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by LonelyContext 2754 days ago
It’s all way easier than this. Eating vegan prevents all of this as it’s basic food-web biology that as you go up the food chain you lose energy by a factor of 10. Yeah an artificial leaf is technically more efficient than a plant at making energy from sunlight but plants already operate at 1-2% so unless you plan on making a synthetic system better than 10-20% at making biomass (hint: you don’t) then just cutting meat farm subsidies and introducing a meat tax alone already puts you way ahead of decades of scientific funding at perfecting multilayer amorphous silicon to where it’s less than $1000/cm^2.

Edit: It’s also not clear that the synthetic foods considered in your post are those which are less energy intensive to produce, I should note.
1 comments
brownbat 2754 days ago
> just cutting meat farm subsidies

Most farm subsidies do not go directly to meat. In fact, current subsidies probably shift some land away from pastures and grazing to oversupplied field crops:

https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies

You can absolutely be both against the farm bill and simultaneously in favor of reducing American meat consumption... But you're probably looking at corn and soy subsidies that in turn make cheaper feed, rather than something as simple and direct as cutting a meat subsidy.

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aaronblohowiak 2754 days ago
Where do you think most of that corn goes?
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brownbat 2754 days ago
Feed, like I acknowledged in my original comment.

> ...corn and soy subsidies that in turn make cheaper feed...

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agsdfgsd 2754 days ago
Most of it doesn't go to any single use. Only 36% of US corn production goes to livestock feed. 40% to ethanol production. And while people like to complain about the caloric inefficiency of animals vs plants, the reality is that chicken being fed corn produces 5 million calories per acre, the same calories per acre as wheat. Almost all plant crops produce fewer calories per acre than that. For some reason nobody seems to be demanding that we stop eating wheat, nevermind things like lettuce, spinach, broccoli, onions, tomatoes, etc, that produce far fewer calories per acre.
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