A new - another - report telling us that we’ll all have to stop eating like we desire to:

Another six planets needed to eat like most meat-loving countries

Well, that’s if we all wish to eat like the Argentinians do. From the report itself:

Dietary choices in G20 countries are destroying the planet.

Global adoption of current G20 food consumption patterns by 2050 would exceed the planetary boundary for food-related GHG emissions by 263%. This would require between one to seven Earths to support.

We’d better get building those spaceships therefore.

The point being that the existence of an economy, of a civilisation even, is so that we humans get to do more of what we humans like to do. That these eating patterns are common across the G-20 tells us that they’re fairly basic humans desires. Very different cultures, different historical paths, but once anywhere gets rich enough to be able to do so it eats in this manner.

We the people like doing this, our aim is that we the people get to do more of being we the people. Thus spaceships, not rationing.

Spaceship here meaning actual steel ships only in partial jest. For there is the alternative method we’ve been using for some 8,000 years now. Which is to use technology to create new Earths right here right now. This goes under the more common name of “agriculture”.

Every time we increase the productivity of some part of the food production system we’ve done just that, created more land. If this acre could, formerly, support 2 cows and now 4 then that means we need half the amount of land to have 4 cows. Or, obviously, we can have 8 on our original two acres. This is the process we’ve been following since Ur of the Chaldees. Making the land more productive, thus allowing ourselves to either use less of it for the same output or to enjoy greater output.

There is no obvious limit to this increase in productivity, Sure, we can all think of hard limits - say, the level of insolation - but we’re nowhere near any of those at present. In our immediate technological future we can see low methane cattle, lab grown meat just to take two examples from the current newspapers. Either and both and the myriad other experiments being conducted are all usefully described as building spaceships, or at least creating new Earths to feed us.

Without agriculture the carrying capacity of the Earth if we’re all hunter gatherers is perhaps 10 million souls. OK, maybe 50, we’ll even grant 100 million if you really insist. There are rather more of us than that presently and we are producing enough food for all even if distribution is less than perfect.

We know how to build those spaceships, we’ve been doing it for millennia. We’ve found new Earths. The general name for the process being “industrial agriculture” so the solution is a bit more of that, isn’t it?