World Animal Protection. No date. Support the Farm System Reform Act.

Chapter 9, “Technology,” in your textbook discusses how technological  advancements and changes may affect how we can work to find solutions  for the global threats discussed so far. 

Technological advances can and  do affect development in positive and negative ways.

Besides biotechnology, identify one technology that seems to have  the greatest potential positive effect on food security. 

Discuss any  potential negative uses of that technology. 

Do the benefits of these  technologies outweigh the potential negative consequences they have on  food security? 

Why or why not?

Review the posts of your classmates and respond to at least one other  post, offering a substantive comment on that classmate’s position.

This Foreign Affairs  article is the best piece I’ve read yet that analyzes how technological  advancements are cleaning our air of carbon dioxide and methane.  

The Paths to Zero Emissions

How Technology Can Save the Planet

By David Victor

May/June 2020

For  30 years, diplomats and policymakers have called for decisive action on  climate change — and for 30 years, the climate crisis has grown worse.  

There are a multitude of reasons for this failure. 

The benefits of  climate action lie mostly in the future, they are diffuse and hard to  pin down, and they will accrue above all to poor populations that do not  have much of a voice in politics, whether in those countries that emit  most of the world’s warming pollution or at the global level. 

The costs  of climate action, on the other hand, are evident here and now, and they  fall on well-organized interest groups with real political power. 

In a  multipolar world without a responsible hegemon, any collective effort is  difficult to organize. 

And the profound uncertainty about what lies  ahead makes it hard to move decisively. 

These  political hurdles are formidable. 

The good news is that technological  progress can make it much easier to clear them by driving down the costs  of action.

 In the decades to come, innovation could make severe cuts in  emissions, also known as “deep decarbonization,” achievable at  reasonable costs. 

That will mean reshaping about 10 sectors in  the global economy—including electric power, transportation, and parts  of agriculture—by reinforcing positive change where it is already  happening and investing heavily wherever it isn’t. 

In  a few sectors, especially electric power, a major transformation is  already underway, and low-emission technologies are quickly becoming  more widespread, at least in China, India, and most Western countries.  

The right policy interventions in wind, solar, and nuclear power,  among other technologies, could soon make countries’ power grids far  less dependent on conventional fossil fuels and radically reduce  emissions in the process. 

Technological  progress in clean electricity has already set off a virtuous circle,  with each new innovation creating more political will to do even more.  

Replicating this symbiosis of technology and politics in other sectors  is essential. 

In most other high-emission industries, however, deep  decarbonization has been much slower to arrive. 

In sectors such  as transportation, steel, cement, and plastics, companies will continue  to resist profound change unless they are convinced that decarbonization  represents not only costs and risks for investors but also  an opportunity to increase value and revenue

THE FUTURE IS ELECTRIC 

No  single domain offers greater opportunities for decarbonization than  electric power.

 Getting there will require progress on two fronts. 

The  first is the electrification of tasks that use vast amounts of energy  but still rely on fossil fuels, such as transportation and heating.  

Overall, transportation accounts for 27 percent of global energy use,  and nearly all of it relies on oil. 

The car industry has had some  success in changing this: the latest electric vehicles rival high-end  conventional cars in performance and cost, and electric cars now make up  around eight percent of new sales in California (although only 1.3  percent nationwide) and nearly 56 percent in Norway, where the  government offers massive subsidies to buyers.

 With improved batteries,  heavier-duty vehicles, including buses and trucks, could soon follow. 

In  fact, China already fields a fleet of over 420,000 electric busses.  

By contrast, aviation—which makes up only two percent of global  emissions but is growing rapidly and creates condensation trails in the  sky that double its warming effect—presents a tougher challenge. 

 A modern battery can store only two percent of the energy contained in a  comparable weight of jet fuel, meaning that any electric airplane would  need to carry an extremely heavy load in batteries to travel any  reasonable distance. 

Besides  transportation, the most important electrification frontier is heating —  not just in buildings, but as part of industrial production, too. 

All  told, heating consumes about one-half the raw energy that people and  firms around the world use. 

Of that fraction, some 50 percent goes into  industrial processes that require very high temperatures, such as the  production of cement and steel and the refining of oil (including for  plastics).

 These sectors will continue to rely on on-site fossil fuel  combustion for the foreseeable future, since electricity cannot match  the temperature and flexibility of direct fuel combustion. 

Yet in other  areas, such as lower-temperature industrial processes and space heating  for buildings, electrification is more practical.

 Heat pumps are a case  in point: whereas conventional heaters work by heating up indoor air,  heat pumps act like reversible air conditioners, moving heat (or, if  necessary, cold) indoors or outdoors — a far more efficient approach. 

Renewables,  in particular, will play a central role. Thanks to decreases in  the cost of wind and solar power equipment — and thanks to a mature  hydroelectric power industry—renewable energy already accounts for over  one-quarter of global electricity production. 

(Nuclear provides another  ten percent.) In the United States, the cost of electricity from large  solar farms has tumbled by 90 percent since 2009, and wind energy prices  have fallen by nearly 70 percent—and both continue to drop. 

To  better integrate renewables, policymakers can also rely on  the strategic use of another zero-emission technology: nuclear energy. 

 Although most efficient when running flat out 24 hours a day, nuclear  power plants can also operate flexibly to cover the supply gaps from  wind and solar power. 

THE GREAT UNKNOWNS

Political  obstacles notwithstanding, expanding the electrification of  transportation and heat and the production of low-carbon electricity  offers the surest path to a clean economy to date. 

The latest analysis  by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for instance, suggests  that more pervasive use of clean electricity in the global economy  would cover more than half the cuts needed for deep decarbonization. 

Yet  just how big a role electrification will ultimately play is hard to  predict—in part because its impact will depend on the future trajectory  of rival solutions that are only just beginning to emerge and whose  potential is impossible to assess precisely.

Hydrogen,  in particular, could serve much the same function as electricity does  now in carrying energy from producers to users—and it offers crucial  advantages. It is easier to store, making it ideal for power systems  dependent on ever-fluctuating supplies of renewable energy. 

And it can  be burned — without producing any new emissions—to generate the high  levels of heat needed in heavy industry, meaning that it could replace  on-site fossil fuel combustion in sectors that are hard to electrify.  

Hydrogen (either in its pure form or mixed with other chemicals) could  also serve as liquid fuel to power cars, trucks, ships, and airplanes. 

A  zero-emission economy could integrate the two carriers—electricity  and hydrogen—using each depending on its suitability for different  sectors.

Another  promising area for reducing emissions is agriculture, a field in which  advances on the horizon could yield large cuts.

 More precise control  over the diets of animals raised for food — which will probably require  more industrial farming and less free grazing — could lead cows, sheep,  and other livestock to emit less methane, a warming gas that, pound for  pound, is 10 times as bad as carbon dioxide.

 (It would also help if  people ate less meat.)  Meanwhile, a host of changes in crop cultivation  — such as altering when rice fields are flooded to strategically  determining which engineered crops should be used—could also lower  emissions.

Agriculture’s  biggest potential contribution, however, lies belowground. 

Plants that  engage in photosynthesis use carbon dioxide from the air to grow. 

The  mass cultivation of crops that are specially bred to grow larger roots—a  concept being tested on a small scale right now—along with farming  methods that avoid tilling the soil, could store huge amounts of carbon  dioxide as underground biomass for several decades or longer.  

The  defining industrial project of this century will be to leave carbon  behind, meaning that a bigger supply of new fundamental ideas for  decarbonization is essential. 

Respond:

Hi Everyone,

Factory farming techniques are being utilized in areas where farmers cannot compete with larger, more popular farms to produce animals for human consumption.

 These farms raise poultry, pigs, veal calves, and cattle in a small space, and most do not get to roam freely in the pastures.

 The positive side of this process is that these factory farms can produce plenty of animals for food consumption which will help with the food supply. 

However, this process often has an unethical approach, like adding antibiotics to grow animals faster than the usual way.

 I can’t entirely agree with these practices because there could be harmful to humans who consume these unnatural animals. In 1990, pig farms raised about 900 pigs, which rose to 8,000 by 2009.

 At the request of the World Health Organization, countries like Denmark have banned the use of antibiotics in factory farming and found there were no ill effects on their meat supply by switching to more sanitary practices.

More and more people are going vegan due to the data about the unsafe practices in meat farms today and how the animals are treated due to they believe these animals have souls. 

Animals like humans have a growth time, and we should allow them to grow at their own pace.

Many organizations like World Animal Protection are calling for a Farm Reform System Act.

 “This proposed bill would decrease the number of farmed animals kept in extreme confinement and subjected to brutal mutilations, as well as reduce the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture” (World Animal Protection, 2021).

World Animal Protection. No date. Support the Farm System Reform Act.