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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

Why does this matter when food scarcity has never been the problem? Americans throw away a huge portion of the food they buy.

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since California made this compost rule I visually see how much food waste there is, a lot being unedible for sure. However there sure is a lot when you see it all in one place concentrated in a bucket.

It would be neat to convert it to other things like chickens and larger insects beyond the fruit and house flies and occasional soldier flies that pop up.

Agreed. We compost fruit and vegetable waste in our garden, but it is scary how much other food waste (as well as meat and fish bones goes in our "blue bin" for external composting.

Entocycle (https://entocycle.com/) is one startup looking at this - using black soldier flies to convert food waste into high-protein animal food. (I'm not affiliated, but I think it's a neat idea!)

awesome stuff, I love this line

> Secure protein supply while valorising organic waste streams.

> when food scarcity has never been the problem?

food scarcity in America is not a problem. Then you have logistical challenge to transfer this food to other region and efficiently distribute it. Then you have financial problem who will pay for all of this.

Tell it to all those millions of malnourished children all over the world, being stripped of their future and adult lives as we discuss this. Even if we ignore those dying from hunger outright. Seriously?!?

What proof do you have that this is true?

What persistent global shortages currently exist strictly because of climate change and are not related to the Ukraine war or COVID?

More plant grow more CO2 captured. It’s a natural stabilisation cycle and a positive side effect. But we shouldn’t talk about it because we should be so so afraid all the time of the green apocalypse.

This natural stabilisation cycle leads to a different flora and fauna, some species adapt, some don't and go extinct.

So life as such isn't in danger but life as we know it, because we could be the one to go extinct.

Just look how it seems that fungus adapt to higher temperatures so they now survive in humans too.

Nothing is static in nature. We were in an ice age a blink-of-an-eye ago in geologic terms. Animals migrate. Something may or may not be caused by a warming temperature, but immediately assuming all changes are caused by co2, or that all changes are inherently bad, is an unnatural understanding of natural processes.

1. “Climate scientists are claiming that all changes from climate change will be bad!” is quite the strawman. No scientist really believes this, but almost all agree that the average change will be very bad for humans.

2. Climate change does not mean “increasing CO2”. It means changes in global climate as a result of human activity - things like dumping waste in the ocean count too. CO2 isn’t causing the Anthropocene, Humans are.

3. Arguing in poor faith against climate change because the idea of global catastrophes scares you is a poor evolutionary strategy and you should reconsider your outlook.

I agree with you on that one.

It will change the plants and animals equilibrium and at a fast pace compared to most normal process. It’s not a good experiment. I just think that it’s not the panic for global warming. We will be fine on that front with the log scale of renewable growth.

More CO2 captured is meaningless if that CO2 is shortly released as the dead plant decays.

but you eat a part of that plant, which itself grew by capturing carbon, but then you poop and breath out CO2. Yea in reality CO2 just keeps increasing until we stop extracting hydrocarbures

It's not meaningless if there's consistently more plant biomass (which there is, see https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...).

Leaving aside its magnitude, it seems clear that CO2 -> more plants is a negative feedback loop.

The amount of living plant biomass is trivial compared to the amount of excess carbon we’re putting into the atmosphere.

Consider that we’re unearthing millions of years worth of sequestered carbon. The planet could be covered pole to pole in lush forest and it wouldn’t account for what we burn today.

The only realistic answer here is permanent sequestration by e.g., repeatedly growing and burying entire forests’ worth of dead trees.

Google says that about 25% of global CO2 emissions are captured by plants. That's not trivial.

What, exactly, do you think plants did before we started burning massive amount of oil and natural gas?

The Earth was in rough equilibrium before this. The only way this factoid is even remotely plausible as a permanent store is if Earth’s total plant biomass is growing at rate proportional to our CO2 emissions.

Do you genuinely believe that to be the case?

All I did was point out that the greening earth as a result of more CO2 is a negative feedback loop, i.e. as the carbon content of the atmosphere increases, plants grow more and will sequester more CO2. Per the article I linked, over the past ~40 years, an area the size of the contintental US has greened and about 70% of that is attributable to CO2.

I didn't say the greening earth will totally offset climate change. You should ask yourself why you felt the need to spew nonsense in this thread. I find it baffling.

Food crops do not sequester carbon. They will either be eaten and exhaled as CO2, or decompose into CO2. Unless you have a link to someone planning on growing fields of corn just to bury it in an anaerobic environment?

Trees have entered the chat.

Living trees will grow faster and harvested lumber successfully sequesters carbon indefinitely.

Even crops we consume have non-negligible amounts of carbon sequestered in soil as they decompose.

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