saltedshiv's comments

Your message seems to imply that its consumers fault for paying to little for food from California; that's a silly way to think about this problem.

California allows the disruption of true prices of water. If water is scarce, it should be more expensive.

If the water at true market value is so expensive that prices of goods produced with that water are now no longer competitive on the market, then that means that agriculture is not sustainable nor feasible in California and will be correctly priced out of the market by those who are able to produce the same quality product for less.

Yes, but the only way we can manipulate those energy sources is predicated by the existence of cheap malleable fossil fuels

The article presents a very interesting thought experiment, but I think the answer is flatly no, with explanation for this belief being the context of the article.

Based on the narrative, I think the premise and definition of "modern civilization" was basically how our society is configured today, regions, space between cities, social architecture, travel, available goods and resources, etc. Under that thought, the answer is as I said before, flatly no.

Without fossil fuels, the world could not take shape in the way it has due to the sheer density of energy for its weight. We currently have nothing else like that, and all of our advancements into new generations of energy rely on products manufactured with fossil fuels, cheap fossil fuels at that.

Even today, we do not have such a resource readily available and as safe as fossil fuels.

That being said, "a modern civilization" could come into existence without fossil fuels. I do not doubt the ingenuity of humans whether I am in the same period of time with them or not.

My belief on this is based on how our society would be structured when you cannot travel so far away from the epicenter of a city because of the cost of fuel.

This type of thought experiment is fun.