Climate change is becoming a problem you can taste | Amanda Little

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Our food systems have not been designed to adapt to major disruptions like climate change, says environmental journalist Amanda Little. In this eye-opening talk, she shows how the climate crisis could devastate our food supply — and introduces us to the farmers, entrepreneurs and engineers who are radically rethinking what we grow and how we eat, combining traditional agriculture with state-of-the-art technology to create a robust, resilient and sustainable food future.

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60 Comments on Climate change is becoming a problem you can taste | Amanda Little

  1. If we want a green future, we need to pay attention to the limiting resources. Lithium, cobalt, iridium, silver, nickel, etc. These mines are energy-intensive and very dirty, with mines in impoverished areas dumping highly toxic wastewater directly into the ocean. Lithium mining takes lots of water but most lithium is mined in the desert! These are the high-cost issues stopping our green future.
    I would say our best bet is on fusion and liquified hydrogen tech but that’s at least 30 years away. Until then we need to focus on slowing the economy down while keeping the R&D funding for energy projects like ITER. The worst part is that the storage solutions we have now are not usable and any funding put into green energy infrastructure now will be obsolete before it makes a net energy return.

    • @Jordi Pujol Dafuq does your comment have to do with the previous person’s post? Honestly, if your not going to add anything other than baseless conspiracy theories to this otherwise thought provoking thread, don’t say anything at all.

    • Problem is, we’d also have to modify how we manufacture the machinery and everything else that goes into harvesting said resources before we can even start modifying how we harvest those resources. We’d basically have to completely redraw the process of manufacturing.

    • @Jordi Pujol Well some men just want to see the world burn. I know people think the world is like yeast in sugar water; Where the alcohol ends up killing the population. Is it right for a small class of “yeast” to play god in that scenario to reduce the population for the “greater good”? I say make hay while the sun shines!

    • The tale of an infinite and low cost energy is really old, but there is no solution by now. The proposed alternatives are much more costly and indeed unusable.
      Slowing down the economy is a task for everyone of us, only a few are doing it, me included, but not most people that are advicing this to the others.
      Obviuously the world is dominated by money and the big millionaires are dictating all the plans for us, actually we may see it clearly every day; cheating and killing the poor, old and disabled people has been imposed on every country of the world; of course a phantom virus is guilty.

    • Yeah maybe for first world countries, they MIGHT be able to pull off something like fusion but what about 3rd world countries? They obviously aren’t going to flip over and stop producing everything they’ve worked hard for. They want to industrialize and become first world too. And they’re the ones producing all of the pollution (70% of ocean pollution comes out of a few rivers in Asia and africa), there’s little regulation, cheap wages and a lot of money to be made. It lifts up their people most importantly, provides desperately needed work and infrastructure. Stimulates the economy. I’m not saying It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, there are human rights violations just like in the U.S a hundred years ago. The U.S wasn’t always industrialized, it took a course of 200 or so years along with everyone else. They were just like those 3rd world countries but they industrialized. So who’s to say that now, that the U.S and other countries like it has the good life, they can halt everybody else’s progress?

  2. It has nothing really to do with earths calabilites to produce food, only money not is keeping people starved. Yes we should capitalize on all technological advances but that wont save the soil, change the system or make your food healthier. Illness is profit, food is medicine

  3. Leadership would apply data warehousing and logistics to food use optimization. It is all there. Nothing about GMO? Keto is a bigger part of the picture than depicted here. Food waste? That seems to be a good place to start, at the end.

    • Non ho mai saputo che avrei riavuto il mio ex e ristabilito la mia relazione fino a quando un amico non mi ha presentato a Nana Oloruns. Ecco il suo numero WhatsApp: +447441455939

    • Exactly, republicans thinking we need a lower minimum wage, unlimited tax cuts for billionares, and like that poor people go bankrupt from medical bills and wont be covered if they’ve ever been sick before. Republican policy is what you should look into, vs being triggered by culture wars stuff, dry mrs shapiro. Ever heard of the lochner era? Last time republicans had a majority in the courts…7 day workweeks, no overtime pay…you republicans sure know how to succ authoritarian dictator boots so well!

    • @jean Mejicanos “… not exactly (new).”

      Does this issue need to be new to acknowledge it? This issue is far more alarming than global warming! It’s because of active sentient beings who produce wasteful materials, commit dangerous acts through policies constructed behind closed doors that we face global warming now; which is also an old problem.

      It’s these people who misinform by poor education systems for the youth growing into adults with immature brains, and disinformation by political and media means by which the uneducated become ill informed. Thus does the masses become a cancer to the very easy of life they can’t live without and had very little to do with in the decisions for us construction.

      We did build this nation or world. We were given options on a shelf, a commercialed tv slot, and salesmen who knows no more than we do about what it is he sales to us.
      Children of children, mice of the maze, rewired to consume and produce nothing.

      A new problem is the wind blowing over the flames of old we’ve gotten use to.

    • Non ho mai saputo che avrei riavuto il mio ex e ristabilito la mia relazione fino a quando un amico non mi ha presentato a Nana Oloruns. Ecco il suo numero WhatsApp: +447441455939

  4. When you perform rigorous research into revolutionary new technologies to improve farming but then you have farmers in Australia who cant afford to buy water or bale for their livestock during drought

  5. “If people let the government decide which foods they eat and medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.
    ” – Thomas Jefferson

  6. Nature ensured that all creation has access to free food.
    We are moving too far away from a Natural world that has successfully supported life for many, many generations.

    • @Ed L. As far as I know bananas were always there. About a century and half ago, they were cross bred to create the yellow variety which is common in our markets..

    • @Jude Soares they looked nothing like modern once, so as any wild fruit or vegetable. We changed them to fit our needs. There is no “natural state” for humans

    • “There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”
      ― G.K. Chesterton

    • @kicka55 Luckily, replacing coal power addresses both issues simultaneously. India has one of the biggest opportunities to grow their grid with renewables as they continue to industrialize given that renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuel energy. Only some industrial processes still require fossil fuels (for now).

    • In Delhi, India customer service representatives are so bad you can hear half the frequency chart as they shriek into the telephone to “unplug your router for 5 minutes”, and can’t properly hear for the next 5 minutes.

    • no my fellow human, we can not support that…we can not support feeding evry mouth on the planet before and not right now…that can not be our future or solution…
      love from belgium

    • Non ho mai saputo che avrei riavuto il mio ex e ristabilito la mia relazione fino a quando un amico non mi ha presentato a Nana Oloruns. Ecco il suo numero WhatsApp: +447441455939

    • This is just capitalism. No one was gonna buy that food to give away for free.. They always claim it would make us lazy. Despite decades of evidence that paying garbage wages for shift work make most retail employees unmotivated to put in effort.

  7. twenty-five years ago people could be excused for not knowing much, or doing much, about climate change. Today we have no excuse.

  8. Unless you have a way of stopping the Methane Hydrate pouring out of the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea, the East Siberian Sea and Chukchi Sea all along the East Siberian Artic Shelf you can forget attempting to save the Planet. This feedback loop now triggered has the potential to destroy all human life. Methane Hydrate is estimated to be 80 times more potent than Carbon Dioxide as a green house gas. There is currently an estimated 5 Gigatonnes in the atmosphere but 1,500 Gigatonnes in the sediments beneath the Artic Shelf; it is escaping and the writing is on the wall.

  9. Bayer/Monsanto will fight to preserve the practice of overspraying their pesticides and fertilizers because they’re blinded by greed. They won’t stand for targeted weed or crop spraying- they’d rather farmers continue wasting tons of their chemicals and fertilizers – potable water supplies be damned. (Lake Eerie toxic algal blooms from agricultural runoff has had Toledo and surrounding areas curtailing potable water supply and usage a few years ago already).

    And yet midwest corn yields are up, prices are down, and the specter of repeated formidable toxic algal blooms remains a constant threat to drinking water for the 54M people served by the Great Lakes watershed.

    Farm bill policy has for decades been incentivizing farmers in the heartland to pump the Ogallala Aquifer dry. Kansas City has already encountered zero day (when wells run dry) and more cities will soon experience this.

    This is bigger than food. It’s the availability of potable water that’s being threatened which needs our attention firstly. The food concerns can be dealt with after we secure and protect our potable water supplies. That’s going to take more than just science. It’s going to take political capital and will to produce sound policy changes regarding water rights and usage.

  10. This kind of entitled, elitist TED talk is just getting tiresome:

    1) Here is a problem, X. (In this case, lots of produce in one place and lots of starving people in another place.)

    2) I have absolutely no education or expertise in this topic. However, I come from a wealthy family and went to an Ivy League university, so I was able to get other people to pay for me to take a FIVE YEAR VACATION, where I talk to people who are solving an entirely different problem that happens to be peripherally related.

    3) All of the proposed solutions require capital, so they can only be implemented by capitalists.

    4) Denigrate solutions that do not require capitalists.

    5) Utterly ignore the fact that simply improving the supply does not solve the problem of getting said supply to the people who are demanding it.

    6) Invent a new term to describe what other people are already doing so you can pretend that you had some part in inventing the solution.

    The problem is almost never been that we could not make enough food. The problem has almost always been that capitalists continuously find more and more ways to make accessing that food more expensive so that the capitalists continue to wring more and more blood out of those turnips.

    The solution is:
    A) Tuning our production to match an appropriate nutritious diet. Instead of producing tons of potatoes because they are a high profit item for fast food restaurants.

    B) Distributing production so it is physically closer to the demand.

    C) Putting that production in the hands of the people instead of capitalists.

    But you are never gonna see this solution on a TED stage because rich people don’t pay $3,000 a ticket to be told that they are irrelevant.

    • The purpose of this tedtalk was not to remain ignorant towards the economical limitations of LEDCs and third world countries in the agriculture sector .. but is to express that there is a whole avenue of biotech and Ai technology which could eventually improve the economical and environmental conditions of countries affected by climate change… especially third world countries where locusts attacks have been damaging crop supplies and affecting the food supply chain. By developing CRISPR and all sorts of technology from capitalist societies.. crops can be protected from oscillation in weather conditions (especially East Africa) and intruders…such as locusts. I agree with your solutions however the overarching message of this ted talk was not to downplay our environmental problems… but to raise awareness regarding scientific breakthroughs…

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