Jones Beene wrote:
Right figures. Wrong conclusion. It takes only 1/4 acre of land to feed
the average citizen for one year.
Not with the U.S. diet. We eat a tremendous amount of meat, and this takes
10 times more starting plant food (mainly cattle feed). Even with our
fertilizer intense production it takes more than 1/4th acre to feed one
American. The rest of our agricultural land is presently devoted to
producing food for export. If we use it to grow biofuel instead, more
people overseas will starve. Two billion are already at the edge of
starvation and millions die from malnutrition.
If the people working on synthetic meat succeed, this will instantly solve
all the world's food problems. (See
http://www.new-harvest.org/default.php.) This would be the second most
important breakthrough of the last hundred years, after cold fusion.
Intelligently managed, one acre of land can both feed and supply the
energy needs for every citizen.
With a vegetarian diet yes, and only if you don't mind killing a few
million more people overseas.
Once again Pimentel's own previously debunked conclusion do not follow
from fairly accurate figures and have proven his "spin" and racist-tainted
logic laughably incorrect....
These are not Pimentel's figures. They are from NASA, Tokai U., and
Cosmoplant Corp., as noted.
The idea of replacing food crops with biofuel crops may not be racist, but
it ignores the fact that a third of the human population lives on the edge
of starvation. That is as bad as any brutal racist could be. Even if the
biofuel comes from Brazil, that does not excuse the policy. They could grow
food in Brazil instead of fuel.
Although I have grave reservations about things like uranium fission
reactors, I would much rather see the nations of the world build 3,000 more
of them than devote a significant fraction of the world's arable land to
biofuel. Even if that meant a meltdown every year, that would kill fewer
people than biofuel would, and it would eliminate the use of fossil fuel.
As a practical matter it would be better to build the equivalent of ~1,500
fission reactors with wind and solar thermal plants, and ~1,500 advanced
next-generation fission reactors.
(I mean ~3,000 plants of the average U.S. nuke plant size, 900 MWe. This be
approximately enough to produce all of the electricity and synthetic fuel
we now use, with several assumptions about efficiency, plug-in hybrids,
future growth, replacing existing nuke plants, etc., etc. There are
presently 442 nukes worldwide. The U.S. could generate all energy with
about 700 plants: 500 for electricity + fuel synthesis, and 200 for
chemical fuel synthesis only. The whole world needs roughly 700 * 4 = 2,800.)
- Jed
- Re: Photosynthesis upper limits are unclear Jed Rothwell
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