A severe heatwave is ongoing in Europe. Temperature records broken in France, Switzerland, Germany and Spain.
On 11 July 2023, the Land Surface Temperature (LST) in some areas of Extremadura (Spain) exceeded 60°C, as highlighted in this data visualisation derived from measurements from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR) instrument. The ongoing heatwave in Spain this week is resulting in a total of 13 autonomous communities, being at extreme risk (red alert), significant risk (orange alert), and risk (yellow alert) due to maximum temperatures that, in some cases, will exceed 40°C and reach a maximum of 43°C.
For reference, “in areas where vegetation is dense, the land surface temperature never rises above 35°C. The hottest land surface temperatures on Earth are in plant-free desert landscapes.”
Those big tech solutions always strike me as a very complicated way of solving a very simple problem. The Iberian peninsula is drying out because people (and their animals) are turning it into a desert. Look at Extremadura and many other places in Spain (and Portugal, to a somewhat lesser extent) - what ever happened to the trees? If we allowed trees and the connected biodiversity to return we could also retain water in the landscape more efficiently. And the best about this is that it doesn’t need high-tech anything. It really just requires to think twice before you chop down a tree. Actually, do less. Cut less, plough less, stop transporting stuff around … just chill, and the planet can chill as well.
That doesn’t feed 10 billion people though. CEA industrialises nature, but not in nature. If it’s powered by renewables, it’s pretty much net zero. Uses no pesticides or herbicides, no runoff and the water is reused for a year by filtering and using reverse osmosis.
I used to talk your talk, because I parroted it from other smart guys in Academia. Then I got into small scale gardening and permaculture, and started studying traditional food production. I have to tell you, big ag has been lying big time about their efficiency. Yes, they can produce more per hectar of one crop, but that takes an enormous input of fossil fuel, heavy machinery, fertilizers. In a permaculture system you might not get a ton of x per hectare, but 100kgs of x, 200kgs of y, 300kgs of z … with less input of fossil fuel and less environmental destruction. Of course if you just count the tons of grain, industrial ag wins. But you have to count both input and output plus long term sustainability to know which system really works better. Combine animals, plants, mushrooms, microorganisms in the right way and you can create a very resilient, nutrition-dense system with little energy needs. Spain is turning itself into a dust bowl for the profit of the few, and a lot of the monoculture propaganda is made up and spread by landgrabbers who are too happy to buy up smaller farms in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘feeding the multitudes’ - it just sounds so much better than ‘I bought my neighbors land because I have more money than him’.
I suggest you visit a well-run forest agriculture and permaculture place to see how you can achieve results that are even more positive than huge technological solutions like vertical farms or desalination water lines crossing the land.
With renewables only the energy itself is an ‘infinite’ source (nothing is infinite, but for example solar is quite infinite in our terms, geothermal a little less so). The mechanisms for harvesting said energy and for running vertical farms and desalination plants do need finite resources to be built and maintained, however, while a diverse ecosystem basically runs itself. Big engineering has become so normalized that we believe we need this to make a big impact, but I think we have to think smaller again. Big tech has brought us here, let’s be a little more careful with it in the future.
It’s not one or the other. Regenerative agriculture is great, but it’s still very land intensive. The beauty of vertical farming is it can be placed in urban areas on brownfield sites which reduces food miles and provides jobs.
I would say the only environment where I would want to see such a thing is dense urban environments. But then, maybe we shouldn’t have urban environments so dense that we have to build skyscrapers for our salads …
If everyone spread out, we’d have about an acre each and no natural habitat.
It makes sense to have dense urban environments and to build up instead of out.
Either that or depopulation by moving into space or a cull…