> If higher input leads to higher output, demand can be met with less land.
That is a big debate in conservation biology (known as "land sparing vs land sharing"). One of the major problems of the land sparing approach, which you outline above, is that there is nothing that makes (at least European) farmers as upset as the requirement to give up farming on part of their land. So while it's neat in principle, many conservationists doubt its political practicability.
I don't disagree with you, but to give a bit of colour to the counterargument, as I understand it, we now have maybe 5 decades of experience which suggests that the "sharing" approach doesn't work at scale. In general, if you want to see wildlife in western Europe you go to a nature reserve, not a farm, because "spared" land will have nature but "shared" land increasingly won't. Of course there are some individual farmers who are doing great work and bucking that trend, but so far no one has found a magic formula that allows land to both be subject to intensive agriculture, and also support historically normal levels of wildlife. Or maybe someone has, but if so they've failed to convince farmers to adopt it unilaterally, or governments to impose it as policy.
So arguably the evidence we have is that if you consider only things that farmers like to be politically practical, then we're likely to see wildlife declines continue indefinitely.
That is of course why many people are looking for solutions that don't depend on the consent of the agricultural industry. One approach is to go over their heads and appeal directly to government e.g. the biodiversity COP agreement requiring 30% of land to be set aside for nature. Another is to hope that technological breakthroughs (e.g. precision fermentation) can fundamentally alter consumer demand for food products in a way that makes them much less land intensive (primarily by cutting out meat and other animal products, which use a disproportionate amount of land when farmed extensively, and produces a disproportionate amount of pollution when farmed intensively).
Of course, in the short term, the practical answer is "do both, wherever possible". Conservation organisations should be encouraged to purchase land so that it can be managed directly for wildlife. Farmers should be encouraged to adopt wildlife-friendly practices as much as possible. Governments should be encouraged to consider wildlife conservation a goal in itself when designing incentive schemes for the agriculture industry, and the taxpayers who directly fund much agriculture through subsidies should be encouraged to hold them accountable for their progress in this area.
Easier said than done, of course, but as the original article makes clear, the status quo is chronic failure, and there's no reason to suppose that can be changed within the current paradigm.
The marketing director that started the meatless program said "The [meat] sausage will become the cigarette of the future". Sales were stagnating or declining. Sales in the meatless segment were low but increasing steadily and they entered that segment, convinced, that they could produce alternatives with broader appeal. For one year, they spent all their advertisment budget on the new meatless line.
Initially the target group was "reducers". The first products included a lot of egg protein, so vegans were not targeted at all. Somewhat surprisingly, they decided to launch the new line under their well-known and established brand. That probably prevented some marketing claims that may have been off-puting to their existing customers.
That's 590 MWp. I could not find the expected annual production, so I tried to guess using a PV calculator and came up with about 1.2 TWh/y. That would be 137 MW on average. They say it cost more than €300m.
Generating readable C code was an important goal from early on. Parts of the linux kernel would have to be translated to Low*, which is the subset of F*, that can be extracted to C.
I guess there would be a new build step, that runs when code is checked in, to not burden everyone with all the new toolchain (F*, z3, karamel, maybe OCaml and more). While the generated C code can be read and understood by C programmers, changes to that part should be done in Low* and that may require changes to proofs in F* or to the extraction tool (karamel). That's a pretty big investment for a project like linux and I guess, any work in that direction will happen on forks for a while, before there is enough confidence that such changes are sustainable.
A good first candidate may be HACL* (https://hacl-star.github.io), a cryptographic library that is already used in several projects.
> We find that an electricity emissions factor of less than 139 g CO2e per kW h is required for this [Direct Air Capture system paired with Fischer–Tropsch synthesis] pathway to provide a climate benefit over conventional diesel fuel.
The grid averages in most regions are higher than that. I don't think multiplying current renewable generation just for jet fuel is easy.
I don't think readers with any kind of computational background expect to read FAILED writes. Apparently, neither does RDX Works - claiming to have fixed most of the issues.
> harvesting honey which has fallen off a honeycomb beneath a tree
I never had this opportunity, but I don't see an ethical problem here. As a more realistic example (in my environment), I suggest dumpster diving. I think it would be okay, ethically, but I would not do it because it grosses me out in a way that vegan substitutes don't, and that feeling is not related to the dumpster part.
I may have to do some more introspection, but I honestly don't think, that my acceptance of vegan substitutes is based on a desire to harm animals.
I often come back to a local repository to change something and think, while I'm at it, I'll just `git pull` and end up with a non-working working directory. Surely I should know better, but I think it's also hostile to users, when the easy thing to do is often the wrong thing to do.
Even worse, I'm not sure I correctly remembered the weird combination of actions and flags to use to get back to the state where I can continue with what I wanted to do in the first place.
That article is a good example of the problem. It tells me `git rebase` is an easy thing to do but I better not use that distributed VCS to publish my work that way, where 'publish' probably also applies to different machines of mine.
Here is one example of that tradeoff: "Scale-dependent effectiveness of on-field vs. off-field agri-environmental measures for wild bees" - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S143917912...
Different species and crops may yield different results.