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We produce more resources than we could ever consume in the least sustainable ways possible.
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this post was submitted on 24 May 2026
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That's not necessarily true. How much of our overall greenhouse emissions come from which sector?
From this chart, decarbonizing electricity and transport will go a long, long way, and decarbonizing manufacturing and construction could also give some room to reduce overall emissions by more than the entire agricultural sector produces.
And it's not just some kind of pipe dream. We're doing real work at decarbonizing electricity, heat, transport, shipping, construction, etc., as the prices of low or zero emissions options start to outcompete the higher emission options for many applications.
Plus if the data center boom crashes as a bubble, a lot of the infrastructure investment into increasing energy production and distribution with both high carbon and low carbon sources will at least have financed a lot of low carbon energy and the potential for curtailing the least carbon efficient generation methods.
Too narrow a view. You're looking at it purely through the climate change lens.
Our farming activities have other issues as well though, which won't go away no matter how successful decarbonization is going to be.
Eutrophication of soil and bodies of water through intensive use of fertilizer and the loss of biodiversity which comes with that, as well as with widespread pesticide use and the loss of small scale structures across agricultural land is one huge example. Top-soil erosion is another one.
Those issues are really only a result of overuse of inputs driven by meat consumption, fuel ethanol production, and basic misunderstanding/incompetence at agroecology. Not hard problems to solve if regulatory tools can be used. Wouldn't be an issue if you could get rid of industry groups and lobbyists etc.
It wouldn't be an issue if you suddenly had to tell everyone in the western world they need to cut their meat consumption to like 1/10? I've seen how even the seemingly smartest, most rational western leftist reacts to the mere suggestion that their personal consumption habits are unsustainable, no matter the economic system. Good luck...
and we all know how easy that is...
I didn't mean to sound too gloomy, those things can definitely be changed as well. I just meant to say, that if you purely focus on climate issues, those issues still remain unchanged.
I disagree with your analysis however. It's not just meat consumption and energy crops. I mean, both of those are particularly bad, sure, but other fields (pun intended) are also not super sustainable.
I take your point, but I also think that all the other stuff can improve, too. Fertilizer use peaked in the US in 2013, and better land use practices are trying to use less water and less fertilizer and allow less erosion.
None of this is by any means guaranteed to get better, but it's also not inevitable that it will get worse. The work needs to be done.
There's definitely a lot of work to be done. The relevant question for this discussion is, if we're going to have to take cuts to productivity during the transformation to more sustainable practices.
I can't give a qualified answer to that, but I guess we'd have to. However there are also promising new technologies emerging, that might be able to mitigate those; like precision farming and agro-robotics.