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Right now there is no financial incentive to preserve topsoil. In the future there will be. So why artificially create incentive to pay the higher cost now whe
by 99_00 6y ago
Right now there is no financial incentive to preserve topsoil. In the future there will be.
So why artificially create incentive to pay the higher cost now when we can punt to the future where technology will be so much better and the cost will probably be lower?
- CuriouslyC 6y agoTopsoil takes a long time to build up. If you wait until it's an emergency to start trying to change farming practices, it'll take 10 years for farming practices to change, then another 10 years to build topsoil, and a lot of people will starve.
- 99_00 6y ago>“In 150 years or so, we’ve lost over half of that rich topsoil—if not all in some places.” If the timescale of the solution is decades we are good, because the time scale of the problem is centuries.
- evan_ 6y ago50 years from now "We've got 100 years left before we have to worry about this!" 100 years from now "We've got 50 years left before we have to worry about this!" 145 years from now "This is a crisis, if only we had 150 years to work on this maybe we could get somewhere, but as it is..."
- meowkit 6y agoSame problem with climate change. 1) You assume technology will be better. There is no guarantee that this will be true. 2) Externalities like mass migration or civil unrest that could occur from food shortages would mean we don’t have a chance in the future to tackle the problem effectively.
- 99_00 6y agoNuclear power can solve climate change now. Technology doesn't need to be better. People don't want to solve the problem now because 1) We don't need to solve it now 2) Fear of impending doom is a great way to push a wide array of agendas (ideological, economic, political) forward.
- kiliantics 6y agoYou sound like a literal parody and it's terrifying to know that you probably actually believe what you are saying. The fact that enough people think like you do, especially those people in positions of power, is why we are all fucked. Thanks. Could you not go and just read some real literature on climate and natural ecosystem dynamics before deciding to believe all this nonsense?
- yco29 6y ago"Why can't we just wait until some magical future time when technology has fixed everything?" Exactly the type of do-nothing idiocy I'd expect from this place. What exactly do you think you're contributing here? On every single important topic, HN consistently pushes to the top whatever sentiment contains the least actionable information. People here are simpletons that can't even fathom anything other than the status quo, even to the point that they'll condone killing off all other life on the planet as long as they don't have to address their own gluttony and revolting ignorance.
- 99_00 6y agoInsults are not an argument.
- colineartheta 6y agoWhat makes your you think that in the future there will be financial incentive?
- 99_00 6y agoIf there is no financial insetive in the future it's because we don't need top soil in the corn belt and we saved ourselves and he cost of dealing with this problem which ended up being irrelevant.
- bluGill 6y agoThere has been financial incentive to preserve topsoil for years. You cannot buy subsidised crop insurance if you don't adopt soil conserving practices. You can't get record yields out of your land if you haven't spent the previous seven years carefully building up your soil .
- ecf 6y agoWhy force future generations to solve a life-or-death problem and rob them of freedoms that people enjoy today? I hope in 50 years the entire adult generation of today is mocked and ridiculed for how they destroyed the only known inhabitable planet for our specifies.
- 99_00 6y agoBecause over time humans get better at solving problems. Are you predicting the earth will become uninhabitable in 50 years?