Yes for me this is also the case. The WIP on the Kanban is very important. Is not a question of deadlines, is more a question of doing as little as possible at the same time.
The costs are tiny because right now they not internalize pollution and social injustice. Yes, “local” is not an end on itself but the same is true for “global”. Right now the cost of sending a banana to the other side of the world in a container is small because we are jeopardizing the future of the planet by not putting a price on CO2 emissions.
Local food need to spend effort on Marketing because they are more expensive that monocultures, and the reason for this is that monoculture prices benefit from subsidies and not paying externalities. We need to fix this for the sake of future generations and if we do this local goods would be much more competitive and so much more effective in marketing.
I agree, we can apply robotics but always thinking in small scale farming, otherwise the gains in production will be lost in distribution. Sadly right now we are not paying for externalities of distribution so there is no incentive for thinking in small distributed economies.
There are more benefits of thinking small. We are creating a big interdependent and fragile economy. It’s seems robust but a black swan event - as Nassin Taleb would name - can provoke global disaster. Small scale economies are less exposed to this.
To apply robotic berry pickers you normally need to produce in a large scale (many tons of berries). So you will need to distribute them. If you don’t apply the externalities of transportation and preservation of the food it would seem that this kind of production makes sense but it doesn’t. It actually less effective if you count for the costs of transportation, packaging and freezing.
Environmentally this is also known as “mix vs sort” and is almost a physical rule. If your are very good in mixing (making things at large scale), your tend to be bad in sorting (distributing things).
Every time I read about farm mechanization I remember the Ralph Borsodi work on the book "The Distribution Age". Every efficiency you gain in production scale you tend to lose in distribution efficiency.
The key to sustainable farming is a decentralized small scale. This is the only way to keep transportation, marketing and preservation of the goods low.
We don't need to scale up if the developed countries agree to scale down consumption. Reducing commuting (working from home when possible), have taxes on airplane travel, tax goods that come unnecessarily from far away, invest in durability. This is not scyfy solutions sorry to disappoint
Every study that I know show that the dematerialization of economy will lead to a degrowth [1]. Moreover there are many non material things that we need but the majority used to be free. Having time with friends and family for instance. Do we need to turn our relations into a commodity only to achieve growth? Why are we so obsessed with growth that we are willing to exploit ourselves and the planet in order to achieve it?
We reading this kind of news we need to be concerned about survivourship bias. How many people did the same and lost everything? That people don't appear on BBC but they are far more than the success examples. https://xkcd.com/1827/
How about just building less houses? Even China has overproduction of houses.
All comes down to our economic paradigm where we need to produce infinitly otherwise we colapse
Yes, and in the last 50 years carbon emissions have skyrocketed, while wages have stagnated.
We are depleting the resources of the planet and polluting at an unbearable pace.
We have to change the economy and protectionism for me can be a good measure. If protecting the environment or health is good, why is protecting the economy bad?
What is the opposite of protecting? attack? If so, why does protecting something lead to a trade war? should not it be to attack an economy?
This area is full of self-righteous words like "free market" or "trade war". We cannot question something that is free? And a war is something that has to be fought at all times?
We need to see through this.
By reducing imports from China, China will need to invest in their local market too and by doing that they will need to improve chinese worker conditions.
We are starting to recognize that we don't need alf the things we buy. We are getting to the point that we don't own things, things own us. A sugestion, if you want to get rid of stuff, do it because you don't need the oject, not to get more stuff.
How many fossil fuels do we need to burn to accomplish all of this? The solution is to greatly reduce unnecessary consumption, decentralize agriculture, avoid private transportation. It's to do less not more
Many people need this resources, including our children. That’s why we need to slow down our crave for things and enjoy what we have. We don’t need to change cars every 4 year, we don’t need to commute as we do, we don’t need all the clothes, we don’t need to eat meat at every meal. Also we don’t need to work in useless jobs only to have money to buy useless things. We need to reconnect with nature and with each other.
The question is not how many resources we have, the question is how hard they are to extract. The more resources we extract from earth the more difficult they become to extract, that is, we need to apply more resources/pollution/energy/technology to extract the same ton of cobalt that we used in the past. This turn this problem in an exponential one, I don’t know when we will need to face it but I understand the concern of Nature (pun intended).
Australia is not utilising only 14% of their resources, they have only 14% of the known world resources. More than 50% is based on Congo were the work is performed in miserable conditions.
We are all happy that we still don’t reach peak oil, but if we don’t change the way we think about progress and economic growth, in a world with finite resources will have severe consequences.