People have no idea how much food prices are going to shoot up, even with a 1.5 degree rise, let alone 2 degrees, which is pretty much game over.
The food system is incredibly vulnerable to climate change. You only need to hit the tipping point where crop destruction or failure is so regular as to make planting futile, and the price of food will go absolutely batshit mental. Meanwhile, people crowd onto the latest easyjet and ryanair flight for short city breaks without giving a fuck.
We’re a reactive species, we only react when something is taken away.
I’d just like to highlight the fact that industrial food systems are vital to feeding the world’s 8 billion people.
Climate Change is real and is the biggest challenge of out generation – but trying to combat it through introducing food systems that can’t produce anything like enough to feed us all is not the answer.
In the UK our climate won’t get significantly worse when it comes to growing seasons etc, thanks to us being fortunate enough to be in a temperate climate so warming won’t be disastrous in the same way it would be in the likes of the Indian subcontinent. There could be significant issues with imported products, but we grow enough domestically that thankfully our general food supply isn’t really under threat.
We need GM plants just so we can reduce use of fertilisers and pesticides.
The haber process is a huge huge polluter.
We are also far from self-sufficiency and increasing tension as climate change takes effect will make it much harder to get imported food and to get it cheap. When food prices and hunger are already going through the roof, this will look like the good times in a decade or two.
Well we’ve tried enormous subsidies. Time to try the stick.
The UK will be much less able to adapt its food system to the problems caused by climate change than some poorer countries. Our system is highly centralized, with most food being produced by large farms and supplied through supermarketts. We have virtually no localized food production on the scale required, and low availability of land to do so. The most robust food economies employ a larger proportion of people in the production of food in a highly decentralized manner, with small scale market gardeners and small herd livestock farmers supplying informal local markets. The UK needs to get serious about allotments, market gardens and homesteads, permaculture methods and local food markets.
8 comments
People have no idea how much food prices are going to shoot up, even with a 1.5 degree rise, let alone 2 degrees, which is pretty much game over.
The food system is incredibly vulnerable to climate change. You only need to hit the tipping point where crop destruction or failure is so regular as to make planting futile, and the price of food will go absolutely batshit mental. Meanwhile, people crowd onto the latest easyjet and ryanair flight for short city breaks without giving a fuck.
Airline fuel is still ZERO percent taxed.
This dude gets it: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/nasa-scientist-protest-extinction-rebellion-b2057563.html
We’re a reactive species, we only react when something is taken away.
I’d just like to highlight the fact that industrial food systems are vital to feeding the world’s 8 billion people.
Climate Change is real and is the biggest challenge of out generation – but trying to combat it through introducing food systems that can’t produce anything like enough to feed us all is not the answer.
In the UK our climate won’t get significantly worse when it comes to growing seasons etc, thanks to us being fortunate enough to be in a temperate climate so warming won’t be disastrous in the same way it would be in the likes of the Indian subcontinent. There could be significant issues with imported products, but we grow enough domestically that thankfully our general food supply isn’t really under threat.
We need GM plants just so we can reduce use of fertilisers and pesticides.
The haber process is a huge huge polluter.
We are also far from self-sufficiency and increasing tension as climate change takes effect will make it much harder to get imported food and to get it cheap. When food prices and hunger are already going through the roof, this will look like the good times in a decade or two.
Well we’ve tried enormous subsidies. Time to try the stick.
The UK will be much less able to adapt its food system to the problems caused by climate change than some poorer countries. Our system is highly centralized, with most food being produced by large farms and supplied through supermarketts. We have virtually no localized food production on the scale required, and low availability of land to do so. The most robust food economies employ a larger proportion of people in the production of food in a highly decentralized manner, with small scale market gardeners and small herd livestock farmers supplying informal local markets. The UK needs to get serious about allotments, market gardens and homesteads, permaculture methods and local food markets.