Feeding Everyone if Industry is Disabled
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Pearce Publications: Energy Conservation • Energy Policy • Industrial Symbiosis • Life Cycle Analysis • Materials Science • Open Source • Photovoltaic Systems • Solar Cells • Sustainable Development • Sustainability Education
Source
- Deborah Cole, Mohamed Abdelkhaliq, Michael Griswold, David Denkenberger, Joshua M. Pearce. Feeding Everyone if Industry is Disabled. International Disaster and Risk Conferences (IDRC) Conference Proceedings 2016, Davos, Switzerland. pp. 141-146 (2016). open access
Abstract
A number of risks could cause widespread electrical failure and temporary global electronics loss, including a series of high-altitude electromagnetic pulses (HEMPs) caused by nuclear weapons, an extreme solar storm, and a coordinated cyber attack. Since modern industry depends on electricity and electronics, it is likely there would be a collapse of the functioning of industry and machines in these scenarios. As our current high agricultural productivity depends on industry (e.g. for fertilizers) it is generally assumed that there would be mass starvation in these scenarios. We model the loss in current agricultural output due to losing industry. Then we analyze compensating strategies such as reducing edible food fed to animals and turned into biofuels, reducing food waste, burning wood in landfills for energy, phosphorus, and potassium, and planting a high fraction of legumes to fix nitrogen. We find that these techniques could feed everyone, but extracting calories from agricultural residues, fishing with wind-powered ships and the backup plan of expanding planted area could feed everyone several times over.
Keywords
solar storm, high-altitude electromagnetic pulse, computer virus, global catastrophic risk, existential risk, industry, food, electricity
See Also
| Feeding Everyone No Matter What- Cambridge |
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| Feeding Everyone No Matter What |
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- Feeding Everyone No Matter What - The full book main page
- David Denkenberger and Joshua Pearce, Feeding Everyone No Matter What: Managing Food Security After Global Catastrophe , 1st Edition, Academic Press, 2015
- Free Preview: Google books
- Cover on Academia
- Facebook page
- Alternative Foods as a Solution to Global Food Supply Catastrophes
- Resilience to global food supply catastrophes
- Feeding Everyone if the Sun is Obscured and Industry is Disabled
- Cost-Effectiveness of Interventions for Alternate Food to Address Agricultural Catastrophes Globally
- Dave Denkenberger Publications
- Feeding Everyone: Solving the Food Crisis in Event of Global Catastrophes that Kill Crops or Obscure the Sun
- Food without sun: Price and life-saving potential
- Cost-effectiveness of interventions for alternate food in the United States to address agricultural catastrophes
- Micronutrient Availability in Alternative Foods During Agricultural Catastrophes
- Preliminary Automated Determination of Edibility of Alternative Foods: Non-Targeted Screening for Toxins in Red Maple Leaf Concentrate
- Scaling of greenhouse crop production in low sunlight scenarios
- Potential of microbial protein from hydrogen for preventing mass starvation in catastrophic scenarios
- OSE Wiki "Synfood" (i.e. protein and other dietary components from microbial organisms fed on gas or other hydrocarbons)