170 petawatts. We use 10 terrawatts. But our energy demands are fixed. Even the hated USA uses 10 kW per person. And as societies get more industrial, people have less kids (apparently, people like cars, computers, cell phones, etc. more than kids). The best way to conserve energy is to promote economic development, so we start to reduce population growth. One thing about the sun though is that if you fill the whole planet with solar panels, you do not run out of energy. You just get 170 petawatts. We can't use it up until peak solar in the year 1 billion (approx) because the sun will start to explode. When we do, I think we won't care about sunlight anymore, except to light our crew cabins:-p.
You start. Turn of your computer. We'll have another industrial revolution and you'll be left in the dust with that kind of attitude. Would you like to move to Africa or Cuba?
The problem with Lucas' argument is that he states that there is some region of possibilities that cannot be described by mathematical logic (for example, "this statement is false."). He then assumes that the universe is in this region. Except that this region only includes nonsense statements, so ether the universe is nonsense or it is mathematical.
You think it is nonsense, I think it is mathematical. Can you propose a theory, or hypothesis that is not reducible to math or random numbers, yet is internally inconsistent and not vacuous?
But the system makes 12 times as much oil as it consumes. So it does not matter if it is and oil driven technology. You can say what ever the hell you want about scaling. It does not make a difference because all the plants are independent, you have built one, you have built two, three, four as your business exponentially grows.
Good luck to you and your horse commune. You guys haven't drowned in horse crud yet have you? Cause I'm not gonna bail you out.
Just so you understand, nuclear has insanely high EROEI. Solar has 20X EROEI. We currently have the technology to do electricity to liquids at %63 percent. I would do this in my house, but I could not get the required catalysts, nor would anyone want to have 50+ atm in their house. Solar PV can provide real gasoline and oil at $9 a gallon currently (actually a few years ago). Wind turbines could potentially do it at less than $3 a gallon. Solar thermal is cheaper. Possibly less if you use the thermochemical engines linked.
Here's the process. Electricity is used to make hydrogen by dipping some stainless steel plates in baking soda. This can be up to %70 efficient. Then, baking soda would be heated to release CO2. The CO2 and the hydrogen would be heated by concentrated sunlight. Once they are heated, the same process the Nazi's and New Zealanders (what a combo) and the same process used to make methanol industrially today will kick in (%80-90). And you will have petroleum. Next time I can do my own project in a real lab, this will be it. Also, since it is %63 efficient, solar will have a real 12.6 EROEI. You and the likes of you can go back to horses, but I'm not going to stop the Chinese guys from taking your land while they drive their nuclear powered hummers.
And, if Einstein is the end-all-be-all explanation of all things physical, why do we need quantum mechanics?
Scientists don't say it's the end-all-be-all. Other people put those words into our mouths.
And, when you bring Godel's Incompleteness into it, this makes sense.
Godel's incompleteness states that no system can be both consistent and complete. Therefore, if the universe is consistent, it is not complete. If the universe is not consistent, it is not complete. It does not say the universe is not consistent. It could be though. If so, it would contain some element of randomness. Also, if the universe was complete, everything would be possible. This clearly not true. So thus, it is unlikely that Godel's theorem applies.
There is a fundamental disconnect between what we can know and what is.
Sadly, there may always be. We don't know though, but we can increase the probability that we are right. Please remember that all technology is the result of science and math, and that it works.
All we know for sure is that some set of localized [and incomplete/incompatible] theories is all we can ever hope to gain from methodological naturalism.
Only if the universe is both consistent and complete. The universe is ether deterministic and everything is not possible or it is random and everything could be possible - that's the result of Godel's theorem. Not that science can't understand it with one unified theory. I'm currently working on a proof that all other ideas the world (all philosophies, religions, etc.) are reducible to one of four things: internal inconsistency (many religions), vacuous truth (I.E., they say nothing factual about the universe), randomness with definite probabilities (QM), or a deterministic set of laws about the universe (Newton's laws).
Please note that general relativity and quantum mechanics are completely happy together, and do mix. See the Dirac equation. The problem is quantum gravity. This is a though thing to deal with because gravity has such a small effect at quantum scales that it is really hard to measure.
Actually, the current theory is a bit weird, but what happens is three things. Please keep in mind that we think that the universe is infinite but not eternal. The first thing is that what we see is a bubble 13.7 lightyears in radius inside this infinite universe, expanding by 1 lightyear per year. The second weird thing is that there was a short period of FTL expansion when the universe was starting, called inflation. The third weird thing is that several types of apparent FTL are in play. One is that if something is flying away from you at say 3/4 the speed of light, and something else is flying away from you in the other direction, you have see something that looks like FTL. It's not though, due to time dilation.
The understanding of how exactly special and general relativity act in apparent FTL will be left as an exercise reader, as the author does not understand those theories and thus cannot explain them to you.
I'm a centrist. I know because the leftwinger up here disagreed with me, and just a little while a go a rightwinger disagreed with me.
I would say that everyone who places something else above the human race (god, environment, health, morality, etc.) is inherently opposed to the human race. They know that human (and computer) ingenuity is the way we survive and grow.
I care about the environment not because of the environment, but because humans are dependant on the environment. Biology does not and never will care about us, because it cannot think. That means it just does things randomly, and the next random thing it does might be to wipe us out. We must eliminate our dependence on the earth and biology if we are to survive.
Keep in mind that in the dark ages, innovation was stymied by totalitarian governments and kingdoms. A new land was found, and a new, more free government was created - the USA. This lead to revolutions throughout the kingdoms until democracy replaced many of them. Maybe it is time to find a new land again? The bottom of the ocean (rich in unobtainium)?
I see possible uses for GMO crops, but they are not what is implemented.
I agree with you. I just do not want to conflate agrobusiness with GMO technology because agrobusiness uses the technology.
That's the defining characteristic of market capitalism.
In a true capitalist society (a regulated one), the costs of doing business are payed by the business and the profits are kept by the business. In an ideal communist society, the profits and costs are shared. In a corrupt communist (corporatist) society, the profits are kept by the business, while the costs and risks shared.
Nope, I don't, and you don't understand what I'm saying. GMO and hunger are completely orthogonal to each other. Hunger is a social and military problem, which can be solved by economic development powered by renewable energy. GMO and evil agrobusiness are completely orthogonal to eachother.
GMO is a method for improving the efficiency of the converting solar energy into people energy. That's what agriculture is. Everything else about community, ecosystems, pollution, and stuff are just side reactions, some undesirable, some debatable, and some desirable (jobs for unemployed).
Evil agrobusiness (not all are) is about perverting the meaning of capitalism through corruption. It is a form of communism where the risks and cost of doing business, are shared with the public, (in this case, poor people in brazil), while the profits are privatized. I don't agree that their leaders should be shot. That is a decision for Brazilians, not us (you're against imperialism, right?).
So once again, please do not make the connection between GMO and agrobusiness. GMO is a farming technique, attempting to improve the efficiency of converting solar energy into people energy, while minimising the amount of pollution. We can agree or disagree about its effectiveness. Evil agrobusiness is a method of creating communism by externalizing costs to increase profits. They are orthogonal.
Why do you ignore it isn't "made"? Heck, nothing is made, just transformed. Oil in Germany was "made" simply from another fossil fuel (and introducing a lot of inneficiency in the process)
Actually, there was not much inefficiency in the process, it was %80+ efficient. And the starting material was not coal, but CO2 + H2, because that was what they converted the coal into first.
thing like that doesn't help with excessive usage of "global hectares" (past, present or future) at all! Quite the contrary.
But what are most of those hectares used for? Food. Not nuclear power, which takes up basically no space, or desert space, or polluted space, or other space that no one cares about. That's because food is less than %0.1 percent efficient at converting solar energy into fuel for people. The ecosystem around that is incidental, and just useless inefficiency. Nuclear power reduces the amount of space by synthesising catalysts (fertilisers) for the process. Ironically, the ultimate sustainable agriculture process would be to upload your mind to a computer, and connect it solar panels. That would be hundreds of times more efficient than all other proposals.
We can be sure about conservation or sustainable agriculture - that's what biosphere on Earth has been doing for millions of years!
The only reason we've been sustainable is because of improvements in agriculture. Population has grown, and technology has compensated. If it were not for technology, we would have catastrophes over and over.
I'm talking about simple fact that this will be a huge industrial infrastructure, which needs to be built and maintained. An infrastructure probably dwarfing our current installed industrial base.
There is no reason to assume that nuclear would require more industrial base than fossil fuels. It would require more advanced infrastructure. What resources are overused besides energy, fresh water, and hydrocarbons, all of which nuclear will make? Iron? Nope. Copper? Nope. Aluminium? No way. Silicon? No way. Carbon dioxide? We've got a bit too much of that. Calcium? Nope. Unobtainium? no or not very much unobtainium in nuclear power. Your statement basically boils down to: industrial activity produces negative externalities. You fail to recognise that biological activity produces negative externalities. If you really cared about the planet, you'd go to the moon, so you have no effect upon the earth. And, if you're so concerned about the environment, do you practice what you preach (sustainable agriculture and conservation)? Because by using that computer, you are producing industrial activity, which is unsustainable, and by your definition can't be.
But from your sig I take it that's your magical solution which will surely work, no doubt about it...
Nope. There are 2000+ magical solutions being tested in labs today. That one is just an extremely well tested approach. It's also one that people forget - why re-solve the hydrogen storage problem when gasoline is a solution? The magical solution is human creativity and ingenuity - run out of that, we're dead.
Ultimately, the universe is the best simulation of itself, and we'll find out who's right soon enough...
That's what you don't seem to get. Oil is not some magic thing. YOU CAN MAKE IT. It was done in Germany. It was done in New Zealand. It is done today from gas to methanol. We can't be one hundred percent sure of nuclear power, and nor can you be 100 percent sure about conservation or sustainable agriculture, nor can you be 100 percent sure that oil is even unsustainable.
But with a calculator and some data, we can show that nuclear is likely to provide all energy needs for 100,000 years using just uranium from sea water. Thorium is millions of years from rocks. Technology is exponential, and by the time 100,000 years is through, we (or robots) will be flying across the galaxy, playing with toy nuclear reactors in first grade.
That probably is wrong. Nuclear to oil with current, proven technology is around 30 percent efficient (nuclear -> heat -> electricity -> hydrogen -> oil). By the time you have enough nuclear powerplants to generate at peak power, you can make oil when they aren't running. General atomics is working on a way to make hydrogen using just nuclear heat (others are working on just solar heat), that will be more efficient, and still have most of the power generation capacity left. Besides, nuclear power plants are so tiny and use so little resources that building even ten times as many is not a big deal.
Nope, that's why I brought up nuclear, which is viable right now, with all the externalities, all the infrastructure, all the inefficiency, all the crap taken into account. Except for one: bureaucracy. So ask China and Japan about it.
People are machinery. There's no law that say a machine could not harvest an ecosystem, nor build one. Once you learn, you could program robots to run the ecosystem. It won't be easy, but it is possible.
But I've done enough to see that this is profitable (in terms of expenses reduced, quality gained, carbon footprint reduced, learning gained) to learn about and get set up -- profitable not just for myself, but for my planet. It's a lifestyle change that's worth making. Look into it or no. I don't much care. I have better groceries than you, ones that don't take oil to ship, time to shop for, and minimal time and effort to grow.
Meantime, I will work on reversing the process of combustion with solar energy, turning waste in to oil, and building electric SUVs (turns out that bigger = more batteries = better), running steam engines on solar, etc, etc. It takes all kinds. I'm in highschool right now, so my options are a bit limited...
Actually if you read the article, you'll see that at one point ammonia was produced with hydrogen from hydroelectric power. You could produce the hydrogen from any source of electric energy, but it's very expensive. An exciting development is the use of thermochemical engines to produce hydrogen from solar at %50+ efficiencies. That could also produce gasoline. If you have the hydrogen, and you have carbon dioxide (there are many processes to trap it), you have oil via FT.
The term "liberal" is a description of a set of political ideas and social graces, just like the term "neocon" or "redneck". I'm a US centrist, so I hate everyone;-). IMO, there's really four main parties in the USA: the Obama voters, the Hillary voters (me, well not voter because I was too young), the religious right, and the corporate right.
So why don't you buy a big land and start a permaculture farm there? Sounds like it would be profitable and if you sold it, VC's would go for it (trust me, many Silicon Valley VC's are organic food types).
Slashdot Mirror
170 petawatts. We use 10 terrawatts. But our energy demands are fixed. Even the hated USA uses 10 kW per person. And as societies get more industrial, people have less kids (apparently, people like cars, computers, cell phones, etc. more than kids). The best way to conserve energy is to promote economic development, so we start to reduce population growth. One thing about the sun though is that if you fill the whole planet with solar panels, you do not run out of energy. You just get 170 petawatts. We can't use it up until peak solar in the year 1 billion (approx) because the sun will start to explode. When we do, I think we won't care about sunlight anymore, except to light our crew cabins :-p.
You start. Turn of your computer. We'll have another industrial revolution and you'll be left in the dust with that kind of attitude. Would you like to move to Africa or Cuba?
This story appears to be a dupe.
Iridium, a form of unobtainium, is used. This costs upwards of $13,000 per kg. About 3 tons are produced a year.
The problem with Lucas' argument is that he states that there is some region of possibilities that cannot be described by mathematical logic (for example, "this statement is false."). He then assumes that the universe is in this region. Except that this region only includes nonsense statements, so ether the universe is nonsense or it is mathematical.
You think it is nonsense, I think it is mathematical. Can you propose a theory, or hypothesis that is not reducible to math or random numbers, yet is internally inconsistent and not vacuous?
But the system makes 12 times as much oil as it consumes. So it does not matter if it is and oil driven technology. You can say what ever the hell you want about scaling. It does not make a difference because all the plants are independent, you have built one, you have built two, three, four as your business exponentially grows.
Good luck to you and your horse commune. You guys haven't drowned in horse crud yet have you? Cause I'm not gonna bail you out.
Good luck to you too, Oh trollish one.
You and all alike will be dragged into the atomic age, kicking and screaming. Forget the horses and buy a hummer. And if not, the sun shall reverse the process. And even then, there is renewable petroleum at your local restaurant.
Just so you understand, nuclear has insanely high EROEI. Solar has 20X EROEI. We currently have the technology to do electricity to liquids at %63 percent. I would do this in my house, but I could not get the required catalysts, nor would anyone want to have 50+ atm in their house. Solar PV can provide real gasoline and oil at $9 a gallon currently (actually a few years ago). Wind turbines could potentially do it at less than $3 a gallon. Solar thermal is cheaper. Possibly less if you use the thermochemical engines linked.
Here's the process. Electricity is used to make hydrogen by dipping some stainless steel plates in baking soda. This can be up to %70 efficient. Then, baking soda would be heated to release CO2. The CO2 and the hydrogen would be heated by concentrated sunlight. Once they are heated, the same process the Nazi's and New Zealanders (what a combo) and the same process used to make methanol industrially today will kick in (%80-90). And you will have petroleum. Next time I can do my own project in a real lab, this will be it. Also, since it is %63 efficient, solar will have a real 12.6 EROEI. You and the likes of you can go back to horses, but I'm not going to stop the Chinese guys from taking your land while they drive their nuclear powered hummers.
This is very true.
And, if Einstein is the end-all-be-all explanation of all things physical, why do we need quantum mechanics?
Scientists don't say it's the end-all-be-all. Other people put those words into our mouths.
And, when you bring Godel's Incompleteness into it, this makes sense.
Godel's incompleteness states that no system can be both consistent and complete. Therefore, if the universe is consistent, it is not complete. If the universe is not consistent, it is not complete. It does not say the universe is not consistent. It could be though. If so, it would contain some element of randomness. Also, if the universe was complete, everything would be possible. This clearly not true. So thus, it is unlikely that Godel's theorem applies.
There is a fundamental disconnect between what we can know and what is.
Sadly, there may always be. We don't know though, but we can increase the probability that we are right. Please remember that all technology is the result of science and math, and that it works.
All we know for sure is that some set of localized [and incomplete/incompatible] theories is all we can ever hope to gain from methodological naturalism.
Only if the universe is both consistent and complete. The universe is ether deterministic and everything is not possible or it is random and everything could be possible - that's the result of Godel's theorem. Not that science can't understand it with one unified theory. I'm currently working on a proof that all other ideas the world (all philosophies, religions, etc.) are reducible to one of four things: internal inconsistency (many religions), vacuous truth (I.E., they say nothing factual about the universe), randomness with definite probabilities (QM), or a deterministic set of laws about the universe (Newton's laws).
Please note that general relativity and quantum mechanics are completely happy together, and do mix. See the Dirac equation. The problem is quantum gravity. This is a though thing to deal with because gravity has such a small effect at quantum scales that it is really hard to measure.
Actually, the current theory is a bit weird, but what happens is three things. Please keep in mind that we think that the universe is infinite but not eternal. The first thing is that what we see is a bubble 13.7 lightyears in radius inside this infinite universe, expanding by 1 lightyear per year. The second weird thing is that there was a short period of FTL expansion when the universe was starting, called inflation. The third weird thing is that several types of apparent FTL are in play. One is that if something is flying away from you at say 3/4 the speed of light, and something else is flying away from you in the other direction, you have see something that looks like FTL. It's not though, due to time dilation.
The understanding of how exactly special and general relativity act in apparent FTL will be left as an exercise reader, as the author does not understand those theories and thus cannot explain them to you.
I'm a centrist. I know because the leftwinger up here disagreed with me, and just a little while a go a rightwinger disagreed with me.
I would say that everyone who places something else above the human race (god, environment, health, morality, etc.) is inherently opposed to the human race. They know that human (and computer) ingenuity is the way we survive and grow.
I care about the environment not because of the environment, but because humans are dependant on the environment. Biology does not and never will care about us, because it cannot think. That means it just does things randomly, and the next random thing it does might be to wipe us out. We must eliminate our dependence on the earth and biology if we are to survive.
Keep in mind that in the dark ages, innovation was stymied by totalitarian governments and kingdoms. A new land was found, and a new, more free government was created - the USA. This lead to revolutions throughout the kingdoms until democracy replaced many of them. Maybe it is time to find a new land again? The bottom of the ocean (rich in unobtainium)?
Yep. I just say that to piss of all the conservatives - Bush is communist because he baled out the banks.
I see possible uses for GMO crops, but they are not what is implemented.
I agree with you. I just do not want to conflate agrobusiness with GMO technology because agrobusiness uses the technology.
That's the defining characteristic of market capitalism.
In a true capitalist society (a regulated one), the costs of doing business are payed by the business and the profits are kept by the business. In an ideal communist society, the profits and costs are shared. In a corrupt communist (corporatist) society, the profits are kept by the business, while the costs and risks shared.
Nope, I don't, and you don't understand what I'm saying. GMO and hunger are completely orthogonal to each other. Hunger is a social and military problem, which can be solved by economic development powered by renewable energy. GMO and evil agrobusiness are completely orthogonal to eachother.
GMO is a method for improving the efficiency of the converting solar energy into people energy. That's what agriculture is. Everything else about community, ecosystems, pollution, and stuff are just side reactions, some undesirable, some debatable, and some desirable (jobs for unemployed).
Evil agrobusiness (not all are) is about perverting the meaning of capitalism through corruption. It is a form of communism where the risks and cost of doing business, are shared with the public, (in this case, poor people in brazil), while the profits are privatized. I don't agree that their leaders should be shot. That is a decision for Brazilians, not us (you're against imperialism, right?).
So once again, please do not make the connection between GMO and agrobusiness. GMO is a farming technique, attempting to improve the efficiency of converting solar energy into people energy, while minimising the amount of pollution. We can agree or disagree about its effectiveness. Evil agrobusiness is a method of creating communism by externalizing costs to increase profits. They are orthogonal.
Why do you ignore it isn't "made"? Heck, nothing is made, just transformed. Oil in Germany was "made" simply from another fossil fuel (and introducing a lot of inneficiency in the process)
Actually, there was not much inefficiency in the process, it was %80+ efficient. And the starting material was not coal, but CO2 + H2, because that was what they converted the coal into first.
thing like that doesn't help with excessive usage of "global hectares" (past, present or future) at all! Quite the contrary.
But what are most of those hectares used for? Food. Not nuclear power, which takes up basically no space, or desert space, or polluted space, or other space that no one cares about. That's because food is less than %0.1 percent efficient at converting solar energy into fuel for people. The ecosystem around that is incidental, and just useless inefficiency. Nuclear power reduces the amount of space by synthesising catalysts (fertilisers) for the process. Ironically, the ultimate sustainable agriculture process would be to upload your mind to a computer, and connect it solar panels. That would be hundreds of times more efficient than all other proposals.
We can be sure about conservation or sustainable agriculture - that's what biosphere on Earth has been doing for millions of years!
The only reason we've been sustainable is because of improvements in agriculture. Population has grown, and technology has compensated. If it were not for technology, we would have catastrophes over and over.
I'm talking about simple fact that this will be a huge industrial infrastructure, which needs to be built and maintained. An infrastructure probably dwarfing our current installed industrial base.
There is no reason to assume that nuclear would require more industrial base than fossil fuels. It would require more advanced infrastructure. What resources are overused besides energy, fresh water, and hydrocarbons, all of which nuclear will make? Iron? Nope. Copper? Nope. Aluminium? No way. Silicon? No way. Carbon dioxide? We've got a bit too much of that. Calcium? Nope. Unobtainium? no or not very much unobtainium in nuclear power. Your statement basically boils down to: industrial activity produces negative externalities. You fail to recognise that biological activity produces negative externalities. If you really cared about the planet, you'd go to the moon, so you have no effect upon the earth. And, if you're so concerned about the environment, do you practice what you preach (sustainable agriculture and conservation)? Because by using that computer, you are producing industrial activity, which is unsustainable, and by your definition can't be.
But from your sig I take it that's your magical solution which will surely work, no doubt about it...
Nope. There are 2000+ magical solutions being tested in labs today. That one is just an extremely well tested approach. It's also one that people forget - why re-solve the hydrogen storage problem when gasoline is a solution? The magical solution is human creativity and ingenuity - run out of that, we're dead.
Ultimately, the universe is the best simulation of itself, and we'll find out who's right soon enough...
That's what you don't seem to get. Oil is not some magic thing. YOU CAN MAKE IT. It was done in Germany. It was done in New Zealand. It is done today from gas to methanol. We can't be one hundred percent sure of nuclear power, and nor can you be 100 percent sure about conservation or sustainable agriculture, nor can you be 100 percent sure that oil is even unsustainable.
But with a calculator and some data, we can show that nuclear is likely to provide all energy needs for 100,000 years using just uranium from sea water. Thorium is millions of years from rocks. Technology is exponential, and by the time 100,000 years is through, we (or robots) will be flying across the galaxy, playing with toy nuclear reactors in first grade.
That probably is wrong. Nuclear to oil with current, proven technology is around 30 percent efficient (nuclear -> heat -> electricity -> hydrogen -> oil). By the time you have enough nuclear powerplants to generate at peak power, you can make oil when they aren't running. General atomics is working on a way to make hydrogen using just nuclear heat (others are working on just solar heat), that will be more efficient, and still have most of the power generation capacity left. Besides, nuclear power plants are so tiny and use so little resources that building even ten times as many is not a big deal.
All the hidden energy is:
-gas
-oil
-coal
All can be synthesized using proven technology, but it has not been done yet.
Why not? France has replaced theirs. Japan's working on seawater uranium extraction.
Nope, that's why I brought up nuclear, which is viable right now, with all the externalities, all the infrastructure, all the inefficiency, all the crap taken into account. Except for one: bureaucracy. So ask China and Japan about it.
What machine can harvest an ecosystem?
People are machinery. There's no law that say a machine could not harvest an ecosystem, nor build one. Once you learn, you could program robots to run the ecosystem. It won't be easy, but it is possible.
But I've done enough to see that this is profitable (in terms of expenses reduced, quality gained, carbon footprint reduced, learning gained) to learn about and get set up -- profitable not just for myself, but for my planet. It's a lifestyle change that's worth making. Look into it or no. I don't much care. I have better groceries than you, ones that don't take oil to ship, time to shop for, and minimal time and effort to grow.
Meantime, I will work on reversing the process of combustion with solar energy, turning waste in to oil, and building electric SUVs (turns out that bigger = more batteries = better), running steam engines on solar, etc, etc. It takes all kinds. I'm in highschool right now, so my options are a bit limited...
Good. I just hate it when people promote some way of life and then don't actually live it :-).
Actually if you read the article, you'll see that at one point ammonia was produced with hydrogen from hydroelectric power. You could produce the hydrogen from any source of electric energy, but it's very expensive. An exciting development is the use of thermochemical engines to produce hydrogen from solar at %50+ efficiencies. That could also produce gasoline. If you have the hydrogen, and you have carbon dioxide (there are many processes to trap it), you have oil via FT.
;-). IMO, there's really four main parties in the USA: the Obama voters, the Hillary voters (me, well not voter because I was too young), the religious right, and the corporate right.
The term "liberal" is a description of a set of political ideas and social graces, just like the term "neocon" or "redneck". I'm a US centrist, so I hate everyone
Nope. Business as usual for large farms.
So why don't you buy a big land and start a permaculture farm there? Sounds like it would be profitable and if you sold it, VC's would go for it (trust me, many Silicon Valley VC's are organic food types).
So do you have your own orange tree? Do you eat it? If not why don't you, despite land being quite cheap in the USA? (If you not in the USA, sorry)
The best way to reduce population growth is to promote economic growth in poor nations. I.E., to set up factories there and other stuff.