

Why vertical farms are a crock. - jlangenauer
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/08/16/towering-lunacy/

======
jdietrich
Farmland isn't just a place to put some plants while they grow. A farm is a
giant solar power facility, one that converts solar energy, carbon dioxide and
water into carbohydrate. Monbiot doesn't stress the point enough - it's all
about light.

When we say that we have a shortage of farmland, what we mean in practical
terms is that we have a shortage of flat areas with good drainage to function
as solar collectors. Going vertical doesn't increase the amount of light you
can gather, so it doesn't increase the amount of food you can produce.

Vertical farming is only remotely feasible if we see the cost of energy fall
ten-thousand fold. That's only likely if we crack nuclear fusion. Of course,
such an abundance of energy would render any worries about food production
moot.

Unfortunately, we appear to live in a world where supposedly educated adults
are unfamiliar with such advanced scientific concepts as photosynthesis.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_When we say that we have a shortage of farmland, what we mean in practical
terms is that we have a shortage of flat areas with good drainage to function
as solar collectors._

Well, it _is_ a bit more complicated than that. A huge problem in agriculture
is the depletion of soil. For example, over time intensively irrigated soil
tends to become contaminated with excess salts which destroys its fertility,
yet still leaves it as flat, well-drained, and sunny as ever.

I completely agree, however, that the first-order consideration in growing
plants is the availability of light.

~~~
DennisP
Aquaponics actually gets you pretty close to a closed-cycle ecosystem.

I read the other day about a family of four which grows all its food from an
old in-ground swimming pool in their back yard. They put a greenhouse covering
over it, filled a couple little ponds inside with tilapia, added vegetables
and chickens. After one year they're extracting all the veggies, fish, and
eggs they can eat.

~~~
dalke
Potatoes give about 6 million food calories per acre. (Wheat and most other
plants yield less.) Assuming 8,000 calories per day, the family would need at
least 1/2 an acre to survive. An Olympic-sized pool is 0.3 acres, so it's a
bit beyond the edge of possible. I doubt their pool was that large, and since
most other vegetables, to say nothing of fish and chickens, are less efficient
food sources, I suspect they get a good fraction of their calories from
elsewhere.

To check myself, this seems like a good thread:
[http://urbanevolution.org/thinktank/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=...](http://urbanevolution.org/thinktank/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11)
. The strongest advocates for intensive and efficient agriculture say "less
than half an acre (~ 0.2 hectares) can support a family of four" and "a vegan
diet can meet calorie and protein needs from just 300 square metres using
mainly potatoes. A more varied diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables,
grains and legumes would take about 700 square metres." Say it's 2500 square
meters for a family of 4 = 0.6 acres.

So, no, I don't think they get most of their food from the area of their
backyard pool.

~~~
DennisP
Your arguments are compelling but I'm not yet convinced it's impossible. One
of their main crops is duckweed, an aquatic plant that grows very rapidly,
though I haven't found specific numbers. Duckweed feeds their tilapia, which
also breed and grow quickly. They say they extract eight tilapia every day,
along with eggs and vegetables. Their chickens eat a lot of insects, a reserve
of calories neglected by your potato field.

Their website is at <http://gardenpool.org>. It doesn't yet have as much
detail as I'd like but hopefully more is forthcoming.

Here's someone else who harvests 6000 pounds of food per year from a tenth of
an acre, with 350 different crops: <http://urbanhomestead.org/urban-homestead>

It seems to me that exploiting a lot of ecological niches might be more
productive than monoculture. You can't extract more calories than sunlight
provides (not counting insects from surrounding areas), but maybe sunlight is
not the most limiting factor.

~~~
dalke
Vegetables have about 100 calories per pound. (See
[http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t/cal-par/calorie-
paradox1...](http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t/cal-par/calorie-
paradox1c.shtml) ). You can get higher by picking the right plants so let's
say 300 calories per pound. At 6,000 pounds per year that's 1.8 million
calories. At 2500 calories per person per day that's enough for two people for
a year.

For a family of 4 that's at least twice the area, or 0.2 acres needed, and
likely more as the web page says their max was 6,000 pounds. It also doesn't
say which plant those were, nor what the moisture content was. After all, if a
watermelon is 15 pounds then that's 400 watermelons, and each one gets 11 sq.
ft, but most of that is water weight.

And as for the gardenpool, as best as I could tell, duckweed is 6 times more
productive than corn, and tilapia at best consume 1.5 lbs to produce 1 lb of
weight. Not all that weight will be edible, and corn isn't as productive as
potatoes, but the numbers work out that it might be 2-3 times more productive
than my potato number for the same area.

However, I think the numbers for duckweed yield are in pig waste water or
something else with a lot of nutrients in it, and everything is here is under
best conditions, which also means a lot of care taking. Which potatoes don't
need.

BTW, the web site says 8 eggs per day, not 8 fish. It looks like it takes 5
months for tilapia to mature to eating weight, and 8 fish a day would mean
stocking 1,200 fish at a time. What they don't say is, is duckweed the only
food source for the fish or are they adding other feed?

They also mentioned that they need a swamp cooler to keep the temperature in
check. Assuming that's 200W average over 24 hours, that another 4,000 kcal
("food calories"), or almost enough for two people. They get that off the
grid, but if they needed to provide their own fuel source for heating and
cooling (tilapia can't handle cold water) then that's another factor in the
energy equation. Potatoes are hardy in northern, cool climates.

~~~
DennisP
Oops, yep, 8 eggs. They say "unlimited" tilapia but I imagine the limit there
is how much of it they're willing to eat!

The aquaculture idea is that wastes from the fish, and in this case the
chickens, puts lots of plant nutrients in the water. Maybe not as much as pig
waste water, I don't know.

200W doesn't sound like that much power...solar panels on the roof, where you
can't grow crops anyway, and/or wind turbines could provide that. Those are
local resources you can't otherwise use to produce food, sort of like
exploiting another ecological niche.

Potatoes are certainly convenient and productive, though I wouldn't want to
subsist on them alone. Some people are growing them in tall boxes for easy
extraction, and I was startled to see how much they claimed to produce.

Re: 6000 lbs/year, that must be why they sell their stuff instead of eating
it.

This has been very interesting.

~~~
dalke
Which leads me to ask - what do the chickens eat?

I see that gardenpool gives a timeline on the side. They didn't stock the pool
with tilapia until May 2010. Their page at
<http://gardenpool.org/?page_id=242> says "A tilapia matures from egg to
harvest size (1.5 lbs) in only 6-9 months."

It hasn't been long enough for the new spawn to reach edible size. How can
they say "unlimited" when they don't have the experience to know if it's
stable? I suspect they are being overly optimistic.

Regarding 200W - I don't know what their swamp cooler needs, and they say they
installed solar power. I picked 200W because that looks like a common size for
portable home devices.

Looking now, I think solar cells are about 20 sq ft for 200 W. Since they need
to work during the night as well (though not as much), call it 40 sq. ft of
otherwise unused space. I was thinking that that would go into the area
calculation, but as that's about 0.1% of an acre, it's not a big contribution.

And yes, I've found it interesting as well.

~~~
DennisP
In part they eat bugs but I wouldn't think that would be sufficient in such a
contained area. It's not like they're set up in a swamp.

Polyface Farms seems to feed their egg layers entirely on bugs, cattle
droppings, and maybe a bit of greenery:

"The Eggmobile is a 12 ft. X 20 ft. portable henhouse and the laying hens free
range from it, eating bugs and scratching through cattle droppings to sanitize
the pasture just like birds in nature that always follow herbivores as
biological cleansers." <http://www.polyfacefarms.com/products.aspx>

Of course that's a much larger operation. They keep moving, so cleaned areas
can recover. They've got forested areas nearby which play a part in the
ecosystem. They claim higher overall productivity than conventional farms
producing the same stuff, but nothing extreme.

The peril of aquaculture is sometimes everything suddenly goes haywire and
dies. Eventually the kinks get worked out and it's pretty stable, but the pool
people may well have surprises in store.

I do love the idea of a little self-contained ecosystem, almost like a space
colony. I hope people do a lot more experiments along these lines.

One idea from Marshall Savage's _Millennial Project_ is edible algae, like
spirulina. According to him it's absurdly productive in a small space, and the
numbers from the "algae for fuel" people seem to bear that out. A turnkey
system for producing it safely would be pretty neat, but I haven't been able
to find much information. Everybody's talking biofuel. I wouldn't exactly want
to subsist on algae but it could be great as a supplement in flour or stews,
as fish feed, etc. How healthy it would be to eat large quantities seems to be
a little uncertain, but supposedly it has a long history as a food.

~~~
dalke
If power isn't a concern (which it would be for the original topic of this
thread) then the space programs have done research into small self-contained
ecosystems, as you mentioned. I haven't looked them up before, but I see now
that BIOS 3 (early 1970s Russia) had a 3-man crew for 180 days, with only some
import of external food and air. It did need 400 kW of power, which if my
10W/sq.ft solar power is right means about 1 acre of solar panels. More if
there's darkness.

Some other links:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Ecological_Life_Supp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Ecological_Life_Support_System)
and <http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/designer/regen.html> . The latter says
"The present crop growth chamber ... is about 12 m^2. The energy requirement
of the system is about 15 kw of which 13 kw ... The present system provides
complete nutritional needs of 1 person (a vegeterian)."

That power, at retail levels of about $0.10/kW hr, costs $36 per day. $18 if
you can be diurnal. Sunlight puts out about 1kw/sq.m so that power is mostly
going into replacing sunlight.

Which means, if that link is correct, that 12 sq.m _is_ enough for a single
person. But I'm at the end of my stamina for researching this topic.

Cheers!

~~~
DennisP
I'll cap off my contribution with this guy who's eating nothing for the next
two months but potatoes. Twenty every day. He's the Executive Director of the
Washington State Potato Commission. <http://20potatoesaday.com/>

It's been fun!

------
ghshephard
As important as the specific theme (Vertical Farms are a crock) was this line,
"Magical thinking is a universal affliction. We see what we want to see, deny
what we don’t. Confronted by uncomfortable facts, we burrow back into the
darkness of our cherished beliefs. We will do almost anything – cheat, lie,
stand for high office, go to war – to shut out challenges to the way we see
the world."

So many of the inane approaches to solving some of our economic and
environmental challenges make absolutely no sense, have almost completely
consensus that they violate laws of physics, and quite often result in Net-
Negative results. "Local Growing", except as a hobby, is one of those insane
ideas that seems to be underlying the silly "Vertical Farms" concept.
(<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/opinion/20budiansky.html>)

Ironically, if there is government funding, the fact that an idea makes no
economic sense doesn't mean it won't be pursued. There may be peripheral
advantages or developments in technology that take place, while we tilt at
these windmills.

So - I say let's build a couple of these vertical farms, see what we discover,
do the math and realize it will never make sense, and maybe discover something
else that we never even considered!

~~~
hugh3
_So - I say let's build a couple of these vertical farms, see what we
discover, do the math and realize it will never make sense, and maybe discover
something else that we never even considered!_

You're suggesting doing something that we already know makes no damn sense in
the hopes that we might learn something useful in the process. This argument
could be used to justify an awful lot of things which make no sense.

This is, of course, just fine, as long as you're spending your own money on
doing nonsensical things, and not mine. Good luck rustling up the hundred
million dollars you'll need to build a skyscraper though.

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
you could build just a two story house, glass side walls, high enough
ceilings, and see what happens on the first or second floor.

------
parfe
Vertical farms are a crock because transport of crops is easy. Moving people
is much harder. This is why economic centers are densely populated, but can
still eat food shipped from 1000 miles away. There is no reason to spend
millions to build vertically when you can buy cheap land and transport the
products to the most profitable markets on demand.

~~~
slapshot
This. People should be dense, farms should be sparse.

Taking city land to grow crops is NOT carbon-efficient. The far more carbon-
efficient method would be to use city land for more housing, and use suburbia
for farms.

Think of it this way: people commute both ways every day, but food commutes
only once.

I'm not even going to get into the idea that it's more carbon-efficient to
grow bananas in South America and ship them to New York than it would be to
heat and light a greenhouse in New York...

~~~
ajdecon
I agree with most of this post. But, a small correction: food only commutes
in, but then waste commutes back out again. Unless you propose to build
landfills _in_ the city.

------
philk
I have to admit to being astonished that there was a need in the first place
to explain that vertical farms are a crock[1].

The long list of articles from prominent news sources was actually rather sad.

[1] The question _how do you propose to grow over a thousand bucks worth of
wheat each month in your tiny apartment?_ comes to mind.

~~~
fleitz
If farmland is as scarce as Monbiot proposes then vertical farms could work.
Most of the value of a $1000 a month apartment is in consumer surplus. Yes, a
vertical farm in manhattan will probably never work, but one on some existing
farm land in New Jersey probably will. Vertical farms currently won't work but
any real scarcity in farmland will drive up prices until it becomes economical
as the price of food is highly elastic.

~~~
hugh3
Farmland isn't _actually_ scarce, though. Right now the world has plenty of
farmland for all its people, which is why food is so cheap and why we can
afford to consume massively space-wasting crops. People may be starving in
Africa, but it's for political reasons which have nothing to do with the
amount of arable land there (significantly more than China or India which have
similar populations to Africa).

If the world's population ever does increase to the point where farmland is
scarce, there's a lot of other things which become economical before
skyscraper farms do... even if fusion energy comes along to solve the lighting
problem. Switching to land-efficient crops is one thing. Irrigating the
world's deserts is another. Even farms on barges out in the ocean make a lot
more economic sense than skyscraper farms.

~~~
alex_stoddard
I am genuinely interested in references for available arable land in Africa vs
China & India.

------
hugh3
While George Monbiot is often wrong about a lot of things, it's nice to see
him being right in comparison to someone even wronger than he is.

A quick calculation: the total floor area of the Empire State Building is 63
acres. You can do your own calculations for the cost of building the Empire
State Building vs the cost of buying 63 acres of land (which, incidentally,
gets light) in upstate New York, but I'm pretty sure that one is much, much,
much larger than the other.

~~~
jameskilton
And with that number in mind, you also see another problem with vertical
farms: pure space availability. Modern farms are hundreds and even thousands
of acres to grow enough food to feed the masses we have today. You would need
> 100 of these buildings (ignoring all the other issues for now) to be able to
replace _one_ major farm.

Frankly hydrogen vehicles are more feasible than this, but only barely.

~~~
alabut
" _You would need > 100 of these buildings (ignoring all the other issues for
now) to be able to replace one major farm._"

So what if it didn't replace one major farm and just a small local one? And
what if the vertical farm and office building idea were combined, so that you
had alternating floors of greenhouses for plants and office workers that ate
them?

I'm surprised I haven't seen the ideas brought together before, it seems more
pragmatic than a dedicated building just for the farm and there's a growing
movement to eat healthier at work. We order from FarmFresh at my offices,
which supplies us with fruit and veggies from a local family-owned farm and
we've been loving the results.

~~~
hugh3
_And what if the vertical farm and office building idea were combined, so that
you had alternating floors of greenhouses for plants and office workers that
ate them?_

It takes 1-2 acres of farmland to support one person's eating requirements,
which is two floors of the Empire State Building. Alternatively, there's 21000
people working in the ESB so that's about 200 people per floor. If you devoted
every second floor to agriculture (and magically solved the lighting problem)
then each worker could acquire 0.25% of his daily caloric requirements from
the floor below... maybe a couple of strawberries?

Oh, and the ESB rents for $38 a square foot, so working out the effective cost
of each strawberry is left as an exercise for the reader.

~~~
qq66
$38/year or per month?

~~~
hugh3
Per year.

I also looked up the average cost of agricultural land per acre in the US,
which comes down to about $1200 per acre, or about 0.3 cents per square foot.

This means that for the cost of buying outright the average agricultural
square foot somewhere in the country, you could rent that same square foot in
a big-city skyscraper for about 45 minutes.

------
sophacles
Every time I read of these, my thought was always "how do they get light?". I
just assumed that this was somehow solved, otherwise why would everyone be so
excited about it? I figured some day I would have some time to properly
investigate it and find some cool tech.

It saddens me greatly, and in numerous ways, to find out that "How do they get
light?" is a killer question.

~~~
quantumhobbit
I always assumed that the light would be artificial. And that they were
relying on hypothetical cheap energy of the kind that reliable fusion would
provide. This may be possible a hundred years from now but surely not in
today's energy economy.

~~~
mhd
But once you've got reasonably cheap and plentiful energy, what's the big
incentive for growing locally. If trucking it from Kansas to NYC doesn't
pollute as much, reasons for building those towers diminish somewhat.

Of course, it's slightly different if you've got plentiful energy, but no good
way to transmit/store it. Lots of solar panels all over the city to power its
greenhouses. Or windmills in Chicago.

------
jlgbecom
Vertical farms are kind of a crock, kind of. The idea of indoor agriculture is
not, however (just look at Thanet Earth), and there is an advantage of
building up a few floors and using grow lights to supplement the loss of
passive lighting.

A series of low-rise warehouses using hydroponics in the outer rings of a city
makes a lot of sense.

However, the architectural games people are playing with huge spires in the
center of Manhattan, those are ridiculous, and always have been.

~~~
ghshephard
Can you identify a single instance of economic use of grow lights for
agricultural (as opposed to pharmaceutical) purposes? Green Houses (Thanet
Earth) are designed to trap the Sun's energy.

~~~
jlgbecom
Using grow lights 100% of the time? No, that's definitely not going to work,
unless major gains in efficiency are made. But using led grow lights to
supplement passive solar and elongate the grow cycle is what I'm referring to,
and designing low-rise greenhouses to capture the sun's energy for the light
hours. If you capture excess solar energy, store it, and use it at night, then
the energy pull from the grid for night-time grow lights is reduced, and then
it's an economic question of cost of energy versus sale potential.

I'm not specifically thinking about staple crops (ie, wheat, rice, etc), but
supplementary crops like tomatos, lettuce, cucumbers, etc. Mostly, what Thanet
Earth is growing.

------
Misha_B
I've seen this nonsense for a few years now in all kinds Architectural
publications. One such example:
<http://www.mvrdv.nl/#/projects/research/181pigcity>. Unfortunately, many
architects and architecture students would buy any green (or otherwise hyped)
BS thrown at them without questioning it.

I think the most prohibitive aspect of the "vertical farming" is the enormous
cost (in materials, labor and energy) of building highrises or even buildings
of more moderate heights, compared to the cost of growing any legal kind of
crop on farmland and shipping it. Structure will have to be significantlly
more massive to carry the loads of some soil and water. And not a word about
competing land uses in Manhattan... But let's assume we can afford to ship the
crop 10 or 30 miles into the city from a place with cheaper land, rather than
a 1000 from far far away.

Otherwise, I actually believe the problem of lighting is solvable - for crops
that require perhaps 3-10 times as little light as available in an open field
on a certain location. Light can penetrate from the sides of the building. A
structure shallow ebough compared to the floor height might suffice, say 10-15
meters for a floor 3 meters high. Close to the equator sunlight is abundant so
even having less light by an order of magnitude is probably enough for some
crops. Further away from the equator it's trickier: the sun is much lower in
the south and so more direct sunlight is gained so perhaps only two thirds of
it are lost compared to an open field. But then, the structure casts very long
shadows which may prevent the land "behind" it from being used for farming
(vertical or otherwise).

------
nitrogen
What about using vertical farms just for semi-exotic plants that fetch a
higher price? Instead of expecting to feed a city of 15 million on skyscraper
farms, just grow things that have to be 100% fresh in order to be tasty, and
sell them to upscale restaurants and gourmet markets.

------
dflock
Quite possibly. Here's a group who are actually building one now, in Chicago,
and blogging about it:

<http://www.plantchicago.com/?page_id=2>

Be interesting to see how that works out.

------
astine
These ideas aren't new. I doubt that they are impossible but we haven't yet
solved the technical problems that would make 'vertical farms' cost effective
over regular farms. If farmland became expensive enough (really expensive,) I
could see them seeming more viable.

If these were to happen, my entirely uneducated guess would be that it would
start with rooftop farming, and that extending to storied greenhouses at the
tops of skyscrapers. Depending on your crops, these both don't need artificial
light and could lead to solutions for other engineering problems such farming
would involve.

~~~
ars
No it wouldn't.

The amount of usable farm space at the top of a skyscraper is so small it's a
joke. You could feed 1 person for each skyscraper.

And if farmland got expensive, exactly where would you get your energy to make
light?

------
Jsw32
It seems that many people here are making conjecture based upon little
research. Vertical farms are very much possible and actually relatively
efficient . The EPA has been funding small scale pilot farms to test the
concept. The engineering hurdles which people are describing have mostly been
dealt with. Food from these farms may cost more but it is fresh, local and
organic instead of ethelyne ripened and full of pesticides. Take a walk to
whole foods and you'll see that people are willing to pay for that.

------
alabut
The writer rambles on with setup and indirect arguments for a couple of
paragraphs before even mentioning what he's attacking, but he raises some
excellent points once he actually gets going.

This bit was witty:

" _The only crop which could cover such costs is high-grade cannabis. But a
30-storey hydroponic skunk tower would be quite hard to conceal._ "

~~~
hugh3
What about opium?

Maybe roses or saffron?

------
orblivion
<http://www.plantchicago.com/>

This guy sees your critique on expensive real estate, and uses an abandoned
factory. Sees your argument about nutrients not just appearing, and uses
aquaponics. Lighting... that I don't know.

I'm curious to see how it goes.

------
davars
What if you covered existing skyscrapers with hydroponic trellises?

~~~
cturner
Structural issues. Adds weight, in ways buildings aren't designed to take.
Requires soil, and water in the soil, which is more weight. Water causes
damage to building structure. Some plants will be impractical because they'll
want to burrow into the structure. It's dangerous to collect the produce.
There are insurance issues around stuff falling off onto people. It becomes
difficult to clean or replace windows. Once plants are on it will be difficult
to change damaged trellises. Change to fire risk profile of building. Security
and insurance considerations from people climbing on the structures. Buildings
not designed to supply water to the plants. Freehold issues from one person's
plant growing into another's area. Allergies. Bees. Rats. Effect of plants
growing into air-conditioning systems. Council complications over the change
to the view profile of the building from sleek thing to tentacled thing.

~~~
stellar678
Tons of upvotes for a comment that says hydroponic trellises require soil?
What's going on here?

Hydroponics uses a fraction of the water that soil-based agriculture uses, and
generally uses a very lightweight growing medium. (Vermiculite, hydroton
balls, etc...)

------
chadmalik
Maybe vertical farms are a crock but at least people are starting to realize
that local food production is a better idea than shipping factory farm food
thousands of miles. Eating local, seasonal food is how it has been done for
99.99% of human history. We waste hydrocarbons in a criminal fashion and our
ancestors will absolutely hate our guts for it. Why should we burn up billions
of years of oil inside of ~200 years just so that we can eat strawberries in
NYC during winter? It is INSANE. The decision-making process we use is only
what will make money in the short term. The issue of cost externalization by
companies is well documented by economists. Just because it appears "cheap" to
use factory farm methods, N-P-K based fertilizers, etc., doesn't mean the long
term effects already showing up are not going to severely impact the food
chain inside of our lifetimes.

Ultimately though agriculture itself is a non-sustainable process. That is why
the fertile crescent, cradle of civilization, is now a desert. We should start
creating food forests, this is a very promising sustainable way to feed people
and all of the unemployment we experience can be solved by transitioning a
larger % of our population to food production as a job, just like our
grandparents used to do it.

The desertification caused by agriculture and our increasingly desperate use
of technology to cover up the fundamental flaws in how we feed ourselves is
increasing rapidly. The water table in many places around the planet is being
depleted faster than it can restore itself. These issues are NOT going away
and they are far more important than coupons for cupcakes and the like.

~~~
mattmcknight
The local food movement is quite silly.
<http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/08/23/loco-vores/>

99% of human history pretty much sucked.
[http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2008/06/the-real-
life-o.h...](http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2008/06/the-real-life-o.html)

~~~
chadmalik
Saying "it sucked" doesn't address ANY of the points I made. Wake me up when
you can make a serious rebuttal.

~~~
shasta
I think your comment was reasonable, but the point of the "silly locovore"
link above is that insisting on locally grown food isn't the way fossil fuel
conservation should be implemented, as locally grown does not imply fuel
efficient. Rather, the nonlocal food market is a symptom of low fuel prices.
But if fuel prices were $20 or $50 per gallon, as you'd probably like it, that
would really hit the economy hard. If it turns out that by the time we run out
of fossil fuels we have bootstrapped our way to some other reasonable forms of
renewable energy, then arguably our resource allocation will have been pretty
optimal. Cross your fingers!

------
eogas
This is what I hate about the times we live in. When someone comes up with an
idea of how to solve a problem, all we do is discuss. We discuss and we
discuss. We argue about the plausibility, we may even do some calculations to
see how plausible the solution is. But we never actually try it.

In other words, if some guy thinks a vertical farm would be a good idea and a
possible solution to a problem, then why the hell doesn't he just, you know,
make a vertical farm and see what happens? If it works, then that's fuckin'
awesome, we've got vertical farms! If it doesn't work, well then hey, no
biggie. Let's try something else.

Of course some problems have very expensive solutions that are not feasible to
just "try out", but I don't think it would cost a ton to make a small scale
version of a vertical farm. Even if it was only like 10ft by 10ft and as tall
as a two story house, you have to start somewhere.

But I guess we'd rather just _talk_ about the possibility, and never take it
any farther than that.

~~~
hugh3
_When someone comes up with an idea of how to solve a problem, all we do is
discuss. We discuss and we discuss. We argue about the plausibility, we may
even do some calculations to see how plausible the solution is. But we never
actually try it._

That's not really true. An awful lot of the time, someone comes up with a
solution to a problem, tries it, and it works.

In cases like this, though, it never gets beyond the discussion stage because
the idea is a complete useless crock of shit and the major flaws in it are so
obvious that a nine-year-old (or even George Monbiot) can see right through
it.

And yet the discussion goes on, because the guy who has the idea (and a number
of hangers on) is religiously wedded to it refuses to acknowledge that "wait,
actually, yes, this makes no sense on the grounds of physics _or_ economics",
so I suspect we'll continue to see this idea pop up from time to time.

In conclusion, sane and workable ideas get implemented. Stupid unworkable
ideas with horrendous flaws get endlessly discussed.

