How do you supply enough power to vertical farms without those same externalities? And then how green is it to build and run them? Considering all the equipment, infra and inputs. It is not like that stuff magically comes from thin air with vertical farming.
The biggest argument for vertical farms is that you'd be able to bring high-quality year around produce to more places. We do have most produce year around, but the quality of it varies wildly depending on the time of year. Most produce shipped from California and Mexico during growing off seasons is quite subpar.
But this is an argument for quality, of which people would have to be willing to pay a premium for. I could see high-end restaurants and others wiling to pay for this.
Greenhouses already extend the growing season. This would ideally be able to do that further.
True! But you can do some fun acts like using heat pumps in certain climates (the Netherlands, for example) to extend growing seasons or create them (if they don’t exist) all year long.
Alas there is a backlog of a century of emissions to handle. You know, externalizing costs on other people?
At this point we'll need active carbon capture not for neutrality, which is its own political boondoggle, but for actual active mitigation of some of the damage.
Dont worry, nothing like this will come to pass. Pollute away.
Nuclear power. I don't think there's any other alternative if you really wanted to grow anything other than "green water" (i.e. leafs like lettuce) for large portions of the planet.
Many of the inputs are reduced; You use the natural gas to make energy for LEDs to decrease your time to market by increasing sun. By circulating the water you save 80% of it.
what if I told you that to be actually sustainable at current population levels long term, we'd need to surrender 70% or more of currently used pastureland and farmland?
Oh wait, we aren't going to stay at current population levels. Still at least have, what, another 4-5 billion people to crank out before we allegedly plateau?
Wind power doesn't take up a lot of space, especially offshore. Solar? There's this thing called a desert.
People, we are in the midst of a mass extinction. We NEED that land for biodiversity. Mass extinctions occurred over long periods of time that enabled evolutionary adapatation to some degree. We're doing ours over the span of a thousand years. Most mass extinctions at least get to "experiment" will all Earth's land surface to find new adapted animals. We've taken a huge portion of the world's biodiverse and fertile lands and industrialized them.
Otherwise, yeah, we'll have vertical farms... in space, because we won't be on earth.
I guess you think solutions to traditional farming, which is unsustainable, will come out of THIN AIR.
