Next thing you know we'll have Bayer selling Apple a gigaton of "yield improvement" carbon credits at $1 a pop. But this is an interesting framing of the carbon impact of R&D that I hadn't really considered before.
As you know, biofuels have a very serious impact on indirect land use putting pressures to convert forests to agriculture. We could avoid the need for a whole lot of research by using the US land dedicated to biofuels for feeding people. Also “If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million.” Unfortunately, the best solutions are hiding behind political change.
I just stumbled onto this article - 5 months later - but was thinking along very similar lines as I read this. Maybe in 1961 there was a legitimate concern for being able to feed the world's growing population; I think it's much more difficult to say that today's production levels -- where nearly half of crops raised in the US Upper Midwest go to biofuels, and yet still (for the most part) the world's 8.2M people have enough to eat. With global population projected to go up 20% in the next 50 years... growing enough to eat is not the problem.
Preventing additional land use change for the purpose of growing more crops... is much more concerning. Maintaining ecological systems that are able to support today's production levels -- meaning maintaining or increasing topsoils; maintaining or increasing soil organic matter; and ensuring water (quality and quantity) suffices to produce crops -- is where the research and practice efforts are needed.
Next thing you know we'll have Bayer selling Apple a gigaton of "yield improvement" carbon credits at $1 a pop. But this is an interesting framing of the carbon impact of R&D that I hadn't really considered before.
As you know, biofuels have a very serious impact on indirect land use putting pressures to convert forests to agriculture. We could avoid the need for a whole lot of research by using the US land dedicated to biofuels for feeding people. Also “If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million.” Unfortunately, the best solutions are hiding behind political change.
I just stumbled onto this article - 5 months later - but was thinking along very similar lines as I read this. Maybe in 1961 there was a legitimate concern for being able to feed the world's growing population; I think it's much more difficult to say that today's production levels -- where nearly half of crops raised in the US Upper Midwest go to biofuels, and yet still (for the most part) the world's 8.2M people have enough to eat. With global population projected to go up 20% in the next 50 years... growing enough to eat is not the problem.
Preventing additional land use change for the purpose of growing more crops... is much more concerning. Maintaining ecological systems that are able to support today's production levels -- meaning maintaining or increasing topsoils; maintaining or increasing soil organic matter; and ensuring water (quality and quantity) suffices to produce crops -- is where the research and practice efforts are needed.