Yes, it would make money for stockholders. But it's much more than that: it's an empire-scale psychological game for leverage in the future.
LOL
Under Trump policies, China will win "in the future" on energy and protein production alone.
Once we've speedrunned our petro supply and exhausted our agricultural inputs with unfathomably inefficient protein production, China can sit back and watch us crumble under our own starvation.
No conflict necessary under these policies, just patience! They're playing the game on a scale of centuries, we can't even stay focused on a single problem or opportunity for a few weeks.
Sort things out with Venezuela and this issue resolves itself (for a little while, at least).
Our military and political focus will be keeping neighbors out on one side and trying to seize land on the other side while China goes and builds infrastructure for the entire developing world that they'll exploit for centuries.
Is this a serious suggestion? America can just keep invading people ad infinitum instead of... applying slight thumb pressure on the market's scales to develop more efficient protein sources and more renewable fuel sources before we are staring at the last raw economic input we have?
Brilliant
What's going to be left of their population in a single century?
China is the largest importer of crude oil in the world. China imports 59% of its oil consumptions, and 80% of food products. Meanwhile, US is fully self sufficient on both food and oil.
> They're playing the game on a scale of centuries
Is that why they are completely broke, having built enough ghost buildings that house entire population of France - 65 million vacant units? Is that why they are now isolated in geopolitics, having allied with Russia and pissed off all their neighbors and Europe?
China is dead broke and will shrink to 600M in population before 2100. State owned enterprises are eating up all the private enterprises. Meanwhile, Chinese rich leaves China by tens of thousands per year, and capital outflow increases every year.
In 2023 China had more net new solar capacity than the US has in total, and it will only climb from there. In order to do this, they're flexing muscles in R&D and mass production that the US has actually started to flex, and now will face extreme headwinds and decreased capital investment.
Regarding agriculture: America's agricultural powerhouse, California's Central Valley, is rapidly depleting its water supplies. The midwest is depleting its topsoil at double the rate that USDA considers sustainable.
None of this is irreversible or irrecoverable, but it very clearly requires some countervailing push on market forces. Market forces do not naturally operate on these types of time scales and repeatedly externalize costs to neighbors or future generations.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35582-x
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/57-billion-tons-of...
Uh yeah, duh. Why would you not deplete other people's finite resources while you build massive capacity of your own infinite resources?
Instead of figuring that out, they'll just watch their civilization crumble.
Btw: they're already investing heavily in artificial wombs and affiliated technologies.
No-till farming has been significantly supported by the USDA’s programs like EQIP
During his first term, Trump pushed for a $325MM cut to EQIP. That's 20-25% of their funding and would have required cutting hundreds if not thousands of employees.
Even BEFORE these cuts (and whatever he does this time around), USDA already has to reject almost 75% of eligible EQIP applicants
Regarding CA’s water: Trump already signed an EO requiring more water be diverted from the San Joaquin Delta into the desert Central Valley to subsidize water-intensive crops. This water, by the way, is mostly sold to mega-corps at rates 98% below what nearby American consumers pay via their municipal water supplies, effectively eliminating the blaring sirens that say “don’t grow shit in the desert.”
Now copy-paste to every other mechanism by which we can increase our nation’s climate security and ta-da, you’ve discovered one of the major problems with Trumpism. It turns out politics do matter!
But why are programs like this controversial, even though anything shaped like a farm subsidy is normally popular? It seems to me that things like your Central Valley analysis are precisely the reason. The Central Valley has been one of the nation's agricultural heartlands for a while, and for quite a few common food products represents 90%+ of domestic production. So if this "blaring siren" you describe is real, and we have to stop farming there, a realistic response plan would have to include an explanation of what all the farmers are going to do and where we'll get almonds and broccoli from.
Perhaps you know all this already, but a lot of people who advocate such policies don't seem to. This then feeds into skepticism about whether they're hearing the "blaring siren" correctly in the first place. Personally, I think nearly arbitrarily extreme water subsidies are worth it if that's what we need to keep olives and pomegranates and celery in stock at the grocery store.
You really DON’T need to centrally plan everything. The market will still find good solutions under the new parameters, but we need those parameters to change before we’re actually out of water.
Yeah, obviously the whole thing makes no fucking sense.