Imagine that humanity quit fossil fuels. Think of our entire Ozymandian blob of a global economy running on clean energy instead of ancient heat-trapping hydrocarbons—more than 1 billion vehicles, 2 billion homes, every school, mall, skyscraper, data center, airport, seaport, factory, and cryptocurrency on Earth. No more gas stoves, gas stations, or gas-fired power plants. No more petrochemicals, petrostates, or petroleum jelly.
Even as a thought experiment, it’s almost unimaginable. Fossil energy is so ubiquitous, so useful, so entrenched. The president of the United States is shredding regulations to get Americans to produce and consume even more of it. But radical change always seems unimaginable before it happens, and in recent years, the absurd fantasy of fossil-free energy has gotten a bit less absurd. America’s coal power has declined by more than half since 2010, while wind power has more than tripled, solar capacity has expanded fortyfold, and more than 4 million electric vehicles have appeared on the road. Globally, most new electricity is zero emissions, because clean is now usually cheaper than dirty. Fossil fuels still energize most of the planet, so the transition away from them will take years, but it has begun, and Donald Trump can’t stop it. We can now start to see how the fossil-fuel story will end, even if we don’t know when it will end.
The thing is, fossil fuels are only two-thirds of the climate problem. Even if we do quit them, we’ll never meet the emissions targets set by the Paris Agreement without addressing the other third. The challenge is food: what we eat, how we produce it, and the forests and other natural ecosystems we keep clearing to make room for more farms to make more food. And that’s mostly a land story about the relentless spread of crops and pastures that already cover two of every five acres of land on Earth, obliterating the wild landscapes that soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We have no idea how or when that story will end.
Humanity’s dominion over the Earth isn’t really about the spread of cities and towns, highways and driveways, industry and commerce. It’s about farming. Of all the planet’s land that isn’t ice or desert, barely 1 percent is developed. Half is cropped or grazed. Urban sprawl is a rounding error compared with agricultural sprawl. Look out the window on a cross-country flight: The land people use to live, learn, work, and play is dwarfed by the land used to make food.
Agriculture’s footprint is already larger than Asia, and the more it expands, the more nature’s footprint shrinks, expelling the carbon stored in its soils and vegetation into the overheated atmosphere. Somehow, we’ll need to get the limited land on our hot and hungry planet to produce much more food to sustain us and absorb much more carbon to save us, because it will be impossible to decarbonize the atmosphere if we keep vaporizing trees. It’s like trying to clean the house while smashing the vacuum cleaner to bits in the living room. And not only is the conversion of natural land into farmland and rangeland the leading driver of deforestation; agriculture is responsible for much of the world’s water shortages, water pollution, wetland destruction, and biodiversity loss. It’s propelling the worst extinction since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
Oh, and unlike the fossil-fuel problem, this land problem is getting worse. That’s partly because the number of people on Earth increases every day, while the amount of land on Earth does not. But it’s also because those people are eating more meat, which means not only more methane emissions from cow burps and manure, but the use of more land to grow grass and grain for animals to eat before we eat them. More than three-quarters of the world’s agricultural land now supports livestock. In the U.S., nearly half that land is used to produce beef, which provides just 3 percent of U.S. calories.
In other words, we’re eating the Earth. Agriculture is essential because food isn’t optional, but the planet can’t keep losing a soccer field’s worth of tropical forest every six seconds. If current trends hold, the world’s farmers will have to clear at least a dozen more Californias’ worth of land to fill nearly 10 billion human bellies by 2050. That could wipe out the Amazon rainforest and other natural carbon storehouses that are not only refuges for wildlife but our best defense against climate chaos. The math is daunting: Global agricultural production will need to expand about 50 percent by 2050—the caloric equivalent of a dozen extra Olive Garden breadsticks every day for everyone alive today—while the global agricultural footprint needs to shrink.
Producing enough calories to nourish our growing population without chewing up the carbon sinks that stabilize our warming climate will be as monumental a challenge as ending oil. The rich world will need to eat less beef and more plants, while the entire world will need to produce more food with less land. That’s going to get even harder as climate-driven droughts, floods, heat waves, and pest infestations drag down crop and livestock yields.
The good news is that remarkable people are working on this eating-the-Earth problem, and their work can be antidotes to climate fatalism. They’re reengineering soybean plants to grow dairy proteins, developing feed additives to help cattle burp less methane, restoring carbon-rich peatlands, upcycling food waste into snacks, and even improving the miracle of photosynthesis. They’re growing superefficient salmon in indoor tanks, superefficient trees on barren land, and superefficient crops genetically manipulated to survive droughts and floods. They’re inventing bio-fertilizers that train microbes to fetch nutrients from the air and biopesticides that use RNA technology to constipate beetles to death. John Deere is preparing to roll out its first electric tractors—in green, naturally.
But food and climate solutions are still about a quarter century behind energy and climate solutions. Less than 4 percent of the world’s climate finance is flowing into the land sector, much of it toward farm-grown biofuels and low-yield agricultural approaches that would induce even more deforestation and emissions. There’s a strange consensus among hippie-foodie lefties who read Michael Pollan, all-natural biohacker bros who listen to Joe Rogan, and executives who run major agribusinesses and philanthropies that the answer lies in kinder and gentler alternatives to industrial farming. But the truth is that organic and grass-fed are usually worse for the climate than conventional and feedlot-finished—mainly because they’re less productive and more land-intensive. Meanwhile, all public agricultural research and development focused on the climate in the U.S. is a fraction of Apple’s R&D, as if farming weren’t nearly as important as a better iPhone camera.
Although the fossil-fuel problem is now a mostly political story because we basically know what we need to do, the eating-the-Earth problem is still an analytical story. We haven’t yet figured out what we need to do. But we know it won’t be easy. Making more food with less land will require new crops, new foods, new policies, and new behaviors—and they won’t be invented, approved, and adopted worldwide overnight. We’ll have to make personal and political changes as unimaginable as quitting fossil fuels, and we can’t quit food. Feeding the world without frying it is another absurd fantasy that eventually needs to become reality.
This essay has been excerpted from Michael Grunwald’s forthcoming book, We Are Eating the Earth.
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