I don’t generally tilt at strawmen, but it seems that transcending said limits is what Life, in general is all about.
We have to stop pretending that organic food – which uses more pesticides and requires more land than high-tech farming – is better. We have to stop pretending that “GMO” is a meaningful category
I’m not sure I understand what you mean here.
-
Which pesticides are you talking about? BT? There are plenty of questionable controls approved for organic use (e.g. pyrethrin [chrysanthemum], copper sulfate), but most real organic farmers in the States won’t touch them. Maybe some of the large farms that supply places like Whole Foods engage in those practices, but that’s more like consumer-organic (i.e. organic in name only). I’ve worked on many farms on the East Coast (some large, some small), and the most-employed controls I’ve seen were floating row cover, disease-resistant varieties, beneficial nematodes, Surround (kaolin clay), neem, and maybe diatomaceous earth. Diseased crops are burnt or thrown out altogether, and those fields either go fallow or will contain a different type of crop for a number of years. Are practices different in the UK? Either way, It would be nice to see your sources on this.
-
RE: “high-tech farming”, why do you think organic means low-tech? A smaller farm might use smaller tractors, but that’s just common sense. I’ve been laughed at by organic farmers for preferring hand tools to tractors (my own personal preference for certain tasks, and not something I’d advocate for large-scale farming). Sure, some people are using draft horses and chomping on corn cob pipes while posing for their article in Mother Earth News, but most farmers I’ve seen are far from Luddites, and are happy to use every new tool that comes on the market. In addition to that, you have the organic hydroponic growers who are doing more or less the same thing as conventional growers, but with organic inputs. Pesticides don’t even factor in there when you get clean room-type environments like with the indoor farms at Toshiba, Fujitsu, et al.
-
Safety isn’t the only reason one might want to label GMOs. Food packaging is one thing; it’s the end product, and it’s only for consumption. For farmers and gardeners, however, it’s an entirely different story. When I get conventional or organic seed, I can be assured that a certain species of crop will have certain characteristics. Its protein or sugar content, for example, might be within a certain range. It might have resistance to this or that. It might be a landrace, or otherwise be known for a certain type of diversity. As a farmer, I’m going to want to know how my crop will behave. The GMO label tells me that something may be different about a particular crop, in the same way that catalogs will describe that a certain variety is a traditional cross, or otherwise divergent. It tells me that in targeting a certain gene, some latent characteristics might have been lost. In seed saving, this is especially important. If the world is flooded with varieties that were previously resistant to a certain disease, but now inadvertently lack that gene, it would be nice to know when that occurred, and in which varieties. I’m not even talking monocrops. It could be a range of varieties that have been adopted widely. To be perfectly clear, I don’t have anything against GMOs themselves; it’s just a technique. All I’m referring to here is a need to diligently catalog what has been changed.
8 Likes
Sorry to break it to you, but Stalin was no Marxist. Neither am I, my own economic outlook includes some elements of Marxism, but considerably more of capitalism and it’s predecessors. However, if you’re going to evaluate every Marxist and/or socialist by the ruler of a despot who used state corporatism to implement his own brand of fascism, you’ll be in error. Just as every capitalist is not the Koch brothers or Bernie Madoff, not every socialist is Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong.
Precisely. Society is the the tension between the polar opposites of tyranny and anarchy. Prosperous civilizations have always found the balance related to their real-world non-theoretic conditions, and have been doing so since long before the various and sundry economic theorists of the 19th and 20 centuries.
I find the most unrealistic economic views to be those based on absolute principles that resist bending to reality.
6 Likes
There’s some of that. But it’s not all selfishness. A lot of people simply have trouble believing in systemic change. The human mind by its very nature is rooted in ideas of static norms, the belief that a complex system must seek the same equilibrium every time. The notion that a complex system can transition equilibria seems to many a leap of faith, because we evolved in a largely static environment and we naturally expect our biases to be reinforced. We’re biologically unprepared for change, even though it’s been the only iron law of the cosmos since as long as far back as we can empirically study it. Back-to-basics is epistemic comfort food.
This is important because understanding the motives for primitivism is a prerequisite for breaking the mold.
5 Likes
Who supposes that? What is the benefit of believing so?
You already live in a world (or at least this is true in the US) where 2/3 of new generating capacity comes from renewables, (and the balance from natural gas).
Most of the models I’ve seen indicate that storage starts becoming an issue at 20-30% combined wind and solar penetration, which gives us at least 10, maybe 15 years to get our act together. By that point the best estimates are that lithium ion batteries will cost well under $200/kWh, with a cycle life of over 10,000 cycles. Other energy storage options can be cheaper but not universally applicable (compressed air, pumped hydro, etc.). Even at $200/kWh capacity, that compares favorably with a lot of natural gas peaking plants which can have a LCOE as high as $1/kWh and are used a few hundred hours per year. And when you consider that by the mid-2020’s the average car will at least be a microhybrid with ~10kWh of batteries, and that companies like Tesla are marketing home battery systems for backup power (in lieu of things like diesel generators), the storage problem starts to look a lot more manageable.
And I do wish I lived in a society with enough sense to use a whole lot more nuclear power. But I don’t, so I expect we’ll keep fossil fuels around a long time but to a rapidly decreasing extent.
3 Likes
There is a good possibility that the world population will decline signficantly in the not-too-distant future, due to the mismanagement of antibiotics, climate change, imperial war, and other serious errors which could have been avoided but were not. If such a decline ensues, it will probably not be pretty and may pose important difficulties for extensive use of high technology.
1 Like
or as ever, it could be both, something in between, and neither. the core choice is do you duck and cover, hunker down in an eco-bunker or try to build the best future we can?
‘The best future’ will require appropriate technology. What technology will be appropriate in the future will depend on conditions. It is of course hard to know exactly what these conditions will be, but certain consequences of present human behavior seem inevitable – indeed, we’re already seeing their early onset. One of the motives for the sort of primitivism which the article we’re discussing decries is that high technology seems to require a lot of authoritarian regulation, but the necessary political structures for carrying out this regulation ironically create a class of people who derive more advantage from circumventing the regulations (or helping others to do so) than from enforcing them. Part of the appropriateness of a technology for the immediate future, then, would seem to be one which avoids the formation of these structures.
2 Likes
Chad .
Thorium, until fusion is made working?
1 Like
…
Ffs. If the libretardian zpgers ever realize that Africa is the future and their Koch-daddies are useless at R&D for anyone but their marketing departments, the cranial grenade-splatter will make Scanners look like the Left Behind series.
Who’s talking about collectivisation? Ag has required subsidy to support comfortable overproduction since agriculture was fucking invented. Ten thousand years. Open a book.
2 Likes
“Where did you get your axe?”
If by gilded you mean gaining undue influence, then yes, absolutely.
1 Like
Germany will be the testbed for this - in 2015 solar and wind were the source for ~ 20% of the electrical energy. This boost was kicked off by the EEG, setting fixed and long-term feed-in tariffs. Because of the European grid not directly comparable to the US, but an example for a large national economy conversing to renewable energy.
Oh sure, renewables are gathering steam (to use a FF metaphor…
) and storage costs are coming down rapidly. But if we’re going to remain an extremely energy intense society, as this book seems to suggest, and have a further 9ish billion join us in that energy intense way of life then the land use to supply that level of energy demand will be ridiculous. Likewise the quantity of nuclear plant required to deliver that level of energy intensity is equally insane.
With something as important as the continued existence of human civilisation, a reasonably strong application of the precautionary principle is a wise way forwards and a starry-eye techno-utopia is not that.
That’s not to say that the alternative is luddite or technology-free (as it is frequently mischaracterised), it’s just not reliant on unknown future technologies to get us out of trouble.
Phillips believes that the green left's anti-consumerist/pastoral view is more aesthetic than political: they don't want to stop consuming, they just want to stop consuming things that poor people like, and limit their consumption to labor-intensive items that are priced out of reach of most of the world.
An entire argument predicated on an ad hominem argument and a fallacious definition of “technology”.
1 Like
“Socialism” is of course different things to different people.
If by socialism we mean a deep and wide social safety net, funded by taxes upon profit making, market driven enterprises (whether those enterprises are investor owned or worker owned), that’s one thing, and there are some examples of reasonable success. Bearing in mind of course that improving living standards over time is dependent upon continuing economic growth over time, and if one’s world view is that economic growth is not necessarily a good thing, this may not be one’s cup of economic tea.
If on the other hand by socialism we mean centralized political control of what goods are produced and how/where they are distributed, that’s pretty much been a recipe for subsistence living and authoritarian rule everywhere it’s been tried, from Lenin to Chavez.
1 Like
In 1895, one could probably make the case that the population of New York City had reached its material limits due to the fact that (1) there was no more room above the streets for all the individual power and phone lines and (2) there was no longer any more capacity for the streets to hold the daily accumulation of horse shit.
And if the “precautionary principle” had been aggressively applied with respect to any technological fixes for those limits, said limits would still probably be in place. Giddy-ap, Nellie!!!
1 Like
