@donaldball@mekkaokereke@Jonricha we have the technology to begin moving to giant indoor environmentally controlled grow operations. They require far less land than outdoor farming. They require no topsoil. They will not need to constantly consume water. There will be no nutrients flushed out in wastewater. There will be no such thing as "seasons". The crops can grow 24/7 with specific pulsed light cycles so they never shut off their growth. They'll grow even faster with controlled, elevated co2 and increased atmospheric pressure. Entire trees that take years to mature and fruit can be done in months.
Doing this removes the variable of weather destroying your yields.
All of this exists. We just aren't using it. If you want to chat with an expert on it reach out to @SlicerDicer
@MichaelTBacon@mekkaokereke@Jonricha most of the corn grown is not for human consumption. I'll give the farmers growing potatoes, broccoli, and beans a break but the big farms in the Midwest are almost all corn and it is a net negative on society
@mekkaokereke btw Hurricane Helene may very well be linked to our emissions reductions. It raised ocean temperatures from our sulphur reduction in the shipping industry. We have confirmed heatwaves from it.
Not that we shouldn't do it -- we should. But there are consequences to reducing our emissions. They should be short term though
@Jonricha@mekkaokereke No they are the villains and every family farm barely hanging on due to government subsidies should be wiped out, not strung along for decades causing only further debt and misery. A farm is a business and if you're bad at business you deserve the consequences.
e.g., This is not WW2. My grandfather was told to go home and farm to serve the war effort. That's not where we are today.
Instead we are paying millions of farmers to grow crops we don't need and the results are disastrous to our economy and our health. That's how we got HFCS. That's how we got ethanol (which destroys cars -- another burden on the taxpayer). That's how we get our terrible quality meat that everyone eats. The fertilizer we're paying them to use is destroying our environment. Almost all the corn not being used for those purposes goes to feed animals, not humans. They grow food to feed our cattle as cheap as possible, not to feed us. It subsidizes factory farms that we all detest!
The Farm Bill exists only to protect "farming culture" in America. That's it. Imagine if we did the same for any other cultural group in America. It would be absolute outrage.
@punctuated@gilduran crypto is easy to track, you've been mislead. It's easier than bank transactions because it's a single database. Only Monero is untraceable. The FBI *loves* crypto criminals, so easy to watch.
@mekkaokereke China's deploying a nuclear power plant worth of solar every week now. But they aren't a democracy with capitalism so we cannot assemble those kinds of resources. It's just not gonna happen.
However, our progress with renewables is vastly understated. Over the last 20 years? Pretty bad. Over the last 5 years? Really impressive actually.
Did you know we had a 55% increase between 2022 and 2023? Is that not fast enough??? Does that not seem like we are taking it seriously??
@mekkaokereke This was a Republican ploy to bail out farmers with socialism but not call it socialism. The farmers who grew too much corn should have failed, but instead we encouraged them and they're also destroying all our topsoil as a consequence.
We have too much corn. We need to stop. No, we do not need corn for PLA plastics. That's just another lie to keep them producing corn.
@jima@Ardubal@petergleick I'm not sure but I'd expect so. They can already get you to sign up for variable rate plans for Time of Day usage but I don't know if anyone does this for commercial / industrial consumers?
Either way the bulk energy customers get a massive deal on their rates compared to residential customers which makes me incredibly angry. The little people are totally subsidizing any of these businesses in their communities. It's so unfair especially as you can't really have competition / free market for energy like this.
If these bulk customers paid a higher rate everyone else could have a cheaper rate by several cents per kWh
@jima@Ardubal@petergleick is Microsoft getting power rates locked in at a specific rate for 20 years? Because that alone could be enough to drive this deal. Renewables can trend to be cheaper for the producer* but that doesn't mean the customer is getting cheaper rates.
* e.g., solar/wind *can* be cheaper than coal/natgas and certainly will be, but I don't know if that calculation ever includes the cost of energy storage so a consumer like a datacenter can still have clean power during the off-peak time periods where generation is not possible