(C) Common Dreams
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Disrupting Dinner? Food for the Future by Rob Bailey [1]
['Rob Bailey']
Date: 2023-07
Innovation may also help us reduce our dependency on crops for feed and biofuel which together account for around 45 per cent of crop use. Industrial scale cultivation of algae could potentially meet global liquid fuel demand from an area three times the size of Texas, while additionally supplying 10 times as much feed protein as global soybean production. Crucially, this land need would not need to be agricultural because arid subtropical regions are best suited to algae production.
As with cultured meat, vertical farming and algae have high energy needs. But energy will become less of a constraint as the costs of renewable technologies continue to collapse and opportunities for decentralized generation are harnessed: algae farms in sunny deserts could utilize off-grid solar for example.
Far-sighted investors are looking beyond the constraints of today’s energy system when assessing the prospects for tomorrow’s technologies, but the broader point here is that cheap, zero carbon distributed energy has the potential to reshape food production. Suddenly food production becomes viable in desert regions – like Australia and the Gulf – where sea water can be extracted from below ground. Solar energy can be used to first pump and then desalinate water, and heat and cool greenhouses to optimal temperatures for food production.
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[1] Url:
https://hoffmanncentre.chathamhouse.org/article/disrupting-dinner-food-for-the-future/
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