so, i just watched a three hour mit food security symposium and what i learned is that, because meat consumption is correlated with wealth, the best way to promote the shift to vegetarianism is to promote policies that decrease total wealth.

they weren't even asking the right questions. so of course they didn't have any useful answers.

they danced around the climate change issue, but the closest thing to a straight answer i could pull out what was "we find that the greater uncertainty makes it difficult to make predictions, and consequently to plan".

it's fair on some level. but it's not encouraging.

what they're all more concerned about is malthus...

first, i should point out the sarcasm if it's not obvious. to them, the issue is trying to find a way to produce enough livestock to feed 8 billion people. the idea of not producing livestock seems to be outside of the ideas being contemplated.

but, malthus. he thought we'd all starve to death. a simple mathematical model.

it turned out he was wrong, but he was wrong for a specific reason: as quickly as population has risen, and it has risen quickly, technology has simply moved ahead faster: mechanization, refrigeration, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides...

that doesn't mean his model was wrong, it just means he didn't realize how useful oil would be.

of course, there's a cost.

but these guys get that. and now they have the blind faith that malthus was screaming at us all to avoid. technology has been elevated to this sort of religion, defined by some kind of creed of moore's law.

well, i'm willing to listen. skeptical. i mean, it has to burst at some point. tomatoes are finite.

infinite tomato.

anyways, what's your fancy technology that's going to beat the math this time? i'm waiting...

it's....

africa.

no, for real.

africa.

well, ok. africa is huge. makes sense on some level. that's math you have to do with a pen and a paper, not guess in your head - not due to computational complexity, but because the precision of the calculation is important. there is probably lots of arable land in africa, which is a really unfathomably big place. it just might work...

but, you're going to work in the effects of desertification, right?

*crickets*

you're going to make sure there's carbon offsetting from cutting down all those trees, right?

*crickets*

here, in the heart of the empire? we'll be the last to starve.

i'm going to retreat back to my previous suggestion of terraforming mars into a natural strawberryological cycle.

we could promote it by getting strawberry shortcake to do a rendition of "strawberry rain".

no cryptoracism.

"the red planet". wouldn't even create galactic chromopollution.