Instead of "the economy" think "having food to eat," "not facing mass civil unrest," etc. The economy is more than corporate profits.

A lot of people gained weight or started drinking or smoking too much during the pandemic. Though home gym gear was also sold out, so that seems to have been a bi-modal issue. Everyone either got more fit or got more fat.

I'd add cultured meat. It's for sale now in Singapore, but is being approved in more countries. Costs continue to come down, and factories are being built. And no, the industry is not limited to using fetal bovine serum. No company is going to scale production with FBS.

Cultured meat is just one part of cellular agriculture, though. Meat, dairy, seafood, cotton, wool, leather, gelatin, fat, coffee, and chocolate have all been made with cellular agriculture. Along with analogues of flour and plant oils. That represents a lot of farmland that could be returned to nature. And no, there's not even close to enough demand for housing to realistically say "nah, it'll all go to suburbs." We use 50x more land for agriculture than we do for all cities and towns and built-up areas put together. And 70% of that agricultural land is used for animal agriculture.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

What is "excess"? Are you just devaluing people's wants as not being authentic, just because you don't think they should want them? People in Dubai, Tokyo, Beijing etc who are buying status or luxury goods are not "acting American." People just like that stuff.

Sumptuary laws have a long history, long predating capitalism. People have always passed judgment on desires of the rabble for luxury, status goods, and the like. So much that they sometimes passed laws trying to regulate it.

Regarding 'optimism,' I wasn't speculating about the future. I was pointing out something that has already happened in many rich countries. There's no reason that China would be exempt from this longstanding trend.

• Total primary energy use
• Energy Use per Person (Note the decline in most of these countries. That's not my naive optimism, rather that's empirical reality.)

I think it's astounding that the US is using almost 20% less energy per person than when I was born. With BEVs and ongoing greening of the grid, that will improve yet further.

>Otherwise we're just living on a finite planet pretending we have infinite resources.

Resource use was never going to scale to infinity. Energy use plateaus. No one buys infinite blue jeans or eats infinite steaks. People like wealth, yes, but consumption does not keep spiraling upward forever. No one was under the impression that we were going to have infinite people using infinite energy per person, no more than we were going to be eating infinite gyros or infinite M&Ms.

Humans won't even last for infinite years. The sun and all the stars in the galaxy will not last for infinite years. "We can't scale x to infinity" is a given, but also not a rebuttal of anything anyone actually believes. Plus it's generally just a proxy for degrowth now, which is a different argument altogether. You don't forego building a house now just because of the truism that we can't build infinite houses.

I don't think we had to persuade anyone else to want to be rich. People seem to like wealth, comfort, status goods, travel, etc.

No one blames China for dragging their people out of poverty. Conservatives are just using China as an excuse for the US to not invest more in clean energy. They aren't speaking in good faith, and never were. No one advocates for China to have remained poor, just as no one wants India to stay poor.

China's emissions will drop. Right now their emissions are increasing because their electricity demand is increasing faster than they can install renewables. But that won't continue forever, because energy demand doesn't keep going up forever. They're still in the process of pulling their people out of poverty.

People aren't going to get more hours in the day. So if you make travel slower, people will be less able to travel. If you want to talk about Americans vacationing to see Europe, you'd eat up a weeks or a month of time just in travel, making it impossible for everyone who wasn't independently wealthy. "Good!" is one response, but not one I think most people want to embrace. That's less "culture" and more denying people the travel and convenience they want. You're effectively denying any Americans who have to work for a living the chance for long-distance travel.

> This is a result of the west offshoring it's factories.

This is partly the result of offshoring. Most of China's emissions are for domestic consumption.

• Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, China
• Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, United States
• Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, Europe

And they are installing renewables hand-over fist. Their emissions are still increasing (though they may be very close to plateauing) because their overall demand is increasing still faster than they can install renewables.

Renewables specifically, yes. But the US is doing better on low-carbon energy, due to its preexisting nuclear plants.

• Share of primary energy from low-carbon sources
• Share of electricity from low-carbon sources

> That's only technically true. Much of the western world's emissions have simply been transferred because we moved our factories to Asia

"Technically true" meaning "true, but with some caveats that bear noting." Most of China's emissions are from their own consumption. The emissions, both in the aggregate and per capita, of both Europe and the US have declined, even when accounting for trade, and are still declining. "Technically" or otherwise.

• Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, China
• Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, United States
• Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, Europe
• Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions per capita, China
• Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions per capita, United States
• Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions per capita, Europe

> thats despite an -unsustainable- population increase.

Why that is unsustainable is itself interesting. Not because we can't feed or house people, but because the fertility rate is ~1.65, well below the replacement rate. The only source of population growth is from immigration. Our main sources of immigration are from Latin America, China, and India, all of which now have fertility rates below the replacement rate. So immigration will continue for a while, but taper eventually.

I find it far less demeaning than Subway's "Sandwich Artist." At least at Disney someone really is playing a character, so it makes sense in some way.

> it should be obvious that a making poor nations richer makes everyone safer

I think the problem there is that many romanticize poverty, at least poverty of others. If only it wasn't for the corrupting influences of advertising and television and whatnot, the theory goes, these people would be content and happy with their subsistence agriculture. It's just a slightly updated version of the Noble Savage myth.

There's also synfuel, also called electrofuel. Prometheus Fuels and multiple other companies are working on synthesizing jet fuel (and diesel, and everything else we get from fossil fuels now) from air-captured CO2. It won't be as efficient or cheap as electrified planes, but as you say, electrifying aviation won't be easy.

• https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2819999/the-air-force-partners-with-twelve-proves-its-possible-to-make-jet-fuel-out-of/
• https://newatlas.com/aircraft/us-air-force-produce-jet-fuel-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide/

I have more confidence in this synthetic jet fuel, mainly because it works in planes we already have now. Not hypothetical future designs that use only hydrogen.

Solar can coexist with agriculture on the same land via agrivoltaics, and also with wind turbines. PV can also go on rooftops, over reservoirs, etc. Studies have already been done showing that, per acre, PV generates more energy than plant-based biofuels. "But they both use land" doesn't make them equal.

I'm honestly more interested in hydrogen as a feedstock to make ammonia, for seasonal storage. BEVs are moving quickly, both in market share and also the technology moving forward. I'm not opposed to fuel-cell cars, but I don't see a robust network of filling stations being built out. Not where it could compete with the charging network+home charging.

Plant-based biofuels are land- and water-intensive. Putting aside recent rains, CA has been facing serious drought issues. Plant-based biofuels are just not that great.

• https://www.cleanwisconsin.org/more-energy-on-less-land-analysis-reveals-solar-farms-produce-100-times-more-energy-per-acre-than-corn-ethanol/
• https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/03/10/solarfood-in-ethanol-fields-could-fully-power-the-united-states/

If we scaled algae-based biofuels that picture might be different.

I don't think efficiency matters as much when we're talking about sunlight. The sun was going to shine anyway. When burning fuel efficiency matters more, since you're consuming a resource that you had to extract and refine. Not saying efficiency means nothing here, just that it might take a backseat to the importance of reducing the burning of fossil fuels.

Another question is—do we have a choice? We're stuck in a prisoner's dilemma. Even if your country decides AI is too dangerous and bans it, they can't control other countries. The benefits of AI are so great that someone is going to invest in it.

I also think we need AI. We need stronger automation. In agriculture, mining, manufacturing, construction, tunneling, all kinds of things. So the risks of AI, while real, might not be enough to overcome the benefits offered. Because AI doesn't seem like something "nice to have," but something we really need. And it need not be strong AI, conscious, whatever. Just ever-better automation, ever-better augmentations and assistance to human objectives.

I've had a cricket-based protein bar. It was... a protein bar. Intensely mediocre, as they generally are. There are insect-based protein bars and powders for sale now. So you don't have to eat bugs in the form of bugs. I've also seen flour and pasta (made from said flour) made partly from insects. Haven't tried it yet, but I would if I came across it in the store.

> They’re ultra processed

Since Reddit seems to consider that a big deal, we should clarify what it means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_food#Definition

The category includes things such as:

• Carbonated soft drinks, such as Pepsi and Coca-Cola
• Sweet, fatty or salty packaged snacks, such as Cheetos and potato chips
• Candies (confectionery), such as Snickers and Butterfinger
• Mass-produced packaged breads and buns, such as Wonder Bread and other White bread
• Cookies (biscuits), such as Oreo
• Pastries, such as Pepperidge Farm and Franz Family Bakeries
• Cakes and cake mixes, such as Duncan Hines and Pillsbury
• Margarine and other spreads, such as Smart Balance and I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!
• Sweetened breakfast cereals, such as Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms
• Sweetened fruit yoghurt and energy drinks, such as Go-Gurt and Monster Energy
• Powdered and packaged instant soups, noodles, and desserts, such as Cup Noodles and Campbell's Soup Company
• Pre-prepared meat, cheese, pasta and pizza dishes, such as Ball Park Franks and Jimmy Dean (brand)
• Poultry and fish nuggets and sticks, such as Tyson Foods and McDonald's Sausages, burgers, hot dogs, and other reconstituted meat products, such as Spam and Slim Jim (snack food)

People are going to have to exclude a lot of commonly eaten food to avoid everything that is 'ultra-processed.' Not just those that happen to be plant-based meat substitutes.

I'm not a consumer of any of the products from these two companies. I do like Quorn nuggets, by those are mycoprotein, so possibly a different thing. But I have them maybe a couple of times a year. But some people who are trying to reduce their meat intake have told me that they do try Beyond or Impossible from time to time, and they are serviceable facsimiles for their purpose. Not that burgers or sausage or whatever, either plant-based or meat-based, are exactly healthy.

Nature’s Fynd is the one here that interests me the most. They're using an extremophile organism they discovered in a geyser at Yellowstone. I want an extremophile burger in my hand ASAP.

And even that one was based in Korea, where entemophagy is already somewhat accepted. But Reddit can't hear about any new agricultural products without it being Snowpiercer and us being forced to scarf down wriggling cockroaches. Literally every advance must be a segue to a dystopian hellworld.

You distribute generation, and also combine with solar and other methods. Storage will be needed, and is already incrementally being rolled out. Seasonal storage too is possible, with green ammonia and some other options.

>Why do you think France is an energy exporter

Except when they aren't. France too is facing possible energy cuts, largely due to unforeseen problems with their nuclear fleet. And I'm talking about new capacity, i.e. decisions made in the current day as to new generation to be built. And around the world solar and wind are far outpacing nuclear when it comes to new capacity.

And a good percentage of the world's nuclear fuel and fuel processing comes from Russia. Yes, you can build out new processing and mining capacity, but that takes time. If you cut out all fuel imports from Russia, what percentage of currently operating nuclear plants around the world will have to shut down? For how long? So dependency on Russian energy is a wider, more entrenched problem than merely gas pipelines.

Wind turbines can coexist with crops or other agriculture, or with PV, or be placed offshore. So it's not as if wind turbines preclude other uses for land.

We also have to consider build times and cost per MWh. Finland's Olkiluoto-3 may come online this year, and construction started in 2005.

What's the build time and cost per MWh for that new nuclear plant? Finland's new Olkiluoto-3 reactor might come online this year, and construction was started in 2005.

Wind turbines can coexist with crops, or with PV, and also be placed offshore. So it's not exactly like the land is excluded from other uses.