As it stands, we see a lot of people talking about how Western culture is superior, about how Israel needs to be defended even while it commits a genocide because it's a 'Western outpost'. We also see a rise in right wing governments across Western powers, and we're seeing them struggle as cheap resources are becoming hard to come by.
I truly fear that the ugly colonialism we saw in the past will return, and while they're committing horrifying violence they'll be claiming they're doing the global South a favor. They won't call it colonialism, but it'll be exactly that. Terminology rather than substance is what's more important; they'll be more concerned with what their actions will be called than what they're committing.
I want to point out that what we're seeing right now with Israel in regards to people trying to claim it's not a genocide, even if they do agree that all the horrors are real, is not something we haven't seen before in relatively recent history. In Iraq, when the oil for food program was instated, the human rights coordinator to Baghdad quit his job so he could criticize it as a genocide; his successor also quit saying this was indeed a genocide. The UN's response? To quibble about the term 'genocide'.
France has overthrown AT LEAST 22 African leaders since the 60's, and is most likely also behind the assassination of the Haitian president who was demanding reparations. They also, alongside America and NATO, overthrew Gaddafi, despite Libya being the most successful country in Africa.
How long before other European countries decide they want to go over to resource rich countries in the global South and 'liberate' them? I understand not every country can bring America's power to bear, but I wouldn't be surprised if they engage in joint ventures with America offering support.
All the horrors our government and Western accomplices have committed they've defended.
I genuinely hope the global South arms up heavily and prepares for this possibility, and I also honestly hope to see a successful pan Africa movement.
We're watching people literally say Israel's crimes are okay because Western culture is superior; if these people are, more than fine with genocide, ARMING a genocide, then these people will have zero compunctions with resuming the violent colonialism of the past. Colonialism didn't end because of the non-existent mercy of Western powers, it ended because it either wasn't feasible or because the colonizers were forced out. Life is getting harder in 'the garden' as Borrell called it, and since they see the rest of the world as a jungle, they'll have no problems 'taming' it for their resources. British people, even politicians like Farage, openly say they did nations like India a favor. They'll call the horrors they unleash a gift.
The rise of a right wing that idolizes 'the West', and despises everyone else is going to make this return of colonialism an easier undertaking.
Those pipelines exist because they connect one specific origin to one specific destination, and they cover maybe 5000 km of distance. Your proposal above is to literally do 20 km of piping for every climate-stressed hectare of cropland. For context, you will feed about 10 people per hectare, so every 2500 people you're feeding will be the equivalent of a big transcontinental pipeline. Doing this for the subsistence of 25 million people? That's 10 thousand transcontinental pipelines. It would be an unprecedentedly large project.
Not to mention that geothermal cooling is a viable technique for houses because you only need about 20 m of it per dwelling, and there is a limited volume that needs to be conditioned. This length can be fit alongside a house or incorporated into its foundation. It doesn't work so well when you're trying to cool things that are open to the outside air. Even with high tunnels, you would either have less cooling efficiency, or you'd have to put them in greenhouses (further amplifying the scale of the project).
Moreover, what you are talking about is literally ripping up all the topsoil to be able to build something that extends to almost every square meter. It's doing mountaintop removal to farmlands- ripping up the skin of the earth, disrupting thousands of square km of soil biomes that are critical to life on this planet yet are poorly understood. All this, just to duplicate the function of earthworms, trees, fungi, and wetlands. For less than 1% of the cost per hectare, instead of turning over 2 meters of soil across the whole field, you could make a microclimate by building a few fruit walls, digging a pond, and/or planting shade trees.
You're reaching a bit past your understanding with the engineering and agriculture on this one, and this was obvious as soon as you started talking about "arable land" in NK. The impulse of "well we have the ability to engineer high-tech things, why don't we just engineer high-tech everything and have unlimited benefits" evokes the Solar Freaking Roadways hoax a decade ago.
It sounds kind of like people saying "well we have good technology, the tech will see us through". No it won't. Half the technologies we use today are making the planet uninhabitable, and we don't see this when we only look at the direct use of them instead of the life-cycle analysis. Ironically, it's a colonial perspective that ignores the accumulated wisdom of people who have adapted to living in places for millennia.
The bad news is that concrete domes, spray-crete, plastic gaskets, metal brackets, and synthetic sealants all come with their own logistical challenges and complications that make them unfeasible in the long run. The good news is that even if you botched the specifics, you are kind of right with the general idea. There are lots of vernacular architectural techniques that resist flooding. The DPRK was able to rebuild and now their society has a relatively low environmental impact, though it's still in many ways low-tech and agricultural (but that's not a bad thing). Part of their philosophy is actually that they refuse to tear up a mountain for just a modest amount of mineral resources.
With a mobilization around appropriate technology and also convincing people to not recklessly consume the proverbial branch they're sitting on, we can make lots of places more resilient to climate shocks for a long time. There will still be a lot of losses but we probably have the ability to keep 8 billion humans alive, and maybe even the continuity of most of our biomes. It's not just socialism or barbarism, it's eco-socialism or extinction.
I dont think that you're really on the same wavelength as me here. Im not talking about full blown geothermal air conditioning of an entire field. Im talking about a very basic and cheap system to blow a bit of cool moist air directly onto a plant every now and then. We already do like misters and evaporative cooling for example. This is just a less water intensive version of that. All you have to do is enhance the plants already existing temperature regulation systems. Slightly cooler air blowing over it, a bit of moisture due to condensation, then let it dry in the sun, and the evaporation keeps it cool as the fan oscillates to do the same to other plants. Im guessing the reason you keep talking about 20km of piping is because your imagining like a system that keeps the entire air volume of the field cooler. Because i said "Criss cross all around the ground" Thats not necessary. When i said that i just meant theyd be spread out. Not that theyd be everywhere. You just leave a lot of space between them so you dont overheat a certain portion of the ground and spread the heat out evenly. Im talking about like a perimeter of pipe with 2 or 3 pipes that connect the opposite sides. So for a hectare your looking at around 1km of cheap PVC piping. Maybe 1500$ max. We already use this same exact tubing for irrigation. Its already in mass production and used on farms a ton.
Im talking about at farms. This is no more disruptive to soil than tilling, or putting in plumbing when you build a home. Which we already do all the time.
As for food forests which you allude to a bit theyre great and we should totally utilize them but they take a long time to get going and people need to eat now. Plus theres the issue of harvesting. All our equipment is made for fields now. Itll take decades or more to transition any significant portion of fields into food forests. Its definitely something we should do, but we cant let crops fail in the meantime.
I really think your arguing with someone who doesnt exist. Because youve taken some examples i gave about tech that can withstand climate change, and taken that to mean the most extreme version of those, and that im saying those are the only solution and we should do nothing else.
I think the main area where we actually differ is in how we view technology and industrialization. I totally get the view that highly industrialized society would be more pollutant, but thats just how the west has done it. China for example has been industrializing more and more and their emissions have gone down in the same period, and they are rejuvenating their local ecosystems too. We do need to learn from native techniques for architecture and agriculture and other things, but we take those lessons and use them with modern materials. A concrete dome functions a lot like a native dwelling in many regions would have. Large thermal mass, and with an opening in the top to let heat out. The difference is we have materials now that can last 100+ years.
Now obviously not every building in the world should be a concrete dome. Its mostly useful for small housing units in towns or villages. Medium Density. But they are definitely a much more viable housing unit than plywood and drywall massive homes.
Are there other solutions? Of course. Cob houses work well in the right climate, A frame cabins, Soviet style bloc housing, etc.
When i gave the example of that concrete dome i was giving an extreme example of how even in the worst case scenario where your being battered by storm surge, and hurricanes we can overcome it. Its a very niche application.
Now if youd like to we can talk about all those other solutions and discuss specifics. But lets avoid assuming the worst and do so productively. Im happy to talk more about this stuff. Im even going to school for Environmental Studies right now, and am planning on doing independent research on local remnant native food forests in my area. Theres a pawpaw patch Im sure used to be one. So im sure we would have plenty to talk about.
You said "if your crops are overheating". I presume you want a solution for all the crops so you can feed people, rather than for just enough crops for a botanical garden to keep the species alive.
Tilling mixes up the top 10-15 cm, or the O soil horizon and maybe part of the A horizon. Putting pipe down at a 6-foot (stabilized across the seasons) depth is categorically different. PVC is used partly because it has low thermal conductivity, which would defeat the purpose of it. The throughput of air you'd need for a field, even just in high tunnels for 20 hot days a year, is more than a simple fan could pull out of these pipes. Run some numbers and tell me what volume of air you'd need to move through the ground to keep the surface plants 5°C cooler during heat waves. I suspect there's a good reason why it's not commonplace, that has to do with more than just labor input.
Again, you're right that we just need to build out the infrastructure with technology that already exists (and in fact has existed for centuries). It turns out that when your goal is to feed people, you get better yields (and better nutrition and better soil quality) out of labor-intensive polycultures. Broad-field monocropping is done for animal feed and for the supply chains of highly processed food. Treating food as a globalized commodity inevitably leads you toward a paradigm that treats land as expendable and people as colonial subjects.
Concrete tends not to last very long when it borders a humid or indoor environment, and it also depends on coarse/construction-grade sand which is a resource we're set to run out of this century. Fortunately and fittingly, we can build what we need to survive the effects of fossil fuels, with stuff that existed before we started drilling for them.
I happen to live in pawpaw country too, I'll PM you the more specific area.
Well when youre putting in a pipe you just need to dig up the thin line it'll go in. I don't think it would take long for the surrounding microbes to recolonize that dirt. The low thermal conductivity of PVC actually helps in this case too. It would allow for a slight cooling of the air without dropping it too much, causing the pipes to clog from condensation. If you had a highly conductive piping then the condensation along the pipes would be a big issue. You also arent keeping the air outside cool. You are keeping the plants cool. It's like AC in your house vs just using a fan. The idea is to get slightly cooler moist air, and blow it periodically at the plants. Say once every 5 minutes. This is not looking to turn a 100F field into a 95F field. It's just looking to give the plants some relief from heat shock so they can grow properly. It mimic's a cool breeze you might get coming off a nearby body of water. Water condensates on the plant leaves a bit, and then evaporates keeping them cool for the next couple minutes, and then by the time it's gone the fan would come back around again to that area.
They are already doing similar things on high value crops like berries. It's basically a life support system for the existing agricultural capacity we have. Since full on hydroponics is much more expensive/needs new infrastructure, and food forests will take time to get going. Time we don't have. You would use systems like this, deployable shades, misters, etc to keep current agriculture going so that people don't starve. Then for high population urban areas you'd need to transition to vertical hydroponics, and in rural areas you transition to food forests. Both of which take a lot of time, and are much more different than what we do now. The challenge is that what we have now, and where we need to get are so far apart in how they function. So if we just jump straight from one to the other you'll have food shortages in the meantime. Since it's not as if people are gonna be proactive about this. The change over will only come once the material reality sets in that there is no other option. By then we will already be dealing with massive crop failures constantly. We're already seeing the beginnings of that now.
Concrete dome homes are also something that has actually been done before. This lady for example: https://youtu.be/zjBpVtHBHpc
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The plants only get cooled off if their surroundings are cooler. A brief burst of 65°F air is going to dissipate in a few seconds and not have any effect. You actually need to lower the surface air temperature, making the air around them less hot for 5 minutes out of every hour is not going to solve the problem. Replacing water with air only magnifies the problem, because you now need 800x more of it. But if you wanted a cool breeze coming off a body of water, why not just put a pond in on a high point or inflection point in the landscape? Such earthworks already are common permaculture practice, and shades and misters are widely used too. Geothermal cooling really only works when the destination area is contained.
Shades generally work anywhere but misters not so much. If you mist a plant in a dry climate itll work great, but in a humid one it wont do much. But the temps of the earth are universal everywhere. And in a humid climate when you run that humid air down thru the tubes and it gets cooler the waters gonna condense. Then your blowing cool dry air onto the plants and water particulates too. The sun hits it, evaporates the water droplets on the leaves, and heat is transfered from the plant back to the air. So the air doesnt need to stick around. Its leeching heat from the plant. Youd have to do it every few minutes. Frequency would depend on exact conditions locally.
The reason you cant just build a pond is that is a much bigger terraforming project and takes a lot of land, and water. Things most farms are already in short supply of. This method would utilize the moisture already in the air and the temperature already in the earth.
The things we need are already right there. Working out the specifics would just be an engineering problem.
The most energy intensive parts are the cooling of the air and the phase change of the water. The energy for that is provided by the sun, and the thermal mass of the earth acts as a condenser. With the fan doing the least intensive part of moving the air around.
Doing it every few minutes is why you'd need a larger underground pipe. With 1 m of 3"-diameter pipe per 10 m², you'd have 0.46 L of pipe volume per m². Even if it were to fully cool off once per cycle, it's still not a lot of breeze.
The breeze-from-beneath approach is unconventional and innovating but I think it would have a use case for purposes other than agricultural ones. I'm personally really eager to apply it to shelters.