn is made in your garden or on a farm. The net effect on the corn supply is identical.
It takes orders of magnitude more input to grow a piece of corn in a garden than on a farm. That had better be offset by the personal enjoyment of the gardener.
You seem to be thinking about this from a personal finance angle instead of an economy-wide production angle.
Yes, I tried to be clear:
Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use, which I suspect is why most people have home gardens.
No one's backyard garden in the USA is going to help feed someone in Africa, but even if the global food shortage doesn't mean food shortages in the USA, it's going to drive up prices, and a backyard garden can help offset that household expense.
You took specific objection to my comment that victory gardens were to make people "feel like they were helping". I meant this to imply some kind of externalized effect beyond just saving money.
It's also probably wrong that a home garden will net save you money unless you make like $3/hr. Again, unless you're extracting pleasure from gardening.
You took specific objection to my comment that victory gardens were to make people "feel like they were helping". I meant this to imply some kind of externalized effect beyond just saving money.
Yes, that's why I quoted it specifically and clarified that I was talking about a home garden.
It's also probably wrong that a home garden will net save you money unless you make like $3/hr. Again, unless you're extracting pleasure from gardening.
The people that benefit the most financially from a home garden are already low paid - those are the people that aren't going to struggle to afford food as prices rise. My sister has been gardening for years, a couple years ago she kept a spreadsheet and added up her savings based on retail prices of produce and her "revenue" from her garden (which covers most of the back yard of her 1/2 acre lot plus one apple tree) was over $2500 after deducting expenses (excluding labor).
She estimated around 2 hours/day tending the garden for a 6 month growing season, so that's around 360 hours of work, or around $7/hour, which is better than she'd take home working a minimum wage job and in exchange they get all of the organic produce they can eat in the summer, plus a lot of frozen or canned food in the winter. And she ends up giving a lot of it away to friends/family.
For a lot of people here, putting in 360 hours of work to earn "only" $2500 worth of food sounds like a terrible bargain, but for many people in this country, that's a great bargain.
Commercial production of vegetables, particularly those not considered essential, was artificially low during the war, constrained by government control of allocation of things like materials for packaging and freight cars for transportation, and by no draft exemptions for male workers from the farm to the market.
That's great and all. I think home gardens are great. But the topic is about food shortages in poor nations due to increases in grain prices. Home gardens does literally nothing to help anyone in poor nations who will be going hungry later this year.
Try talking to some older folks - who at least heard many first-hand accounts from relatives who both had WWII Victory Gardens, and also gardened food during the Great Depression, out of economic necessity. With a few years' experience doing that, sharing tips and seeds with neighbors also doing it, and memories of being pretty hungry at times in the winter...ordinary people can get pretty damn good at growing a lot of food in a fairly modest-sized garden.
Getting good at gardening doesn't allow you to exceed agribusiness land efficiency levels, so we can put a pretty tight cap on how much small home gardens actually helped.
Agribusiness will happily choose lower yields in exchange for improved mechanization. Or resistance to disease (higher risk thereof from aggressive monoculture). Or better shelf life/transportability. Or marketability (yellow tomatoes don’t sell as well).
The backyard gardener doesn’t quite have those worries and could get higher land efficiency.
Isn’t this a bit of a false dichotomy though - solving a (potential) world food shortage or not; being more efficient than industrial farming or not; feeding one’s self/family completely via gardening or not gardening at all?
It seems to me that the more people who supplement their food supply with goods that don’t depend on imported supply (home or community gardens) lessens demand fractionally on the general supply, which fractionally helps with local pricing and household budgets, both of which are positives.
I’m not sure it’s ever been a requirement of victory gardens to be completely autonomous unless ur a hardcore prepper.
> The economies of scale in industrial farming are insane. The ROI on a personal garden is abysmally low, except for herbs and other low-volume plants.
So I read this book called "How Asia Works" which documented the economic transformations of a few different Asian countries.
I was shocked to learn that in a lot of cases, the industrial farming not the huge boon that was expected efficiently a few people can grow things with intensely you can plant small plot farms.
Countries that promoted small-scale household farming instead of moving too soon to large scale farming were more successful, but this was largely because the labor pool can't transition that fast to going from farmers being everyone one in ten overnight.
We live at a time where very few people work in farming, the smallest amount in history. Why can't it slide back the other way?
It can't slide back because 99%+ of people don't want to live like peasants of 100 years ago. I hope I don't need to explain why having a lot more people spending a lot of their time farming small plots leads to a substantially lower standard of living than an industrial or post-industrial economy.
> Countries that promoted small-scale household farming instead of moving too soon to large scale farming were more successful
Promoting small-scale farming and industry lead to widespread poverty and famine in cultural revolution China.
> very few people work in farming, the smallest amount in history. Why can't it slide back the other way?
It could, but this would probably be a pretty bad thing. I guess it depends how many people who currently have fake bullshit jobs transition to being farm workers. My guess is that almost everyone who would go into an expanded ag labor base is currently doing some actually useful work, and we would suffer a severe net decrease in labor output, if we tanked farming efficiency.
> Promoting small-scale farming and industry lead to widespread poverty and famine in cultural revolution China.
In this specific example, there might have been other causes.
In general I agree with you, getting the entire US to "go Amish" isn't viable. Just picking on your example which leaves out some of the details about how the transition was "promoted".
If rationing kicks in, and you're able to garden, that means the government is somehow preventing the ag supply from expanding. Random people gardening is a really inefficient way to work around that.
Your local zoning board might object. I live in PA, and one of the neighborhood vigilantes immediately ratted me out to the local government when I started growing corn, squash, and beans in my backyard while raising a couple of chickens for eggs.
> Please keep that sort of slur off HN. We don't need it here, and you don't need it to make your substantive points.
I think that may be an overly heated response.
Given that I have seen the term used as a pronoun applied to multiple genders, sex preferences, races, ethnicities, etc, I see the term as speaking to behaviors, rather than being a pejorative unique to a group. Here are good examples of it being applied across multiple ethnicities and genders [1] & [2] . There is even a transgender karen [3] .
Normally it is applied to people acting improperly, hall-monitor type of behaviors where it is not warranted. Someone maliciously reporting food growing in a backyard meets the definition.
Please don't make decisions based off Wikipedia [4] or dictionary.com [5] redefining a word to meet a specific agenda.
'internet forum aspiring to curious conversation' and 'youtube videos making fun of people's public meltdowns' have different standards and HN's are pretty well documented.
The word Karen reaching a tipping point in public awareness associated with the Gamestop incident I already pointed out. Many of us have seen it. We're aware of it, we know about it. And we know it is potent, otherwise it wouldn't be on the chopping block for redefinition. And forever, when I think of the word Karen, I think of that particular incident.
The word in that sense, has a great deal of similarity with a tiny little phrase, of a mere two words.
Mission Accomplished.
Whether tearful, premature, ironic, deceptive, tragic, or an example of great hubris, many of us living will forever associate those two words with George W. Bush on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, and the incalculable human suffering of an unpopular war. The friends we lost after that, and military adventurism run amok. The missing Weapons of Mass Destruction. So much is wrapped up in those two words. And forever, when I think of the phrase Mission Accomplished, I think of that particular speech.
Please do not tell me that HN is going to redefine a word for me, whether it is Karen, or Mission Accomplished, or some other phrase.
We don't need civilized pejoratives that are completely decent for dinner table talk to be conflated with uncivilized utterances not fit for the written or spoken word.
To say 'Au contraire' you have to provide some sort of meaningful counter-argument. You have 'comedy' youtube videos, oddly overwrought bombast ('dictator', 'agenda') and something about a completely different phrase which, unlike 'Karen', is not intended as an insult.
Directing tropey slurs at people is mostly not ok on HN and it's been moderated like that for ages.
The 'examples' obviously don't fit HN at all and beside you, nobody has mentioned racial or ethnic slurs nor made any argument the word should be treated here in some way that's different from the way it's widely interpreted. That seems more reach-y and redefin-y than simply asking people not to be trope-wielding jerks on HN.
I don't know if the comment was edited or not, but I hope you're not claiming "vigilante" is a slur. I looked up the definition of slur just to be sure and you are technically correct, but I'd say you're abusing language far more than the person you're responding to.
Editing a comment after the fact in a way that deprives a reply of its original context and makes it look stupid is, in most cases, a dick move. I think most users understand that. It doesn't make a difference whether the reply was by a moderator or not.
- Getting snarky because they did the reasonable thing and got rid of the slur after it was pointed out
- Calling said user a dick. If Karen is a misogynistic slur, How is dick not moreso misandristic? I realize you said "dick move", but that's functionally the same. Saying something was a "c?nt move" or a "n????r move" would be tantamount to calling someone a c?nt or n????r.
- Because maybe it made your comment "look stupid"
Jawdropping desecration of the guidelines. You need a vacation.
In most of the spaces I frequent, an edit to change objectionable wording after being called on it is acceptable. Since you've made it plain that that sort of approach doesn't work here, I'll keep that in mind.
It's not a borderline case. People have trouble with the distinction between a judgement about a word overall, and a judgement about what a word will do to an HN thread. Also, people just like to gripe.
A Karen is no more an inappropriate slur than many other useful words and phrases that are negative, such as goody-two-shoes, busybody, bully, crank, etc.
She griped about both, the zoning board demanded I get rid of the chickens.
I was tempted to leave their corpses on her doorstep and egg the municipal building as a petty sort of revenge, but that would have been too obvious.
Those chickens were good eating, though, especially with some homegrown corn on the cob and baked beans. The squash didn't work out so well, unfortunately.
What was she griping about with the garden? Chickens I can understand if there are smell complaints. In San Francisco you are allowed to keep them but there are rules about the number you can have and the minimum distance their enclosure can be to any neighbors window, etc. But squash? That’s really an odd thing to complain about.
backyard chickens don't have a smell, that's only once you start mass producing them in a factory. The same way yours or your neighbors dogs, that produce substantially more feces than a chicken, don't cause neighborhood wide odor.
My biggest problem with my neighbor's chickens was that they kept getting out an coming over to my property and he'd have to ask me to let him in the back yard so he could take them back home. Never noticed any smells near their coop which was near the property line.
Never really bothered me since they mostly just hung out around the back fence far from my house, but finally another neighbor complained to the city and they had to get rid of the chickens. Chickens are allowed here (up to 10 per property), but have to be kept confined and on your own property.
I was probably just interpreting the ordinance requirements of a minimum distance of 20 feet from any neighbor’s door or window as having to do with smell when I read it.
Obviously regulations vary across counties and municipalities, but when/where I lived in PA, the zoning rules spelled it out pretty clearly that hens were fine but roosters weren't.
Growing a garden and raising livestock are pretty different in practice & impact from my experience. Assuming you voluntarily moved into the zoning and "Karen" objected to you violating them, it's all on you.
The zoning change came after I moved in and after I got my chickens. If I had the time, money, and inclination I might have been able to find a lawyer willing to appeal on ex post facto[0] grounds, but it wasn't a battle worth fighting. I had had a year's worth of free eggs by then, and the chickens themselves didn't go to waste.
Quite true, and the potential for gardening is quite situational. OTOH, current forecasts of mega-scale hunger, famines, & death look pretty useful, if you wanted to paint such, ah, busybodies, in a rather negative light, and try to get some rules changed.
> one of the neighborhood vigilantes immediately ratted me out to the local government
Better than your previous phrasing, but try again; if the action that they took was to report you to the government then they are the opposite of a vigilante by definition.
The original word (which: I can't keep up, is that really bad now? When did that happen, last week?) made more sense, really. "Vigilante" is way off from it.
I don't think it's right to co-opt and despoil that name of doubtless many real people, so if there is a pushback against using "Karen" as an insult then I'm in favour of it. That said, this is first time I've seen anyone else say anything against it. Perhaps I also can't keep up? ;-)
It also takes well over an acre to support a single person, and that's if you know what you're doing and have the time to manage a garden of that size.
> To grow all the food for one person's needs for the whole year requires, for most people, at least 4,000 square feet—though some diet designs are possible that can use a smaller area.
> A 0.44 acre of land can produce enough vegetables and fruits to meet up with the daily calories needed for one person to feed for a year.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1993:
> It is realistic to suppose that the absolute minimum of arable land to support one person is a mere 0.07 of a hectare–and this assumes a largely vegetarian diet, no land degradation or water shortages, virtually no post-harvest waste, and farmers who know precisely when and how to plant, fertilize, irrigate, etc.
> The minimum amount of agricultural land necessary for sustainable food security, with a diversified diet similar to those of North America and Western Europe (hence including meat), is 0.5 of a hectare per person. This does not allow for any land degradation such as soil erosion, and it assumes adequate water supplies.
Cut out meat and it gets better, but not that much better.
Only if you use traditional farming. Hydroponics, Aeroponics, and Aquaponics use far less resources (more startup capital but far less inputs), can grow year round (assuming indoor grows), and has 5-10x the yield per sq ft.
The post you're replying to suggests a Victory Garden. While a personal victory garden may not have a big effect on global food supplies, it can absolutely help supplement food for households that are squeezed by higher food prices (which is another side effect of global food shortages).
Victory gardens, also called war gardens or food gardens for defense, were vegetable, fruit, and herb gardens planted at private residences and public parks in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany during World War I and World War II. In wartime, governments encouraged people to plant victory gardens not only to supplement their rations but also to boost morale. They were used along with rationing stamps and cards to reduce pressure on the public food supply.
I just wanted to look out my window and see something more useful than grass, OK? If I got to enjoy a couple meals out of what I grew, so much the better.
I've zero objection to "I like gardening" and "I love a home-grown tomato" as reasons to have a garden. I simply don't think it's a meaningful part of a fix to a collapse of the supply chain.
Might also be worth examining the amount of crop grown, then subsequently burned in the U.S. Somewhere between 25% to 40% of corn in the U.S., up to 20% of agriculture land is devoted to ethanol production. If food production is a growing concern, it seems strange that so much agricultural production is spent on non-food producing activities.
I think it’s something like 75% of soy and corn go to ethanol and animal feed (which loses most of the nutrients in the process just to inefficiently concentrate some bits).
Considering that the US alone could feed another 800M people with just the grains that go to feed cattle - the idea that we're going to run out of food any time soon is strange.
Sounds like there's a big potential for upheavals similar to the Arab Spring. A fair number of countries subsidize food for their citizens, and if they can't get their hands on any, there's going to be issues.
I wonder which countries are most at risk? I read somewhere that the Arab countries get a lot of Ukrainian wheat.
That’s probably mainly due to low shipping costs due to proximity (in the grand scheme of things). There is scope for substitution with supplies from elsewhere in the world, if those supplies can be freed up from their usual end use. Biodiesel, cattle feed, etc.
Here in the UK restrictions on labelling sunflower oil now mean it’s acceptable to adulterate it with other oils. My family has switched to using rapeseed oil where we can (except for deep frying, it stinks). I’d recommend eating less meat even if that means eating more grain products, it’s a more efficient use of the resource. For the well off we can weather this just fine, but we can still help by reducing our use of the scarcest resources.
> A subsidized flatbread loaf in Egypt sells for the equivalent of about 1 U.S. cent. The country allocates five loaves a day to people in the program and uses the public treasury to compensate bakers for their losses.
> An attempt in the late 1970s by then-President Anwar Sadat to end subsidies on basic foodstuffs triggered riots that left more than 80 people dead, so the government since has resorted to workarounds such as shrinking the size of loaves.
> CAIRO, Feb 1 (Reuters) - Egypt is considering replacing a popular bread subsidy with cash payments for the poor to protect the budget from soaring global wheat prices, but domestic inflation and a history of protests could make the government opt for a less ambitious reform.
> Under the existing program, more than 60 million Egyptians, or nearly two thirds of the population, get 5 loaves of round bread daily for 50 cents a month, little changed since countrywide "bread riots" prevented a price hike in the 1970s.
It's not really as much about freeing up the supplies as much as it is about whether or not the supply chain can ship that food from someplace else. From what I've read, we don't have nearly as much of a food problem as we do a food shipping problem.
> Here in the UK restrictions on labeling sunflower oil now mean it’s acceptable to adulterate it with other oils.
Do you have a source for this claim? I'm interested since I'm using sunflower oil here in the UK.
Tesco labels its sunflower oil as "pure sunflower oil", it also has an ingredient list of "sunflower oil" [1].
Asda only labels it "sunflower oil", it doesn't have an ingredient list (at least on the website), but it states that the "regulated product name" is "sunflower oil" [2]
From the two the Asda one looks more suspicious, but I don't know what the regulation is. My suspicion is that regulation is for the label "sunflower oil", and Tesco goes out of its way to clarify that it doesn't contain other oils, or otherwise why risk putting "pure" there?
I'm not sure why sunflower oil is so popular. Olive oil is much nicer for anything that isn't going to be deep-fried, and peanut oil is much better for frying (more saturated fats = more crispiness).
I don't see them selling anything, just a Patreon and some referral links. If that's considered some dark ulterior motive, then you also wouldn't be able to trust most youtubers (Veritasium, CPG Grey, MinutePhysics, etc)
There's a direct ask for support in the form of paypal donations right there on the linked page. He also funnels traffic to his youtube, where he has well over a quarter million subscribers. He has quite a cottage industry selling doom prepper news.
I'm well aware of the general quality (or lack thereof) on Youtube, but that's why I gave a few examples of good Youtubers that also use patreon/referral links. Point being, I don't see a good reason to specifically call out iceagefarmer for having vested interest in saying what they say
"Farmers have nowhere to store their next harvest, due to start in late June, which may therefore rot."
In Saskatchewan (where I grew up on a farm), when the grain bins get full, some farmers put their grain in shops or sheds normally used for storing farm machinery. Others put it in long giant plastic bags out in their fields. Others build makeshift plywood cylinders on some bare land (such as an already-harvested field). In short, farmers will do what they can to protect their harvests.
Ad hoc storage in Saskatchewan is for fall harvest and over winter storage. Rot isn't a concern when it is cold and dry.
In contrast Ukraine plants a higher percentage of fall crops harvesting in the summer and has about twice as much rainfall. Ad hoc storage is much more challenging. They'll try, but they'll lose a lot more crop than a Saskatchewan farmer would.
What nobody understands is that this is not happening strictly because of the war or the drought, but because of the fragility of the global food system, which simply cannot bear any shocks.
I wouldn't argue against the research but to me, the "global food system" is much more robust than I imagined.
We stayed in our homes for months en mass without prep time and prior warning and the food availability barely changed. We are creatures that need to eat multiple times a day and yet we can stay in our homes for months and get fed just as well. Therefore I'm not very worried about the management of the food production and distribution, we are extremely good at it.
Thanks to the global nature of it, things move quickly and even though a problem in one location can be felt everywhere we don't end up with millions of deaths in that location. I'm really not onboard with "localize everything" motto because everything being local means catastrophic consequences at local issues.
What scares me is something biological or ecological happening at global scale. Something that takes at least 6 months to fix for example.
We are extremely good at it is your take when 900 million people don't get to eat even in times of abundance?
If our food system can't take a little bit of war and drought imagine how will it fare when production starts falling. Climate change is happening at global scale, and we must be able to coordinate and innovate on a similar scale to be able to handle it.
Instead we have a spontaneously formed a shitty system. Most people are ignorant of this. Some pretends that isolation is the solution, let's Brexit it, some are blaming ethanol apparently. There is no shortage of bad takes on this, but the fact remains that we suck at this.
The system is unfortunately exclusionary of some parts of the world due to extreme conditions at those places - which are much worse than a single war. It's more like decades of never ending wars and extreme droughts. Africa's problem isn't that they don't know how to code and as a result make less money and can't afford food, the troubles there are much much bigger and as a result they are outside of the supply chain we have.
And yes, by global event that scares me is exactly the climate change.
Literally, untrue - LOTS of people understand. But like the people who understood that launching a space shuttle when the ambient temperatures were running far, far below the absolute minimum spec. for the SRB's...
In this case, the slack is obvious. And it has once again been wrung from the supply chain in the name of efficiency (aka more profits), under the grand delusion that there will never be bad lean times.
> What nobody understands is that this is not happening strictly because of the war or the drought, but because of the fragility of the global food system, which simply cannot bear any shocks.
Your logic seems strange: "he didn't die because of a car crash, he died because his car didn't resist being smashed into a tree"
Sure, any system could be made more or less fragile, and you could argue that making it less fragile would have lessened the impact, but you can't say that "this is not happening because of the war" - of course it is
What you're missing is that the global food system is under attack by bad actors.
1. The US Treasury drew up the list of economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus. Then they pressured the compliant EU to follow. The sanctions no surprises had a predictable impact on global grain/fertilizer and energy supply prices. The US basically sanctioned themselves and the global economy.
2. Meanwhile China was hit by terrible flooding last year and faces record low yields for crops so they are now desperately converting baseball courts and roads because their farmers can't get seeds and fertilizers. Do you know why? Because they're stuck on cargo ships sitting off the coast of Shanghai which has been locked down under the bizarre "Zero Covid" quarantine. This is conveniently being done during planting season when they're already facing a huge shortfall. End result - they are importing more and increasing the global grain/food price further.
3. Whilst China gets hit by flooding, the reverse weather pattern (La Nina) is causing droughts in places like Argentina and Paraguay which produces the majority of the food in South America. So thanks again to our sanctions against Belarus and Russia, we can't get fertilizer to those countries. Similarly 35 African countries get food from Russia/Ukraine and 22 of them get fertilizer from there so the end result is famine in S America and Africa.
4. In Europe, the EU's "Green Agenda" deal means the Italian government can't provide more state aid to the farmers. In Germany, they want to phase out agriculture because of greenhouse gas emissions so they've stopped farmers who want to grow more food. At the same time, the sanctions are making covid-induced food shortages dramatically worse.
So you have well timed global food disasters which are amplified by our sanctions whilst back home:
a) "On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific informed CF Industries without advance notice that it was mandating certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately. The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers. Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers."
Not only are they preventing urea and UAN from getting to farmers during the crucial planting season but they're also stopping DEF (Diesel Exhaust Fluid). DEF is used to control emissions in diesel trucks, without it engines can't run. So they're ensuring a complete shutdown of the supply chains across the United States at the same time.
b) "EPA will allow a 50% increase in corn-based biodiesel and ethanol fuel mix for the summer"
Before Covid even began, we had the "Renewable Fuel Standards Act" which mandates annually RISING targets for the production of corn for ethanol fuel blends. This add major price inflation for food. Now the EPA is mandating another increase in corn ethanol for fuel at the same time as when we have astronomical fertilizer prices due to sanctions we imposed AND we're blocking domestic fertilizers being shipped by rail... that's going to send corn prices through the roof and the government knows this very well.
and I'm not even going to touch on all the poultry that USDA are ordering to be destroyed because of "Bird Flu".
As I said in my other comment, it's not by accident or pure back luck - it's by design.
hi, please don't say "russia/Ukraine", it encourages the false equivalency between an international pariah state engaging in a genocide, and the country the genocide is being perpetrated against
Ukraine is not under sanction, and the only things preventing it from providing more food to the world are russia's genocide against Ukrainians, farmers included, russia's blockade of Ukraine, and russia's theft of Ukrainian grain
indeed, the sanctions of the world against russia and belarus, too, are purely a predictable result of their actions, which they nonetheless choose to perpetrate to this very moment, and thus they bear the entire brunt of the consequences
Any article with the term "Global Production Ecosystem (GPE)", financialization, sustainability, biotic homogenziation (!) and translational corporations should not qualify to be published in nature. They mean so many things that they don't mean anything (tm).
This article has all of them. This is topical doom-mongering, which always works for clicks, but speaks nothing to substance.
Haven't ethanol fuels been introduced to have a buffer for this situation? If we don't turn grain and corn into petrol then there should be some reserves.
Additionally, if we stop rising live-stock, where roughly 10 units of plant create one unit of meat, there should be even more calories available.
If you are not able to digest cellulose, it doesn't matter if it takes 100, 1000 units of plant calories to create one of meat.
This criticism against meat only works for grain-fed beef, for grass-fed animals it makes no sense at all.
I suppose it gets more complicated though because in at least some cases, we could plant human-edible food where the grass is and still come out ahead (after taking into account that it's harder to grow pretty much anything than grass)
Iunno, I really don’t do anything to the apple tree other than trim branches (which I sell or give away to bbqers depending on my mood). Every couple years it yields a huge crop (and some years gets completely defoliated by disease, but I’m lazy and just let nature take its course).
Energy is having an even greater supply crunch than food (indeed part of the food shortage is that agricultural inputs can't get delivered in adequate quantities because the energy to transport them doesn't exist).
The energy market is willing to outbid the food market, so I wouldn't expect the conversion of agricultural inputs into fuel outputs to decelerate.
OP is speaking to the market level effective demand.
Someone who's poor and starving will direct their own very limited economic purchasing power toward food. But the marketas a whole includes those who are wealthy (far fewer in number, but individually having vastly greater purchasing power), who might prioritise energy purchases generally.
It's not the poor's own food-vs-energy deceisions, but poor-food vs. rich-energy, which are in play.
> where roughly 10 units of plant create one unit of meat
Those units are not remotely fungible.
Protein quality of plant protein (as measured by PER or other metrics not explicitly designed to favor soy) is horrendous compared to beef.
Much of the plant material fed to cows is also not even slightly edible to humans, like soy meal.
I would rather have 1lb beef than 10lb nominally edible soy extractives (or wheat, or grass, or inedible soy meal, or other inputs to cattle production).
> I would rather have 1lb beef than 10lb nominally edible soy extractives
The argument is not "eat soy extractives instead of meat".
It's more like "lunch on veggies 2 or 3 days per week instead of having meat on every meal, including breakfast".
It obviously includes repurposing some of the land used to raise cattle into other things more suitable for direct human consumption. No one is talking about making you eat grass.
Vegetables also have horrendous nutritional profiles. For the most part, the only parts of plants with anything approaching good nutritional qualities are fruits. Human resistance to various poisons also makes certain root vegetables like potatoes acceptable, but they are not great. I will continue extracting the preponderance of my nutrition from meat.
Once again, you are trying to compare units which are not fungible.
There is more land on which you can make meat than land on which you can make plants. Animals can graze on non-arable scrubland, grassland, etc.
Growing staple crops is harder on the land than raising animals. Staple crops deplete soil nitrogen and other nutrients.
Raising crops typically requires massive importation of fertilizer from petrochemical plants, whereas cattle grazing (for example) does not require significant additional petrochemical input.
A classic tale of how animals unfairly take the heat for plants: we often hear about how the amazon is being cut down "for cattle". If you actually look into it, what's happening is that farmers are cutting down the amazon to grow soy for around 3 years, until the soil is totally depleted, at which point they will put some cattle on the land because the cattle can extract value from land destroyed by soy and helps the farmers maintain land claims.
We raise very few animals purely through grazing on non-arable land. If nothing else, they need feeding through part of the year in many climates, and more typically, supplementary feed to increase intensity. Pure free range non-arable grazing ruminants constitute a relatively low percentage of total meat produced.
A somewhat more common thing is to raise cattle on arable fallow land between crop cycles. This is better than keeping permanent pastures, but nowadays we still often supplement the feed or intensively finish.
Battery farms, which is purely fed on crops grown where humans could grow food, accounts for about 70% of beef and 99% of pork and chicken. Often the soy being grown in the rainforest is to support these animals.
The other thing is a lot of "non-arable" and fallow land is actually a lot more arable with modern agriculture than it used to be, it's just more profitable to grow animals. A lot of the plant matter that used to be considered as only usable for animal feed can also now be processed for further use in human food.
Meat production isn't quite as bad as people sometimes suggest, but it's still pretty bad. There are some cases where it is still a good option (e.g. low intensity lamb grazing on rocky/hilly terrain) and if we scaled our meat production to only these cases, we'd be in a much better situation, but there's also be way less meat.
> Battery farms, which is purely fed on crops grown where humans could grow food
They are mostly fed on the byproducts of human food production. Human-edible material has higher margins than cattle feed, so cattle feed either comes from human ag byproducts (like soy meal) or from land that probably isn't good for much except hay.
Black beans, for example, have a PER of 0 (unrealistically low) and a PDCAAS of 0.75 (unrealistically high, vs 1 for egg). A realistic comparison can't be reduced to a single scalar, but for my own personal dietary requirements, I would probably want to eat 5-10x as many grams of nominal protein from black beans as from beef. This would be very challenging.
I think some other beans like kidney beans fare somewhat better, although I don't recall numbers. Still not close to mammal meat.
Some beans can be large sources of anti-nutrients [1] . Because over consumption of anti-nutrient foods can seriously impact your overall health, it is important to think about when getting a balanced diet.
Another example is soy, which has been studied some [2] . The problem is with longterm vegans that consume a huge amount of soy over a long term.
What's the problem with vegans consuming soy long term? Your second link talks about soy fairly positively and your first link only mentions soy once in the context of a lot of other foods (and really it's rare for a food to be purely good, e.g. lots of plants contain toxins). Based on those links I'd probably conclude soy consumption is very far down my list of foods to be concerned about.
There's even this quote: "Studies on vegetarians who eat diets high in plant foods containing anti-nutrients do not generally show deficiencies in iron and zinc, so the body may be adapting to the presence of anti-nutrients by increasing the absorption of these minerals in the gut." indicating that it may not be a real problem to eat foods that contain these 'anti-nutrients'.
> What's the problem with vegans consuming soy long term?
Vegans I have known said that a heavy soy diet over an extended amount of time does impact the thyroid more. While it was anecdotal hearing this, it was not anti-soy, just, about soy quantities over a long time, and the need for a diverse diet for vegans too.
Some of the anti-nutrients seem positive in one way too, which makes it even more complex.
This article is partisan garbage, as usual lately for The Economist. Sure, the war had an impact but most of the problems were months BEFORE the war.
Search for "AgInflation" articles from 2021. I know farmers who skipped this season due to razor thin profits, suppressed prices by governments and major supermarkets, and risk of water controls. Would you put $50k of your money for a 10% return with a very, very high risk of failure?
The farmers that did plant, say wheat, are not benefiting from the price surge because to minimize risk they sold their harvest in advance or sold futures. SPECULATORS that are making a killing. Usually hedge funds like Citadel, ETFs by BlackRock, and others.
And in several countries farmers are being blamed for higher prices. Governments should've given the sector a bit of help and control risks. Help with water management. Help with shrinking labor base and increasing costs. But nothing is being done.
There is a perverse system right now and action needs to be taken to heal the sector. But I bet they'll just keep blaming farmers and impose price controls or suppression of some kind. Fixing farming would take years and populist politicians want magic immediate results and shift-blame. So buckle up.
I am not sure how to do it, but some futures-plus arrangement might improve incentives - say sell your crop as a future, but with a (gov supported) price cap - so if the price goes through the roof the farmer gets a share of the overage.
Not sure how much difference it will make but agriculture is kind of important
From doom-scrolling the Ukraine/Russia war it is pretty obvious that Ukrainian farmers have not been idle. Battles are being fought in the treelines and along rivers next to plowed and planted fields. Hopefully some of these crops are harvested and make it to market.
I heard an interview with a farmer in Western Ukraine today. His area isn't immediately affected by the war (as in, no bombs, no mines, no occupation). His stores are still full with the 2021 harvest. The regular route would be via the black sea, but that's blockaded. He has a contract to ship some of the stored grain via train to Poland. But there's very little capacity to store his 2022 harvest.
> Hopefully some of these crops are harvested and make it to market.
There are unfortunately a lot of problems here which make me seriously pessimistic:
- Ukraine will need a lot of the harvest for itself, given how Russians raided crop silos [1] and what they can't raid they bomb to pieces [2]
- No one knows if Russian operatives didn't poison crop silos - there are a number of poisons that are very stable in the environment and very hard to detect if you don't know what you are looking for, and Russians have proven over and over that they have an awful lot of skill in dealing with poisons
- Russians looted a lot of agricultural machinery, and a lot more got destroyed or seriously damaged - and the Ukrainians repurposed a lot of stuff either to tow off Russian tanks or to convert into technicals
- fertilizer is made of natural gas which is in short supply, which in turn will massively impact yields
- similar to the post-war situation in Yugoslavia, fields will need to be de-mined extensively, and they need to be cleansed off of shrapnel and fuel
- even if there are quantities to export, you need a way to transport them. The railroad track width is different in Ukraine (Russian wide-gauge) and Europe (standard), there aren't many re-trackable cargo wagons, a lot of rail equipment and bridges got blasted by Russians or by Ukrainians for sabotage. God knows in what state the sea ports are, there has been heavy fighting, not to mention the sea mines that are already causing chaos [3]
All in all it will be years if not decades until Ukraine can be a serious player on the crop market again.
We should stop growing corn for ethanol since it's worse for the climate than gasoline[1] and instead use all that land and machinery to grow wheat instead.
Corn produces 4-6 times the calories per acre as wheat, not to mention farmers and distribution networks would have to spend a whole lot to switch.
Many people are suggesting eating less meat to help potential food shortages, switching corn to wheat actually loses about as much food as feeding corn to cattle. (i.e. a cornfield switched to wheat and a cornfield fed to cattle would result in a similar number of calories)
We indeed should stop producing ethanol, but plenty of hungry people around the world could be just as happy eating corn as wheat.
Won't happen unless the fear of food shortage becomes an actual food shortage.
Ethanol subsidies let farmers already invested in corn grow more corn than they might otherwise sell for food, and politicians get to say they're doing something for renewable energy.
As with so many other things in politics, the good of society isn't the driving factor. Money and talking points are king.
Aren't the Iowa Caucus' days numbered? They've been a complete disaster the last few cycles – it seems to take days/weeks to determine a winner. Their last competently-run caucus was in 2008.
This is like asking how fungible are calories. People with the means to mill and cook with wheat flour can probably manage with corn too if the alternative is starvation.
I don't mean on the consumption side. I mean on the production side. Do they grow in the same soil? Do they take the same nutrients? Do they have the same water / sunlight / temperature band tolerances?
Looks like that rotation is pretty common but there are some details to concern oneself with.
Much of it boils down to water and/or irrigation. Maize (corn) likes wetter, wheat can stand dryer. In the US the corn belt starts in Ohio and includes eastern Nebraska, wheat is grown largely on the far western plains.
Wheat is also a viable winter crop --- fall planting / spring harvest for "winter wheat". That typically means 2 crops a year (winter + summer), and possibly more.
Rice is the third staple crop, though it wants a lot of water, and tends to be grown in subtropical climates as with China and India.
Other substitutes include barley, oats, millet, etc., though those are far less prevelant than wheat & maize.
I am refusing to agree that it is all "Putin's fault". The war is his decision and is not to understand from the normal Western position. However, it is the decision of the West to sanction Russia and to
1) accept increasing energy prices
2) accept a lower fertilizer production
3) break up supply chains even further
4) accept the refugee crisis, the costs of entering this war as a proxy combatant, sending tens of billions to not let the enemy win
5) ... and ultimately win and accept the even worse consequences: pouring billions into a corrupt Ukraine to rebuild it, deal with a terrible unbalanced post-war society (women who came to the West will stay, men will find no women in UA after the war; young people will stay in Europe, while UA population will be much older on average after the war) and finally a Russia crisis that could be something like the "crazy 90s 2.0" or a Russia that broke into many unstable post-Russian republics.
I am saying this as a person with UKRANIAN ROOTS.
The West has decided to fight for some "Western values" and now all people living here have to accept the costs and long-term consequences.
We had the chance to open up and help substantially during the crazy 90s when the post-Soviet economies dropped GDPwise to the 1960s/1970s levels, average male life expectancy dropped by 10-12 years, life-savings were destroyed, criminals became ultra-rich and were welcomed in Zurich, New York and London with open arms. We did not.
We had the chance to open the EU and NATO towards the Russian in the 00s, even when the Russian came crawling to the Berlin Bundestag and suggested to draw a path towards this direction and were rejected hardly.
We had the chance for a compromise, e.g. through the Normandy format when ALL relevant parties agreed more or less except the Americans.
This all does not make the invasion right, but it is not as one-sided as the propaganda is showing it here right now. And this is why agree with your statement that real life is not not as simple as "good" and "bad", it is all just bad - on all sides.
And just another anecdote. As we are originally from Ukraine, I went down to the border with friends, money and cars and helped people at the border to make the right decisions. We mainly focussed on people withough language skills, old people and people with very very very little money. I had the chance to speak to hundreds of Ukranians crossing the border to the EU. 90% DO NOT CARE who "rules" them. They have their dreams, hopes, they have their apartments, their jobs, their pets, friends, homes... they just want this war to be over - even if Putin "wins".
When watching Western news and reports I dont see those opinions represented in the same way I experienced them when talking to people. I see stories about values and democracy and other philosophical stuff - and when they show Ukranians then it is not those who I have met.
Where is the opinion of the normal folks that I have met: the war should end asap, no matter who wins. Instead I feel spoon-fed that we HAVE TO PAY THE PRICE for $VALUES. And then you speak to people who have absolutly NO CLUE and NO RELATION to either Ukraine or even Russia and they are so opinionated and SOOOO SURE about the things that must be done and the price that has to be paid.
I feel very frustrated and I stopped telling people about my experience at the border or here when volunteering and ACTUALLY speaking to the REAL people.
One part of me agrees with this. War is the worst (as far as i know from books and tv).
The other part of me thinks: That is how Germany expanded half a century ago, getting resources for ww2.
(thug perceives the pacifist as a weakling and an easy opportunity to profit).
Ukraine has a lot of natural resources, part of the reason for the war.
One of my theories it happened the way it did is that the US at that time was far weaker and spent from the Cold War than it let on. That it was fiscally more of a close a call as WW2 prevailing fiscal standards were, and the US simply did not have it within itself to financially support another rebuilding like it did with Germany and Japan. The US possibly also expected that if Russia integrated with Europe, the US would underwrite most of the check, the NATO alliance would absorb the benefits, dissolve, turn around and economically compete with the US after the US just exhausted itself from the extended effort.
Please ELI5 because I'm not following your anecdote. For your "90%" figure to make sense to me, you'd have to be able to draw the line connecting the dots that explains how 10% of the Ukrainian population can coerce however many remain in Ukraine to join that 10% and put up sufficiently organized resistance to stall Russian forces. The widespread expectation at the beginning was that too few Ukrainians would put up a fight (your "90%") and it was time to cede all of Ukraine like Crimea was ceded and move on.
How do we get from that expectation to the reality on the ground where the titular second most powerful military in the world was supposed to steamroller through Kyiv in a few days but is now bogged down in a conflict it now admits to its own citizens might be a long slog, on only 10% popular support of Ukrainians? I find it more plausible that 90% of those at the border might have this attitude, but that is still a minority fraction of the total population remaining in the country. Perhaps 90% of those fleeing are predisposed to just wanting it to all be over no matter who rules them?
And why would these people trust Putin's word that he wouldn't implement a modern Holodomor if they just let him have Ukraine, even as he's shipping grain away from Ukraine by the metric thousand-ton right now? And what would they feel if the rest of the world turned their backs on Ukraine in such a scenario because 90% "just want this war to be over - even if Putin 'wins'" and Ukraine is definitely a part of the Russian Federation instead of a currently-recognized sovereign state, and strategic nuclear weapons are instantly in play in that scenario to wrest control of Ukraine-the-Russian-Federation-territory from Russia?
Once Ukraine is under a vengeful narcissist's thumb with the other thumb on the nuclear trigger, just what exactly do you think will happen, Slavic brotherhood rainbows and unicorns? If that 90% ever existed in reality at all, then it lost its chance at any kind of "just want this war to be over" in the first week or two.
The statistics that are given in these articles make the situation sound a lot worse than it is. At least in this article they say “traded food”. The point being that less than 10% of global production is traded. The world could survive Ukraine not exporting without too much problem. The big unknown is how many farmers reduced their plantings due to higher fertilizer prices. When you add multiple factors like these together then you really do end up with a food shortage.
Don't forget substitution effects. As it turns out, grains are pretty fungible. (Yes, it's nice to be able to use that word in its normal context for once.) As wheat becomes too expensive, demand for others will increase and their prices will spike as well. So yes, gluten intolerant folks will be significantly affected as well.
Not a bad article but this is just a short term problem in a world with potentially much bigger long term food issues. Mega factory farming of monoculture crops covered without rotation or though for the health of the soil and environment and the insects and birds that support it all is going to really screw us long term.
Isn't this one of the reasons why farm subsidies exist in the US? Paying farmers not to farm so in time of need or emergency we can produce more? (In addition to not over farming soil and depleting it permanently, keeping the price of food in a range to support farmers livelyhood)
> The simplest useful view of this system is that land and fertilizer are used for farming, and more of either will produce more food. In the context of the model, since land is finite, and industrial output required to produce fertilizer and other agricultural inputs can not keep up with demand, there necessarily will be a food collapse at some point in the future.
Another French academic (can't recall his name) gave a recent presentation explaining that our ability to harvest energy is growing slower than our development of new energy resource. This would also inevitably lead to food collapse.
The Economist is the only news publication I pay for, I do wish they were more economics focused (as opposed to politics, though of course the two are fundamentally intertwined).
Any other publications (paid or free) I should be looking at?
really? at least 50% of any given issue is concentrated on business/eocnomics. A few weeks back half the magazine was a deep dive into the expanding role of central banks
> Russia and Ukraine supply 28% of globally traded wheat, 29% of the barley, 15% of the maize and 75% of the sunflower oil
It sounds a lot, it sounds "scary" if you dont know the global crop production figures.
China, India & Russia are the largest producers. Ukraine is down in 8th place and only represents something like 3% of global production figures of Wheat, so any shortage will be countries refusing to buy from Russia.
Russia will be demanding their payments are made in Roubles. If there is any civil unrest in your country it will be because your media outlets are fuelling you with propaganda. I noted how easily the BBC started a UK fuel shortage last year by abusing their state broadcaster position to misreport and exaggerate the severity of a situation.
Don't fall victim to media lies, Trump was right when he said Fake News! LOL
Grain is at the root of our dietary and other consumption problems. Much of farmland is given over to growing corn for —-corn syrup and variations to put in processed, artificial ‘food’.
We can live better, healthier lives without grain.
This article is full of unsubstantiated claims and generalities. Not to mention plenty of left-wing talking points. Global warmi--oops! I mean "climate change", etc, etc.
It seems like the Economist is running point for the current administration's intentional food crisis. I wonder what freedoms we're now supposed to give up to the government so they can save us from the scary food monster?
Climate change is not a "left-wing talking point" it is a fact. And it's no longer called "global warming" because some places will experience colder weather than they are used to due to disturbed weather patterns, and conspiracy theorists will jump on the chance to "disprove" it.
But make no mistake, the earth is warming, at a much more rapid pace than ever before, and it is a man-made change.
Can you substantiate that claim with verifiable evidence?
New England used to be under a 10-mile thick ice sheet during the last ice age. I think the Earth has been warming for a very long time.
But this isn't only about the climate. The article also mentions COVID-19 shut downs which were mostly pushed by the left. The IMF is mentioned as some sort of savior and is definitely saturated with left wing ideology.
You would think that with a food catastrophe on the way - the current administration's finest minds wouldn't be encouraging even higher corn prices (already at a 10 year high in April) with this mix of legislative action:
> Washington announced the EPA will allow a 50% increase in corn-based biodiesel and ethanol fuel mix for the summer. On April 12 the Secretary of Agriculture announced a “bold” initiative by the US Administration to increase the use of domestically-grown corn-ethanol biofuels
Or with what I can only call absolutely diabolical sabotage of food production:
CF Industries of Deerfield, Illinois, the largest US supplier of nitrogen fertilizers as well as a vital diesel engine additive, issued a press release stating that:
"On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific informed CF Industries without advance notice that it was mandating certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately."
"The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers. Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers."
CF has made urgent appeals to the government for remedy, so far with no positive action
Also ask yourself why Union Pacific is imposing these restrictions?
Maybe it might have something to do with the latest rage in the world financial markets? Blackrock and the WEF set up ESG certifying companies that award ESG ratings and punish those that don't comply. So you have companies forced to push for completely bonkers restrictions and policies because they're mandated to top down:
Union Pacific is acting to try to improve their "operating ratio" according to the current management fad that they've fallen prey to.
CF Industries is begging the administration, not because the administration is in a plot to cause this, but because Union Pacific isn't listening. (And also because the government just had hearings about the incompetence of railroads under the current management fad.) CF is just looking for some lever that will keep UP from damaging CF's business.
No, I don't think Blackrock or the WEF have anything to do with it. It has to do with Canadian National, and then Canadian Pacific, adopting Precision Scheduled Railroading, and improving their operating ratios by doing so, and every other major railroad (except maybe BNSF) jumping on the bandwagon. But in doing so, UP is driving away some traffic (not just food- or fertilizer-related), in the hope that net profit will go up.
This has all been building for a decade or so. It's nothing related to the current geopolitical and economic situation.
Wasn’t there an HN discussion recently about how rail operators were running extremely long trains which are more economically efficient for the operators, but much more likely to derail (causing physical and pollution damage to communities)?
It's even worse when you realize biofuel is bad for the environment.
> Third-generation biofuels do not represent a feasible option at present state of development as their GHG emissions are higher than those from fossil fuels. As also discussed in the paper, several studies show that reductions in GHG emissions from biofuels are achieved at the expense of other impacts, such as acidification, eutrophication, water footprint and biodiversity loss. The paper also investigates the key methodological aspects and sources of uncertainty in the LCA of biofuels and provides recommendations to address these issues.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7735313/
> Our study examined data from 2005-2013 during this sharp increase in renewable fuel use. Rather than assuming that producing and using biofuels was carbon-neutral, we explicitly compared the amount of CO2 absorbed on cropland to the quantity emitted during biofuel production and consumption.
Existing crop growth already takes large amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere. The empirical question is whether biofuel production increases the rate of CO2 uptake enough to fully offset CO2 emissions produced when corn is fermented into ethanol and when biofuels are burned.
Most of the crops that went into biofuels during this period were already being cultivated; the main change was that farmers sold more of their harvest to biofuel makers and less for food and animal feed. Some farmers expanded corn and soybean production or switched to these commodities from less profitable crops.
But as long as growing conditions remain constant, corn plants take CO2 out of the atmosphere at the same rate regardless of how the corn is used. Therefore, to properly evaluate biofuels, one must evaluate CO2 uptake on all cropland. After all, crop growth is the CO2 “sponge” that takes carbon out of the atmosphere.
When we performed such an evaluation, we found that from 2005 through 2013, cumulative carbon uptake on U.S. farmland increased by 49 teragrams (a teragram is one million metric tons). Planted areas of most other field crops declined during this period, so this increased CO2 uptake can be largely attributed to crops grown for biofuels. Over the same period, however, CO2 emissions from fermenting and burning biofuels increased by 132 teragrams. Therefore, the greater carbon uptake associated with crop growth offset only 37 percent of biofuel-related CO2 emissions from 2005 through 2013. In other words, biofuels are far from inherently carbon-neutral.
https://theconversation.com/biofuels-turn-out-to-be-a-climat...
Is there any topic on which we’re not currently facing a catastrophe? In the last few months I’ve been warned about impending doom for insects, food, nuclear weapons treaties, democracy, the economy, the internet, space, the environment, the arctic circle, abortion rights.
Most all of them. As people have gotten safer they have gotten progressively more afraid of the remaining danger.
Doom sells, don't buy it.
Economic cycles, political unrest, diseases, on and on and on, these things always have existed and constantly will ebb and flow, while people will pretend what's happening now is the worst its ever been because grabbing your attention is profitable and gives people the sense that their life has meaning.
We weren't living in an idyllic world n years ago, we're not living in one now, we won't be living in one in the future. The things that suck just kind of rotate from time to time. Things remain pretty ok.
Not really, no. Panic sells so panic is what is being sold. This is not a new thing as a stroll through the archives (in any language I can read at least - Dutch, English, German, French, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish) will quickly show, especially weather scares have a long and rich history.
There once was a boy keeping watch. He cried out "Wolf! wolf!" And the villagers came, and saw the wolf was quite far away, and not a danger yet.
The next night, the boy cried out "Wolf! Wolf!" And while the wolf was at the gate, it didn't seem to be hurting anybody. After all, the boy and his village were fine still, and there could be benefits to the wolf.
The third night, the boy did not cry wolf. The villagers discovered him dead the next morning next to the village free-range wolf. A great meeting was held, and it was decided that since most people were safe and secure and able to live their lives normally, we must all adapt to the new normal and learn to live with the wolf.
In the past decade I've also noticed the word 'crisis' being used a lot more in less inappropriate ways. I just found, in today's DDG news stories, headlines about a US border crisis, a baby formula crisis, Sri Lanka having a fuel crisis, the Israeli govt. in crisis, a covid crisis in N. Korea, a mental health crisis in Alabama, a gun violence crisis, a cost of living crisis.... and many more.
And they're really using the word "crisis" wrong. It's supposed to mean something like a fork in the road, a situation that forces change. Not just "shit is bad right now".
Meta rant: You know a thread is compromised by sock-puppets when "Article photo is pretty badass" is one of the top comments in the thread, ahead of criticisms about the article.
That's just a typical high noise comment that no longer gets downvoted into oblivion like it used to. It was a top comment due to HN's comment ranking system weighting new comments towards the top for a while.
This aversion to "seed oils" (a totally made-up, arbitrary category) is one of the weirdest health fads I've seen in recent years, and that's saying something.
You are right. Add to that, the constant and persistent info flow from russian media and incentives to “say the right things”, which raised whole generation.
I'm pretty sure this fear of change at the helm is something all dictators will happily project out ("look, without me there will be chaos or worse"). It's likely not true. It's really impossible to predict what will happen once Putin is gone.
He'll die anyway sooner or later, and there will be a struggle for power regardless. Russia has a constitution, and article 81 describes how to get a new president via elections.
Current paranoid leader is waging major war and isolating the country, so it's hard to say what could be worse for the world. Maybe mobilization in Russia, but that may be a tough call for any newcomer.
…but be reallllll careful thinking through the consequences of “any means necessary”, because a lot of those means end in a huge escalation of the conflict which further reduces access to minerals and food. (And, like, human lives.)
no shit, but who do people expect to come after Putin?
what would taking out Bush Jr. in the early phase of operation Iraqi Freedom accomplish? would the next guy immediately withdraw from Iraq and apologize to the world for the past wrongdoings?
> Now, Europe tries to buy out all grain stock that's left
No. Europe is pretty much self-sufficient for vital crops. The problem is China [1] and the fact that Africa doesn't have much of its own once famous agricultural power left after decades of European and American "donations" - hard to compete against donated products...
