Kunilou,
I admire your persistence. Perhaps your looking at it wrong. You want a solar powered tractor basically. Well how about growing food without tractors?
I can tell you a new method of feeding cattle and other meat animals that requires less land is fodder feeding. In it you grow the animal feed which is healthier than manufactured feed and uses less pastureland than normal grazing. Here is one link: http://www.fodderfeed.org/
So basically with a system like this I could feed my animals highly nutritious fresh feed even in the worse droughts or the dead of winter. Countries like China and Australia which have arable land issues are getting behind this. Now it does take more energy but THAT could be from a renewable source like solar.
One can also look into hydroponics. With the right hydroponics you could grow fresh vegetables year around in even the harshest climates.
No, I was just trying to completely answer** Try2Be**. My own feeling is that we need a whole constellation of little things – some smaller but more diverse farms, improvements in cropping practices, even biotechnology.
I like what the Mennonites do with their operations. They aren’t anti-technology, but they also aren’t into the bigger-is-better mindset and they’re very conservation-oriented.
I’m not sure what you’re asking for to ‘make the case’. I think we agree that carbon levels at their highest point in 3 million years is no bueno, and that the cost of doing nothing is going to be unacceptable.
I’m not sure just how much we’d have to cut emissions to bring pollution under control, I use an estimate of 75%-90%. If we’re looking at everything- personal transportation, shipping, trucking, mining, agriculture, etc- we might be able to make an argument that we could leave a sector to be powered by fossil fuels if we adjust the rest. I think an all of the above approach is going to work best though- if we are going to recognize what emissions are doing, we really ought to tackle them in every sector.
In terms of $, it is hard to say. Right now there are hundreds of billions in profits going to various fossil fuel companies. Shrinking the whole industry would in the long run leave a lot of resources available for other endeavors. Recognizing the problem as a threat and reallocating defense spending to address it instead of imaginary foes is another. Reversing the Reagan tax cuts is another source of government funding if we want to incentivize the process. In the long run I’d expect a lot of new industries to employ a lot of people and make a lot of money on a project like this (or old ones. Is John Deere going away? I doubt it)
ISTM it is something we have to confront. I think deciding just what to do and getting people to go along could be harder than coming up with the money (Urbanredneck’s ideas look to be on the right track, but I can see people resisting moving to them). Can you flesh out your objection for me?
Are you sure about that? A lot of people take it as gospel that we have to stop climate change regardless of the cost. I think people who feel that way may not have really looked at the costs and benefits. Bjørn Lomborg claims it would require a global cost of $150B per year (in terms of actual expenditures and reduced productivity). Year after year. If you want to make the world a better place, a cost-benefit analysis suggests that there are far better ways to spend that money.
Here’s a TED talk where he makes his case that we would be better off simply adapting to climate change and spending that $150B on projects that provide far larger and more immediate benefits to humanity.
That’s only 1% of the annual GDP of only US alone. It’s about 0.2% of the current worldwide annual GDP. And estimated crop failures (by insurance companies - hardly ivory tower academics) eat into a good portion of this, as they’re already seeing insurance costs increase by tens of billions in coming years, much less the direct cost to farmers and consumers.
As an economic argument, that’s not as strong as you might think, especially if mitigation efforts produce new, exploitable technologies which reduce this figure further.
Yeah, $1 billion sounds like a lot. But if you said it would cost $1 Billion (!!!) to get to the moon, I’d say that’s rather cheap.
The reason fossil fuel companies makes hundreds of billions in profits is not because everyone likes them, but because fossil fuels are the most efficient way of getting energy. If every farm has to replace diesel engines with smaller more expensive hybrids then farms are going to have to be smaller. 1 kilometer wide solar panel grids are going to cost huge amounts of money and be more expensive to run. All this means food is going to cost a significant amount more. That means millions of people will have to be told McDonalds is a once a month treat instead of once a week. Since everyone has to spend more on food they will have less to spend on everything else and we will have a large recession.
For this we get to cut out the carbon burned running farm equipment, since that is a fraction of our overall carbon footprint and since the US contribution to carbon output is shrinking as a percentage while other countries is rising it will have a very small overall effect on global warming. You will have ruined our farming industry for maybe a postponement of a couple of weeks.
I know it was posted upthread. I was the one who posted it. And if you re-read the link you’ll see that it’s a tractor with a built-in electric generator to power pull-behind equipment. It’s NOT an electrically powered tractor; it has a conventional diesel engine both for motive power and to power the generator.
Try2B, no one in this thread is saying taking a more environmental approach to agriculture is a bad thing, we’re just saying that converting every farm in the world to all-electric tools is not as easy as you’re assuming.
Right, but it is an excellent example of the kind of progress I’m looking for. If we can install a generator on a tractor, why can’t we run it with electric motors? While gasoline is the world champ when it comes to energy density in fuel, electric motors are actually far more powerful pound-for-pound than ICE engines. So, using diesel or biofuel or whatever to power a generator that charges a battery that runs the electric motors would be yet more fuel-efficient. If you can plug it in before the shift and/or receive power via microwave from the battery tower, all the better.
The thing could power electric water pumps, hay balers, all kinds of power equipment for constructing housing for all the homeless migrant hippies of the future who will have the opportunity to subsist on these electric farms in exchange for environmentally friendly, not-excessively-capitalistic labor. Large lodges with more centralized restrooms and kitchens. Pot is legal, crime is illegal, basically wandering displaced homeless people of the future eternal recession are invited to come and squat in the shelter, make friends, learn how to produce pollution-neutral sustenance to the world.
This sentence puts words in my mouth. I never said this project would be easy. OTOH, we practically don’t have any choice- we have to stop polluting the atmosphere, and we have to do it pronto. Other options are ultimately unethical (to an American) since we have the resources and the stability to make it happen (though there are probably solutions that don’t involve a homeless-population invasion).
Now, by ‘make it happen’, it is still possible that the overall solution will end up allocating NGLs or something to the agricultural sector, not making it fossil-free at all, and everything else is going to run on electric or biofuels or _______. But I kind of doubt it, and so we can’t waste time countenancing the “we can’t do it” POV.
Well again if I were you I would focus on hydroponics or fodder feeding which uses less land and large equipment to produce more food in a smaller location.
Yes, I think hydroponics have a lot of potential. For one, they can answer one of the main objections raised to my idea, raised by Habeed
Sure, I suppose we could encourage millions of bats to roost underneath our solar panels and come up with some way of collecting the guano and spreading it on the fields with electric tractors. Or we could resort to aquaponics in order to deal with the nitrogen cycle.
Advantages: Hydroponic greenhouses pair well with large expanses of solar panels. As the effects of climate change take effect, growing food under some shelter is a great way to adapt to an increasingly hostile environment.
Drawbacks: How much does it cost? Can we scale it up to an industrial scale?
Maybe this is a big part of the answer. For example, an aquaponic greenhouse might not require vehicles much more robust than golf carts, solving the electric tractor problem. I’ll have to take a closer look at it.
Yes, the provenance is questionable, but I remember hearing it and John Steele Gordon remembers hearing it, and if it’s good enough for him it’s good enough for me.
Comprehensive, I’d have to carefully study plant chemistry to give you a definitive answer. However, my instinct is to point out that usually thermodynamics blocks “free lunches”, as it were. If you need to supply tremendous energy to produce nitrated fertilizer to get fast growing crops, there may not be an alternate method that doesn’t supply just as much energy.
The easiest way to see this is that entropy must always increase overall, and so you have to increase entropy somewhere else if you want to decrease it. Producing a complex plant from C02/water/trace elements is a decrease in entropy.
Speaking of protein, consider these points, from here:
Step one in reducing the petroleum consumption of agriculture is to stop the colossal waste of effort that is corn ethanol. In theory we could simply cut out that entire sector, reducing petroleum used in corn production by an instant 40%. In practice that will result in a lot of angry, out-of-work farmers and we’d have to proceed more carefully than that. I hope dropzone has the time to turn his budget ire toward this silly practice.
Another 1/3 of our corn is used to feed livestock. While your fodder-feeding technique is probably a more efficient way to go about it, the kinds of changes we’re contemplating here extend to changing the way we think about livestock. If our hydroponic crops co-exist symbiotically with an aquaculture, we can have fish protein with a lot less effort.
Yes, if the effort level in agriculture is going to have to go up to take the petroleum out of the process, something is going to have to give. We can theoretically eliminate 70% of our corn production before we even start if we do away with both cattle and ethanol. In practice, a lot of ranch land really isn’t good for much else besides raising cattle, and people aren’t going to be persuaded to give up beef even if Fox started telling them it is a good idea. I’m saying that I don’t see hydroponic agriculture being used to support a lot of livestock, so if these kinds of plans take hold there is going to be upward pressure on the price of things like beef.
Now, I’m thinking of insect farming as a way of providing food for chickens and maybe our aquaculture. As a source of protein for a crowded, impoverished world, well, I guess we’ll see if it catches on.
The point of this is to point out that producing grains and proteins under our current way of doing things is extremely inefficient. If the only goal were to reduce carbon emissions, doing away with ethanol and reducing beef consumption would go quite a long way without any other changes at all being implemented.
Right, too many pie-in-the-sky proposals and suddenly we find ourselves up to our eyeballs in debt. That’s why I pointed out the folly of the F-35, the size of our carrier fleet and other points of military waste upthread. It seems the sacred cows in our budget are never the things that directly address real problems and needs of the population at large.
Yes, changing to fossil-free agriculture will probably raise costs. But sticking with the status quo is going to lead to the same thing. If you have a minute, check out this article on the energy trap. Fair warning- it deals with peak oil problems, but it is written by a respected physics professor.
I don’t think peak oil has happened yet, and I don’t have a clear idea of when it will. I suspect it is coming though, and if we wait too long to address both it and climate change, the costs from those are going to far outweigh the costs of taking action now.
Habeed: could you rephrase your point? I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to say.
Some quick googling, and I found the answers. Turning N2 gas -> NH3 requires a large amount of energy. The “natural” way is that nitrogen fixing bacteria take energy supplied by the host plant and perform this conversion, using a biological enzyme. This means that out of all the energy the plant produces, a big chunk of it must go to fixing nitrogen.
When you dump synthetic fertilizer on the plant, it no longer needs to divert so much energy to fixing nitrogen, and the plant will grow much faster. For any given amount of arable land, you’ll get better productivity if you use synthetic fertilizers. There are no alternatives to this. No amount of woo-woo lets you cheat thermodynamics. Things like “bat guano” and so on are not solutions, as they are limited resources. 1% of the world’s production of energy goes to this process.
Viable solutions to the problem : we can put photovoltaic panels or mirror arrays on non-arable land, and use the heat or electricity to run our Haber process plants during the daytime only. This at least effectively lets us use non-arable land to boost the productivity of the arable land.
We can use nuclear heat directly to supply the energy to run the haber process. This is a better use of a nuclear reactor than driving turbogenerators, because you are using the heat/steam directly instead of losing 60% of it as waste heat. Unfortunately, as you are well aware, a nuclear fission reactor involves a massive quantity of material that is not passively stable and it is deadly to all life in a large area if it ever escapes. If mishandled, it also lets you build weapons. This means over the long term, it is harder to make nuclear energy cheaper than it is to make alternatives cheaper.
In fact, just the other day I thanked a customer for using biowaste instead of food to produce ethanol. Still not perfect, but a step. Of course, for hungry farm animals the difference between biowaste and food is not always clear. See: silage.
The question is: if beef production were reduced but silage production stayed constant, could machinery running on biogas produce surplus silage at a profit? To what degree can biogas displace fossil fuels in agriculture?
Of course I’m not going to rest my case on woo-woo. I agree that fossilized guano is a limited resource, as is potash. In the case of guano anyway, we don’t have to wait for nature to leave us a deposit, we can encourage the process
Although admittedly this approach has its limitations:
If it were possible to produce enough aquaponic fish to take significant market share away from wild ocean fishing, fish stocks could be restored and the guano-generating birds may yet return. In conjunction with encouraging our own hordes of bats to replenish our guano supplies. Strange that the fate of so many might hinge on such things, no?
Daytime only solar is going to fade into the past as storage gains ground, see here:
Yes, this would serve to help remove the fossil fuels from agriculture. Besides using renewables to run our Haber process (supplemented by birds and bats), we could also use it to produce hydrogen via electrolysis instead of from natural gas. It doesn’t seem like the most elegant solution at first, until you factor in the [zero carbon emissions] part.
I’m going to have to look into it all some more though. This thread has been very productive so far in terms of giving me things to chew on.
Storage is still a long way off, but we are going to need it if we ever want significant load from wind and solar. There are still significant gains to be had by CH&P; I haven’t run the numbers for nuke+HB, but folks are also looking into smaller scale, such as building-size power plus heating/cooling.