Living in comfort forever.

[Workingman]

All we have to do is:
* Grow the forests by 5-15%
* Raise crop yeilds by 40 - 60%
* Get hundreds of million electric cars on the road by 2050
* Get CO2 emitted per unit of electricity to fall by at least 90%
* Switch to diets high in vegetables
* Only eat meat from animals raised through intensive farming

Simple, or so says the calculator from this group. The detail is a bit iffy, well non-existent, but if the calculator says we will be fine then why not?

Err, could it be that replanting forest will take up food producing farmland? Could it also be that raising crop yields by up to 60% is impossible? How about where is the electricity to come from for all those eco friendly electric cars? How is the CO2 per unit going to be dropped by 90%, what technology will be used? All the evidence is that as countries grow richer their populations move away from veg to meat diets, how will that be reversed? Where will all these intensive farms for the meat be located? And what about global population size? As ever the subject is conveniently bypassed.

Rather than just reporting these ideas as viable solutions, with a good dose of feelgood factor thrown in, it is time the media forced these goons to provide hard evidence. We need details of the figures, statistics, and the technologies, processes and methods which will be used to achieve these dreams.

I did check, and it is not April 1st yet.

[TheOstrich]

What strikes me is that it will be interesting to see where we go with "the technologies". Technology is innovating and changing so fast, surely it's difficult to predict more than a couple of decades in advance.

[Workingman]

Well, yes, but.......... If crop yields could be increased by 60%, and the land able to sustain such yields in the long term, agri-business would be investing billions on R&D to make it happen. Similar with the CO2 footprint per unit of electricity - it has to be achievable and there has to be big money made from it. No technology is needed to alter attitudes to diet to change us all into vegetarian 'lite', but all the evidence shows that as we get richer we eat more meat, not less.

Also, take the "hundreds of millions" of electric cars. How is the electricity to be generated and where will the rare earth metals used in the cars' construction come from? We already struggle to keep pace with demand for electricity and the only "new" technology on the horizon able to cope with an increased baseload demand, 24/7, is nuclear fusion...... And that always seems to be 30 years away.

[Suff]

Actually it's not that hard Ossie. Barring some kind of killer breakthrough tech, the energy and farming industries are following a trend which has been fairly consistent for the last half century.

One really killer tech that is being worked on is batteries which can fully charge in one or two minutes then release the energy over hours of time. There is a lot of work going into this to allow it because a huge amount of the charging energy currently is wasted as heat.

WM says it quite succinctly but there is another way of saying it as well. Trolling through the figures, I find that the UK produced 75twh of electricity in 2013. If I'm right in the calculations and it seems to be about right given the cost of heating gas, we would need to increase our electricity supply by an addition 50twh in order to be able to supply all these wonderful electric vehicles. Given that our electricity production goes down every year, I wonder where we're going to get that from or what technology we'll use to get it???

As for intensive farming techniques? There are two points to that.

1 is battery or massively restricted movement for animals. After all intensive means more animals in less space. Something we have spent 4 decades trying to stop

2 Fertilisers and lots of them because we can't intensively farm the ground without returning what we remove and if we're not going to let the ground rest, then we have to push in potentially damaging chemicals.

Scientists. Usually can't see beyond the silo's they work in. Then someone picks the work up and says "See it's possible".

Now if they want to talk about flooding the sahara with the ocean and turning it into a forest again, I'm up for that discussion. We have the technology and the power for pumping etc could come from solar and hydro. But, of course we'd have to displace a whole bunch of people who wouldn't want to move.....

There are options. But people keep thinking you can take shortcuts. It's simple. The entire planet has spent every waking moment screwing up the CO2 balance for 200 years. Culminating in us finally overwhelming a very robust system and pushing it into decline.

Now, what I want to know is this. How are they going to make some smart move which undoes the work of the entire planet over 200 years. That's a hell of a lot of effort and once you've started it back on the right track, you have to keep going until you can let it stabilise on it's own.

Engineering on that scale is not impossible. Just improbable in our current political environment.