The article makes the impression, that this security threats caused by climate change are somewhat new to gov bodies. As this is not true, the risks for political and societal stability and security have been very well researched in depth in the respective scientific disciplines since the Club of Rome firstly broad this topic to the larger public attention in 1972. But the contradicting forces are not long-term perspectives but short term gains on the political agenda, which makes it much harder to lobby for solutions against threats, which will happen "only" in 5 to 10 years in the future.
That doesn't mean that efforts to suppress awareness and subsequently action against climate change isn't being done to this very day. Some of it is done by governments (such as mentioned here, or with the EPA dismantling in the US), some by hostile governments (e.g. Russia funding a lot of the Western far-right parties that all run on climate change denial), some by fossil fuel companies (e.g. BP creating the "CO2 footprint" to individualize responsibility), and the rest by utterly braindead clown individuals (we used to call them "village idiots") that, thanks to the Internet, now have a global audience.
In the US I feel we have entered the stage beyond trying to suppress awareness. Not that the government is being honest about it, but they also aren't really trying to hide it. They've just moved to not directly talking about it, and since our mainstream media is fully captured nobody is pushing them to talk about it. We've moved from trying to downplay the impact to just announcing what we plan to do about it as the impacts continue to manifest into reality.
We're going to continue down the path of fossil fuels (we have no intention of trying to lessen the severity at the cost of economic growth, number MUST GO UP) and we're going to attempt to take countries (Greenland, Canada) that "benefit" from the changes (at least in terms of having more livable/arable land). Migrants trying to enter the US to escape the catastrophes in their own countries will be thrown into concentration camps or worse. Large parts of the US will be impacted, of course, but those are sacrifices they're willing to make (and, hey... large scale displacement is good for the GDP!). Better double check your insurance policies.
Almost all of Trump 2.0's actions to date make a sort of sociopathic sense if you assume the various groups pulling his strings have accepted that large impacts from severe climate change are coming soon and have just decided to YOLO it.
The population of the UK or Europe did not explode in the last hundred years. It did not even double.
The population used to be more rural and relatively self sufficient in terms of food. There is actually enough land in Europe to feed everybody, especially considering the great progress we made scientifically.
You can actually sustain yourself on a few hundred square meters of land and you won't get fat and be healthier (in your body and mind).
The great migration of the local population to the city to get a good factory or a bank job is over I believe. But the country side is still empty.
The reason is it is hard to make the jump first and ending up in the middle of nowhere living with a few old people.
Also your politicians hate independent people so they are not gonna encourage it. They would rather keep you in a constant guilty state about their vision of "climate change" while letting you board a 10 GBP Ryanair flight for a week-end city trip or order useless things on Temu.
For Europe and many other places, the solution to a more sustainable future is actually quite straightforward.
Europe’s big problem is the hindered of millions of climate refugees on the doorstep. Even the most open heart liberal will baulk at the population doubling or more in 20 years. The only ones promising a solution will be the neofeudalists
But Europe also have to stop believing they can solve the world problems and act on a global scale. This time is long gone, about at least a hundred year.
Every region, culture will need to find a path to sustainability in their own way. If the path they take is invading another region, it leads to war. Like it has been for thousands of years.
Presumably they mean that acceptance of migration is a continuum and the numbers of climate refugees would push a large fraction of people self identifying as liberal to oppose it.
What makes it a different question? What numbers change that change things?
Leaving aside what you hear on the internet, I personally know a few people who say they have no concern welcoming any number of refugees, a couple of them actually to the point of getting quite enraged at people who do have different opinions. So there definitely are some such people in existence.
Spaniard there, from rural background. Self-suficient... you wish. Post civil war even oranges were a luxury, something to be give as a present in Christmas. Any autharchic attemp, be left or right, just produced famines and misery.
> The great migration of the local population to the city to get a good factory or a bank job is over I believe. But the country side is still empty.
My major belief/bet is that young professionals that work in front of the computer all day will figure out that living in a very expensive city doesn’t make much sense and there are a ton of cheap rural houses in the beautiful countryside and we’ll have a reverse migration for young, educated white collars. Right now it’s just a trending topic for youtubers, but most people, especially Gen-Z existing in an economic limbo, have not caught on.
At least that’s my plan because it makes so much economic sense, I have had enough of city life and I am too old to care about urban amenities vs quality of life.
I think the fundamental problem is the conflict between climate, family and live-style vs corporate interest and economic growth.
Ideally, we should want populations that are either not growing or slowly shrinking, but we can't have this because multi-national corporations don't want to invest in countries with a declining consumer base. We must therefore sustain population growth indefinitely.
Similar humans would presumably prefer more space – perhaps a home with a few bedrooms and a decent sized garden where they can grow a little food and the kids and play in the summer. But we can't have this because it's more economically productive if we increase population density such that people increasingly live in small flats within high-rise buildings with no gardens and little natural light.
And I get it, money is nice... People will trade a lot of things for more money, but the government ideally should not encourage this.
Ideally the government should be encouraging people to have a home with a garden. To have a couple of kids. To grow some of their own food. To work in their local community, and therefore obtain an education which will help them to be productive members of their community – rather than say taking a punt at studying journalism at university and hoping they'll get a job in some city 200 miles from home and their family.
Just speaking personally, the city I grew up in in the UK has become hell to live in over the last couple of decades. It's almost impossible to drive around today because of densification which has taken place. All of the local fields that I played on as a kid have been turned into cheap flats which has transformed the semi-rural area I used to live into an ugly anti-human concrete jungle. And because of the number of people now living around here no one seems to know anyone anymore – I walk outside my house and it feels like there's random people everywhere, and I've noticed many people around me don't even seem to speak English anymore.
It's such a strange thing we are doing... It really makes no sense for us to want to live like this.
Makes sense if you want to make money, and have money enough to not have to suffer the worst of it yourself. Of course, nobody voted for it, but those that promised not to do it and did it anyway were democratically elected, so only a fascist would take issue with it surely.
> your politicians hate independent people so they are not gonna encourage it
Your politicians are actually subsidising the rural lifestyle with direct and indirect transfers. Eg in Europe, you can buy land, leave it more or less abandoned and cash in agricultural subsidies.
Subsistence farming would be farming to only feed the farmers with little excess left for trade, it's a little too keyhole in this context.
They're talking more in the direction of EU scale closed loop / closed cycle agriculture, in which a network of farms across countries interop to exchange resources (pig and chicken waste, for fertilizer, for example) in order to reduce or eliminate outside inputs (synthetic fertilizers from the Gulf, for example), but still work to maximise production for EU consumption.
Moving from the current situation to the situation you describe is impossible, because the UK has far too much debt and far too small an annual government income to pay for even the popular kinds of infrastructure spending, let alone the degrowth proposition you articulate. The millionaires really do take their assets and leave if taxes are raised and a Mossad-style international program to repatriate them in duffel bags would see the government that initiated it both out of power permanently and in cells themselves.
The UK is consistently amongst the lowest household expenditure on food in the entire world. Only 3 countries in the world are self sufficient in food. If this "reasonable worst-case" scenario happens, surely the UK is one of the better placed to deal with it?
Most countries could easily adapt to other types of food. There are multiple source for carbs, fat and proteins, as well for various micronutrients. Some countries where obesity is rampant could also adapt to eating a lot less than they do now. That would bring the number from 3 (assuming that's true) to a lot more.
For only three countries to be self-sufficient, I suspect there is some funny definition like, "Well Americans eat 100pounds of pork each year, and they have to import pork to hit that number, ergo America is not food self sufficient." When instead you could switch calories to any number of alternatives.
"The climate", not decades of political mismanagement, has led the UK to its current predicament... In the specific case of immigration the article touches, inexistent border controls and welfare programs and incentives for "refugees" who cross several safe countries to get to England have a lot more impact then the days getting hotter.
> If collapse happens, it notes the UK does not have the ability to absorb global shocks through higher domestic output. It lacks enough land to feed its population or rear livestock to maintain current consumption patterns and price levels.
Yet they're pushing to use farmland for solar farms and social housing.
There's a real hatred of farmers among the UK Leftist/Green crowd.
Farmland is ~69% of the total area of the UK with it being quite stable in the last decade, and most of that being grassland. Solar accounts for ~0.1% of (former) agricultural land, and after 2030 it should be around ~0.6%. The Land Use Framework aims for 1% of land (mainly agricultural, so ~1.5% of ag) for renewables by 2050. Housing doesn't have as comparable figures, but I'm envelope mathing it to about 1.5% by 2050 again. Which makes 3% of ag land, of which crops are roughly 1/3rd, and google says 60% of solar is on good crop land. So a reduction of up to ~6% at the top end.
There are a few flip-sides here - things that many don't like to hear or acknowledge:
There are alternate diets that are suitably nutritious that are achievable on this land, largely by reducing meat consumption. Meat production uses much more land than other food sources, and a lot of that is input crops. Its inefficient. A change in diet can make the UK self-sufficient on much less land.
Solar is a developing technology; it will improve, requiring less land for the same production. If long term trends push up the value of crops and down solar production, the panels can be removed and crops grown instead - its either/or but it is reversible. This is especially important for bringing in non-solar power sources which take longer to realise (nuclear, tidal). I will also note that solar farms are built on the good crop land because it is convenient and the price is right. We will see south facing hills covered soon enough.
Housing and social housing are the same problem; where housing prices are so high compared to salaries, social housing demand increases. Building houses - any houses - solves the problem. The question of density, location, style is a question about what kind of problems we want in 10-20 years time. High rises did not work well at all.
> > It lacks enough land to feed its population or rear livestock to maintain current consumption patterns and price levels.
> Yet they're pushing to use farmland for solar farms and social housing.
Cities, you may note, never ever make enough food to feed themselves. Always been true, everywhere and everywhen since the invention of the city.
Farmers choosing between cash crops and food crops was literally a game the teachers got the kids to play when I was in school in the 90s. Cash crops, and PV is kinda a cash crop, let you make enough money to buy food. That said, how much money depends on what industry you have to use the power, because nobody else in the world will care for the £ if the UK employment consists entirely of baristas, hairdressers, and Amazon warehouse staff/delivery drivers.
The biggest problem with using farmland for social housing is that a lot of the good farmland is a flood risk.
But the only case where the UK has to care that it doesn't make enough to feed itself is if the economy becomes an autarky, at which point it cannot help but suffer a massive population reduction because it's a small island quite close to the arctic circle which has spent or depleted most of its natural resources, first the wood (1600s-1700s), then the coal (1930s or so), then the fish (1980s or so), then the natural gas (early 2000s).
I don't think it's been possible to feed the UK domestically since before WW2.
I note you put the word "social" in there; very little social housing is being built, it's mostly private. Agrivoltaics are also possible, but of course everyone would rather do the politics of emotions ("hate farmers") than discuss the issues. Such as how we grow enough electricity, too.
This covers moving the UK to self-sustain by reducing animal products and repurposing animal feed cropland to direct consumption cropland; it also covers reforestation.
So while it isn't possible today, its possible to become possible without relying on any technological advancements.
> I don't think it's been possible to feed the UK domestically since before WW2.
Of course you can, I know people being almost self sustainable right now on very little land. It is hard, frugal but highly rewarding and we have evolved to do it since very recently.
Energy and heating is a bit more complicated. We obviously cannot burn wood or coal like we use to because this is actually very damaging to the planet.
So this is where technology has to play a bigger role.
Farming might feel rewarding while watching someone else do the hard work. I watched and had to help my grandparents do it and went through my own decade of "farming" and it never gets easier and you only get older.
> ... "it never gets easier and you only get older."
Hence why traditionally farmers either had large families, hired outside workers, or most often did both.
(Source: I grew up in rancher/farmer territory and earned some of my earliest "spending money" working for local farmers or ranchers during harvest season.)
The farmers are the ones selling the land off and living off the million pound proceeds
Farmland is worth £100/acre/year, at most that’s £3k an acre. But people pay £10k because it’s a way to avoid tax and if you get the right planning permission a way of making millions.
No. It's because farmers sometimes pollute rivers (despite household sewage being pumped into UK rivers daily), want to kill badgers to stop TB spreading, and because they work large areas of land they're obviously wealthy.
Dyson? Sure - he seems performative (from afar, I'm antipodean to this BTW) with his industrialised strawberry wheels etc.
> the musician
Lost me .. I'm sure the UK has a few gumbooted millionaire class rockers / composers - I'm guessing that's a throw at the impresario of musical theatre with a life peerage who is rarely seen cutting hay.
I'm not sure I'd class either of those as farmers (by our local understanding), and Clarkson smacks of content farmer cos player more than generationally consistent production farmer .. but perhaps he might get there.
Andrew Lloyd Webber. Billionaire composer of musicals like cats and phantom. Also a farmer apparently, owning thousands of acres and befitting from the tax breaks and hope value.
They either employ people to farm the land (like Clarkson did I to 2019, and indeed stop does), or rent the land out for a tiny return on investment in the 1-2% range while avoiding the only tax that even attempts to fight against the aristocracy
There’s no real hatred of farmers on the left, other than the fact that farmers generally vote small-c conservative.
There’s certainly a hatred of land owners, and vast amounts of UK farm land is privately owned, renting the land to farmers. It’s the right wing parties and press that takes that to mean that the left hate farmers.
The article makes the impression, that this security threats caused by climate change are somewhat new to gov bodies. As this is not true, the risks for political and societal stability and security have been very well researched in depth in the respective scientific disciplines since the Club of Rome firstly broad this topic to the larger public attention in 1972. But the contradicting forces are not long-term perspectives but short term gains on the political agenda, which makes it much harder to lobby for solutions against threats, which will happen "only" in 5 to 10 years in the future.
That doesn't mean that efforts to suppress awareness and subsequently action against climate change isn't being done to this very day. Some of it is done by governments (such as mentioned here, or with the EPA dismantling in the US), some by hostile governments (e.g. Russia funding a lot of the Western far-right parties that all run on climate change denial), some by fossil fuel companies (e.g. BP creating the "CO2 footprint" to individualize responsibility), and the rest by utterly braindead clown individuals (we used to call them "village idiots") that, thanks to the Internet, now have a global audience.
Or are presidents!
> or with the EPA dismantling in the US
In the US I feel we have entered the stage beyond trying to suppress awareness. Not that the government is being honest about it, but they also aren't really trying to hide it. They've just moved to not directly talking about it, and since our mainstream media is fully captured nobody is pushing them to talk about it. We've moved from trying to downplay the impact to just announcing what we plan to do about it as the impacts continue to manifest into reality.
We're going to continue down the path of fossil fuels (we have no intention of trying to lessen the severity at the cost of economic growth, number MUST GO UP) and we're going to attempt to take countries (Greenland, Canada) that "benefit" from the changes (at least in terms of having more livable/arable land). Migrants trying to enter the US to escape the catastrophes in their own countries will be thrown into concentration camps or worse. Large parts of the US will be impacted, of course, but those are sacrifices they're willing to make (and, hey... large scale displacement is good for the GDP!). Better double check your insurance policies.
Almost all of Trump 2.0's actions to date make a sort of sociopathic sense if you assume the various groups pulling his strings have accepted that large impacts from severe climate change are coming soon and have just decided to YOLO it.
Here is the solution nobody is talking about:
The population of the UK or Europe did not explode in the last hundred years. It did not even double.
The population used to be more rural and relatively self sufficient in terms of food. There is actually enough land in Europe to feed everybody, especially considering the great progress we made scientifically. You can actually sustain yourself on a few hundred square meters of land and you won't get fat and be healthier (in your body and mind).
The great migration of the local population to the city to get a good factory or a bank job is over I believe. But the country side is still empty.
The reason is it is hard to make the jump first and ending up in the middle of nowhere living with a few old people. Also your politicians hate independent people so they are not gonna encourage it. They would rather keep you in a constant guilty state about their vision of "climate change" while letting you board a 10 GBP Ryanair flight for a week-end city trip or order useless things on Temu.
For Europe and many other places, the solution to a more sustainable future is actually quite straightforward.
Europe’s big problem is the hindered of millions of climate refugees on the doorstep. Even the most open heart liberal will baulk at the population doubling or more in 20 years. The only ones promising a solution will be the neofeudalists
But Europe also have to stop believing they can solve the world problems and act on a global scale. This time is long gone, about at least a hundred year.
Every region, culture will need to find a path to sustainability in their own way. If the path they take is invading another region, it leads to war. Like it has been for thousands of years.
"Europe, you don't have global influence?" What is this? Disconnect, splinter and prepare for war?
> Disconnect, splinter and prepare for war?
But this is what we are doing anyway...
I am just trying to articulate a path where can have better food security and sustainability.
Europe should find another way or it will get eaten by China and its proxy, Russia.
It’s ok when the AMOC collapses and Europe plunges into an ice age no one will want to live there either.
Why would an open heart liberal have any concern with welcoming refugees?
Depends where they're coming from I guess. There's basically no where on Earth where people are as liberal as Europe.
No liberal would want millions of people coming from Afghanistan, for example.
Well, I have something to tell you about the last decade+ of EU immigration policy
Presumably you mean No True Liberal.
Presumably they mean that acceptance of migration is a continuum and the numbers of climate refugees would push a large fraction of people self identifying as liberal to oppose it.
That is not a safe presumption since they made an absolute claim about all liberals.
Numbers. Very few of the most staunch conservatives would turn away one family in need.
But when it’s the best part of a billion people - at a rate of 4:1, that’s a different question.
What makes it a different question? What numbers change that change things?
Leaving aside what you hear on the internet, I personally know a few people who say they have no concern welcoming any number of refugees, a couple of them actually to the point of getting quite enraged at people who do have different opinions. So there definitely are some such people in existence.
- mgimo finished? - aaaask
Spaniard there, from rural background. Self-suficient... you wish. Post civil war even oranges were a luxury, something to be give as a present in Christmas. Any autharchic attemp, be left or right, just produced famines and misery.
> The great migration of the local population to the city to get a good factory or a bank job is over I believe. But the country side is still empty.
My major belief/bet is that young professionals that work in front of the computer all day will figure out that living in a very expensive city doesn’t make much sense and there are a ton of cheap rural houses in the beautiful countryside and we’ll have a reverse migration for young, educated white collars. Right now it’s just a trending topic for youtubers, but most people, especially Gen-Z existing in an economic limbo, have not caught on.
At least that’s my plan because it makes so much economic sense, I have had enough of city life and I am too old to care about urban amenities vs quality of life.
How is having a bunch of people move to the countryside going to make for a more sustainable future?
I think the fundamental problem is the conflict between climate, family and live-style vs corporate interest and economic growth.
Ideally, we should want populations that are either not growing or slowly shrinking, but we can't have this because multi-national corporations don't want to invest in countries with a declining consumer base. We must therefore sustain population growth indefinitely.
Similar humans would presumably prefer more space – perhaps a home with a few bedrooms and a decent sized garden where they can grow a little food and the kids and play in the summer. But we can't have this because it's more economically productive if we increase population density such that people increasingly live in small flats within high-rise buildings with no gardens and little natural light.
And I get it, money is nice... People will trade a lot of things for more money, but the government ideally should not encourage this.
Ideally the government should be encouraging people to have a home with a garden. To have a couple of kids. To grow some of their own food. To work in their local community, and therefore obtain an education which will help them to be productive members of their community – rather than say taking a punt at studying journalism at university and hoping they'll get a job in some city 200 miles from home and their family.
Just speaking personally, the city I grew up in in the UK has become hell to live in over the last couple of decades. It's almost impossible to drive around today because of densification which has taken place. All of the local fields that I played on as a kid have been turned into cheap flats which has transformed the semi-rural area I used to live into an ugly anti-human concrete jungle. And because of the number of people now living around here no one seems to know anyone anymore – I walk outside my house and it feels like there's random people everywhere, and I've noticed many people around me don't even seem to speak English anymore.
It's such a strange thing we are doing... It really makes no sense for us to want to live like this.
Makes sense if you want to make money, and have money enough to not have to suffer the worst of it yourself. Of course, nobody voted for it, but those that promised not to do it and did it anyway were democratically elected, so only a fascist would take issue with it surely.
> your politicians hate independent people so they are not gonna encourage it
Your politicians are actually subsidising the rural lifestyle with direct and indirect transfers. Eg in Europe, you can buy land, leave it more or less abandoned and cash in agricultural subsidies.
I think you’re talking about subsistence farming, which plenty of places in Europe do practice. But it is hard work.
Subsistence farming would be farming to only feed the farmers with little excess left for trade, it's a little too keyhole in this context.
They're talking more in the direction of EU scale closed loop / closed cycle agriculture, in which a network of farms across countries interop to exchange resources (pig and chicken waste, for fertilizer, for example) in order to reduce or eliminate outside inputs (synthetic fertilizers from the Gulf, for example), but still work to maximise production for EU consumption.
Moving from the current situation to the situation you describe is impossible, because the UK has far too much debt and far too small an annual government income to pay for even the popular kinds of infrastructure spending, let alone the degrowth proposition you articulate. The millionaires really do take their assets and leave if taxes are raised and a Mossad-style international program to repatriate them in duffel bags would see the government that initiated it both out of power permanently and in cells themselves.
If they take their assets and leave, tax the land. They're not going to be able to take that when they leave.
The UK is consistently amongst the lowest household expenditure on food in the entire world. Only 3 countries in the world are self sufficient in food. If this "reasonable worst-case" scenario happens, surely the UK is one of the better placed to deal with it?
Most countries could easily adapt to other types of food. There are multiple source for carbs, fat and proteins, as well for various micronutrients. Some countries where obesity is rampant could also adapt to eating a lot less than they do now. That would bring the number from 3 (assuming that's true) to a lot more.
For only three countries to be self-sufficient, I suspect there is some funny definition like, "Well Americans eat 100pounds of pork each year, and they have to import pork to hit that number, ergo America is not food self sufficient." When instead you could switch calories to any number of alternatives.
> The UK is consistently amongst the lowest household expenditure on food in the entire world.
How?
> Only 3 countries in the world are self sufficient in food.
Surely a small island nation is not one of them?
The UK achieves this by having a diet relatively unchanged from that of Londoners during the Blitz
I don't think the UK does achieve it at all. Cut off all import lines and what would happen?
Smells like Soviet censorship.
self serving garbage from the "intelligence" aparatus designed to maintain the status quo mumble gump, dressed up as THE WORD
[dead]
"The climate", not decades of political mismanagement, has led the UK to its current predicament... In the specific case of immigration the article touches, inexistent border controls and welfare programs and incentives for "refugees" who cross several safe countries to get to England have a lot more impact then the days getting hotter.
> If collapse happens, it notes the UK does not have the ability to absorb global shocks through higher domestic output. It lacks enough land to feed its population or rear livestock to maintain current consumption patterns and price levels.
Yet they're pushing to use farmland for solar farms and social housing.
There's a real hatred of farmers among the UK Leftist/Green crowd.
Farmland is ~69% of the total area of the UK with it being quite stable in the last decade, and most of that being grassland. Solar accounts for ~0.1% of (former) agricultural land, and after 2030 it should be around ~0.6%. The Land Use Framework aims for 1% of land (mainly agricultural, so ~1.5% of ag) for renewables by 2050. Housing doesn't have as comparable figures, but I'm envelope mathing it to about 1.5% by 2050 again. Which makes 3% of ag land, of which crops are roughly 1/3rd, and google says 60% of solar is on good crop land. So a reduction of up to ~6% at the top end.
There are a few flip-sides here - things that many don't like to hear or acknowledge:
There are alternate diets that are suitably nutritious that are achievable on this land, largely by reducing meat consumption. Meat production uses much more land than other food sources, and a lot of that is input crops. Its inefficient. A change in diet can make the UK self-sufficient on much less land.
Solar is a developing technology; it will improve, requiring less land for the same production. If long term trends push up the value of crops and down solar production, the panels can be removed and crops grown instead - its either/or but it is reversible. This is especially important for bringing in non-solar power sources which take longer to realise (nuclear, tidal). I will also note that solar farms are built on the good crop land because it is convenient and the price is right. We will see south facing hills covered soon enough.
Housing and social housing are the same problem; where housing prices are so high compared to salaries, social housing demand increases. Building houses - any houses - solves the problem. The question of density, location, style is a question about what kind of problems we want in 10-20 years time. High rises did not work well at all.
> > It lacks enough land to feed its population or rear livestock to maintain current consumption patterns and price levels.
> Yet they're pushing to use farmland for solar farms and social housing.
Cities, you may note, never ever make enough food to feed themselves. Always been true, everywhere and everywhen since the invention of the city.
Farmers choosing between cash crops and food crops was literally a game the teachers got the kids to play when I was in school in the 90s. Cash crops, and PV is kinda a cash crop, let you make enough money to buy food. That said, how much money depends on what industry you have to use the power, because nobody else in the world will care for the £ if the UK employment consists entirely of baristas, hairdressers, and Amazon warehouse staff/delivery drivers.
The biggest problem with using farmland for social housing is that a lot of the good farmland is a flood risk.
But the only case where the UK has to care that it doesn't make enough to feed itself is if the economy becomes an autarky, at which point it cannot help but suffer a massive population reduction because it's a small island quite close to the arctic circle which has spent or depleted most of its natural resources, first the wood (1600s-1700s), then the coal (1930s or so), then the fish (1980s or so), then the natural gas (early 2000s).
I don't think it's been possible to feed the UK domestically since before WW2.
I note you put the word "social" in there; very little social housing is being built, it's mostly private. Agrivoltaics are also possible, but of course everyone would rather do the politics of emotions ("hate farmers") than discuss the issues. Such as how we grow enough electricity, too.
https://animal.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/Eating-Awa...
This covers moving the UK to self-sustain by reducing animal products and repurposing animal feed cropland to direct consumption cropland; it also covers reforestation.
So while it isn't possible today, its possible to become possible without relying on any technological advancements.
> I don't think it's been possible to feed the UK domestically since before WW2.
Of course you can, I know people being almost self sustainable right now on very little land. It is hard, frugal but highly rewarding and we have evolved to do it since very recently.
Energy and heating is a bit more complicated. We obviously cannot burn wood or coal like we use to because this is actually very damaging to the planet. So this is where technology has to play a bigger role.
Farming might feel rewarding while watching someone else do the hard work. I watched and had to help my grandparents do it and went through my own decade of "farming" and it never gets easier and you only get older.
> ... "it never gets easier and you only get older."
Hence why traditionally farmers either had large families, hired outside workers, or most often did both.
(Source: I grew up in rancher/farmer territory and earned some of my earliest "spending money" working for local farmers or ranchers during harvest season.)
> Of course you can, I know people being almost self sustainable right now on very little land.
Please run the numbers for UK farmland divided by UK population.
The farmers are the ones selling the land off and living off the million pound proceeds
Farmland is worth £100/acre/year, at most that’s £3k an acre. But people pay £10k because it’s a way to avoid tax and if you get the right planning permission a way of making millions.
There's certainly a justified hatred of faux-farmers of convenience such as Clarkson et al.
I suspect that's the hatred being mischaracterised and amplified by the GBNews Farrage crowd.
No. It's because farmers sometimes pollute rivers (despite household sewage being pumped into UK rivers daily), want to kill badgers to stop TB spreading, and because they work large areas of land they're obviously wealthy.
Sure, someone always believes such things, .. is that really widespread and a core belief of the "the UK Leftist/Green crowd." ?
The constant observation made about the UK is there's always an excess amplification of what various groups are alleged to believe.
Last I checked, the current King is in the "Leftist/Green" camp and pro-farmer. (by default, he'd be "UK" and not a "crowd" though).
Is there any strong evidence that killing badgers reduces bovine TB?
To his credit Clarkson has done more form farming with his show than countryfile or the archers has done in decades.
He bought it as a tax break, but I’d leave not ire for “farmers” like the musician and vacuum cleaner salesman.
Nothing caused me to laugh more at the “woe is the millionaire march” than seeing Lloyd Webber and his dog out on the march.
> vacuum cleaner salesman.
Dyson? Sure - he seems performative (from afar, I'm antipodean to this BTW) with his industrialised strawberry wheels etc.
> the musician
Lost me .. I'm sure the UK has a few gumbooted millionaire class rockers / composers - I'm guessing that's a throw at the impresario of musical theatre with a life peerage who is rarely seen cutting hay.
I'm not sure I'd class either of those as farmers (by our local understanding), and Clarkson smacks of content farmer cos player more than generationally consistent production farmer .. but perhaps he might get there.
Andrew Lloyd Webber. Billionaire composer of musicals like cats and phantom. Also a farmer apparently, owning thousands of acres and befitting from the tax breaks and hope value.
They either employ people to farm the land (like Clarkson did I to 2019, and indeed stop does), or rent the land out for a tiny return on investment in the 1-2% range while avoiding the only tax that even attempts to fight against the aristocracy
Sure, land owner .. not farmer, as the term is used here.
He owns thousands of acres of farmland and benefits from the tax breaks, hence him turning up protesting removing those tax breaks.
There’s no real hatred of farmers on the left, other than the fact that farmers generally vote small-c conservative.
There’s certainly a hatred of land owners, and vast amounts of UK farm land is privately owned, renting the land to farmers. It’s the right wing parties and press that takes that to mean that the left hate farmers.