Food Production Drops 21% Due To Climate Change
This is a story worth paying attention to – Climate change cut global agricultural productivity 21% since 1960s
That’s a huge drop in productivity, which we’ve managed to avoid dying from in huge numbers by rampant deforestation. Feeding the world has become a question of how much land can we expropriate from its natural habitat (and all the species that used to live there) and how fast we can accomplish this. Billionaires are moving into farming and farm investments for exactly this reason – the opportunities for enormous profits are there. But wherever money like this goes – destruction surely follows. So this is actually bad news for humanity and the world’s species. Extinction (including ours) just gets that much closer as we harvest the planet of habitat and convert it to our exclusive use.
This is interesting: Panic Rooms, Birth Certificates and the Birth of GOP Paranoia
I dislike politics (very much) and dislike even more the rampant stupidity, connedspiracies and asinine behavior we’ve all seen. The GOP become party over country and betrayed Americans of all political persuasion. The enormous damage they’ve done to the country is likely irreparable. Most of these men and women are traitors and have seriously violated their oaths of office. But I don’t say that because they are “Republicans”. There is very little real difference between a Republican and a Democrat. It’s just a label. What matters is what each of these party members says and does.
America has been through a great deal of crazy shit in the past 4+ years, and we’re still not free of the insanity just because there is another party in power. While I like the emphasis on climate change that Biden appears to be considering (hasn’t happened yet), I’m not in support of more growth. Growth always leads to more destruction of the things I want to see preserved and protected. Degrowth and downsizing would actually be better for everything (humans and non-humans) instead of more consumption (growth).
Since we’re going to do what we’ve always done (maintain the status-quo), I do not expect the planetary collapse to be delayed at all. It will be accelerated.
The incrementalism that “climate change” will be addressed will very likely miserably fail (I have 100% certainty about this) as none of what is being proposed will go far enough. However, something is definitely better then nothing and perhaps the ongoing failure will teach the lessons that need to be understood. We should indeed try – but our try should be laser focused on doing the right things and taking the right steps, not on doing what we’ve always done that created this problem in the first place.
What is so ridiculous abut the claims of those who say “we’ve never produced more food” is that it is not us that produce food, but nature that produces food. And the assault on nature, particularly since the Second World War, has been so intense and so persistent there is little of it left.
What we DO have is a global system, whereby natural fertilisers are shifted from one place in the world to another using diesel, and synthetic fertilisers are manufactured and shifted from one location to another using diesel, and chemicals that affect growth and control pests are manufactures from oil and shifted from one location to another, and water is extracted from aquifers using energy that is frequently derived from fossil fuels, and a harvesting, processing and distribution system that is totally dependent on fossil fuels.
And ‘no one’ gives a thought to either the future availability of fossil fuels or the effect burning fossil fuels has on the average temperature of the planet.
If all that were not bad enough, we have a massive population overshoot of approximately 7 billion more humans than the Earth can sustainably provide for or process the waste of.
So, to keep the population overshoot alive and in the overshoot zone, [using fossil fuels] we strip the seas and ocean of practically all the large fish, then practically all the medium-size fish, then practically all the small fish. And we use the seas and oceans as dumping grounds for the crap we don’t want or are too lazy or too disorganised to deal with.
And [using fossil fuels] we cut down the last of the tropical jungles, and fill in the last of the mangrove swamps to make room for more humans and their idiotic activities. Just to make sure we run short of fossil fuels quickly, we encourage the squandering of them via tourism, motor racing, consumerism etc. (okay, tourism has taken a hit over the past year or so, but the politicians are desperate to get it up and running again -can’t have those fossil fuels left languishing in the ground when they could be converted into carbon dioxide the atmosphere and exacerbate the climate catastrophe!).
And people think this system has a future???!!!
Well, yes, it does have a kind of future. It’s called collapse. It’s called mass starvation. It’s called a largely or completely uninhabitable planet for most vertebrate species, including humans.
Luckily the politicians and the business sector are right onto it, and are going to ‘save the planet’ and ‘save us’ via money-printing and enhanced shareholder value.
I personally give the current system another 6 months to two years (maximum) before the shit really hits the fan big time.
The US drought monitor sure makes for ‘interesting’ viewing:
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
Wow, that’s an excellent summary! I only wish more people realized what was unfolding. Not that they could do anything about it, but so that they could prepare accordingly.
I consider collapse inevitable now, as certain as the rising Sun.