Net Zero’s artificial food crisis paves the way for ‘future foods’
The Left can push us only so far into a dystopia so I doubt that the following scenario is fully realistic
Net Zero rules employed by the United Nations, European Union, and domestic political parties across the world are expected to cause the imminent shutdown of high-production farmland, or at least, significantly reduce its capacity.
Yes, after centuries of perfecting food growing techniques, a bunch of bureaucratic regulators have decided to deliberately massacre the industry. Farmers in the Netherlands are first on the chopping block, with their historic estates being forcibly purchased by the State in what amounts to a complete erasure of private property rights.
As these policies are primarily targeting the world’s food bowls – the Netherlands, Canada, Sri Lanka, the United States, and Australia – the global agricultural supply chain can expect a prolonged artificial shortage of critical food items in the near future.
Food shortages, where demand remains the same or rises with population growth, results in the rapid increase of cost. Add to this problem huge changes to fertilisers, transport, red tape, pesticides, biosecurity, packaging, and labour.
We are already seeing the early stages of these policies play out in supermarkets across the Western world where gaps are appearing on the shelves, the diversity of products is in swift decline, and of the food that remains – its price is becoming a financial burden, even to the lower-middle class who have not struggled to afford food for three generations.
How convenient that some corporate and ideological partners of the international bureaucracies pushing these Net Zero policies are waiting in the wings with ‘planet saving’ food products!
In a world where fresh food is plentiful and cheap, no one would dream of sniffing around a lab for their next meal, but poverty is a powerful motivator to accept barely palatable crap sweetened with false virtue. Instead of counting calories, the next generation will be calculating their carbon footprint at the dinner table.
Keep in mind that this is a menu for the poor. Fresh food, real meat, and French wine will continue to fill the kitchens of the ruling classes. It’s the family of five squished into a city apartment, unable to turn the air-conditioner on for more than an hour a day, that will be faced with a range of cheap, depressing items at the supermarket.
The two emerging food groups for the latter half of this century are bugs and printed food – both of which are frequently grown in a lab.
Astonishingly, it is the ‘bug’ portion of this food pyramid that is rapidly making its way into the European shopping trolley, with crushed bug bits being approved as a filler or replacement for wheat. Whoever made that decision should be sat down in front of a plate of crickets and told to mash them up by hand before eating a loaf of bread made from the bits. Let’s see if they really think bug-meat is an appropriate substitute…
Within a few years, it will be extremely difficult for the average European to ensure that their meals are bug-free. Just as our food is currently tainted with chemicals and additives we’d be unlikely to pick if we knew what they were – the future of bread, flour, pasta, and sauces is sealed.
Nothing says ‘civilisational success’ quite like eating the critters that crawl over our mounting piles of garbage.
And yes, these bugs are grown in the lab, but in some ways this is worse. They are fed on a diet of chemicals, locked in tiny boxes, killed en masse, crushed up, and fed to us. At what point do you say that we had it ‘better’ thousands of years ago, salivating over a freshly roasted mammoth steak?
Vegans and vegetarians will want to avoid the eating of sentient insects. (Or maybe not? Who knows… Might be worth laying some money down on that.)
If these two groups of picky eaters remain true to their moral core, they will find their shopping experience rather patchy. The world’s farms are shrinking and the costs of transporting produce around the world is becoming fatally high. At some point Gen Z will realise that their local fruit market was put there by jumbo jets, ships, and vans. What sort of selfish vegan would insist a nation waste their carbon footprint flying fruit and vegetables in from another country? That would be literally destroying the world.
The supply problems of fresh produce may even be accidental, caused by incompetent governments failing to realise that the forced closure of oil and gas will create transport price hikes that no farmer can sustain and no customer can carry.
Regardless of how events play out, vegans and vegetarians will be offered lab-printed food as their ‘cheap’ and ‘convenient’ alternative. You can still have those cashews you love… We printed them out of chemicals for you this morning. They look a bit like a downloaded TV show from the early 2000s, but we promise they taste practically the same!
To compensate, there is a new ‘fad’ mulling around in its infancy. 3D-printed food is somewhat of a mixed bag. It covers everything from what a Mars expedition might expect – up to 5-star dining – and everything in-between. There are genres of 3D-printing, which vary wildly in quality and appeal.
At the high-quality end we have ‘fun food’, where 3D-printed food functions as a gimmick for restaurants. One Italian pasta company has been printing elaborate pasta shapes that serve as the centre pieces of dishes that are impossible to create with real pasta.
This variety of 3D-printing is a quite palatable, as the base pasta mix is still handmade and then fed through printing machines. There is no doubt a future in this type of elevated cuisine in the same way that the Industrial Age led to factory-cut food shapes and the mass production of pasta.
On the more futuristic end of the scale, we have Tokyo’s Sushi Singularity. It describes its mission as:
‘Beyond the future of sushi. A world that sees sushi going digital and linked with the net will come about. Two revolutions are envisioned: 1) Sushi will connect people around the world, and will be produced, edited, and shared online in the form of “new sushi”. 2) Sushi combined with biometrics will enable hyper-personalisation based on biometric and genomic data. Sushi will break away from conventional concepts of food and be continually revised and updated at exponential speed! Humans know nothing about Sushi!’
These guys have a full futuristic enterprise going on where the dream is to digitise food, build a food database, transmit food digitally, and then reprint it.
According to American Scientist:
‘Their 3D-printed food experiments include cell-cultured tuna in a filigreed cube, and octopus sculpted in a honeycomb lattice with negative stiffness. Most of their printing appears to be extrusion-based, using components that undergo computer-controlled mixing to generate the right flavours and textures. They also use a powder-based printing technique that incorporates high-powered lasers to fuse powders together.’
Forgive me if I prefer a quick trip to Croatia for a bit of freshly poached octopus or lightly fried calamari on the Ligurian coast. Some people like future-foods, I prefer old-style simplicity.
Other 3D-printing restaurants focus on meat-replacements which, more often than not, are actually printed from lab-grown fat and sinew. While the first form of 3D-printed restaurant food is about putting on a flashy, futuristic show, meat-replacements are more ‘on vibe’ with saving the planet. It’s about ‘responsible eating’ and finding ways to make the otherwise unpalatable tolerable. If we are honest, it also provides a way for vegetarians and vegans to cheat on the whole no meat pledge.
There is likely to be a backlash to all the bugs and sci-fi food if it goes from being a market option to a government-mandated initiative, as we have seen with electric vehicles. People may start trying to grow their own food – or at the very least, barter outside the government’s field of view with those who have the means to grow food. In some regional communities, this is already happening. Fresh produce is being shared amongst farms away from the greed of supermarket oligarchies and excessive agricultural regulators. If you ask most people whether they’d rather eat something grown in a lab or trust their mate farmer Jeff and his watermelon crop well… I know what I’m eating.
As we watch the wilful and reckless destruction of the world’s agricultural heartlands, we should ask ourselves, ‘Is this progress? Do we want politically-aligned laboratories controlling food production?’
A recent article on the topic writes:
‘Some believe that 3D-printed food could be the answer to global issues such as world hunger. It’s projected that the globe’s population will reach about 8 billion by 2025, which will put a heavy strain not only on food producers but also on food sources themselves. 3D printers can make use of abundant sources of nutrients, such as algae, and transform them into appetising foods that can be mass-produced fairly easily.’
Hmm… Maybe we should all join the farmers’ protests in the Netherlands instead before we reach the point of 3D-printed algae.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/net-zeros-artificial-food-crisis-paves-the-way-for-future-foods
*********************************************EVs and the Fermi gap
Enrico Fermi was one of the fathers of Quantum Physics. It was he who identified what has come to be known as the Fermi Gap. You see, embedded deep in the electronic structure of any conductor or semiconductor, is a fundamental inefficiency that no amount of technology can overcome.
This should come as no surprise to us. The lead–acid battery has been starting cars since 1859 (or at least from when cars were invented). There have been many advances made in their design since then, but one thing that hasn’t changed is their charging time. Even today a $400 Glass-Gel battery will charge no faster than a $100 cheapie. In the normal course of events, the battery is charged by our car’s alternator, after delivering several hundred amps in a couple of seconds to start the car. But if we leave our lights on, and the battery becomes depleted, there is no quick way to get charge back into the battery, and it generally requires an overnight charge. The only differences between the cheap batteries and the premium ones are the amount of current they deliver, the amount of maintenance they require, and their life. But there is no difference in charging rates.
Here’s why.
In just the same way that a car can run out of fuel, we can think of a flat battery as running out of electrons. Charging the battery is essentially putting back the electrons that were lost when the battery discharged. And so when we connect our battery to the charging circuit, electrons flow from the connecting electrodes into the battery cells. Unfortunately, however, the electrons do not flow quite as easily as the fuel from a bowser.
Although, in principle, an electron will flow from a position of higher energy to lower energy, a substantial energy (voltage) gap must be created for the process to start, and this differential is known as the Fermi Gap. It’s an inefficiency that can only be managed, but never eliminated.
So how does it work? Imagine you have an early model 80 Series Landcruiser (notorious for their poor handbrakes) sitting on a ramp, in neutral, with the handbrake on. Suppose we now raise the ramp. At first nothing happens, but when the ramp is steep enough the gravitational pull will overcome the handbrake’s resistance, and it will start to roll down the ramp.
Suppose we now wish to increase the rate at which it rolls down the ramp. Well, all we do is increase the slope of the ramp. Now it rolls faster. But when it gets to the bottom and we examine it, we find that the brakes are hotter than when it rolled slowly.
So it is with batteries. We can increase the charging voltage (the slope of the ramp) to push electrons through faster, but the result of this is increased heat in the battery (caused by internal resistance). And as anyone that knows anything about batteries knows, nothing kills a battery (any battery) faster than heat. This is the reason many European cars place the battery under one of the seats or in the boot – a hot engine bay is not an ideal spot for a battery.
But there’s another problem. As the battery charges, the efficiency decreases – more heat is generated at lower currents as the battery fills with charge. For this reason, smart chargers will begin charging at a higher current, then trail off as the battery approaches maximum charge.
So where does all this leave us with EVs? Firstly, degradation of the batteries is inevitable, even if they aren’t overheated. Eventually, the crystal structures morph into more stable structures that are less reactive (in chemical terms, that’s what ‘stable’ means), and so that portion of the battery’s recharging capacity is lost.
Secondly, we are stuck with slow charging and have to manage it. There are essentially two options here. The first one is to simply put bigger batteries into the cars. Suppose I were to charge a battery from 20 per cent to 80 per cent. I now double the size of the battery and charge it from 20 per cent to 50 per cent. The amount of charge in each case is identical, but the charging of the larger battery would be more efficient, and could therefore be carried out more quickly than in the first case with the smaller battery. This approach, however, has two obvious disadvantages – the cars become both more expensive and heavier.
A lot of people seem unaware of this latter issue. The entry-level Tesla 3 weighs in at 1,800kg, a substantial increase over an equivalent-sized Hyundai at 1,300kg. As the battery comprises generally about 25 per cent of the weight of an EV, doubling the battery would increase the weight to 2,250kg, as much as a Landcruiser… This option, therefore, quickly loses its viability.
The second approach to the battery recharging issue is having removeable batteries, like in a torch. Believe it or not, such a car exists – the ‘Silence SO4’ – a tiny car resembling a Smart Car. How this approach could be implemented in larger cars such as Teslas remains to be seen.
There are other logistical issues with EVs, such as the availability of lithium and the problem (and it’s a big one) of waste batteries. These are beyond the scope of this article.
No doubt more charging stations will pop up here and there, but the problem of slow charging is embedded in the electronic structure of the batteries, and there simply is no way around it.
At this point I normally finish an article with some pithy comment, but on this occasion, I can’t think of one. I simply make this unavoidable observation – the widespread use of EVs is simply not viable. When that become clear to our leaders, and what the fallout from that is, is anybody’s guess.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/evs-and-a-tale-of-two-italians/
*********************************************Will Rishi Sunak admit the truth about Net Zero?
Grant Shapps, the energy secretary, popped up on television at the weekend to explain that the cost of installing a heat pump is only about £3,000, the same as a gas boiler. Hmm. Good luck with that.
That number is only true once a £5,000 grant from the government (of which only 90,000 are available) has been considered. It ignores all the costs of insulation and pipework. A friend of mine with a heat pump says about £15,000 is a more accurate number.
A lower carbon economy is a good thing, but the Net Zero policy as legally implemented in the UK has been a disaster
Inflation, largely a consequence of energy costs, remains the biggest issue not just in Britain but the world right now. We feel it particularly acutely here because UK inflation remains stubbornly high, partly due to our daft energy policy and the delusional state of discussion of this critical subject in the City, Westminster, universities, and the media.
A close watching of Prime Minister’s Questions last week was a reminder of this. There was a total of six questions about energy. The latest public opinion and social attitudes survey from the Office for National Statistics found that a resounding 93 per cent believe that the cost of living is the most important issue facing the country, while 51 per cent are worried about the cost of food and 48 per cent about the cost of energy. Those are big numbers.
Rishi Sunak’s answers at PMQs made more sense than the cries of his detractors and offered a hint of something more rational than we have now. It raises the seductive possibility that if he adopts the same practical and pragmatic approach he has to other subjects, he might recover from the impossible hole he finds himself in.
Sir Keir Starmer’s signature policy is to raise £13 billion by increasing the windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas companies. He also wants to remove their investment allowances in order to fund an ambitious and expensive Green Prosperity plan. He accuses the Prime Minister of ‘giving handouts to oil and gas giants’ and ‘protecting oil and gas profits’ rather than using the money to freeze council tax bills.
But as oil and gas prices fall, the additional windfall tax will collect nothing like the £13 billion Labour hopes. Despite its theoretical attractions, the Green Prosperity plan is a fantasy, impractical policy. Nor is it true that the government has given handouts to the oil and gas industry.
The green lobby are busy condemning the approval of the Rosebank oil and gas field in the North Sea for development by Equinor of Norway, which, they claim (wrongly), would receive nearly £4 billion of subsidies. These are simply the usual corporate investment allowances, not subsidies.
But it is to defend a deeply unfashionable industry, just as Bernard Looney, the CEO of BP did last week, when he proclaimed that fossil fuels ‘have done an enormous amount of good’ for humanity.
Intriguingly, Labour supports, in principle, a huge investment by Equinor and BP in Teesside. This project is includes a carbon capture and storage project. But obviously, it is contingent on there being carbon to capture from North Sea production in the first place, which Labour is apparently against. So the party’s position is contradictory. Reports of allegedly sharp practice among local property developers may provide political way out of that jam, if nothing else.
Meanwhile, British electricity is the most expensive in Europe and probably in the advanced world, at 40p per kilowatt hour, according to the HEPI index. That is nearly twice the European average and three times the American average. This is despite the fact that renewables generators are boasting that their costs are falling and that British solar and wind power produced more electricity (32.4 per cent) than natural gas (31.7 per cent) in the first quarter.
That is good news from a carbon emissions perspective, but absolutely terrible news from a cost of living and price perspective. Contrary to myth, and it is important to understand this, wind and solar are not always cheaper on a system-wide basis. This is because they depend not only on subsidies, but on having a large fleet of gas power stations on standby for cold days, for when the wind is not blowing or the sun not shining. The two systems are therefore run side by side. Currently, that means higher costs.
This is one of the reasons lower oil and gas prices globally are not being passed on to British consumers in cheaper electricity prices. Our energy system, reflecting 20 years of wonky policies, is all bent out of shape.
A lower carbon economy is a good thing for multiple reasons, but the Net Zero policy as legally implemented in the UK has been a disaster. We are one of only a handful of countries to have put the target of Net Zero emissions by 2050 into law. But this policy has the potential to be a bigger fiasco than Brexit or Covid. It has already resulted in higher costs, with huge impact on society and the economy. It has led to higher emissions (because coal power stations have been kept on), encouraged Vladimir Putin, and increased our dependence on China.
Judging by the polls, a good proportion of people understand this. They can see their energy bills for themselves, and they can spot the flaws in the claim that heat pumps cost only £3,000 after a few minutes on the internet. We aren’t stupid. As for the policy that new gas boilers are going to be banned from newbuilds from 2025, i.e. in 18 months, we know that is not going to happen. It is absurd.
It is not hard to see where this might head if Rishi Sunak has the courage to take the pragmatic stance he has taken towards other controversial issues. He can say ‘I am practical and sort things out. I am committed to a low carbon economy, but I also recognise the reality of needing fossil fuels for the moment. Vote Labour if you want to, but it will result in you being forced to install a £15,000 heat pump, even higher energy bills and much higher taxes. You will have to buy an expensive electric car. These crazy policies could tip thousands more into poverty. It will also mean higher inflation and higher interest rates. By contrast, I will keep your bills down.’
In order to do this, Rishi Sunak will himself require a realistic energy policy that makes more practical sense. He will have to match Labour’s ambition and be honest about simple but important things, like boilers and cars and roads. He will also have to admit that hard Net Zero is an ideology. Whether he has the courage and authority to do so is a different matter.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/will-rishi-sunak-admit-the-truth-about-net-zero-2
******************************************************Carbon capture and storage works, but its high cost has slowed its uptake
Carbon capture and storage is “complicated and costly’’ to do on a large scale, and its lack of affordability in part explains why the mature technology is not widely used, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association conference has heard.
The key role CCS will play in reaching net-zero carbon goals has been a key theme of the conference, being held in Adelaide this week, along with calls for more government support for the technology which aims to permanently store carbon emissions underground in depleted oil and gas reservoirs.
And while Resources Minister Madeleine King told the conference this week that CCS was “perhaps the single biggest opportunity for emissions reduction in the energy resources sector’’, her colleague, Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic yesterday said he wasn’t yet convinced.
“If the technology stacks up, great,’’ Mr Husic said in a radio interview. “I haven’t taken the view that it’s all bad and I haven’t taken the view that it’s all great. I haven’t seen it yet to be honest … it really hasn’t shown that it’s able to work at scale.’’
Mr Husic said “it would be great if we can do it’’, but that remained to be shown.
While Ms King’s comments to the conference were strongly supportive of the role CCS could play in reaching net zero, there were no commitments made in terms of supporting the technology through incentives or subsidies.
Her comments follow the government stripping $250m in previously committed funding from CCS projects in last October’s federal budget.
APPEA says a carbon capture and storage strategy is essential at a national level and is pushing for the creation of “net zero industrial zones” where heavy carbon-emitting industries can be co-located, and their emissions captured and stored.
The conference also heard from many speakers that Australia risks falling behind the US and Europe, which are pouring billions into net zero programs including support for CCS projects, with the US allowing them to use a key tax credit.
To date there is only one commercially-operated CCS project active in Australia, at Chevron’s Gorgon project offshore Western Australia, while Santos’s Moomba CCS project is 60 per cent complete, with first injection expected next year.
The Chevron project is underperforming, with Chevron Australia general manager energy transition David Fallon telling the conference on Wednesday that pressure management issues were still hindering the $2.5bn project.
Mr Fallon said the $2.5bn Gorgon CCS project was working and was “the world’s largest stand-alone storage facility’’, but admitted it was only operating at about one third capacity.
It had to date stored about eight million tonnes of CO2, Mr Fallon said.
The Gorgon CCS operation is designed to store CO2 stripped from the natural gas stream in depleted in reservoirs more than 2km beneath Barrow Island, offshore Western Australia.
The company aims to inject about 100m tonnes of CO2 back underground over the life of the LNG project with the system to eventually capture four million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually.
Mr Fallon said there had been some “misleading reporting’’ saying the project did not work, but the high level message was that “the CO2 storage, it is working’’.
“It’s safely storing CO2. Even with the challenges we’ve had it remains, as I understand it, the world’s largest stand-alone CO2 storage facility solely focused on storage, so we’re working through the challenges and we’ve got lots of engineers and plans to remediate the system,’’ he said.
“There’s often some misleading reporting saying ‘it’s a failure, it doesn’t work. I can say it does work.’’
When challenged on why the technology, which has been in use at a modest scale for decades overseas, has not been more widely adopted, Mr Fallon said “it’s not cheap”, while reiterating that it needed to be part of the net zero toolkit.
“The times are changing, it’s not cheap, but as the world’s evolved and lower carbon is a higher priority there’s certainly more interest in CCS and it becomes a more attractive investment from a cost point of view.
Ms Gao said there were several hurdles the industry had to surmount to make it more viable, which differed by jurisdiction. In the US for example, the permitting time frame for a CCS project currently sat at about six years, while countries such as South Korea and Japan lacked the geological structures to store CO2 underground.
Ms Gao said the growing focus on building CCS hubs provided some “promising hope’’ for the technology.
She said while the cost of capturing CO2 was “actually quit high”, carbon prices were also high and would make projects viable.
“I think the bigger problem with CCS is … the scale and the scale comes more around … the transportation and storage side of it,’’ she said.
Ms Gao said transporting CO2 for storage could double the cost of the endeavour, meaning hubs were a better option.
***************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment