your conclusion may be correct but there could be circumstances that change the calculation. For example, if moving expensive leafy greens to vertical farms frees up soil, water and other resources for staples.

Tomatoes and strawberries have been grown vertically. There's an ultra-premium vegetable and fruit sector, but it's inherently tiny.

High energy prices right now are mostly the result of the Ukraine war. It's painful now, but it is accelerating the conversion from fossil fuels. At least if this doesn't expand into a larger war.

The high energy prices are not because of the war but because of the sanctions regime. The thing is, sanctions basically never end. It's impossible to lift them. We still have sanctions against Cuba since 1962. No one even cares about Cuba anymore. The sanctions against Iran remain in place since 1979, and have only ever gotten stricter. Same for Syria, which we began to sanction in 1986. It's called "the sanctions escalator", because it only ever moves up. New sanctions are now being introduced against China.

There is no reason to think that, after the war is over, the sanctions will be lifted. I mean, why would they be lifted? Europe is not going to return to Russia the assets that were frozen/seized or start wanting to trade with Russia -- or vice versa -- moreover there are already new pipelines and trade agreements made within Eurasia that exclude Europe as a market for energy.

This is a permanent change ushering in a new cold war and a new multipolar world, where it's going to be hard (but not impossible) for commodities to cross bloc boundaries. Russia's commodities are going to be flowing east and south, Saudi Arabia's will be flowing mostly to China, while North American commodities will be staying mostly in North America.

After permanently and irreparably rupturing the previous trade relationships, Europe is going to have to become more energy independent, and I think they realize now that the previous energy dependence they had was a strategic weakness for them. They will need to learn to do with less energy at least until they ramp up domestically produced replacements such as nuclear or renewables + storage.

Sanctions do get lifted. Sanctions against South Africa are an example:

https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/european-community-...

EU sanctions against others may also cease after a regime change. US lifted sanctions against Vietnam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States–Vietnam_relation...

I mean, if your hope is for regime change, then I'd recommend an energy policy that is based on something a bit more realistic. Imagine telling farmers or businesses in Germany or the UK that "Your bills will remain high until there is regime change in Russia".

They would correctly view that as lack of an energy policy. Europe requires an energy policy for the world that exists, not the world it wishes would exist.

We have not been able to change the regime in Syria, Iran or Cuba despite decades trying. Not sure why you think China or Russia is going to be a more realistic target. FYI, the successor to Putin is Medvedev, who is much more of an anti-western hardliner. If Europe is pinning its hopes for the future on regime change in Russia, then the people of Europe deserve much more competent leadership.

Tell me a region in the world which couldn't do with more competent leadership. :)

I think Europe is unique in terms of denying reality so much that they don't even have a plan.

It's like the prospect of some things are so terrible as to be unthinkable and when something is unthinkable, you don't come up with a plan to deal with it. Instead, you shout down anyone who brings up the unmentionable thing. For Europe, the list of unthinkable things keeps growing:

* What if they can't deploy enough energy storage at scale to make their renewable push actually work? Unthinkable!

* What if there is no regime change in Russia, and the present situation just continues for a few decades. Unthinkable!

* What will they do with millions of Ukrainian refugees that refuse to or are unable to return home? And the many millions more that will be flooding in soon? Unthinkable!

So this deer in the headlights inability to face reality is the leadership problem. And the sad thing is that Europe does have options. There is coal in Poland, Natural gas in Germany, Nuclear in France, Wind in Italy. They can scale up production of domestic sources and deal with the stark reality that they need to become much more energy independent OR they can spend $200 billion subsidizing the purchase of imported natural gas for consumers, just hoping that things "go back to normal after the war".

Also: sanctions against Yugoslavia were imposed, (mostly) lifted, then imposed again and then finally lifted, all within a decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Yugoslavia

> We still have sanctions against Cuba since 1962. No one even cares about Cuba anymore

That's not true. The sanctions against Cuba remain in place because a small but significant number of Cuban exiles care very much and they happen to be mostly concentrated in a swing state

Please tell me this is a joke or a conspiracy theory. Do I read you correctly? Are you saying that the US has been forcefully suppressing an entire nation for decades, just because of a small amount of US citizens that live in a politically inconvenient location, and who are politically inconvenient to move somewhere else?

To make it less abstract, Cuban-Americans are heavily concentrated in Florida and so are an important constituency there. Easing sanctions on Cuba is not something they want, in the aggregate. Politicians that want Florida therefore don't want to do it. Party leadership (for both parties, but most importantly the Republicans) therefore doesn't push for it because it's such a losing issue. Essentially there is imagined to be no upside politically to easing on Cuba, while the downside is very clear (you lose Florida).

I'm not sure how we could move Cuban-Americans somewhere else unless you are suggesting forced relocations to other parts of the U.S.

I don't disagree about your analysis of the politics but I still think the math just doesn't pencil out. On the other side of the issue from all those Cubans who don't want normalized relations is business interests that do.

Levis wants to sell them jeans. Apple wants to sell them phones. GM wants to sell them truck. Raytheon wants to sell them radar systems. There's just so much money to be made when a formerly isolated market become unlocked that I think you could win back Florida and more with all the donations from the big corporations that would stand to benefit from normalized relations with Cuba.

I think the only reason nothing happens is because there's no one sector that really stands to benefit and can make a concentrated lobbying effort whereas the people that don't want it are a unified ethnic group which for the purposes of high level political analysis can roughly be seen as a voting block.

Ditto all this for Iran, but move all the decimals to the right once or twice.

Cuba is a poor, small country. They can't buy very significant quantities of jeans or phones.

(11.3M people, per capita GDP $9,500 or so.)

I also wouldn't discount the power of inertia in public policy. Why spend capital on this relatively minor issue when we can just keep the status quo going indefinitely with no debate?

I think biorach is quite correct, and that is not even as strange as our commitment to Ethanol, which is largely due to the Iowa caucuses. It's very popular in that state-- they grow a lot of corn. It also used to be the first state of the presidential primaries (I believe this is changing). So if you wanted to run for president at some time (and a lot of powerful politicians do) you had to be in favor of Ethanol subsidies.

The assessment is largely correct.

US Presidential politics has been on a knife edge for the past 2+ decades, with multiple popular-vote-minority presidents elected (or appointed, according to some, notably Bush-Gore 2000).

There are a handful of swing states, with Ohio and Florida topping the list via Google Ngram Viewer. The term "swing state of " starts appearing notably around 1995, and has been persistent since the 2000 election.

<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=swing+state+of...>

(Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, New , Illinois, and Virginia make the top six over that period. "New" seems likely to be "New York", though it could be the combined effect of "New York" and "New Jersey".)

And again, Cuban politics and policy is absolutely pivotal in Florida.

The prices went nuts several months before Feb 24 due to russian machinations with supply. So your claim about it only being linked to sanctions is only partially true.

Also russian controlled gas storage in Germany decided to keep fill levels in storage artificially low. This had direct impact on price and also not part of the sanctions, tho still part of the wider war of russian aggression.

It is not accelerating conversion to renewables now. In fact coal is never been used so much in Europe. The idea of transforming into a full renewable energy society is seen way too opportunistic.

Carbon emissions in the EU haven’t been so low for 30 years, according to the latest CREA analysis [1]

It looks to them like a price-driven transition and if you are a market forces kind of person, the investments in renewables are already following the market pricing structure.

1. https://energyandcleanair.org/eu-co2-emissions-reach-a-30-ye...

Europe is using coal to cover a current gap. It is not building new coal to cover future gaps. That's what is being said.

My issues is that they still need energy input. And this takes land, specially for renewables. And that land is close or even more than just laying the same on flat ground.

I think they are, just not a future that's anywhere near. When energy becomes abundant, through nuclear or geothermal, then going vertical farming is going to be excellent for rewilding and enhancing yields.

Investing $600M right now though.. seems a bit excessive, unless they somehow figured there's a completely unserved multi billion dollar luxury demand.

That investment seems reasonable if part of their plan is to lobby government to force more local consumption. Regulatory capture for the win.

Not true for potatoes. Can even do that on your balcony in some sort of barrel, with many holes on the side. No soil necessary. I'd guess that could work very well in vertical farming. It just wouldn't be economical, for now. OTOH why not grow superspecial heritage strains?

You don't really need soil for calories-rich plants, but you need a lot of energy (sunlight). Which you obviouly can't have in a large vertical farm, unless you use a lot of electrical power.

Why not? Build it with a glass front? Put it on a turn-table, and have it follow the sun!1!!

Why not just keep growing it in the soil? We aren't on Mars.

Hmm, I had issues with the verticality, but hydroponics can save a lot of water (regular greenhouses too, by capturing evaporated water; you can also use pots). Indoor heating, temperature control, and protection from hail also mean year-round production, or at least protection against random weather events. Greenhouses can achieve most of these already, with more efficiency gains if water cannot escape underground.

Verticality (including regular shelves on a single floor) is good for density (may be cheaper to build), but has energy density issues for some crops.

Even on planet Earth many places are not arable:

https://www.mapsofworld.com/thematic-maps/arable-land-map.ht...

True but you're better of combating waste, land degradation, land access/commoditization, etc than inventing some overall lack of arable land. Bigger actual benefits tend to stem from the controlled environment. Sure there are places where these things make sense if you want to limit transport (Water retention in the arab peninsula or the like) but honestly we see it hyped more often in places where it does not.

It's the same nonsensical reasoning behind putting solar panels in places where they don't make sense. I remember france putting money in a solar panel road that was both ridiculously overpriced and ridiculously ineffective for reasons completely predictable. Of course places where solar panels made sense were in essence still barely utilised. Someone just made a lot of money off of the invented scarcity.

I agree with the notion that technology should be used appropriately, but the issue seems to be corruption and that people buy into hypes and misallocate technology, not that the technology itself is useless. I am sure that some corrupt officials manage to overpay for sand in Sahara.

There are, broadly speaking, two groups of people who are very interested in vertical farming.

1) People who wanna grow mind altering plants and fungi.

2) People who are worried about destabilized food supply chains and would rather have $10 lettuce than no lettuce.

Both groups have priorities that come before riding the razor's edge of economic efficiency.

And people who want to eat local foods

Where true, I think that counts as "missing the point".

Local foods are, as I understand it, supposed to be some combination of more eco-friendly and supporting local farmers.

Growing a potato in your kitchen cupboard using hydroponics and PV+LED is very local, but you'd have to grow a lot of them before you saved more on transport and processing emissions than created by the equipment; and you certainly aren't helping local farmers by doing it yourself.

Local is purely about quality for me. I can get food that’s riper fresher and tastier if it doesn’t have to travel.

You're probably in group 2.

Why do you support local farmers? Like on a deep level? Deeper than "well they're my neighbors" Why do you support your neighbor over some guy in Nebraska? Probably because his culture an interests align with yours whereas the same is not necessarily true about the guy thousands of miles away and all the parties between you and him. You'd rather be slightly less dependent on the long supply chain than the short one.

Local foods are necessarily more ripe and fresher than remotely grown foods. There are more reasons than supporting your neighbors or stable food chains - quality is almost universally higher at a farmers market than at a big box store. That’s not because local farmers are superior, it’s because they harvest closer to optimal ripeness and sell it fast before it spoils. Food grown on the other side of the planet and shipped in storage containers is necessarily harvested very early and is non optimally ripened, or never ripens.

3) People interested in self-sustaining artificial islands/seasteading where space+water efficiency is paramount.

Because certain plants don’t transit well to urban areas and you can reduce waste and expense by growing them adjacent or in urban areas, providing fresher food for the same cost. That’s why they tend to grow delicate leafy greens.

Even in such circumstances, lower-intensity ag methods such as greenhouse farming (enclosures to accommodate for inclement weather), but still relying on incident sunlight, are far more resource-effective. The land-use requirements are still large enough that the technologically- and energy-intensive vertical farming methods simply won't compete.

I'd also like to know what these magical nontransportable crops you have in mind are.

How is that different from a glass house or normal agriculture? A normal piece of farmland or glass house captures all sunlight falling on its surface for the produce that grows on the same surface, ratio 1:1. If you were to use sunlight falling on the vertical farm with 5 floors, it would have to divide the sunlight over more surface, ratio 1:5, so there is less sunlight per surface.

Solar panels + lights together are a system for redirecting energy, and the efficiency “loss” is inconsequential. You can simply cover an adjacent area 10x the size to provide the extra sunlight.

But then why not cover the adjacent area with crops and sod the vertical farm, solar panels, grow lamps, wiring, and all the costs, construction time, maintenance work, etc. and just have a farm?

Because good land itself might just be more expensive to purchase and maintain than all of those systems in a highly dense footprint?

Instead of an adjacent area, the panels could be in an arid desert. Meanwhile, the vertical farm is in a population center and using less water

That is equivalent to saying "vertical farming is cost-effective where energy is free and land is scarce and expensive".

Oddly enough, precisely the opposite circumstance describes most farming.

The fact that vertical farms popularized the concept of "leafy greens" should raise an eyebrow alone because that is an oddly specific type of plant that excludes almost every vegetable that I eat.

Leafy greens have been part of human diets for forever. If they weren't popular in your part of the world, vertical farming should receive thanks for having made them so.

Eating raw leafy greens is a hyper modern addition to human diets. If you want a $20 kale salad, go for it, but let’s not pretend eating uncooked nutritionally devoid foods is somehow necessary or historical.

What is your definition of hyper modern?

Greeks and Romans ate pretty literal salads, and I'm pretty sure people historically knew what natural plants were edible and ate them some of the time.

They was pushed for a reason: we need to be able to detach from nature for space exploration, we might need to detach from nature to keep living in changed climate where some places are simply too hot, cold etc to live well and so on.

Being able to be self-reliant meant being resilient and so being able to evolve more.

Of course it's a failure because we are decades behind the needed level of tech and cheap energy to makes such approach feasible and probably they will never scale anyway. But for many aspects they are tempting for many people. Robotic industries like them, service industries like them, some long-term sociopolitical planners like them and so on.

While no wheat or potatoes, 200 varieties, including eggplant and squashes, in aeroponic grow towers under the sun:

https://youtu.be/GpKGbXWepAs

Comparison of five cheap methods to grow potatoes hydroponically:

https://youtu.be/l-gwc8ogevo

Because, on a global scale, we already have over production of basically everything due to highly industrialized agriculture. Our problem is distributing this production, and produce in more sustainable ways, for both us humans and the environment. No amount of "vertical farming" is going to solve any if those two problems, other than creating a bunch if start ups spending VC money on the ideas.

Vertical farms can help solve part of the distribution problem by allowing these farms to be started just about anywhere. A closed system probably will be more sustainable as well, in terms of water and nutrient consumption.

Not only that. Apparently almost 50% of the grown perfectly eatable food gets thrown out because it is oddly shaped or not the right size for grocery stores. What a waste.

Source?

The usual figure I see is that food wastage is about 30--40%.[1] That figure's been remarkably stable over most of the past 100 years, though when the wastage happens has shifted dramatically toward the end-consumption phase, that is after a tremendous amount of additional energy has been applied in the form of transportation, processing, and cold-storage. It's much better to toss unusable food in its raw state on the farm rather than as leftovers from your fridge (harvested, transported, refrigerated or processed, merchandised, bought, driven home, cooked, refrigerated again).

There's some wastage of imperfect fruit and vegetables, yes, though you'd be amazed at how much of that actually is incorporated into processed foods (dishes, smoothies, beverages, etc.) or used in animal feed earlier in the supply-chain.

________________________________

Notes:

1. E.g., US FDA: "In the United States, food waste is estimated at between 30–40 percent of the food supply." <https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/food-loss-and-waste>. An arbitrarily-selected 1977 citation of the 1974 growing year suggests about 30% food wastage at the time as well ("the combined [food] loss ... could have fed an estimated 49 million people"): <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Food_Waste_an_Opportuni...> Food Waste - an Opportunity to Improve Resource Use Department of Agriculture : Report to the Congress, US GAO (1977). I've seen similar figures in works on resource utilization / limits dating to the 1950s.

And having some wastage is much better than not having enough food

True.

Slack is highly underrated.

This also turns out to be a serious problem in advocating for efficiency vs. growth.

Efficiency maximises at 0% wastage. Growth is (in theory, though very rarely in practice) open-ended. At least in the short term, growth compounds, whilst efficiency tends to asymptotically approach some minimum.

I'd had this realisation years ago in various efficiency drives (energy, water usage, etc.). The region that started in a more efficient and lower-usage state often faced a greater challenge than one which was profligate, as the latter would (usually) have an easier time cutting usage.

That's not always the case --- a region might become wholly dependent on profligate wastage, say, in the form of air conditioning or heating, in ways that are difficult to substitute for or curtail, especially given infrastructure which makes limiting such activities difficult. But as a general rule, having more fat to cut should actually increase options, all else equal.

You might be thinking of this comment here [1]?

The problem isn't the medium used to grow the calories per se, it's the overall cost per calorie which is mostly energy either in the form of fertilizer (which everyone pays, vertical or not) and in the form of photosynthetic input (which most non-vertical farms receive for free at the cost of reliability). The cost of scaling vertically (literally) is significantly more expensive in operating costs than scaling horizontally is in capital costs as long as the latter receives free energy in the form of sunlight.

For example, green houses which are half way between bare fields and vertical farms in capital cost are economically competitive all over the world because they get free sunlight and extra trapped heat.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33790631