The Green New Deal

I am well aware of the propaganda Shrike. Pretty surprised you bought into it, but aware never the less.

Sure when your goal is to drive all those farmers off their land, then sure you can claim labor efficiency. As if the small farmer doesn't have the ability to buy a new tractor appropriately sized too. But I would contend that particular stat showing fewer farmers feeding more city folks really doesn't address efficiency at all.

How much food per acre? How many calories of fossil fuels required per calorie of food produced? How many tons of lost soil due to erosion, compared to tons of food grown? These and many more tests of efficiency all show that sure, more food is grown per farmer, but at a massive loss of efficiency. I mean come on, 10 calories of fossil fuels to grow 1 calories of food and solar is free? Are you kidding me? And 100 tons of soil lost per ton of food produced over all crops and even the best ratio is still less than 1:1? Don't you think it might be a bit more efficient to actually put a skilled laborer in the field to improve the efficiency back to at least break even, if not regenerative? In the US system of agriculture the average soil loss rate is 5.8 tons per acre per year. :eye-poppi Average yields of corn, the highest crop we commonly grow over the same period was 3.9 tons per acre per yr!:eye-poppi

You call this efficient? Not anyone who uses sane metrics.
It’s Time to Rethink America’s Corn System

Oh an by the way, where on that chart is the land that was degraded by agriculture so bad it is now abandoned fallow or desertified? Don't you think any true test of efficiency of land use in agriculture should include those stats too?:rolleyes:

I got to say RBF, I'm disappointed in your reply. Your argument seems steeped in conspiracy theory and a luddite POV.

But the article in Scientific American was great. I'm 100 percent in favor of ending the subsidies on Ethanol. And there are troubling concerns with monoculture which seems to pose a problem with corn, potatoes and bananas among others.
 
I am well aware of the propaganda Shrike.
Data aren't propaganda one buys into. Data are data. Inputs & outputs, price points, declining hunger amidst exponential population growth – it's all there. If you can examine that data and contort your mind that into believing it represents inefficiency then I can't help you.

Sure when your goal is to drive all those farmers off their land,
No one's goal was to destroy the family farm. The goal was to feed a growing nation and it's more efficient to do that through modern mechanized agriculture.

Another goal – on the heels of the worst environmental disaster this country has experienced (itself the result of practices employed by family farmers encouraged by ag policies and market incentives that predated the New Deal) – was to stem the drastic loss of topsoil by taking the most erodable lands out of production. How? Give farmers tax breaks to plant cover crops. That's a socialist solution to a specific problem, i.e., paying farmers not to farm with the payments helping them keep their land. If someone eschews the tax break and decides to grow crops on 40 acres of sand but can't compete with someone farming 400 acres of loam, then that's "the market" picking winners and losers, not the liberals.

In the US system of agriculture the average soil loss rate is 5.8 tons per acre per year. :eye-poppi Average yields of corn, the highest crop we commonly grow over the same period was 3.9 tons per acre per yr!:eye-poppi

Yep that's bad. But it's a lot better than it used to be. Why? Socialist programs to concentrate tillage on the least erodable soils, no-till farming, etc.

Oh an by the way, where on that chart is the land that was degraded by agriculture so bad it is now abandoned fallow or desertified? Don't you think any true test of efficiency of land use in agriculture should include those stats too?:rolleyes:
I do. Our history shows that small family farms are rather ***** in comparison.
 

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No one's goal was to destroy the family farm. The goal was to feed a growing nation and it's more efficient to do that through modern mechanized agriculture.

Another goal – on the heels of the worst environmental disaster this country has experienced (itself the result of practices employed by family farmers encouraged by ag policies and market incentives that predated the New Deal) – was to stem the drastic loss of topsoil by taking the most erodable lands out of production. How? Give farmers tax breaks to plant cover crops. That's a socialist solution to a specific problem, i.e., paying farmers not to farm with the payments helping them keep their land. If someone eschews the tax break and decides to grow crops on 40 acres of sand but can't compete with someone farming 400 acres of loam, then that's "the market" picking winners and losers, not the liberals.

Seems that RBF is forgetting the Dust Bowl ever happened. It's hard to see his argument that small farms are more efficient than large farms. That seems totally counter-intuitive.

Consider that “in 1970 an operator could plant 40 acres of row crops per day, planting four rows at a time at 2 miles per hour, and could harvest 4,000 bushels per day running a 4-row harvester for 12 hours per day. By 2005, a producer could plant 420 acres per day, planting 16 rows at 6 mph, and harvest 30,000 bushels per day, running a 12-row harvester.”[18] Today, it is estimated that producers can plant 945 acres a day and harvest 50,000 bushels a day. https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/agricultural-abundance-american-innovation-story
One of things I do know is that these harvesters and planters are expensive which can make them prohibitive to a small farm. Simple economies of scale don't seem to support his argument.
 
I got to say RBF, I'm disappointed in your reply. Your argument seems steeped in conspiracy theory and a luddite POV.

But the article in Scientific American was great. I'm 100 percent in favor of ending the subsidies on Ethanol. And there are troubling concerns with monoculture which seems to pose a problem with corn, potatoes and bananas among others.
How can it be a conspiracy theory if it was done on purpose and even bragged about as a good thing? You just saw Shrike repeat the bragging as if it was somehow good and oppose the claim this is extremely inefficient.

You lost sight of the purpose of the subsidies though. The subsidies are designed to create a huge glut of commodity, and then the reason for the ethanol is to get rid of that subsidized glut. Ethanol from corn was never about being more efficient at producing energy any more than feedlots are about producing efficient meat. Both are designed to efficiently be wasteful....I guess maybe we can call it that. So you are 1/2 way there. Next take animal husbandry.

We have known a long time grasses are far more efficient at feeding cows. How could any sane person even dream that it might be more efficient to plow and plant a field, with all those inputs of fertilizer and pesticide, harvest and dry the corn, store it, ship it, formulate it into feed for animals, store it and ship it again and finally feed it to a cow, compared to the cow just walking over to the next paddock and taking a bite of grass?

Now it is true that cows fatten up faster on corn supplements. But when is faster a metric of efficiency? Is driving 100 MPH more efficient than driving 65 MPH? Of course not. We all understand that the slower speed is far more fuel efficient.

How could any sane person even begin to think this insanely destructive and inefficient food system is more efficient?:jaw-dropp

It's like people are hypnotized and mind boggled.:boggled:

Anyway, at least the dynamic shows precisely what we need to do to mitigate AGW. Pay farmers for increasing long term carbon in the soil. That will be the new goal, rather than driving farmers off their land.

At least this way the dynamic actually provides a service society needs. We need the excess carbon from the atmosphere removed. We don't need to drive even more farmers off their land at all. We do not have a huge lack of labor in the cities the factories or the military. There are plenty there to meet society's needs and then some.
 
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How can it be a conspiracy theory if it was done on purpose and even bragged about as a good thing? You just saw Shrike repeat the bragging as if it was somehow good and oppose the claim this is extremely inefficient.

Because you're attributing and promoting the idea of a nefarious motivation to what clearly demonstrates good intentions or at least benign ones. It's one thing to say that there were some adverse consequences, it's another to say those consequences were deliberately the primary and intended goal.
 
Because you're attributing and promoting the idea of a nefarious motivation to what clearly demonstrates good intentions or at least benign ones. It's one thing to say that there were some adverse consequences, it's another to say those consequences were deliberately the primary and intended goal.

ok lets start with the first one in the article I used as a source:

people chose to leave, but more of them were driven out due to
policy—agricultural policy, in particular. Republicans and
Democrats, alike, have supported laws that favor corporate
agriculture, which continue to drive small farmers out of
business and depopulate the countryside
This is a fact, not a conspiracy. But was that the intended goal and was that goal as you say nefarious?

I would claim YES that was the intended goal, and nefarious means
ne·far·i·ous
/nəˈferēəs/
adjective
(typically of an action or activity) wicked or criminal.
"the nefarious activities of the organized-crime syndicates"
synonyms: wicked, evil, sinful, iniquitous, villainous, criminal, heinous, atrocious, appalling, abhorrent, vile, foul, base, abominable, odious, depraved, corrupt, shameful, scandalous, monstrous, fiendish, diabolical, devilish, unholy, ungodly, infernal, satanic, dark, unspeakable, despicable, outrageous, shocking, disgraceful; archaic knavish, dastardly; rare egregious, flagitious
Yes that too!
FDRs New Deal
Myth: The New Deal Was for Small Farmers
"Historians and economists have reached an overwhelming consensus that the New Deal farm bills were designed to aid large farmers and succeeded in doing so"
Think about that. This is no conspiracy theory. This is what the farm bill was designed to do.

It gets worse:
"The Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA)
“accelerated the increasing concentration of land,” writes Pete
Daniel. “Obviously, large landowners reaped most of the federal
money.”9
An aide to Henry Wallace, then the secretary of
agriculture, later said the AAA was “militantly for the larger
farmers.”

So you tell me, does this meet the level of "nefarious" yet? I don't know what your career is, but lets just say for whatever reason the government decided to close down your place of business, and drive you out of your house too, force you to relocate and get a new career, and hand your job to someone else for whatever reason. Would that be nefarious?

Oh it gets even worse, believe me.

"With the backing of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), large farmers cut costs and drove small farmers out of business, while local USDA agents discriminated against black farmers on a systematic basis: by
1920, there were 925,000 black farmers, and by 1970, 90
percent of them were gone.20 Some of these farmers left for
better opportunities, but more were forced out in one of the
largest government-impelled population movements in all our history.”2"

Oh it gets worse, believe me:
"Black farmers who held onto
their land used their independence to support civil rights
workers, which often made them targets for lynch mobs and local elites.2"

Are we to nefarious yet?:boggled: Maybe Libtard sounds almost kind now? In my opinion we already left nefarious and entered into pure evil already and we haven't even gotten to one of the most despicable elitists/racists the USDA ever put in control of public policy. The evil Earl Butz. See I can call him an evil racist because he actually was forced to resign he was so racist and he served in prison he was so evil. Even if it was the Libtard racist New Deal farm bills that caused 90% of black farmers to be militantly forced off their land. (yes cooperation with lynchings and forced labor is fairly described as militant) But lets get back to Butz's policy changes.

oops another myth

Butz’s farm bill was “the logical extension of the acts of
1965 and 1970,” according to former USDA chief economist
and Kennedy adviser Willard Cochrane.4

Damn, another Libtard causing something being blamed on a Republican. I should have known.:rolleyes:

Does this let Butz and the neoliberals off the hook? Weeeeeeell not exactly:mad:

There was a difference, however: a wealthier class of farmers
was affected. A group of sociologists who interviewed a
representative sample of Iowa farm operators during the crisis
found that “persons most at risk of forced displacement from
farming are found to be younger, better educated, and largescale operators.”5

:eek: OMG a policy designed by libtards to drive small scale black farmers off their land now modified and used by neoliberals and their new partners in crime, the newly created big conglomerate food industry, to force well educated hard working white folks off their land too! Just to make room for even BIGGER monstrosities and the destruction of entire rural communities both of their minorities and their well educated whites. How evil a bureaucracy can you get!?:mad:

Oh but this is just the natural progress as y'all stated earlier. Weeeellll that's not exactly true either.

Experts agree that neither economies of scale nor
technology give large-scale farms an edge over smaller ones.63
In 2013, USDA researchers surveyed the literature and
concluded that “most economists are skeptical that scale
economies usefully explain increased farm sizes.”64 Similarly,
technology itself does not inherently—or as the USDA
researchers put it, “explicitly”—benefit owners of large-scale
farms.65

Now go back up and look at the stats I gave. You know the ones where the average age of farmers was 58.3 with over 20 times more farmers over age 75 as under 25 and only 46.1% of farmers even make a net positive income from farming?

finally:
combined with policies that provide
commercial farms with easy access to capital, while withholding
it from smaller ones, as happened in the United States
aha, destabilized financially even when they were more efficient and higher quality than the big boys :eek: That's almost the last straw, but it gets even worse, believe it or not. I know it seems impossible to get worse, but this is deeply rooted evil we are dealing with. Farmers are notoriously stubborn and many are much smarter than anyone wants to give credit. I mean like elite smart. Like smarter than your typical doctor or lawyer. ;) Even smarter than a 5th grader.

Some few still survived against all odds. They have developed new models of agriculture completely separate and isolated from the industrialized system and 100s of times more efficient by any rational metric. You could basically call it survival of the fittest, where the survival rate was far less than 10%. The survivors are tough. The business models they designed robust. The crop and animal husbandry systems they designed resilient against all sorts of catastrophes like floods and droughts and whims of the markets. And it just so happens they are so good they can actually save the world from AGW.

And so many of these best and brightest farmers literally have been attacked by making their operations unreasonably illegal. You can read up on that here:

Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front


You get it yet? We can fix it. Not only can country boy survive, he can save you too. All that is needed is the above "access to capital" and stop trying to drive us off the land and just let us do our important work of rebuilding the degraded foundations of this great country.

But we don't even want capital from the backstabbing banks. We want paid for providing a needed service that benefits all society. Just like trash collectors get paid to do their job, we want paid to remove the CO2 "trash" from the atmosphere. Not offsets, not charity, Not tax deductions, not socialist dividends split evenly. We don't even want you to drive the corporate boys out of business, because they are our neighbors too. We want paid to do a job y'all need done. Whoever does the job with a verified carbon market and sequestration protocol for sequestered soil carbon, gets paid a price per ton carbon sequestered. That's not charity, socialism, nepotism, communism or any other sort of degenerate corruption. You want something done, pay us to do it, and we will.

You pay for it and be sure it will get done. And if it doesn't then you have nothing to pay, so your risk is zero! We take 100% of the risk and expect to be paid well for that as any entrepreneur would.

Dictionary result for entrepreneur

en·tre·pre·neur
/ˌäntrəprəˈnər,ˌäntrəprəˈno͝o(ə)r/
noun
a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.


Its a win win for everyone. There is no down side. That's how the conservative can roll up our sleeves and pull your sorry arses out of the fire.:boxedin: The American way.

Oh and just in case you didn't read it the first time here it is, please read it this time: The Butz Stops Here: Why the Food Movement
Needs to Rethink Agricultural History


And the original essay for conservatives:
Is there a technically viable and economically advantageous solution to Climate Change and what is preventing its implementation?


and my white paper on the plan for policy makers: Can we reverse global warming?
 
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nuclear technology IS not a mature technology.

https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2010/nea6962-nuclear-roadmap.pdf
Key Findings

The present status of nuclear energy technology is the result of over 50 years of development and operational experience. The latest designs for nuclear power plants, now under construction, incorporate lessons learned from this experience as well as recent technological developments to offer enhanced safety and performance. Nuclear power is a mature low-carbon technology that is already available today for wider deployment.

But hey, what would the Nuclear Energy Agency know about it?

acbytesla said:
Sorry, you're wrong on all this. With that kind of thinking, computers, the internet and solar energy among other technological breakthroughs wouldn't have happened.
Computers, the Internet, and solar energy were not so much breakthroughs as incremental development of technology. This has proven to be a winning strategy, whereas relying on 'breakthroughs' is hit and miss.

Nuclear has been following an incremental development model too, but not so successfully...

EPR (nuclear reactor)
The EPR is a third generation pressurised water reactor (PWR) design... In Europe this reactor design was called European Pressurised Reactor, and the internationalised name was Evolutionary Power Reactor, but it is now simply named EPR.

The first two EPR units to start construction, at Olkiluoto in Finland and Flamanville in France, are both facing costly delays (to at least 2020). Two units at Hinkley Point in the United Kingdom received final approval in September 2016 and are expected to be completed by 2025.

EDF has acknowledged severe difficulties in building the EPR design. In September 2015 EDF stated that the design of a "New Model" EPR was being worked on, which will be easier and cheaper to build.

In 2016 EDF planned to build two New Model EPR reactors in France by 2030 to prepare for renewing its fleet of older reactors. However following financial difficulties at Areva, and its merger with EDF, French Ecology Minister Nicolas Hulot said in January 2018 "for now [building a New Model EPR] is neither a priority or a plan. Right now the priority is to develop renewable energy and to reduce the share of nuclear."

The construction of the Olkiluoto 3 power station in Finland commenced in August 2005... Initial cost estimates were about €3.7 billion, but the project has since seen several severe cost increments and delays, with latest cost estimates (from 2012) of more than €8 billion. The station was initially scheduled to go online in 2009, but operations are now expected to start in 2020.
10-15 years to construct, huge cost overruns - compare that to wind and solar, which only take a few months to install and are getting cheaper all the time.

But China can build anything faster and cheaper, right? Errr...
Taishan 1 & 2 (China)

The construction of the first reactor at Taishan started officially on 18 November 2009, and the second on 15 April 2010. Construction of each unit was then planned to take 46 months, significantly faster and cheaper than the first two EPRs in Finland and France.

The reactor pressure vessel of the first reactor was installed in June 2012, and the second in November 2014. The first pressure vessel had been imported from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan, and steam generators from Areva in France. The second pressure vessel and associated steam generators had been made in China, by Dongfang Electric and Shanghai Electric.

In 2014 construction was reported to be running over two years late, mainly due to key component delays and project management issues...

In December 2017, Hong Kong media reported that a component had cracked during testing, needing to be replaced. In January 2018 commissioning was rescheduled again, with commercial operation expected in 2018 and 2019.
When even the Chinese are having trouble meeting their production goals, you know there's a problem. And this is just an incremental development of a mature technology. Imagine what delays would be expected with a truly innovative 'breakthrough' design!
 
https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/reports/2010/nea6962-nuclear-roadmap.pdf

But hey, what would the Nuclear Energy Agency know about it?

Computers, the Internet, and solar energy were not so much breakthroughs as incremental development of technology. This has proven to be a winning strategy, whereas relying on 'breakthroughs' is hit and miss.

Nuclear has been following an incremental development model too, but not so successfully...

EPR (nuclear reactor)10-15 years to construct, huge cost overruns - compare that to wind and solar, which only take a few months to install and are getting cheaper all the time.

But China can build anything faster and cheaper, right? Errr...
When even the Chinese are having trouble meeting their production goals, you know there's a problem. And this is just an incremental development of a mature technology. Imagine what delays would be expected with a truly innovative 'breakthrough' design!

When I say nuclear power is not a mature technology, I'm NOT referring to traditional high pressure nuclear reactors. But there are many different nuclear technologies. I'm referring to thermal wave and molten salt reactors. I'm referring to reactors that can use depleted uranium aand thorium. And I haven't touched fusion.

So no, nuclear energy is not mature. The way we've been doing it is however. The EDF is an evolution of the first designs which grew out of the needs of the Navy. And that design cost billions of Defense industry dollars including the most expensive R&D project known to man.

The advance of computers is also the result of massive amount of defense and NASA funds. And the Internet was the offspring of the military's Arpanet. Photovoltaics was advanced first by NASA and then through other government funding and then by subsidies.
 
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If you consider the entire production cycle of nuclear power - from mining to decommissioning and permanent storage - no, it surely isn't a mature technology.
 
If you consider the entire production cycle of nuclear power - from mining to decommissioning and permanent storage - no, it surely isn't a mature technology.

Frankly, i don't think we have touched how far we can go with nuclear power. And I'm not the only one. China has hundreds of engineers working on developing liquid fluoride thorium reactors And so has Norway and India. The US built and ran a Thorium reactor up until the 70s and Nixon killed it to divert money to California.

Bill Gates has invested 2 billion dollars into TerraPower which has been developing thermal wave reactors which can use depleted uranium.
 
..and in the US, companies pretend their ancient uranium mines are still open, so they don't have to clean them up.
 
What blows my mind is the idea that market economics can and will solve every problem. It's just not so. There are problems and opportunities that have necessarily required governments to solve or create.
 
What blows my mind is the idea that market economics can and will solve every problem. It's just not so. There are problems and opportunities that have necessarily required governments to solve or create.

a rising tide solves all problems - even when you are already underwater.
 
Green New Deal is feasible and affordable

Relatively recent oped: Green New Deal is feasible and affordable
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/22/opinions/green-new-deal-sachs/index.html

...The Green New Deal proponents are absolutely correct on the merits. Decarbonization, Medicare for All, debt-free higher education, and other social benefits are feasible, affordable, and smart. They will deliver great savings in the case of health care, environmental benefits in the case of decarbonization, and renewed social mobility in the case of debt-free higher education.

As a next step, the Green New Deal ideas should be turned into legislation, plans and budgets. When the Federal Interstate Highway System was being debated in 1955, every Congressman received a booklet with detailed maps showing how their district would benefit from an interstate highway system. It's now important to provide a roadmap of the Green New Deal, showing for each part of the country how the Green New Deal package can be accomplished at low cost and with enormous economic, social and environmental benefits.


Perhaps this needs to be divided into three organizational programs
The Problems detailing the problems and costs of the current systems now and into the Future.

The Solutions detailing a list of the different options we have for addressing the Problems

The Price detailing the different paths we can take to address the problems we face, and the solutions we choose.

This isn't only something that should be used to inform politicians, but also to inform voters on what choices we do have and what the likely consequences of those choices might be.


So far what we have is a campaign or schedule of general policy ideas, not a fully fleshed out set of policy proposals and options to evaluate and choose between, and until we do have some more concrete legislative proposals it is hard to get much beyond general talking points.
 
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The GND seems to be at least a way to ignore the gridlock and obstructionism (and flat-out denial), telling those who do so to stay in the corner and play with themselves, while seeing which of these proposals - many of which are popular - get some traction and build momentum into real change.

Some of it is stupid, but it's telling that the naysayers have latched on to minutiae and terminology rather than debate the merits of the larger issues it attempts to address.
 
Some of it is stupid, but it's telling that the naysayers have latched on to minutiae and terminology rather than debate the merits of the larger issues it attempts to address.
The difference between being paid to sit on your arse and not do a damn thing as is part of The Green New Deal, compared to expecting a fair payment for services rendered is NOT minutiae.

It's fundamental to the entire policy.

The fact that paying people to sit on their arse is a devious trap to undermine the freedoms of the gullible, now that is minutiae.
 

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