In the US I feel we have entered the stage beyond trying to suppress awareness. Not that the government is being honest about it, but they also aren't really trying to hide it. They've just moved to not directly talking about it, and since our mainstream media is fully captured nobody is pushing them to talk about it. We've moved from trying to downplay the impact to just announcing what we plan to do about it as the impacts continue to manifest into reality.
We're going to continue down the path of fossil fuels (we have no intention of trying to lessen the severity at the cost of economic growth, number MUST GO UP) and we're going to attempt to take countries (Greenland, Canada) that "benefit" from the changes (at least in terms of having more livable/arable land). Migrants trying to enter the US to escape the catastrophes in their own countries will be thrown into concentration camps or worse. Large parts of the US will be impacted, of course, but those are sacrifices they're willing to make (and, hey... large scale displacement is good for the GDP!). Better double check your insurance policies.
Almost all of Trump 2.0's actions to date make a sort of sociopathic sense if you assume the various groups pulling his strings have accepted that large impacts from severe climate change are coming soon and have just decided to YOLO it.
The population of the UK or Europe did not explode in the last hundred years. It did not even double.
The population used to be more rural and relatively self sufficient in terms of food. There is actually enough land in Europe to feed everybody, especially considering the great progress we made scientifically. You can actually sustain yourself on a few hundred square meters of land and you won't get fat and be healthier (in your body and mind).
The great migration of the local population to the city to get a good factory or a bank job is over I believe. But the country side is still empty.
The reason is it is hard to make the jump first and ending up in the middle of nowhere living with a few old people. Also your politicians hate independent people so they are not gonna encourage it. They would rather keep you in a constant guilty state about their vision of "climate change" while letting you board a 10 GBP Ryanair flight for a week-end city trip or order useless things on Temu.
For Europe and many other places, the solution to a more sustainable future is actually quite straightforward.
Every region, culture will need to find a path to sustainability in their own way. If the path they take is invading another region, it leads to war. Like it has been for thousands of years.
No liberal would want millions of people coming from Afghanistan, for example.
But when it’s the best part of a billion people - at a rate of 4:1, that’s a different question.
My major belief/bet is that young professionals that work in front of the computer all day will figure out that living in a very expensive city doesn’t make much sense and there are a ton of cheap rural houses in the beautiful countryside and we’ll have a reverse migration for young, educated white collars. Right now it’s just a trending topic for youtubers, but most people, especially Gen-Z existing in an economic limbo, have not caught on.
At least that’s my plan because it makes so much economic sense, I have had enough of city life and I am too old to care about urban amenities vs quality of life.
Ideally, we should want populations that are either not growing or slowly shrinking, but we can't have this because multi-national corporations don't want to invest in countries with a declining consumer base. We must therefore sustain population growth indefinitely.
Similar humans would presumably prefer more space – perhaps a home with a few bedrooms and a decent sized garden where they can grow a little food and the kids and play in the summer. But we can't have this because it's more economically productive if we increase population density such that people increasingly live in small flats within high-rise buildings with no gardens and little natural light.
And I get it, money is nice... People will trade a lot of things for more money, but the government ideally should not encourage this.
Ideally the government should be encouraging people to have a home with a garden. To have a couple of kids. To grow some of their own food. To work in their local community, and therefore obtain an education which will help them to be productive members of their community – rather than say taking a punt at studying journalism at university and hoping they'll get a job in some city 200 miles from home and their family.
Just speaking personally, the city I grew up in in the UK has become hell to live in over the last couple of decades. It's almost impossible to drive around today because of densification which has taken place. All of the local fields that I played on as a kid have been turned into cheap flats which has transformed the semi-rural area I used to live into an ugly anti-human concrete jungle. And because of the number of people now living around here no one seems to know anyone anymore – I walk outside my house and it feels like there's random people everywhere, and I've noticed many people around me don't even seem to speak English anymore.
It's such a strange thing we are doing... It really makes no sense for us to want to live like this.
Your politicians are actually subsidising the rural lifestyle with direct and indirect transfers. Eg in Europe, you can buy land, leave it more or less abandoned and cash in agricultural subsidies.
They're talking more in the direction of EU scale closed loop / closed cycle agriculture, in which a network of farms across countries interop to exchange resources (pig and chicken waste, for fertilizer, for example) in order to reduce or eliminate outside inputs (synthetic fertilizers from the Gulf, for example), but still work to maximise production for EU consumption.
How?
> Only 3 countries in the world are self sufficient in food.
Surely a small island nation is not one of them?
Yet they're pushing to use farmland for solar farms and social housing.
There's a real hatred of farmers among the UK Leftist/Green crowd.
There are a few flip-sides here - things that many don't like to hear or acknowledge:
There are alternate diets that are suitably nutritious that are achievable on this land, largely by reducing meat consumption. Meat production uses much more land than other food sources, and a lot of that is input crops. Its inefficient. A change in diet can make the UK self-sufficient on much less land.
Solar is a developing technology; it will improve, requiring less land for the same production. If long term trends push up the value of crops and down solar production, the panels can be removed and crops grown instead - its either/or but it is reversible. This is especially important for bringing in non-solar power sources which take longer to realise (nuclear, tidal). I will also note that solar farms are built on the good crop land because it is convenient and the price is right. We will see south facing hills covered soon enough.
Housing and social housing are the same problem; where housing prices are so high compared to salaries, social housing demand increases. Building houses - any houses - solves the problem. The question of density, location, style is a question about what kind of problems we want in 10-20 years time. High rises did not work well at all.
> Yet they're pushing to use farmland for solar farms and social housing.
Cities, you may note, never ever make enough food to feed themselves. Always been true, everywhere and everywhen since the invention of the city.
Farmers choosing between cash crops and food crops was literally a game the teachers got the kids to play when I was in school in the 90s. Cash crops, and PV is kinda a cash crop, let you make enough money to buy food. That said, how much money depends on what industry you have to use the power, because nobody else in the world will care for the £ if the UK employment consists entirely of baristas, hairdressers, and Amazon warehouse staff/delivery drivers.
The biggest problem with using farmland for social housing is that a lot of the good farmland is a flood risk.
But the only case where the UK has to care that it doesn't make enough to feed itself is if the economy becomes an autarky, at which point it cannot help but suffer a massive population reduction because it's a small island quite close to the arctic circle which has spent or depleted most of its natural resources, first the wood (1600s-1700s), then the coal (1930s or so), then the fish (1980s or so), then the natural gas (early 2000s).
I note you put the word "social" in there; very little social housing is being built, it's mostly private. Agrivoltaics are also possible, but of course everyone would rather do the politics of emotions ("hate farmers") than discuss the issues. Such as how we grow enough electricity, too.
This covers moving the UK to self-sustain by reducing animal products and repurposing animal feed cropland to direct consumption cropland; it also covers reforestation.
So while it isn't possible today, its possible to become possible without relying on any technological advancements.
Of course you can, I know people being almost self sustainable right now on very little land. It is hard, frugal but highly rewarding and we have evolved to do it since very recently.
Energy and heating is a bit more complicated. We obviously cannot burn wood or coal like we use to because this is actually very damaging to the planet. So this is where technology has to play a bigger role.
Please run the numbers for UK farmland divided by UK population.
Farmland is worth £100/acre/year, at most that’s £3k an acre. But people pay £10k because it’s a way to avoid tax and if you get the right planning permission a way of making millions.
I suspect that's the hatred being mischaracterised and amplified by the GBNews Farrage crowd.
The constant observation made about the UK is there's always an excess amplification of what various groups are alleged to believe.
Last I checked, the current King is in the "Leftist/Green" camp and pro-farmer. (by default, he'd be "UK" and not a "crowd" though).
He bought it as a tax break, but I’d leave not ire for “farmers” like the musician and vacuum cleaner salesman.
Nothing caused me to laugh more at the “woe is the millionaire march” than seeing Lloyd Webber and his dog out on the march.
Dyson? Sure - he seems performative (from afar, I'm antipodean to this BTW) with his industrialised strawberry wheels etc.
> the musician
Lost me .. I'm sure the UK has a few gumbooted millionaire class rockers / composers - I'm guessing that's a throw at the impresario of musical theatre with a life peerage who is rarely seen cutting hay.
I'm not sure I'd class either of those as farmers (by our local understanding), and Clarkson smacks of content farmer cos player more than generationally consistent production farmer .. but perhaps he might get there.
There’s certainly a hatred of land owners, and vast amounts of UK farm land is privately owned, renting the land to farmers. It’s the right wing parties and press that takes that to mean that the left hate farmers.
