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Large scale modern agricultural takes a lot of oil, fertilizer and pesticide inputs to be viable. It's not sustainable.
by rhinoceraptor 4y ago
Large scale modern agricultural takes a lot of oil, fertilizer and pesticide inputs to be viable. It's not sustainable.
- timeon 4y agoAgriculture can be scaled down a bit if you do not need to feed huge amount of meat.
- eru 4y agoSorry, I don't understand how the second sentence follows from the first.
- pjc50 4y agoWhereas greening the Sahara desert will require .. what inputs exactly? It's just an "agriculture" project on an infeasible scale.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agoWhat's so infeasible about it? Large parts of California have actually been terraformed by means of building large dams far away, canals, aequaducts, tunnels and pumps. Not to mention Nevada, Arizona...
- solomonb 4y agoI think the idea would be to sink significant amounts of water and biomass into the desert and let it slowly develop into a prairie? You don't need fertilizer or pesticide and the parent poster was suggesting using nuclear to power the operation.
- rhinoceraptor 4y agoAssuming the plan to use nuclear energy to power large-scale desalination is at all feasible, the inputs are nuclear fuel and the sun, and perhaps some oil to power vehicles for livestock management. It would also be a giant carbon sink, much better than any tree planting scheme could hope to be. The world's topsoil currently contains about 2500 GT of carbon, compared to 800 GT in the atmosphere [1]. Compared to plant agriculture, which requires a huge amount of natural gas for nitrogen fertilizer production, and just fertilizer production itself a pretty sizable contributor to both CO2 and non-CO2 GHG emissions. Not to mention pesticides, oil for farm equipment, etc. 1: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/soil-carbon-storage-84223790/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/soil-carbo...
- eru 4y ago> Assuming the plan to use nuclear energy to power large-scale desalination is at all feasible, the inputs are nuclear fuel and the sun, and perhaps some oil to power vehicles for livestock management. You can use electric vehicles.. But if you are assuming plenty of cheap nuclear power, you can just synthesize all the hydrocarbons you'd normally need oil for straight out of thin air. Including all the hydrocarbons for conventional agriculture.