Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

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> the ability to dramatically reduce world hunger is a direct consequence of humans' capacity to improve crop yields such as rice and corn through breeding and engineering.

Not through "breeding and engineering", through artificial nitrogen fertilizer. We have been turning oil into people.

> prevented the starvation of millions of people.

That delayed the starvation of millions of people and now we are facing the prospect of the starvation of billions of people.

FWIW, I do applauded Maddie and her team, and I wish them luck and hope they succeed. But the only way we are going to avert disaster is to stop taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the air. That's it.

Here's a fascinating talk by Václav Smil at the Driva Climate Investment Meeting in 2019, where he makes the point better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk

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edit: i'm rate limited at the moment. Replying to HWR_14 below

Dwarf wheat was generated through selective breeding, same as the last N-thousand years. And it was only necessary due to the defects of using artificial nitrogen fertilizer:

> Taller wheat grasses better compete for sunlight, but tend to collapse under the weight of the extra grain—a trait called lodging—from the rapid growth spurts induced by nitrogen fertilizer Borlaug used in the poor soil. To prevent this, he bred wheat to favor shorter, stronger stalks that could better support larger seed heads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug#Dwarfing

Anyway, my point isn't that science doesn't work or isn't good, it's that engineering trees to fix the climate is a whiffle.

Dwarf wheat was defiantly a bioengineering marvel, and directly lead to avoiding the starving of hundreds of millions.

>Dwarf wheat

Breeding is included in the genetic engineering definition?

I said bioengineering, not genetic engineering. Selective breeding would count, but with wheat crossing traits is done (and has been for over a century) in a hand-process of mixing pollen for 10-12 generations - it's not just selective evolutionary pressures. Furthermore, wheat has been subject to a lot of alternative methods of genomic modification, like exposure to gamma rays to induce mutations.

Arguably our genetic engineering of grain crops that we grow in large monocultures contributed directly to the current ecological crisis. Because right after putting too much carbon in the atmosphere, the next threat to the biosphere's stability is habitat loss to farm land and urban expansion.

And one could take that argument a step further, by saying that instead of being forced to learn how to stabilize our population growth at a level the planet could support, these bio-engineering advances enabled our population to continue to grow at an unsustainable rate until it is now, potentially, beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. Meaning they may well have saved millions from starvation at the time - but could now contribute to the deaths of billions, the extinction of millions of species, and the collapse of the overall biosphere.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm open to engineering (both through traditional breeding and through modern genetic methods) as a part of the solution. But this writing off of concerns about it by pointing to past successes is absurd. We're talking about an extremely complex systems problem - the fact that our eagerness to grow our own numbers and control our environment has now caused us to push our planet's ecosystems to the brink of collapse - and that means we need to be extremely careful about how we go about solving it.

And the safest solution is to rollback - not try to roll forward. Yes, it happens to be the one that has the highest cost for us in terms of changes to our way of life, but arguably it could lead to a much better (saner, healthier) way of life.

But it also means a lot of people with power need to give up that power. And a lot of people who want the freedom to move fast and break shit with out having to think through the consequences will be forced to slow down and consider those consequences before they get to break shit.

genetic engineering has also contributed to improved yields

the starvation of billions of people is not at stake

your certainty about the "only way" to resolve things is idiotic and reductionist

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