Imagine if people stopped using fossil fuels. Imagine our whole Ozymandian blob of a global economy powered by clean energy rather than outdated, heat-trapping hydrocarbons—more than 1 billion cars, 2 billion homes, every factory, school, mall, skyscraper, data center, airport, seaport, and cryptocurrency on the planet. No more gas-fired power plants, gas stations, or gas stoves. No more petroleum jelly, petrostates, or petrochemicals.
It’s nearly unthinkable, even as a thought experiment. Fossil energy is so common, so practical, and so ingrained. In an effort to encourage Americans to produce and consume even more of it, the president of the United States is tearing down regulations. However, radical change always seems unthinkable before it occurs, and the ridiculous dream of fossil fuel-free energy has become somewhat less ridiculous in recent years.
Since 2010, wind power has more than tripled, solar capacity has increased fortyfold, and more than 4 million electric vehicles have been put on the road, while America’s coal power has decreased by more than half. Since clean electricity is now typically less expensive than dirty, the majority of new electricity produced worldwide has zero emissions. Although the shift away from fossil fuels will take years because they still power the majority of the planet, it has already started and Donald Trump cannot stop it. Even though we are unsure of the exact end of the fossil fuel story, we can now begin to see how it will conclude.
However, fossil fuels are only responsible for two-thirds of the climate crisis. Without addressing the other third, we will never be able to meet the emissions targets set by the Paris Agreement, even if we do stop them. What we eat, how we produce it, and the forests and other natural ecosystems we continue to clear to create space for more farms to produce more food are the challenges.
And that’s primarily a land story about how the unrelenting expansion of pastures and crops, which already occupy two out of every five acres of land on Earth, is destroying the natural landscapes that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. How and when that story ends is unknown to us.
Cities and towns, roads and driveways, industry and trade aren’t really what define humanity’s dominance over the planet. It has to do with farming. Just 1% of the land on Earth that isn’t desert or ice is inhabited. The other half is grazed or cropped. In contrast to agricultural sprawl, urban sprawl is a rounding error. On a cross-country flight, gaze out the window: the land used for food production dwarfs the land used for human habitation, education, employment, and recreation.
The footprint of agriculture is already greater than that of Asia, and as it grows, nature’s footprint gets smaller, releasing carbon stored in its soils and vegetation into the hotter atmosphere. Since it will be impossible to decarbonize the atmosphere if we continue to vaporize trees, we will need to find a way to make the limited land on our hot and hungry planet produce a lot more food to sustain us and absorb a lot more carbon to save us. It’s similar to attempting to clean the house while destroying the vacuum in the living room.
In addition to being the primary cause of deforestation, agriculture is also largely to blame for water scarcity, pollution, wetland degradation, and biodiversity loss worldwide. It is causing the greatest extinction since the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago due to an asteroid.
Oh, and this land problem is getting worse, in contrast to the fossil fuel problem. This is partially due to the fact that, although the amount of land on Earth does not increase daily, the number of people on Earth does. However, it’s also because those people are eating more meat, which means that more land is being used to grow grain and grass for animals to eat before humans do, in addition to the methane emissions from cow manure and burps.
Today, livestock occupy more than three-quarters of all agricultural land worldwide. Just 3% of the calories consumed in the United States come from beef, which is produced on almost half of that land. To put it another way, we are consuming the planet.
Food is a necessity, so agriculture is vital, but the earth cannot continue to lose a soccer field’s worth of tropical forest every six seconds. By 2050, farmers around the world will need to clear at least a dozen more Californias’ worth of land in order to feed almost 10 billion people. The Amazon rainforest and other natural carbon sinks, which serve as both wildlife refuges and our best line of defense against climate chaos, could be destroyed as a result.
The math is intimidating: by 2050, the global agricultural footprint must decrease while global agricultural production must increase by roughly 50%, or the caloric equivalent of a dozen extra Olive Garden breadsticks per day for every person alive today.
It will be as difficult as ending oil to produce enough calories to feed our expanding population without consuming the carbon sinks that keep our warming climate stable. While the entire world will need to produce more food with less land, the wealthy world will need to eat more plants and less beef. That will become even more difficult as crop and livestock yields are reduced by climate-driven droughts, floods, heat waves, and pest infestations.
Fortunately, there are amazing individuals tackling this eating-the-earth issue, and their efforts may serve as counterbalances to climate fatalism. The miracle of photosynthesis is being enhanced, carbon-rich peatlands are being restored, food waste is being upcycled into snacks, soybean plants are being reengineered to produce dairy proteins, and feed additives are being developed to help cattle burp less methane.
Superefficient salmon are being raised in indoor tanks, superefficient trees are being planted on bare ground, and superefficient crops that can withstand floods and droughts are being genetically modified. They are creating biopesticides that use RNA technology to kill beetles and bio-fertilizers that teach microorganisms to extract nutrients from the air. Naturally, John Deere is getting ready to introduce its first electric tractors in green.
However, energy and climate solutions are still around 25 years ahead of food and climate solutions. The land sector is receiving less than 4% of global climate finance, with a large portion going toward low-yield agricultural practices and farm-grown biofuels that would further increase emissions and deforestation.
The answer lies in kinder and gentler alternatives to industrial farming, according to a strange consensus among executives who run large agribusinesses and philanthropies, hippie-foodie lefties who read Michael Pollan, and all-natural biohacker bros who listen to Joe Rogan. However, because they require more land and are less productive, organic and grass-fed farming practices typically have a negative impact on the climate compared to conventional and feedlot-finished farming practices.
As if farming weren’t nearly as important as a better iPhone camera, Apple’s climate-focused agricultural R&D is a small portion of all public agricultural research and development in the United States.
The eating-the-earth problem is still an analytical story, even though the fossil fuel problem has largely become a political one since we essentially know what needs to be done. We still don’t know what we need to do. However, we are aware that it will not be simple.
It will take new crops, new foods, new policies, and new behaviors to produce more food on less land, and these innovations won’t be created, accepted, and widely used overnight. We cannot stop eating, and we will need to make political and personal changes that are as unthinkable as giving up fossil fuels. Another ridiculous dream that must eventually come true is feeding the world without frying it.
