so, should I get tofurkey for wednesday?31504April 8 2008, 01:18:57 UTC
The other thing that stands out for me about that article is the part about half of the edible food in the U.S. being wasted. Which is at least partly because of shit like stores throwing away perfectly good food because consumers expect (or the stores think they expect) their food to be pretty and unblemished. Not that I'm perfect - sometimes things go bad and I toss them - but goddamn, people.
If you'd like to bring sweet potato(es), that'd be great. I'll pick up steak, spinach and broccoli tomorrow.
Oh, and do you have a relatively slender pair of pliers? Our bathtub needs help, and nothing I have is doing the trick.
And thanks, but no, I'm not to that point yet. :) I'm just trying to be careful about using everything I buy and not getting all picky about "oh, that apple has SPOTS."
Back when I was at an agricultural college, people were arguing whether cattle used 12 or 8 units of grain for every unit of food the cattle produced. Now, that's a little fuzzy because you get somewhat more energy from beef than from the same weight of grain -- but nowhere near 8-12x as much. The estimates I've read indicate that we use about 10x as much energy in heating and moving us about than we do as food, which is to say, if we grew the same amount of biomass and all stopped eating meat, it's possible we could just about support our lifestyles on biomass-produced fuels. (We could probably do much better than that once we get algae biodiesel production working better.)
Between solar, wind, and algae, it should be a piece of cake.
In 2000 or 2001 I saw an article that North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas had enough harnessable wind to power the entire US's electricity needs. Transmission, etc, is still an issue, but that's a lot of cheap power waiting to be harvested.
On one of my chemistry class finals -- I think it might've been Physical Chemistry -- we were asked to calculate how large a solar panel it'd take to power the world, with a big long list of constants and assumptions. I don't recall it being very large, like maybe 15 miles on a side.
Francis Moore Lappe's _Diet for a Small Planet_ was the first cogent argument I heard for vegetarianism. Factory meat is an astonishingly inefficient use of resources. Less than cars, though? I don't think so. Cars are the real scam.
No, meat isn't as bad as cars. But eating meat uses way more raw food than biofuels do. If we wanted to alleviate the current looming grain crisis, eating less meat is a better solution than stopping biofuels (except corn ethanol, which is a hoax).
Good point, but do you actually know anyone who doesn't already understand how inefficient industrial meat production is? I'm not hopeful, as the eating of meat is an indicator of class status and social worth in most modern human cultures.
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Should I bring the sweet potato?
Also, there is a Seattle (food) dumpster diving LJ. I can't find it now, but could ask someone who would know, if you care.
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Oh, and do you have a relatively slender pair of pliers? Our bathtub needs help, and nothing I have is doing the trick.
And thanks, but no, I'm not to that point yet. :) I'm just trying to be careful about using everything I buy and not getting all picky about "oh, that apple has SPOTS."
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Yes, will bring pliers and potato(e).
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The estimates I've read indicate that we use about 10x as much energy in heating and moving us about than we do as food, which is to say, if we grew the same amount of biomass and all stopped eating meat, it's possible we could just about support our lifestyles on biomass-produced fuels.
(We could probably do much better than that once we get algae biodiesel production working better.)
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In 2000 or 2001 I saw an article that North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas had enough harnessable wind to power the entire US's electricity needs. Transmission, etc, is still an issue, but that's a lot of cheap power waiting to be harvested.
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