10 September 2022

Miscomprehension of scale

So the Globe and Mail discusses someone trying to arrange for policy to support the success of an investment.  

This looks like part of a general push against the federal fertilizer emissions cap.

I am unable to decide if that push is cynical or deluded or arises from a sincere mammonism where profit is an arbiter of wisdom.

But, anyway.

"I wish to become much richer, and for my descent to be richer than I am" is an unclean motivation.  Wealth as a survival strategy makes everything worse for everyone.  It's (relatively speaking) easy, and it fulfills the primate feels, but neither of those excuse it not working.

Someone can apparently recognize that there's an ongoing loss of farmland due to climate change and not connect that to emissions.  The point to the emissions reduction policy is to try not to lose more farmland; it's inadequate, insufficient, and too late, but the intent does recognize that fewer emissions means more food.   A position that it's only possible to grow food (or only grow food profitably) if there is no such cap devours itself.

If you have to have a large enterprise -- lots of capital -- to be viable, that means either you've got high capital costs or low margins.  (E.g., the lower grocery margins get, the larger the store needs to be, since costs are discrete for many things, rather than scaling.)  Farms keep getting larger; they've got poor and shrinking margins.  The "no cap" argument is that farm viability depends on the margin not shrinking.

Climate change is shrinking the margin for farming more than any effect of policy or markets.

Saskatchewan is west of the  meteorological Hundredth Meridian; in a hot climate system, it's expected to be desert.  (The Oligocene climate we might get, if we're lucky.)  If we cut all fossil carbon extraction to zero tomorrow, farmland in Saskatchewan is probably not useable for field agriculture by 2050 at the latest, since Arctic Amplification kicked off around 2000.

We can't fix that; all the carbon sequestration schemes are at least two of "but we can keep burning diesel, right?", extractive industry FUD, delusive techno-optimism, and confused about sequestration means.  (It has to be for geological time.  "In some sort of biomass" doesn't count, it's a hard problem.)  Even if one of them works, and can be adopted -- one of the ocean seeding schemes, say -- it doesn't solve the core "rains at predictable times" problem of keeping hydrologic stationarity.  Reducing the average temperature of the earth doesn't make the rain come at predictable times.

The domain of necessity says we need to do three things -- stop adding carbon to the atmosphere, figure out how to provide food without field agriculture, and since our current social systems can do neither of those things, we need to collectively organize ourselves differently.

That's really challenging.  It's apparently not as challenging as recognizing that money does not dissolve all troubles.