I know that there are plenty of things that can't grow on this side of the Cascades because it's just too wet.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

and when a city has a bad year, and the crops fail, then what? or what about people in northern climates that have a taste for healthy things like oranges and bananas? you wind up trucking the stuff in from somewhere else, and we are right where we are today.
the system we have now works, so why screw with it?
from a purely economic standpoint, it's much cheaper to grow millions of acres of things like corn and wheat in one area and transport it tens, hundreds, or even thousands of miles to the end user.
do you also think that every city should have their own small factories to make the goods to make the stuff that makes modern life what it is instead of having things manufactured in larger factories that can make things in greater volumes and transported to the end user for less energy usage per unit?

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

With a population of something like 46 million, millions of tons of food weren't needed each month in the U.K. during World War II, but food imports were extremely important because it meant people could work in factories instead trying to cultivate every scrap of land. Even with all food imports cut off, it would have been possible, although extremely difficult, to produce enough food in England to prevent starvation. Japan, however, was in a much more precarious position with regards to supplying its own food.

Yeah, at the end of WWII with the US submarine blockage and the destruction of almost all its shipping, according to US military analysis Japan was looking at some 29 million people starving to death before the year's end had not the atom bombs forced the Emperor capitulate.

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

The big mystery is why the US Navy didn't take a leaf from the German book and concentrate the Submarines on the cargo ships instead of wasting them trying to use them in Fleet Actions. Subs played no part in any of the Fleet actions in WW2 despite their best efforts but a concentration on the Japanese shipping lines would have destroyed the Japanese merchant fleet in months.

At the worst point of the Battle of the Atlantic food stocks were down to something like 3 months supply in the UK and in the 1st war, the German U-Boats came within a whisker of starving the UK.

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'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

If...and I well know this is a HUMONGOUS "IF"...we start putting carbon taxes on foods (and everything else for that matter)...then it'd make sense to grow food in suburban yards, if nowhere else. Huge greenhouses would work too, particularly for foods not appropriate for the local climate (i.e. coffee trees in the mountains of Wales or North Carolina) you could have 2 or 3 growing seasons. BUT, that'd mean extra time and effort put into food growing that could be devoted to sharpening job skills, education, or other high value-added activities. Not to mention extra expenses devoted to maintaining the greenhouses and the political (un)reality of meaningful carbon taxes.

The insect population would expand exponentially PDQ (unless you can afford very tightly sealed greenhouses and such; even then, what if you live in a warm climate like Australia or the southern half of the US?).

For that reason, I agree with Henrik. This would only work with a very stringently planned city. My reccommendation is VERY high density housing - equivalent to 20,000 people per square mile [7712 persons km^2]. That's approaching typical urban population densities in Asia. Even then, we should expect the city to have a wide importation radius in terms of distance traveled from farm to market.

It's been done everywhere, & is being done in large areas of the world. Only the cities then are spread out & called villages, their inhabitants peasants, and the farming is subsistence farming. It takes more skill & knowledge than most give it credit for, and is back-breaking labour from sun-up to sun-down, for most of the year.

Civilisations are built on the back of the man with the plough -- Durant
(IMO probably more correct to say "the man with the hoe".)

Well, they wouldn't be carbon taxes then. A carbon tax is only for extra carbon added to the air and food is carbon neutral. Crops absorb carbon from the air as they grow and the same carbon is released when we eat them so it's a wash. Fossil fuels used in the production and transport of food would have a carbon tax on them, but since only a fraction of the price of food today represents the cost of fossil fuel, a carbon tax/credit designed to cut CO2 emissions in half would only have a small impact on its price. A carbon tax provides very little incentive to not transport food long distances and can be avoided entirely by using biofuel and electric powered transportation and machinery.

While the idea sounds very attractive, it's actually cheaper to import the food thousands of miles from third world countries.

What most people don't realize is that some 4.2 Billion people are employed in global food production.

Does anyone really want to put that many people out of work?

A lot of people argue against the CO2 production involved with transporting the food, but when you crunch the numbers, it's less than 1/2 of 1% of all human CO2 production.

Besides CO2 is 32 times less effective as a greenhouse gas than methane, and the livestock industry is responsible for a lot of human-produced methane (I believe it's around 30%).

But there's an even bigger culprit (several hundred times more of a greenhouse gas than CO2), and that's also heavily produced by the livestock industry.

So if you're really want to make an impact on greenhouse gases, growing locally has less than 1% of simply going vegan (no meat or milk products).

The next time you visit your local fast food restuarant, just get the salad, instead of the burger.

Again, "growing locally" sounds good, but in all practicality, it really won't amount to a hill of beans of any sort of impact, except to put half the planet out of work.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.

Unfortunately, it would no longer meet the definition of "organic" since it won't meet the distance requirements for separation of crops and sources of pesticides and herbicides.

Also, the vast majority of backyards have been grossly contaminated with pesticides and herbicides over the years. Would you really prefer food that's laden with that?

Not me!

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.

Scientists at DTU in Denmark are working on a solution to that problem, it basically consists of replacing the intestinal bacteria with some that produce acetic acid instead of methane, this is then further digested by the cow.
End result: more energy available to the cow from the same feed and CO₂ and water instead of methane.

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"God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have ...
"The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible."Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Which one of the dozens of mutually contradictory definitions does it not meet?

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

So let's look at what circumstances might lead to this being a good idea. The only one that I can think of is a city with no access to arable land-- say, one situated on a small island being blockaded. And in that case, there just wouldn't be enough time to grow the crops, let alone convert the entire infrastructure, before people starved.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

But "we", "the West", mostly SEND food to third world countries, because so many of them don't produce enough to feed themselves.

Dag Nabit!

Will somebody please kill the cattle industry puts out significant methane Red Herring? I remember when this was first coined and it was never meant to be taken seriously!

Is it too much to ask a debunking site like this place not to spread metaphorical cattle excrement?

Does anybody besides myself know that a single swamp, a swamp mind you, wet land, places too muddy to walk, habitat, nature etc, 100 miles on a side, on a warm day, puts out more methane than all the cattle alive?

That's just one 100 mile by 100 mile swamp! The whole artic circle is warming and thawing and the tundra and permafrost will be a swamp again for the first time in tens of millions of years. We are talking planetary atmospheric physics here, not a room in your college dorm after burrito night! Some folks seem to think that putting out a candle in the bedroom somehow mitigates the fire in the attic.

I, for one, suddenly realized I like global warming and no longer feel threatened by it. This realization came when I noticed any terraforming venture I would do to Earth would first involve warming it up to previous temperatures planet wide. Mainly by putting a gigantic dam between the tip of South America and Antartica, reconnecting them and causing the Antartic current to only spin once around Antartica then flow north along the west coast of South America, to the equator. Instead of locked in around it keeping everything cold.

In previous times this kept Antartica in the mid-fifties during the long sunless winter. Has anybody asked the Canadians and the Siberians what they think of global warming? I haven't. It would be nice to see Canadians develope melenin.

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

It takes a few thousand years for a population's melanin level to adjust to a change (which is usually by migration, not by the climate changing on top of them). And it adjusts not to temperature but to sunlight, which doesn't change due to global warming. And why would you care if they darken up anyway?

I do agree, though, that in the ways that you'd think environmentalists would usually be interested in, global warming would actually be a good thing, and it would also generally help the human condition too, because the main limit on both humans and life in general on this planet right now is that it's too cold, and coldness makes life hard. If global warming is real, then someday people will be sitting around in lands that are nearly uninhabitable right now thanking us for the climate improvement we so wisely and generously gave them, and discussing the correction of the icy weather problem as one of the greatest achievements of civilization and a monuments to our own greatness. The rumor/modern-legend that anyone could ever have been silly/crazy enough to be scared of it, as if it were a bad thing to unfreeze and bring life to frozen wastelands, will be one of those tales people tell each other just for the sense of amazement or humorous irony at how bizarrely alien and backward people in the past could be, but many won't even believe it because it just won't be believable.

Living underground is impractical, part of the reason buildings can get so high is that its relatively easy to evacuate them in the event stuff happens. You're using oversized stairs and you're moving in the direction of gravity. When you come up from below, you're fighting gravity, and its FAR too exhausting to run up more than 3 or 4 floors before the average person is winded, lets not even start on the ill or injured. Plus there's the option of external rescue by ladder in tall buildings, where there's no equivalent option in subterrainean structures. Looks nice on paper, but the life safety considerations make extensive underground buildings tombs waiting to be occupied.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

Most Canadians prefer to hug the US border as closely as they can & to escape south of it in winter, for as long as they can afford. Few ever see the North.
Where I am, Muskoka, a region most Torontonians think of as THE NORTH, we are at the latitude of Bordeaux, France & Turin, Italy. The sun is plenty strong, even now, and produces lots of melanin in us in summer.
Admittedly this is also the latitude of Minneapolis and just south of Portland, Oregon, so it probably is The North to most Americans.