So here’s a topic I haven’t touched on in a while – as we’re getting off of fossil fuels, I think we should also invest in indoor farming infrastructure, particularly in cities. A well-run indoor farm can recycle water, keep out pests and pathogens, and generate a constant level of food production year-round. That production can be maintained regardless of temperature or drought, and without the need for anything like the level of pesticides and herbicides used in modern industrial agriculture. More importantly, it’s a way to grow food in population centers, which would dramatically increase a city’s resilience to all sorts of disasters. Fortunately we are seeing an increase in the indoor farming industry, so we may be closer to that slice of the future than most of us expect:
I noticed a couple things while watching this video.
The less important one is the difference in life experience between Aki Ito and myself. It was a bit of a surprise to hear that the crop that’s like nothing I’ve ever had before is sorrel, which I grew up eating on a fairly regular basis when doing stuff outside in New Hampshire. I’m actually a little bit jealous that I don’t get to taste it for the first time as an adult, and it’s nice to think of it being appreciated more widely.
The more important point relates to the farm in the video, in which most of the work is done by robots. The pattern throughout history has been that as technology advances and replaces some jobs, it creates other new ones in a way that means unemployment doesn’t seem to change much even as jobs are lost to automation.
The danger, I think, is that with the global supply chain being what it is, more and more of those new jobs are showing up in terrible, exploitative conditions exemplified by the innovation of suicide nets for Apple factories in China. As we respond to climate change, and work to build a more ecologically sustainable world, it’s important to remember that we also need economic policies that encourage fair, safe, and dignified working conditions all the way down our supply chains. Even in our current state, America has a massive amount of economic influence around the globe.
I think that part of the fight for a stable climate must also include an end to the unrestrained looting of the planet’s resources, at the expense of the poorest among us. In the end, living up to the ideals of liberty and justice for all may be what it takes to save us from disasters of our own creation.
H/T to Climate Denial Crock of the Week for posting the video.
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It’s certainly an interesting idea, but I do wonder about the full lifecycle costs, where all the nutrients are coming from, and whether it’s sufficiently scalable. Looking at that, I see a heck of a lot of embedded energy in the equipment…
I think that high tech indoor farming can be be reasonably sustainable, and it can make food production in city areas more common, but it won’t produce the bulk of our food in foreseeable future, and certainly won’t make cities anywhere near self-sufficient. Also, indoor farming is very dependent on electricity and clean water utilities so it wouldn’t withstand any crisis situation.
What Lumipuna said. I had a line about the supply chain and grid stability issues, but I decided to leave that for a future post.
We need to overhaul our entire electrical system if we want things to get better, and it’s under that scenario that I envision indoor farming as a serious part of our life.
I doubt we’ll ever see any technological advances that don’t have downsides, but solid and liquid waste are, in theory, easier to manage than gaseous waste.
Not only do I not believe there’s any one fix to any of these problems, if there was, I’d be a bit hesitant to take it without REALLY close examination, because I think diversity is the key to resilience in technology as well as ecosystems.
Yes, that’s a very important point. At this point, we have very little idea of what a truly sustainable agricultural system looks like at anything beyond the very small scale. That’s a problem which we need to address urgently, and I’d say that it’s very unlikely that there’s going to be a one-size-fits-all solution, or that the solutions will come from a single strand of development. The best (indeed, only) hope is for lots of different people to work on different aspects of the problem in different ways, and see what works and what doesn’t.
I guess that what worries me with many of these initiatives is that they very often involve throwing more energy and material resources at problems, when I think we need to be reducing our use of energy and material resources. For example, I don’t currently see any realistic means of even maintaining our present level of electricity production* whilst eliminating GHGs, and yet many of the proposed solutions to our problems (indoor farming, electric vehicles, etc) involve using vastly more electricity than we do today.
* In the short to mid term – i.e. based on currently available technology and project financing, within the limits of our existing supply chains, and at realistic deployment rates. Thorium MSRs, a fusion breakthrough, or some other species of what you may as well call “magic technology” might change that, but I don’t see it happening on the necessary timescales.
I think it’s important to account for human behavior patterns. While we can work against self-destructive reflexes or instincts at an individual level, as a group, we seem to have trouble with that.
People aren’t going to willingly give up a high-tech lifestyle, and asking them to is a great way to turn them off to change, or at least that has been my impression. It also plays into the VERY old conservative talking point of “well why aren’t you living in a cave an eating bugs, then?” That genie is out of the bottle, much as I like my odds of being the most competent blacksmith in my neighborhood if civilization collapses.
I think it’s also worth noting that for a lot of the things you’re thinking about, the current system not only uses a lot of electricity, but also wastes a lot. Most plans for carbon neutrality involve a HEAVY dose of increasing efficiency. I’ll do a blog post on this in the next couple days, but things like shifting more to railways for freight and travel, increasing home energy efficiency (in a systemic manner, not an individual basis), can make a huge difference.
While I can’t claim any real expertise, I am currently of the belief that the increase in electrical production needed is less than it seems near the surface, and that if we ever stop licking the feet of the rich and get serious about all this, that efficiency is one of the first places to start, both for high effect, and for reducing the cost of replacing our power generation.
Well, that’s certainly the case when the person asking isn’t doing it themselves, which is a pretty big problem these days… But I would question your immediate association of “a high-tech lifestyle” with “high energy and resource use”. From memory, the average American uses something like twice as much energy as the average western European in order to support very similar lifestyles. In fact, I’m pretty sure the average western European would say they have it better. It’s also worth bearing in mind that a lot of the profligacy that passes for “a high-tech lifestyle” is largely the result of intense marketing. Plenty of people have willingly given up that lifestyle, or at least many aspects of it, and found themselves happier for it – but our corporate-dominated media system isn’t going to tell you about any of them, because it doesn’t further their goal of getting you to buy more crap.
History shows that people can be willing to make enormous sacrifices for a cause they actually believe in. Unfortunately, most of the (visible) people clamouring for action on climate change continue to behave in ways which show that they don’t really believe enough to make sacrifices themselves – and I’m not just talking about buying a different new car here.
There’s certainly a great deal of scope for improved efficiency, but Jevons Paradox makes that something of a double-edged sword. Those sorts of rebound effects could be at least moderated by carbon taxation, but that’s another deeply unpopular idea… Fundamentally, unless we can tackle the idea that more is always better, any efficiency improvements will inevitably be used for expansion.
Aye, there’s the rub: in order to get serious, we need to fundamentally change our economic and social order, and that’s even harder than rebuilding the grid.
I should maybe lay out my position here: I do not believe we’re going to voluntarily choose to do anything that could have a real impact – or at least enough of a real impact to make a difference – until it’s far too late. We are going to continue on more-or-less our current trajectory until circumstances make that impossible. As such, I no longer see much point in trying to avert the coming disaster. The main question now is how to survive it, so I’m more interested in adaptations that are suitable for a resource-constrained world in acute crisis. (It’s also worth noting that quite a lot of the world is resource-constrained and in acute crisis right now, and fancy high-tech solutions aren’t much use if you don’t have clean water, basic sanitation, reliable electricity, or any money to pay for such things even if they were available. As William Gibson said, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”)
20 years ago – roughly when I first started paying serious attention to these issues – we maybe had a chance, but since then we’ve made absolutely no actual progress at all. At best we’ve managed to not make things worse quite as quickly as we otherwise would have – but we’re still travelling headlong in the wrong direction, and we’re not even slowing down. In fact, we’re still accelerating… Just maybe not accelerating quite as hard as we otherwise might.