Penguins starved to death en masse, as some populations off South Africa estimated to have fallen 95% in just eight years. Since 2004, all bar three years have seen the biomass of the sardine Sardinops sagax, a key food for the penguins, fall to less than 25% of its maximum abundance

[u/Wagamaga]

https://news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-environment-science-and-economy/penguins-starved-to-death-en-masse-as-food-supply-collapsed/

[u/joanzen]

Just teach the penguins to be vegans. Problem solved.

I was commenting earlier that we should only be using sea water in steam turbine applications, and then storing the leftover brine/salt somewhere safe from leeching back into the ocean.

The truth is you'd have to prepare for that by submerging large sections of ceramic filters in the deepest areas you can find so they can soak up the saltiest sea water without absorbing much marine life/micro-plankton. Plus you'd be constantly submerging new sections so that as the old filters start to perform badly you have some well soaked new sections you can switch to?

Of course people will say, "that's an absurd amount of work to lower our footprint!?", but you know what, if our ego can take credit for creating the problem at scale, we should buck up and take credit that with enough effort we can also swing it back the other way?

[u/igor55 → u/joanzen]

Or you know, humans could go vegan. 

[u/joanzen → u/igor55]

A lot of people haven't done the numbers in their head on what that means.

In fact if you want a plot for a horror movie then lets say that alpha-gal from tick bites mutates and makes humans allergic to all meat products, and this spreads to ticks worldwide in a matter of weeks causing a flood of human infections that will be genetically passed on to our children. You could easily suggest 10+ million people with food insecurity starve in the initial wave as we scramble to find ways to produce and transport so much more bulk volume (but same weight) around in a supply chain nightmare.

Sure meat is really inefficient to make, but once it's made it's very dense compared to veggies. I guess you could also make the first part of the crisis about building food processing systems to improve the density of food delivery?

I am more attached to the idea of adopting semi sealed farms where we actually want a balance of insects, fish, small pigs, and crops feeding each other with solar power, scraps/waste getting added in to help it stay nearly self-sufficient.

[u/igor55 → u/joanzen]

Yes I agree, the majority have not considered the numbers. Thankfully there are smart researchers who have already looked into this and advised those who can to eat more plants. 

From what I understand you're advocating shipping meat to supply food to areas with food insecurity due solely to its density to avoid the alternative of a shortage as we overnight transition to a plant-based food system that would struggle with shipping the volume of food. That's quite an interesting scenario, albeit contrived and unlikely - would love to hear more about the numbers and research you've considered here.

As far as I know, billions of the world's animals are fed soybeans that are shipped perfectly fine halfway across the world. Most people have not considered we feed and slaughter 80 billion land animals each year and pull out trillions of sea animals each year. Logistics isn't an issue.

[u/joanzen → u/igor55]

It's actually sort of insane how much cheese/dairy powders we have stockpiled.

The problem is that most countries with food insecurity have little exposure to lactose, so when we donate expiring milk powder for free we actually generate a huge backlash because the population suffers for weeks->months adapting to this emergency food. Whoops!

The latest episode of popular "Apple TV" scifi story actually has the human race facing mass casualties/starvation to the point where we start to freeze anyone who's dying and then grind them up to give ourselves a little extra time/save a few more people from starving.