Food, fuel

I often find it interesting to chase down links and other references provided when folks respond to my posts. Generally, I learn something. Sometimes, what I learn is that I didn't make myself clear in my original wording.

I kind of expected that to happen in the case of my previous post. I realized after I'd filed it that I hadn't mentioned one of the things I liked most about the article on sustainable food production -- that the writer demonstrated (not just commented on) a number of the trade-off decisions that must be addressed in any improvement effort. There are, indeed, all too many writings that proceed on the basis of "all other things being equal" which, of course, they never are. This wasn't one of those articles.

Meanwhile, I won't presume to debate with Kenneth Nusbaum when it comes to his area of acknowledged expertise -- pathobiology. Indeed, I'm always happy to learn of a scientific researcher who got some dirt under his fingernails (Nusbaum's a DVM as well as a PhD) before venturing into the lab. When I checked out the report on Industrial Farm Animal Production he recommended, I found that of the 24 recommendations it made, fully 16 were about protecting public health by better managing antimicrobials (necessary due to high animal population densities and very limited genetic diversity) or waste streams (immense, intense, and full of some of those same antimicrobial agents). Nusbaum's comment was brief, so I'm not sure whether he was endorsing the report or pointing to it as an example of "inside the box" thinking. To my mind, though, if the public needs at least 16 different types of protection from an agricultural production process (agriculture being, after all, something that most of humanity did for most of history), then we just might not have the ideal production process.

Going back to the post before that, I want to thank Professor G. at Shenandoah for directing me to the documents from the American Meteorological Society proceeding. In more detail than I was able to muster, what they said was that converting crops, or productive cropland, or forest/jungle acreage to biofuel production is a proposition which ranges from ineffective to idiotic. Read to the end, and you'll discover that the attractive options involve making biofuel from prairie-land perennials, particularly diverse grasses and scrub. While this sort of fuel production is mostly in the lab right now, it has the potential to supplant liquid energy stores. No tilling, no/minimal fertilization, small energy inputs (other than solar).

But (back to the more recent post), I have to say that the question Roboteacher poses is one that's got me stumped. We're currently killing the planet to support 6.7 billion people, many of them at a truly marginal level. We're expecting another 3 billion or so this century, and expectations/standards of living are increasing rapidly for about a third of the people we've already got. I don't even know how to think about that one (slipping in a gratuitous Battlestar Galactica reference just as the series winds to its conclusion was the best I could do). Any and all constructive suggestions gratefully received. ('Nuclear annihilation as a result of Cylon attack' is not a constructive suggestion.)