5 ms·

> more economical In the same way that bunker fuel powered ships are just "more economical" than transporting goods by sail powered ships. People throw this t

> more economical In the same way that bunker fuel powered ships are just "more economical" than transporting goods by sail powered ships. People throw this term around like making it "less economical" to produce food is some minor detail. Things being their current level of "economical" is what drives our global economy at the current scale it runs at. We could not have our current lifestyle using sail powered ships to transport goods from China any more than we could maintain anything like our current lifestyle if we had to produce all of our nitrogen fertilizer through electrolysis. Making food "less economical" means mass starvation.

deleted 5y ago
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kragen 5y ago
It sounds like you disagree with the calculations Robotbeat presented in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842105, but it is unclear whether that is because you have done calculations of your own. Please elaborate. Robotbeat's calculations seem to show that producing all of the US's nitrogen fertilizer through electrolysis would use something like 5% of US electricity production, which would not be a major obstacle to "maintaining anything like our current lifestyle", and presumably the numbers in other countries are even better, except for the Netherlands.
- time_to_smile 5y ago
  > 5% of US electricity production, which would not be a major obstacle to "maintaining anything like our current lifestyle" I don't think there's any point in arguing if you think 5% of electricity (of which, as Robotbeat pointed out is 60% fossil fuel generated) is "not a major obstacle" while we also have to reduce/eliminate fossil fuel use in every sector. It also doesn't touch on the price increase in food production. Where in the world is all of this extra energy going to come from if you remove fossil fuels from the equation? Robotbeat's analysis there is terrifying to me, rather than reassuring. But you can put works like "just" and "only" as modifiers to whatever you want if it makes it sound more achievable.
  - kragen 5y ago
    I take it you agree with the calculations, then, but disagree with their implications? Increasing electricity production 5% would not mean mass starvation. China increased electricity production 5% every six months throughout the 02010s. The US did it every year in the 01960s. It's not some kind of impossible obstacle to "maintain[ing] anything like our current lifestyle".
    - time_to_smile 5y ago
      All of those gains are from an increase in the usage of fossil fuels. Yes China is making big growth in renewables but they're making even bigger growth in coal. This is the problem with our intuitions about energy, we're so used to abundant, high energy density, relatively cheap energy that we can't even get our heads around not having it. You quote me but miss the point where I say that this is fine so long as we have unlimited fossil fuels and there are no serious externalities with fossil fuel usage. Both of these conditions are false, but even your reasoning here is assuming these are true. If for some non-fossil fuel related reason we had to switch to primarily electrolysis hydrogen production, then yea, we'd be fine. We haven't even come close to really solving just replacing our current energy demands with entirely renewable energy (which, even assuming perfect battery solutions, also requires growing the overall output of our grid by a factor proportional to intermittent power needs), let alone additional energy requirements that start popping up all over the place once you start removing fossil fuels. This has been a problem that has been well studied and understood for years, but because it leads to the scary conclusion that our current way of life is unsustainable it is brushed off.
      - kragen 5y ago
        This is not correct. I didn't miss your point; I was explaining why your point was wrong. Now I will do that again, even though you discourteously didn't answer the question in my comment: does that mean you agree with Robotbeat's calculations? The combination of apparently refusing to clarify your position with basing your arguments on easily checkable falsehoods, while accusing me of basing mine on "intuition", reduces my willingness to extend good faith to you. Please, do better. China's growth in either solar or wind generation capacity in 02020 was bigger than their growth in coal generation capacity. I haven't seen the 02021 numbers yet but I expect that their coal generation capacity growth in 02021 will turn out to have been actually negative, i.e., not growth but shrinkage, quite aside from the lower-capacity-factor crises resulting from their feud with Australia, their main coal supplier. Quoting from my notes in Dernocua (http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua): > Specifically, in 02020, the People’s Republic of China installed 71.7 GW of new wind capacity, 48.2 GW of new solar capacity (which was already larger than the rest of the world combined), and 38.4 GW(e) of coal capacity. Assuming typical capacity factors of 40% for wind, 25% for solar, and 60% for coal, that would add up to 23 GW average new coal, 29 GW average new wind, and 12 GW average new solar. (But China’s capacity factors are lower; see below.) New solar installations worldwide double on average every three years, which has slowed down from every two years in the 02010s. ... > But China is a larger country than Germany. Chinese marketed energy consumption was 28 PWh/year (3.2 TW) in 02010, of which 3.9 PWh/year (440 GW) was electric. In 02019 they produced 7330 TWh electric calculated as (+ 4554 233 148 349 1270 32 405 224 113) rounded to three places. That’s 836 GW. (The 32 TWh of pumped-storage hydro may be double-counted.) In 02019 224 TWh/year (26 GW) was produced from solar and 405 TWh/year (46 GW) from wind, using 204 GW of solar capacity (capacity factor 13%) and 209 GW of wind capacity (capacity factor 22%). Also the 4554 TWh/year from coal (519.5 GW) is on a 1.041 TW basis, so their capacity factor is only 50.0%. Hopefully they’ll start installing their energy plants in more propitious places, like the Gobi, and the capacity factor will go up. > So probably last year’s new installations of 38.4 GW (coal), 71.7 GW (wind), and 48.2 GW (solar) will produce on average 19.2 GW (coal), 16 GW (wind), and 6.3 GW (solar). The resulting 22 GW (average) of renewable energy added last year amounts to 2.6% of the total current electric energy use of China. If we assume that China’s total energy use has increased by 90% since 02010, just as their electrical energy use did by 02019, it would now be 6.1 TW, and 22 GW is 0.36% of it. Solar energy (127 PW at Earth's surface) is far more abundant than fossil-fuel energy consumption, which has never reached more than 15 TW, 0.012% of solar energy. Historically the big problem has been that solar energy, though abundant, was expensive to gather; that problem has now been solved, and solar panels are now cheaper in the world market than either fossil fuels or fossil-fuel plants, let alone the sum of the two. > Both of these conditions are false, but even your reasoning here is assuming these are true. No, my reasoning is based on evidence that says it is feasible and economical to expand power generation using renewable energy. It is not assuming either "unlimited fossil fuels" or "no serious externalities with fossil fuel usage." > We haven't even come close to really solving just replacing our current energy demands with entirely renewable energy (which, even assuming perfect battery solutions, also requires growing the overall output of our grid by a factor proportional to intermittent power needs), let alone additional energy requirements that start popping up all over the place once you start removing fossil fuels. Let's take these one by one. First, current renewable energy production is about 12% of world total primary energy consumption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption#Primary_energy_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...). More than half of this is hydro, which is, roughly speaking, not growing. The other half is solar and wind, which is growing 14% per year, which puts it on track to replace all of world total primary energy consumption in 02043. Wind is currently much larger, and already supplies most electricity in countries like Denmark, but solar is growing about 23% per year and has now reached about 1 TW peak, 150 GW average. That means that it is currently supplying about 0.8% of total marketed energy consumption, 1/128. (Since this is all electric, the percentage for electrical energy is higher.) Of course, when exponential growth is involved, prediction is very difficult, because sooner or later the exponential trend must stop, at which point the trend line diverges from reality by orders of magnitude. Even a small misprediction of the exponential growth rate results in misprediction by an order of magnitude after a few orders of magnitude of growth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#/media/File:PV_cume_semi_log_chart_2014_estimate.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#/media/File:PV_cum... shows that the exponential trend was a fairly consistent 36% per year over the last 30 years, so it seems to be slowing down, but it's unlikely to stop anytime soon. I've investigated the fundamentals and can't find any resource limitation or demand limitation that would prevent it. Solar is currently on track to surpass wind around 02030, so probably we'll move to a majority-renewables energy system before the 02043 you get from extrapolating the overall non-hydro renewables growth rate. As for the intermittency question, it doesn't affect hydrogen electrolysis (a gasometer full of hydrogen is a perfectly reasonable way to store excess energy for up to a month or two) and to the extent that intermittency is managed at the peripheries of the grid rather than the center, it doesn't require additional transmission or distribution capacity as you say either. Moreover, even needing to double transmission or distribution capacity would not be a civilization-destroying crisis; as I said, PRC has done that three times over the last ten years, and to generation capacity too. Finally, the additional energy requirements that start popping up are basically only fixing nitrogen into ammonia, smelting steel, and plastics. All three of these are small compared to the use of fossil fuels as fuels. This is indeed a problem that has been well studied for years, but until five years ago, we didn't know how we could scale up PV production; there was the concern that it might be physically possible but out of our technological reach, like fusion energy. That problem has now been solved, and that is why, for example, Peabody Coal went bankrupt and coal-fired power generation is globally in decline. Our current way of life is unsustainable in many ways, but needing a lot of energy isn't one of them. We can increase our energy usage by two orders of magnitude before it starts to be a sustainability problem.
- bob29 5y ago
  I believe Robotbeats calculations are lacking if the intent is to demonstrate how much fossil fuel energy is embodied in one unit (joules, calories, etc) of food: -hydrogen is not a primary energy, no accounting for energy needed to produce 1kg of H2 gas -producing ammonia from hydrogen consumes energy -producing corn from ammonia requires more embodied energy than sunlight - other fertilizers, *cides, fuel and construction industrial sized agricultural machinery. Only measuring the chemical energy in quantity of H2 vs the dietary calories in associated corn produced is incomplete model of fossil fuels required in agricultural production. If you are saying the urea price spike has occured in a complete isolation, like temporary specific failure of urea manufacturing , maybe its not a problem. If its one of the first noticable effects of an overall fossil fuel shortage, its going to have huge feedback effects invalidating economic models such as slowing renewable growth, making the whole economy less productive.
  - kragen 5y ago
    I agree that it's important to include the complete model of fossil fuels in agricultural production, which is in the paper Enginerrd was citing (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842158). It turns out that even when you do that the number is still pretty low; most of the energy is used to make ammonia. You might want to put a blank line between your list items so they don't come out as a single paragraph and/or format them with ·, •, or ●. I think the urea price spike is due to a temporary collapse in natural gas production, which is indeed one of the first overall effects of reduced excess production capacity in natural gas, or shippable natural gas anyway. I don't think an overall fossil fuel shortage would slow renewable growth, though; it increases the returns to renewable generation, and renewables production is one of the sectors of the economy least dependent on fossil fuels. I think an overall fossil fuel shortage is unlikely because coal reserves are still enormous and interconversion of different kinds of fossil fuels is lossy.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  Electrolytic production is significantly more expensive, but it isn't 10x or anything like that. Certainly not lifestyle altering. As a practical engineering matter, you'd want to use base load power for this, so it would have to be nuclear, which is why it will not happen in the foreseeable future. Ammonia is a highly fungible global commodity, and is commonly a means for countries with large natural gas resources to produce an easily transportable value-add product from excess natural gas. None of those countries are going to produce electrolytic ammonia because consuming natural gas is the entire point! If it wasn't being turned into ammonia, much of it would ended being vented to the atmosphere or burned off. While it doesn't look like it in isolation, a lot of industrial chemistry is actually reprocessing and finding value in the waste products of other industrial processes. The US currently produces ~10% of the global total, but we used to import ammonia like everyone else until a glut of domestic natural gas made it cost-effective to produce our own (again, a way to consume excess natural gas). Ammonia is feedstock for a ton of cost-sensitive industrial chemistry, not just fertilizer, so costs will show up in places people might not expect.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Interesting, why would you want to use baseload power for hydrogen electrolysis rather than solar peaks? That's the opposite of the conclusion I had reached, but maybe my crude models of hydrogen electrolysis are wrong.
    - philipkglass 5y ago
      The reason nuclear-electric hydrogen appeared in past decarbonization plans was that electrolyzers were too expensive to only run at a 25% duty cycle and renewable electricity was more expensive even when the sun was shining. It currently appears that electrolyzer production is going to scale up and drop costs to meet renewables faster than nuclear projects can fix their cost/schedule problems. Here's an industry-focused article that talks about growing manufacturing electrolyzer capacity and lists some recent projects for generating hydrogen with renewables: https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/12/12/sunday-read-making-cheaper-h2/ https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/12/12/sunday-read...
jay_kyburz 5y ago
The rts website below suggests that "30-40 percent of the entire US food supply" is wasted. We could start by fixing that. I suspect those of us in wealthy countries also eat _alot_ more that than we should. We are a very long way from mass starvation. [1] https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/ https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kragen 5y ago

It sounds like you disagree with the calculations Robotbeat presented in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842105, but it is unclear whether that is because you have done calculations of your own. Please elaborate. Robotbeat's calculations seem to show that producing all of the US's nitrogen fertilizer through electrolysis would use something like 5% of US electricity production, which would not be a major obstacle to "maintaining anything like our current lifestyle", and presumably the numbers in other countries are even better, except for the Netherlands.

time_to_smile 5y ago
> 5% of US electricity production, which would not be a major obstacle to "maintaining anything like our current lifestyle" I don't think there's any point in arguing if you think 5% of electricity (of which, as Robotbeat pointed out is 60% fossil fuel generated) is "not a major obstacle" while we also have to reduce/eliminate fossil fuel use in every sector. It also doesn't touch on the price increase in food production. Where in the world is all of this extra energy going to come from if you remove fossil fuels from the equation? Robotbeat's analysis there is terrifying to me, rather than reassuring. But you can put works like "just" and "only" as modifiers to whatever you want if it makes it sound more achievable.
- kragen 5y ago
  I take it you agree with the calculations, then, but disagree with their implications? Increasing electricity production 5% would not mean mass starvation. China increased electricity production 5% every six months throughout the 02010s. The US did it every year in the 01960s. It's not some kind of impossible obstacle to "maintain[ing] anything like our current lifestyle".
  - time_to_smile 5y ago
    All of those gains are from an increase in the usage of fossil fuels. Yes China is making big growth in renewables but they're making even bigger growth in coal. This is the problem with our intuitions about energy, we're so used to abundant, high energy density, relatively cheap energy that we can't even get our heads around not having it. You quote me but miss the point where I say that this is fine so long as we have unlimited fossil fuels and there are no serious externalities with fossil fuel usage. Both of these conditions are false, but even your reasoning here is assuming these are true. If for some non-fossil fuel related reason we had to switch to primarily electrolysis hydrogen production, then yea, we'd be fine. We haven't even come close to really solving just replacing our current energy demands with entirely renewable energy (which, even assuming perfect battery solutions, also requires growing the overall output of our grid by a factor proportional to intermittent power needs), let alone additional energy requirements that start popping up all over the place once you start removing fossil fuels. This has been a problem that has been well studied and understood for years, but because it leads to the scary conclusion that our current way of life is unsustainable it is brushed off.
    - kragen 5y ago
      This is not correct. I didn't miss your point; I was explaining why your point was wrong. Now I will do that again, even though you discourteously didn't answer the question in my comment: does that mean you agree with Robotbeat's calculations? The combination of apparently refusing to clarify your position with basing your arguments on easily checkable falsehoods, while accusing me of basing mine on "intuition", reduces my willingness to extend good faith to you. Please, do better. China's growth in either solar or wind generation capacity in 02020 was bigger than their growth in coal generation capacity. I haven't seen the 02021 numbers yet but I expect that their coal generation capacity growth in 02021 will turn out to have been actually negative, i.e., not growth but shrinkage, quite aside from the lower-capacity-factor crises resulting from their feud with Australia, their main coal supplier. Quoting from my notes in Dernocua (http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua http://canonical.org/~kragen/dernocua): > Specifically, in 02020, the People’s Republic of China installed 71.7 GW of new wind capacity, 48.2 GW of new solar capacity (which was already larger than the rest of the world combined), and 38.4 GW(e) of coal capacity. Assuming typical capacity factors of 40% for wind, 25% for solar, and 60% for coal, that would add up to 23 GW average new coal, 29 GW average new wind, and 12 GW average new solar. (But China’s capacity factors are lower; see below.) New solar installations worldwide double on average every three years, which has slowed down from every two years in the 02010s. ... > But China is a larger country than Germany. Chinese marketed energy consumption was 28 PWh/year (3.2 TW) in 02010, of which 3.9 PWh/year (440 GW) was electric. In 02019 they produced 7330 TWh electric calculated as (+ 4554 233 148 349 1270 32 405 224 113) rounded to three places. That’s 836 GW. (The 32 TWh of pumped-storage hydro may be double-counted.) In 02019 224 TWh/year (26 GW) was produced from solar and 405 TWh/year (46 GW) from wind, using 204 GW of solar capacity (capacity factor 13%) and 209 GW of wind capacity (capacity factor 22%). Also the 4554 TWh/year from coal (519.5 GW) is on a 1.041 TW basis, so their capacity factor is only 50.0%. Hopefully they’ll start installing their energy plants in more propitious places, like the Gobi, and the capacity factor will go up. > So probably last year’s new installations of 38.4 GW (coal), 71.7 GW (wind), and 48.2 GW (solar) will produce on average 19.2 GW (coal), 16 GW (wind), and 6.3 GW (solar). The resulting 22 GW (average) of renewable energy added last year amounts to 2.6% of the total current electric energy use of China. If we assume that China’s total energy use has increased by 90% since 02010, just as their electrical energy use did by 02019, it would now be 6.1 TW, and 22 GW is 0.36% of it. Solar energy (127 PW at Earth's surface) is far more abundant than fossil-fuel energy consumption, which has never reached more than 15 TW, 0.012% of solar energy. Historically the big problem has been that solar energy, though abundant, was expensive to gather; that problem has now been solved, and solar panels are now cheaper in the world market than either fossil fuels or fossil-fuel plants, let alone the sum of the two. > Both of these conditions are false, but even your reasoning here is assuming these are true. No, my reasoning is based on evidence that says it is feasible and economical to expand power generation using renewable energy. It is not assuming either "unlimited fossil fuels" or "no serious externalities with fossil fuel usage." > We haven't even come close to really solving just replacing our current energy demands with entirely renewable energy (which, even assuming perfect battery solutions, also requires growing the overall output of our grid by a factor proportional to intermittent power needs), let alone additional energy requirements that start popping up all over the place once you start removing fossil fuels. Let's take these one by one. First, current renewable energy production is about 12% of world total primary energy consumption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption#Primary_energy_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...). More than half of this is hydro, which is, roughly speaking, not growing. The other half is solar and wind, which is growing 14% per year, which puts it on track to replace all of world total primary energy consumption in 02043. Wind is currently much larger, and already supplies most electricity in countries like Denmark, but solar is growing about 23% per year and has now reached about 1 TW peak, 150 GW average. That means that it is currently supplying about 0.8% of total marketed energy consumption, 1/128. (Since this is all electric, the percentage for electrical energy is higher.) Of course, when exponential growth is involved, prediction is very difficult, because sooner or later the exponential trend must stop, at which point the trend line diverges from reality by orders of magnitude. Even a small misprediction of the exponential growth rate results in misprediction by an order of magnitude after a few orders of magnitude of growth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#/media/File:PV_cume_semi_log_chart_2014_estimate.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#/media/File:PV_cum... shows that the exponential trend was a fairly consistent 36% per year over the last 30 years, so it seems to be slowing down, but it's unlikely to stop anytime soon. I've investigated the fundamentals and can't find any resource limitation or demand limitation that would prevent it. Solar is currently on track to surpass wind around 02030, so probably we'll move to a majority-renewables energy system before the 02043 you get from extrapolating the overall non-hydro renewables growth rate. As for the intermittency question, it doesn't affect hydrogen electrolysis (a gasometer full of hydrogen is a perfectly reasonable way to store excess energy for up to a month or two) and to the extent that intermittency is managed at the peripheries of the grid rather than the center, it doesn't require additional transmission or distribution capacity as you say either. Moreover, even needing to double transmission or distribution capacity would not be a civilization-destroying crisis; as I said, PRC has done that three times over the last ten years, and to generation capacity too. Finally, the additional energy requirements that start popping up are basically only fixing nitrogen into ammonia, smelting steel, and plastics. All three of these are small compared to the use of fossil fuels as fuels. This is indeed a problem that has been well studied for years, but until five years ago, we didn't know how we could scale up PV production; there was the concern that it might be physically possible but out of our technological reach, like fusion energy. That problem has now been solved, and that is why, for example, Peabody Coal went bankrupt and coal-fired power generation is globally in decline. Our current way of life is unsustainable in many ways, but needing a lot of energy isn't one of them. We can increase our energy usage by two orders of magnitude before it starts to be a sustainability problem.
bob29 5y ago
I believe Robotbeats calculations are lacking if the intent is to demonstrate how much fossil fuel energy is embodied in one unit (joules, calories, etc) of food: -hydrogen is not a primary energy, no accounting for energy needed to produce 1kg of H2 gas -producing ammonia from hydrogen consumes energy -producing corn from ammonia requires more embodied energy than sunlight - other fertilizers, *cides, fuel and construction industrial sized agricultural machinery. Only measuring the chemical energy in quantity of H2 vs the dietary calories in associated corn produced is incomplete model of fossil fuels required in agricultural production. If you are saying the urea price spike has occured in a complete isolation, like temporary specific failure of urea manufacturing , maybe its not a problem. If its one of the first noticable effects of an overall fossil fuel shortage, its going to have huge feedback effects invalidating economic models such as slowing renewable growth, making the whole economy less productive.
- kragen 5y ago
  I agree that it's important to include the complete model of fossil fuels in agricultural production, which is in the paper Enginerrd was citing (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29842158). It turns out that even when you do that the number is still pretty low; most of the energy is used to make ammonia. You might want to put a blank line between your list items so they don't come out as a single paragraph and/or format them with ·, •, or ●. I think the urea price spike is due to a temporary collapse in natural gas production, which is indeed one of the first overall effects of reduced excess production capacity in natural gas, or shippable natural gas anyway. I don't think an overall fossil fuel shortage would slow renewable growth, though; it increases the returns to renewable generation, and renewables production is one of the sectors of the economy least dependent on fossil fuels. I think an overall fossil fuel shortage is unlikely because coal reserves are still enormous and interconversion of different kinds of fossil fuels is lossy.
jandrewrogers 5y ago
Electrolytic production is significantly more expensive, but it isn't 10x or anything like that. Certainly not lifestyle altering. As a practical engineering matter, you'd want to use base load power for this, so it would have to be nuclear, which is why it will not happen in the foreseeable future. Ammonia is a highly fungible global commodity, and is commonly a means for countries with large natural gas resources to produce an easily transportable value-add product from excess natural gas. None of those countries are going to produce electrolytic ammonia because consuming natural gas is the entire point! If it wasn't being turned into ammonia, much of it would ended being vented to the atmosphere or burned off. While it doesn't look like it in isolation, a lot of industrial chemistry is actually reprocessing and finding value in the waste products of other industrial processes. The US currently produces ~10% of the global total, but we used to import ammonia like everyone else until a glut of domestic natural gas made it cost-effective to produce our own (again, a way to consume excess natural gas). Ammonia is feedstock for a ton of cost-sensitive industrial chemistry, not just fertilizer, so costs will show up in places people might not expect.
- kragen 5y ago
  Interesting, why would you want to use baseload power for hydrogen electrolysis rather than solar peaks? That's the opposite of the conclusion I had reached, but maybe my crude models of hydrogen electrolysis are wrong.
  - philipkglass 5y ago
    The reason nuclear-electric hydrogen appeared in past decarbonization plans was that electrolyzers were too expensive to only run at a 25% duty cycle and renewable electricity was more expensive even when the sun was shining. It currently appears that electrolyzer production is going to scale up and drop costs to meet renewables faster than nuclear projects can fix their cost/schedule problems. Here's an industry-focused article that talks about growing manufacturing electrolyzer capacity and lists some recent projects for generating hydrogen with renewables: https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/12/12/sunday-read-making-cheaper-h2/ https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2021/12/12/sunday-read...

jay_kyburz 5y ago

The rts website below suggests that "30-40 percent of the entire US food supply" is wasted. We could start by fixing that. I suspect those of us in wealthy countries also eat _alot_ more that than we should. We are a very long way from mass starvation. [1] https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/ https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/