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It's honestly like you've never seen that land. Much of Canada -- one of the two big possible breadbaskets you said you were eyeing -- is literally forest. The

It's honestly like you've never seen that land. Much of Canada -- one of the two big possible breadbaskets you said you were eyeing -- is literally forest. The forest starts where the farmland stops. Even if you cleared the forest, the soil is worthless. It's been covered in conifers for thousands of years. It's also goopy, as it is thawing. Or sandy. Or simply too acidic. And while it might be good enough for grasses and cattle grazing one day, that day is not today, nor tomorrow, and in the meantime, you will be quite hungry. In the medium term: good luck replacing California's food output with northern Alberta's. Now, one might be able to hasten the soil improvement that with some sort of complex, time-consuming terraforming ('agriforming?') process, but good luck getting that process to scale in a hurry. Or on-budget. (Have fun even making a budget for that.) Farming is actually just incredibly hard, the land is the biggest variable. It has to be just right. You can't just declare that an area is for food production like you'd rezone a city street for residential. Nature does not care about your lines on maps. Don't believe me? Look at the last time we tried. The same reason that turning the Amazonian rainforest into farmland has not been an awesome thing. And who is condescending to who, here? I'm not a farmer. But neither, I suspect, are you. So why do you discount my experience? I'm from the place you were talking about. My suspicion is that you simply cannot tolerate the ego-dystonicity of ushering in an age of starvation for our children and grandchildren. But we did it. You did it, with help. Check the prices at your supermarket.[1] Check the collapsing populations of insects, birds, and fish. Wait for the unravel to travel further up the food chain. Tag. You're it. And yes, it's apocalyptic. It really, really is. If you want to throw textbooks around, please read _This Changes Everything_. Then, read _Under a White Sky_. You will find them both in the nonfiction section. [1] Before you get typing: yes, inflation and supply-chain disruption can be symptoms of climate change -- specifically, when both are occasioned by a pandemic, which is the sort of event that becomes more common as habitats are squeezed up against one another. There will be more, faster now. I did PhD work on this, back in '05, in the aftermath of SARS-CoV-1. Like.

hagbard_c 5y ago
I've traveled through that land for years, in both Europe as well as north-America, because of my studies (majored in forestry) but mostly because I like to be out and about. I live on a farm in Sweden, a country which stands to gain a sizeable amount of profitable crop area if the envisioned temperature increase comes about. The same is, as said, true for Russia and, yes, Canada. Get off the panic porn and broaden your mind. Read some other authors, e.g. Schellenberger's Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, Lomborg's False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, Koonin's Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters just to name a few. Read them critically (as in "using your critical facilities", not "through the lens of critical theory") but keep your mind open for the possibility that those authors - environmentalists all of them - are on to something which has been covered under thick layers of ideology. I won't link to those books, you can find them anywhere books are to be had. The library is a good starting point, otherwise some local book store.
wyager 5y ago
> The same reason that turning the Amazonian rainforest into farmland has not been an awesome thing. It’s extremely productive land, so whatever extent it “has not been awesome” it has nothing to do with your false claim that we physically can’t increase the amount of arable land. The reason farming the Amazon has been bad is because farmer’s land rights are in a weird limbo state there, where they’re incentivized to deplete the land as quickly as possible with soy and then stick a few cattle on the soy-depleted land in order to maintain their land claim. > ushering in an age of starvation for our children and grandchildren If there’s an age of poverty coming, it’s more likely going to be because misguided or duplicitous “environmentalists” succeeded in their goal of enforcing poverty on people with the goal of reducing humanity’s net energy production. > Check the prices at your supermarket Oh please; I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the strategy of blaming the inevitable deadweight loss imposed by government economic interference on the progressive cause du jour. Yeah, inflation is caused by global warming and not by the fed increasing the cash supply 30% in a year.
- hagbard_c 5y ago
  I did not even touch that claim of not being able to increase the amount of arable land. Perhaps I should have, seeing as how I am a Dutch citizen, a country which is world-famous for just that feat. Dutchmen have been "re"claiming land from the sea since the middle ages after all, the word "polder" (which means lowlying articifically drained land) is used beyond the national borders for a reason. There are polders outside of the Netherlands, e.g. The Fens in the UK are a good example - former marshland which is now productive farmland.

hagbard_c 5y ago

I've traveled through that land for years, in both Europe as well as north-America, because of my studies (majored in forestry) but mostly because I like to be out and about. I live on a farm in Sweden, a country which stands to gain a sizeable amount of profitable crop area if the envisioned temperature increase comes about. The same is, as said, true for Russia and, yes, Canada. Get off the panic porn and broaden your mind. Read some other authors, e.g. Schellenberger's Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, Lomborg's False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, Koonin's Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters just to name a few. Read them critically (as in "using your critical facilities", not "through the lens of critical theory") but keep your mind open for the possibility that those authors - environmentalists all of them - are on to something which has been covered under thick layers of ideology. I won't link to those books, you can find them anywhere books are to be had. The library is a good starting point, otherwise some local book store.

wyager 5y ago

> The same reason that turning the Amazonian rainforest into farmland has not been an awesome thing. It’s extremely productive land, so whatever extent it “has not been awesome” it has nothing to do with your false claim that we physically can’t increase the amount of arable land. The reason farming the Amazon has been bad is because farmer’s land rights are in a weird limbo state there, where they’re incentivized to deplete the land as quickly as possible with soy and then stick a few cattle on the soy-depleted land in order to maintain their land claim. > ushering in an age of starvation for our children and grandchildren If there’s an age of poverty coming, it’s more likely going to be because misguided or duplicitous “environmentalists” succeeded in their goal of enforcing poverty on people with the goal of reducing humanity’s net energy production. > Check the prices at your supermarket Oh please; I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the strategy of blaming the inevitable deadweight loss imposed by government economic interference on the progressive cause du jour. Yeah, inflation is caused by global warming and not by the fed increasing the cash supply 30% in a year.

hagbard_c 5y ago
I did not even touch that claim of not being able to increase the amount of arable land. Perhaps I should have, seeing as how I am a Dutch citizen, a country which is world-famous for just that feat. Dutchmen have been "re"claiming land from the sea since the middle ages after all, the word "polder" (which means lowlying articifically drained land) is used beyond the national borders for a reason. There are polders outside of the Netherlands, e.g. The Fens in the UK are a good example - former marshland which is now productive farmland.