Disaster Planning

[mik3cap]

If Yellowstone park does actually erupt and cover half the country in a bunch of hot ash, it'll most likely end up doing that to the portion of the country that makes food (specifically the part that grows corn). I don't know what kind of remediation would be needed to recover soil that's been volcanically affected for purposes of growing crops, but if a big eruption does occur, it's going to be a world of hurt - a real global food crisis, and then a whole bunch of global cooling that might make growing crops more difficult.

Comments

[saintentreri.livejournal.com]

From what I can tell, the only thing that would change would be corn farmers would stop lobbying about how important corn is (pretty much the only reason it's generally accepted that corn production is practically the life support of our agriculture) because they would have almost none left. Some obscene percentage (close to 60ish I think) of corn grown here is unusable for food and thus used for inefficient biofuel synthesis, causing even more problems than just using gasoline. What we should be doing is lifting the ban on hemp production so we can make ethanol from that, a much more efficient and environmentally friendly process. But the Puritans can't have people growing the demon weed!