Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

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Everything you say is probably true but you don't consider how your proposed solutions scale. They don't.

The amount of meat produced by the methods you suggest is several magnitudes too small. If you remove large-scale farming where pigs, chickens, and cows are fed grains and soy, global meat consumption would be very small. Free-range does not produce enough meat to produce even a fraction of current consumption. China imports huge amounts of soy from the US because there is not enough calories to feed their pigs.

You are proposing boutique solutions that would mean meat consumption would be just a fraction of what it is now.

Count calories per hectare and you realize that your solutions don't work on scale.

    cattle  300 million 
    pigs    1.5 billion 
    chicken  70 billion

You are absolutely right.

With sustainable methods, we would have to severely cut down meat consumption or depopulate.

I wouldn't say I propose a solution, but there is a middle ground and quality is very important.

If you think about it, photosynthesis is about 4-6% effective while high end solar cells are about 20%. LEDs give you a yield of up to 60%. So we could look at a future, where farmland is not required.

Seems strange, but growing plants below a city could be even more sustainable then on farmland.

Making everyone go vegan definitely isn't.

"Making everyone vegan" was a reference point. It seems that you took that as a strict proposal. Going mostly vegan is what you are also proposing.

Reading things too literally and not understanding the nuance in online forums seems more common every year.

I was supplying nuance and another perspective.

Sorry but eating chips, french fries and drinking energy drinks won't save the planet.

I'm not sure the math checks out. Whether you go directly solar or via LEDs, you still have photosynthesis, so you're imposing a large additional inefficiency and huge material expenditures.

Still, there are many other factors - yield of plants grown on the fields is very far from ideal photosynthesis yields due to droughts, diseases, inefficient light use. Agricultural land often lays bare for months every year, etc .. it's a complex topic.

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