Huge Reduction in Meat-Eating 'Essential' To Avoid Climate Breakdown (theguardian.com) 629
Huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to avoid dangerous climate change, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of the food system's impact on the environment. From a report: In western countries, beef consumption needs to fall by 90% and be replaced by five times more beans and pulses. The research [PDF] also finds that enormous changes to farming are needed to avoid destroying the planet's ability to feed the 10 billion people expected to be on the planet in a few decades. Food production already causes great damage to the environment, via greenhouse gases from livestock, deforestation and water shortages from farming, and vast ocean dead zones from agricultural pollution. But without action, its impact will get far worse as the world population rises by 2.3 billion people by 2050 and global income triples, enabling more people to eat meat-rich western diets.
Better idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Rather than exterminating hundreds of existing species of animals, how about we reduce our population growth to a number less than zero, and bring our own population down to sustainable levels?
What happens when we get to 20 billion and can no longer subsist on soy protein and rice rations? Going after all of these leftist utopian dreams of state control over personal living is not going to solve the problem of how to feed an unsustainably-growing human population.
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Re:Better idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Rather than exterminating hundreds of existing species of animals, how about we reduce our population growth to a number less than zero, and bring our own population down to sustainable levels?
What happens when we get to 20 billion and can no longer subsist on soy protein and rice rations? Going after all of these leftist utopian dreams of state control over personal living is not going to solve the problem of how to feed an unsustainably-growing human population.
Except our current economic models of "growth" rely on undermining the value of labor and increasing consumption by more and more people to justify greater concentrations of wealth among the hereditary class.
If we need the occasional war to thin the herd then the rich oligarchs can wait it out in some isolated corners of the world where they can "live a simple life" and write books about how it is all the fault of the dead poor people that created an sustained their extreme wealth in the first place yet were somehow expected not to kill one another fighting over the scraps.
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Rather than exterminating hundreds of existing species of animals, how about we reduce our population growth to a number less than zero, and bring our own population down to sustainable levels?
What happens when we get to 20 billion and can no longer subsist on soy protein and rice rations? Going after all of these leftist utopian dreams of state control over personal living is not going to solve the problem of how to feed an unsustainably-growing human population.
It's happens naturally as populations join the first world. Japan's population is shrinking and much of the Western world would be experiencing shrinking population without immigration (immigration increases population now- and immigrants tend to have more children than people who have been living in the West for generations).
Cue the next disaster (Score:2, Insightful)
One hysterical scare story after another, all of which require drastic damage to the civilized nations.
Does anyone still fail to grasp that this is about centralized control of individual behavior instead of the environment?
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What stage is this again? We had denial, then we can't do anything about it anyway, then we can do something but China won't, and now it's down to wild conspiracy theories...
Is this the last step? I hope so.
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But while I have you here, how long is it supposed to take to reverse centuries of carbon pollution's effect on atmospheric heat retention?
I have a pretty solid hunch it's going to be longer than "centuries," but I'd like to see what others think.
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Just keep wearing your tin foil hat and you'll be safe.
The 97% of scientists (Score:5, Insightful)
The ruling class has been able to keep the pleebs in line for thousands of years without Climate Change. They've got much, much better tactics to use than a complex boogie man like Climate Change. There's religion, racism, classism, war. All are much more effective at controlling a population. Easier to understand and proven to work. Hell, ignoring the damage from Climate Change is a better bet. It'll result in rampant food shortages, which are always an effective way to keep the working class in line (so long as you control who eats, which the ruling class does).
I don't know if you really believe what you wrote, but, well, this is a science forum, and the science is settled. There's some details to work out, but they're details. Go do some reading on google, and step outside the right wing blogosphere and into actual scientific papers.
Re:Cue the next disaster (Score:4, Insightful)
Does anyone still fail to grasp that this is about centralized control of individual behavior instead of the environment?
Option 1: the published science is actually true. (And since it's all published, you can feel free to replicate the studies and show they are wrong).
Option 2: There is a shadowy cabal that consists of millions of people who all are out to destroy your individuality because of their perverse hatred of you. And despite there being millions of people who participate in this conspiracy, nobody has leaked evidence of the cabal's existence. Including the massive profit that a leaker would receive from all the industries that are desperately searching to discredit everything in this area of research.
One of these options seems just a tad more far-fetched than the other.
Doomed to fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to avoid dangerous climate change, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of the food system's impact on the environment.
Asking people to voluntarily change their diet away from things they find tasty is doomed to failure. McDonald's isn't a multi-billion dollar company because people like eating broccoli. Any politician that suggests regulation of what foods people can buy is going to be out of a job rather quickly.
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Indeed. People will keep voting themselves bread and games until both are used up. Then they will die.
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Power without accountability. Corrupts masses just the same as it corrupts individuals.
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I think in this case the IPCC might be doing society a tremendous service. Having a "world government" panel on climate attempting to decide (dictate) what an individual can and cannot eat could not illustrate more clearly what "world government" actually means. Doing things like this virtually guarantees no one will ever take :world government" seriously, Just like the Democrats daily writing the script for the "Trump 2020!" ads. Keep up the good work!
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Of course there's abolutly no drive for creating a binding global government body to dictate what people can or cant eat. You're just making shit up.
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Except that that is *exactly* what this panel is suggesting. Keep up the good work!
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I dunno, worked okay with junk food taxes in some places.
But really the better solution is synthetic meat. Lower environmental impact, fewer antibiotics and other additives, and eventually should be a lot cheaper.
Picard was right.
Citation needed (Score:3)
I dunno, worked okay with junk food taxes in some places.
Name one place where taxes resulted in a massive decrease in junk food consumption.
But really the better solution is synthetic meat. Lower environmental impact, fewer antibiotics and other additives, and eventually should be a lot cheaper.
Note that Better Tasting is not among the items you listed. Until better tasting is #1 on the list it's a waste of money, brains, and time even if you manage to convince people that the ick factor doesn't matter.
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Synthetic meat is just silly. You have a bunch of muscle cells, and you feed them nutrients that they can live and grow on, and then you eat those cells. Why not skip all of that, and just eat the same nutrients yourself ?
Real meat makes sense, because the muscle cells get fed real cow's blood, with immense complexity of nutrients that we cannot duplicate.
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You could make the same argument about most foods. Why spend time combining ingredients and preparing stuff when you can just eat each part individually or throw it all in a blender?
Clearly there is a demand for things that are delicious.
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Well, to be fair we cannot duplicate it now but that isn't evidence that we never could do so.
The important part is to realize that the industry has no incentive. Look at baby formula. Everybody is apparently happy with current product, even though something simple as fatty acid profile from breast milk isn't duplicated. Instead, industry uses cheapest oils they can find to meet minimum standards.
I agree, maybe with billions of investment, we can make an expensive duplication of real blood. In practice, they'll make something that's as cheap as possible that does the job well enough that people are
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1) humans have difficulty digesting algae
They don't feed algae to the synthetic meat cells.
The question is whether it's worth the cost and whether the blood is actually relevant for flavor development (it isn't).
No, it's relevant for the growth of the meat cells. They need all the proper nutrients. Also, these nutrients are then transformed to the nutrients in the final meat product. For instance, vitamin B12 in meat is required to make the cells grow (it's a vital part of their energy system). The muscle/fat cells don't make B12 themselves, it comes from the blood and is actually made by intestinal bacteria. When we eat the meat, we ingest that B12 again. If you g
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Quickly (Score:3)
Invest in Beano!
Better idea: (Score:2)
Prescribe more antibiotics. Remove the requirement to take a full dose. Eventually when a superbug kills half the population the world will finally be in a position to survive.
Or we just collect a bunch of gems, fit them into a metal glove and snap our fingers.
Horse-manure prediction (Score:4, Interesting)
The "Horse-manure panic" [historic-uk.com] was caused, at the end of the 19th century, by the "predictions" that "By the late 1800s, large cities all around the world were “drowning in horse manure”.
The times have changed, but the term "horse manure" (equivalent in this context to the more common "bullshit") remains strangely apropos...
Re: Horse-manure prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is, the population changed what they were doing, in part to avoid the problem.
You know, if you stop driving at full tilt towards the brick wall, then the prediction that if you'd contributed you'd have hit it doesn't apply.
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b) people switched to cars because they are better.
And one of the primary ways they are better is they do not produce horse manure. And yes, this was actually a perk when cars were first becoming popular.
The point is, we do not need to use the force of government to compel ourselves to change
Sometimes we don't, and sometimes we do. The tragedy of the commons is a real thing and it can't always be fixed by asking nicely.
And this opportunity to force others into doing, what they believe is good, is the real motivation behind the noises being made by "global warming" crowd, 99% of them far-Left partisans.
Nope. There's plenty of people that understand climate change is happening are not "far-Left". Or even "left".
But in the US we have a very large industry that has been created to convince a subset of our population that clima
The question never asked (Score:3, Insightful)
You see all kinds of articles bandying about the "9 billion people by 2050" figure.
Not a single one ever asks "wait a minute, maybe there shouldn't BE 9 billion people by then?"
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Quite a few people with actually working minds ask it. The rest is dominated by religion, selfishness and an insane belief in growth and cannot even see the extremely obvious problem, because their minds are broken and do not work. The average person does not even understand simple things.
Re: The question never asked (Score:4, Insightful)
If talking is dictating, democracy is slavery and war is peace.
Besides, if you want to talk about dictating, start with the religious and the Tea Party. They're the ones who will not tolerate dissension and who demand everything is their way.
In Britain, it's the religious who are threatening to overthrow May's government if they don't have things their way.
When was the last time you heard threats to depose a government by a geneticist or mathematician?
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Japan is still working on their "Godzilla" solution.
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Nah, I'd rather that the 2.5 billion future assholes in the pipeline just never get born.
Re: Save The Planet! (Score:3)
People aren't equal, and one person is truly insignificant.
What we need is to greatly reduce unnecessary duplication of genes. You might find a hundred schizophrenics useful, or a thousand, but not a quarter billion.
You certainly don't need three or four billion neurotypicals. I suspect one is sufficient, since normal genes will exist dispersed across everyone else.
As long as all useful mutations are represented (schizophrenia, bipolar, autism, depression, synaesthesia, tetrachromatism - these are all usefu
Not going to work (Score:4, Interesting)
What’s ultimately going to save us from climate change are advances in technology (green renewable energy, electric vehicles, carbon capture devices, etc) that will allow people to largely preserve their current way of lives. Our focus should be on advancing these technologies and breaking the barriers that are currently making them difficult or impossible to implement.
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I don't think so. New technology is advancing far too slowly, because old tech is making some people still extreme amounts of money.
Or, we could.. (Score:2)
How about we just eat people .. at least until the population gets back down to 3 billion. Set up a lottery. Problem solved.
Human - the other, other, white meat*. Yummy.
*No that has nothing to do with skin color, it's based on an old pork industry slogan
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As long as vegetarians and vegans are excluded from your meat-eater lottery, I think it's a great idea. Either you stop eating meat now or you may become meat yourself.
What about... (Score:2)
What about people who can't digest beans easily? As far as I know there are quite a lot of them. I would think that a far more sensible solution is lab-grown meat, which wouldn't contain the fibrous material in beans that is indigestible to many.
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What about people who can't digest beans easily? As far as I know there are quite a lot of them. I would think that a far more sensible solution is lab-grown meat, which wouldn't contain the fibrous material in beans that is indigestible to many.
Gluten! It was a popular healthy protein used in vegetarian "pseudo-meats" before new age millennials invented having gluten-sensitivities.
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The indigestible fibrous material in beans (also vegetables, grains, etc.) is actually good for you. It soaks up the toxins and prevents bowel cancer.
Or limit population growth... (Score:5, Informative)
Switching to a plant based diet will reduce your carbon footprint by less than one ton/year. Having one fewer child will reduce it by _60_ tons per year.
Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/news... [sciencemag.org]
The CO2 impact of children is the equivalent of burning a 55 gallon drum of oil, per week, per child.
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The earth could easily support ten times current population if people stopped eating meat.
Total bullshit. Meat makes up a small percentage of all the resources we use up.
Even without meat, we can't even support current population.
Ok, Greens. (Score:2)
How long will it take to counteract this process by reducing human-generated carbon?
Show your work.
I don't think you're thinking this through.
And the real problem: 10 Billion people (Score:5, Insightful)
If the human race does not get that problem under control fast, nothing else will save it.
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If the human race does not get that problem under control fast, nothing else will save it.
This is perhaps the problem that humans are best equipped to handle. I mean, we could wipe out billions of people in less than an hour. ;)
Where did this line of thinking originate? (Score:3)
So we have to replace cow farts by human farts? (Score:2)
More seriously: didn't they figure out that adding seaweed to cow feed results in a massive decrease in cow methane production?
Welp earth is fucked (Score:3)
If God didn't want us to eat animals... (Score:2)
If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat.
Seriously, humanity needs to start considering whether there is any way to control population. I am not sure that there really is. Population will simply grow until we eat the planet. Sad.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:If God didn't want us to eat animals... (Score:4, Interesting)
Half of Africa is getting ready to migrate to Europe and Europe doesn't have the determination to stop them. Partly because the media keeps screaming about climate refugees while their reduction in per capita water resources because of population growth dwarfs that because of climate change.
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And Europe needs those immigrants because the internal birth rate is below replacement rate.
Japan's economy has been in deep trouble for the last few decades because their birth rate is below replacement and they more-or-less do not allow immigration.
As for Africa itself, birth rate is plummeting. It was quite high before, so it still has a ways to go.
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Most of them end up in welfare or the exact same work which is disappearing any way because of automation
[Citation Required]
Also, your alternative is to not have enough young people to support your economy, as Japan does.
Population (Score:2)
Population control is essential to fight this. Meat is not the problem.
No thanks... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Feeding a world population of 10 billion is possible, but only if we change the way we eat and the way we produce food,” said Prof Johan Rockström at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
Yeah, sorry, I'm not interested in changing my food consumption so that people in other countries can have more kids than they can generate resources to care for. I delayed having kids until I was able provide a stable home and adequate resources to raise them, it was a conscious choice. Sorry, but I'm not going to change my ways just because some people who didn't think things through are in a bad spot. How about if you live in a desert you don't have 5 kids?
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That's not the issue. It's not that they can't grow enough food, it's that if everyone eats lots of meat the planet can't sustain the number of food animals and the amount of methane that they produce.
So either you are going to have to tell other people "sorry, I got here first and you will just have to do without meat, now excuse my while I enjoy this steak" or we all get together and find some other solution.
Fortunately synthetic meat looks like it could solve a lot of these issues and be just as deliciou
Another false binary choice (Score:4, Interesting)
Look, the world is not binary. It's not 100 percent this way or 0 percent this way.
It's a scale.
The probability is that less than 10 percent of current meat eaters of beef will become vegetarian, and most of those due to heart attacks.
A more likely scenario is if 90 percent of current beef consumers replace beef for all but one to two meals a week, and increase the amount of vegetables, fruits, and nuts gradually over time. It's fairly easy to change your diet slowly, experimenting with different choices, and ignoring all those ads on TV that try to get you to eat beef as manly, when actually any of us who grew up in the boonies know it's more manly to eat bison that grow up on scrub land, and learn how to eat a varied diet.
Per this TED Talk, this is 100% backwards (Score:4, Interesting)
Per this TED Talk [youtube.com], this is 100% backwards. We need to eat MORE cows.
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Good link, but he is really saying we need better livestock management, not more livestock. We can use the livestock we have on marginal lands to improve the land and the climate; at the same time we get rid of the feed lots that are raising grain fed cattle.
Opportunity cost (Score:5, Interesting)
A proper comparison takes into account opportunity cost [wikipedia.org] - the next most likely alternative. In this case, if we reduced meat consumption, we wouldn't be raising huge amounts of cattle. But neither would we be hunting large grazing herbivores to extinction for meat. Meaning the reduction in cattle would be offset by an increase in buffalo, wild oxen, yak, deer (elk, moose), wild goats, etc. And aside from agricultural runoff and antibiotics, the net environmental impact of the change would be zero.
It also fails to realize that almost all population growth is in developing countries [prb.org], whereas most meat consumption is in developed countries. In fact several developed nations are experiencing population declines [apnarm.net.au]. You cannot take characteristics of the population with nearly zero population growth (rate of meat consumption), and apply it to the totally different population experiencing large population growth. The countries with large population growth are mostly poor nations where people live off subsistence diets consisting of grains and starches. In fact if one were to apply the study's flawed reasoning here, one would conclude that eating meat correlates with reduced population growth. And therefore to prevent the problems caused by a growing population, we need to get more people to eat meat.
The answer is less people... (Score:3)
...people want lots of food but also cars, houses, mobiles, children, holidays... and the powering/maintenance/upgrading of most them all too...
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By switching to plant based foods, then you will have to plant a ton more plants, and that would act as a carbon sink... Yeah, that could totally do it! On the other hand, they can pry my steak out of my cold dead hands! Bastards!
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Yeah, good luck to them on the reducing meat consumption by 90%...
And you know,if we quite raising so much food to export, it might help turn the tide of world overpopulations around and solve the problem itself, no?
But more realistically.....drop our consumption by 90%, again....good luck with that.
Re:KNEW it. (Score:5, Informative)
You forgot the easiest, which also can not only reduce growth, but also reduce population itself:
4. War.
Unstable war-torn countries tend to have the HIGHEST birthrates, and the fastest population growth rates.
The country with the highest birthrate in Asia is Afghanistan.
The highest birthrates in Africa are in Mali, Niger, and Angola.
Birthrate by country [cia.gov]
People in war-zones move toward an r-selection [wikipedia.org] reproductive strategy.
Re:KNEW it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really, because so many plants are used to raise meat animals. Think of animals raised for meat as middle-men. For the same amount of calories there would be fewer overall plants consumed if you ate the plants directly rather than going through the meat middleman.
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Even when grazing cattle there is a whole industry devoted to raising alfalfa used only to supplement feed; especially in winter.
Um.. No.. (Score:3)
Just as soon as you grow the required multiple stomachs to process grasses.
Oh dear, you didnt realise a large amount of the worlds sheep/cattle are raised on pasture?
You didnt realise that the USs disgusting 'feed lot' system isnt the norm, and other countries generally avoid such fucked up approaches?
Next you will be worrying about how much water the cattle 'consume' because as we know they have internal fusion reactors, and they
dont just piss the water back out half a day later, as it returns to the natur
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This is the whole point of why we should be eating ruminants: they eat GRASS.
We feed them crops rather than their natural food, and it's incredibly stupid.
I gather the statistic is that only 4 percent of land can be used for agriculture, but 40 percent can be used for grass and ruminants.
The experts who write these reports claiming we should be cutting meat, are clueless, probably just specialists in the wrong fields.
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It's because they're vegans and vegetarians, thus their main driving force is a religious rather than a scientific viewpoint.
Re:KNEW it. (Score:5, Informative)
The feed conversion ratio typically compares dry weight of feed to gross live weight of the animal. If you'd compare by nutrients, the numbers can be 3x worse because of water, bones, and intestines. Even for poultry it'd be better to eat the poultry feed directly instead of converting it into chicken.
From WattAgNet.com [wattagnet.com]:
For white leghorns the FCR is closer to 1.5.
Maybe that is somewhat inflated by water that isn't counted in the feed weight. But 3x? Hardly. (Birds get a lot of their water from the waste of their energy metabolism.)
Meanwhile: Have you looked at what chickens eat? (I have - in detail - because my wife and I raise the birds.) If you want to make porridge of layer chow, grower chow, insects, grass, etc. you're welcome to try it. (Don't forget to include the fuel and other inputs of any cooking and/or processing you have to do to it to make it digestible by a human.) But I bet you'd have to eat a LOT more than 3x the weight of that gorp to actually absorb and utilize the nutrients you'd get from a roast chicken or a plate of eggs.
I'll let the birdies do the chemical magic of turning that low-grade veggie junk into the raw material for tasty and nutritious meals.
Re:KNEW it. (Score:5, Insightful)
We may recall that for a while we tried feeding the fattiest part of the cows back to other cows to speed up development [wikipedia.org], it turned out that didn't work out very well (economics not even considered in that part).
If we're lucky though we'll be able to scale up lab-grown meat within the next few decades and we can get the benefits of meat without the costs of raising entire animals. While we do a good job of using a lot of the parts of the animals that are not usually considered edible, we still lose out on the deal.
And this is coming from someone who really would love a good steak. I eat a fair bit of meat but I realize we may reach a tipping point here.
Re:KNEW it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't even need the lab grown meat. If impossible foods continues its expansion (see impossible burger at white castle) then the plant based meat substitute (that really does mimic beef scarily well) then the gound beef industry can switch over. This will not replace the fancy full cuts of beef; but, by percentage, that's the small slice of the beef industry.
Now, getting the beef industry to relinquish the ground beef market is a different hurdle entirely...
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You don't have to get the beef industry to sto
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The ground beef industry uses the waste products from the fancy cuts of beef industry. It's an almost free product.
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we may reach a tipping point here
Tipping? Cows? I see what you did there! Hats off to you my friend.
Re:KNEW it. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not a lie, but an untruth.
We don't need to plant grain, to feed cattle. We can just let them eat natural grasses -- they taste better too.
What's driving this behaviour isn't that it is required to feed grain, but that it is required in the current competitive loop! We currently have waaaaay more in the way of crops, than we need. 1/3 of our grain rots in the silos, and massive -- I repeat MASSIVE amounts of ground is fallow. Nothing planted, because it's not worth it with the price of grains so low.
And this is in a market where large quantities of grain is fed to animals as well! Imagine the drop in prices on various grains, if we switched entirely to grass fed tomorrow!
In my area of the world, most animals are fed hay. Hay that grows without fertilizer (people rotate crops, instead of fertilizing), and there's no shortage of water. Most don't irrigate at all.
In this context? It's very close to a zero cost to the environment to eat meat. Might even be less, since the cost of trucking grain (less dense) is about space -- and meat packs more protein and energy into a smaller space.
The great plains in the US are still there. They could easily start to feed cattle, instead of growing corn for gas. And if we stopped the absurd habit of making oil from soy, canola, and corn? And instead just ate animal fat/oils? Guess what, we'd be fine.
It's all backwards. And every year more and more stories come out, about how animal fat isn't bad for you -- but, that various industries wanted animal fat to look bad.
Re:KNEW it. (Score:5, Insightful)
But if you do it this way, the meat 'grows' pretty slow. And that is the central issue here. We can't satisfy the gluttony that has been growing in the western world by letting lifestock feed off natural resources. In order to make them grow fast enough and in large enough numbers we have to grow their food on fields, where we could otherwise grow fruit and vegetable for human consumption.
Re: KNEW it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: KNEW it. (Score:4)
According to IPCC, CO2 contributes 3.5 times as much as methane. And only part of the methane comes from cow farts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Ahh, but methane is a MUCH more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
That has already been discounted in their numbers (look at the numbers in the column called "radiative forcing")
Re: KNEW it. (Score:5, Informative)
We might not eat 100% of a cow, pig, etc... but the net waste is practically zero. AFAIK, practically every cell of a cow now has commercial value for something. A friend who once had a summer job at a slaughterhouse told me that most of the trash leaving a slaughterhouse comes from garbage cans in the offices & break room, and most of the remainder comes from the janitorial or maintenance departments (detergent containers, old knives, etc) & ends up getting recycled.
Re:KNEW it. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, something like 70% of our agricultural land isn't useful for growing human food. It's used for pasture, hay, and feed grain because you throw stuff out there and then go crudely harvest it. Pigs will eat corn cobs, so you can just dump an entire uprooted corn plant in front of the pig and that's that.
That land isn't economically-viable for food production: you'd have to use a hell of a lot more irrigation, fertilization, and pesticides, with lower yields despite all that, plus more human investment. The amount of greenhouse gas and runoff involved per unit food produced would be massive. Instead, we'd pave over it, build cities, and employ the labor in new factories--assuming we could find a way to feed people.
It has been observed that some regions grow beef entirely on waste byproducts, with 100% of their feed coming from corn stalks, wheat stalks, and the like. More often, it's that plus pasture. Irrigation and fertilization of feed crop is either not used or not used as intensively as for produce, and the use of cover crop also provides an alternative to moisture retention, fertilization, and weed control: legumes add nitrogen to the soil between crop cycles, vetch crowds out weeds aggressively, and any dense cover planting (including plantings during crop growth) retains moisture. Such cover crops also provide feed and forage for livestock.
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Thing is, "feeding the fattiest part of the cows" back to cattle was known as a bad idea for centuries. You can see it in older farm literature and so on with cattle having those symptoms. It's kinda like retroactively looking back through old medical reports from 150 years ago, when you see thing like "bad air" "swamp gas" and so on, and people suddenly realize that it wasn't either case but things like malaria. Anyway, ask yourself why it became such a big thing to do...mainly starting back in the 1980'
Re:KNEW it. (Score:5, Interesting)
We know that in most cases we get about 1 pound of meat from an animal for every 10 pounds of plants we put into them, and that's completely ignoring the economic costs of getting the plants to them and everything else that goes in to that.
Aha! But what if getting the plants to them was free? And what if the pound of meat was more nutritious than a pound of plant?
The reason humans started domesticating livestock is that we don't digest grass very well. But livestock can digest grass and turn it into fertilizer, milk, meat, and work. There are places where it is environmentally and economically more sustainable to raise ruminants than to raise plants. The midwest of the united states, for example, is filled with grasslands where these animals natively thrive. The problem is that these animals are so tasty that humans decided to engage in the unsustainable process you described in order to make more of them. We grow plants elsewhere, truck it to the livestock, then gather burn the fertilizer from the livestock, then mine some coal or metal from yet another place, then derive fertilizer from the mine, truck it back to the plants so we can grow more of them, ...
But a certain amount of this is actually okay. The 10 points of plants to 1 point of meat thing oversimplifies the process. We should be producing meat where meat is viable, and plants where plants are viable.
Re:KNEW it. (Score:4, Interesting)
The nutritional content of a gram of beef is far, far higher than the nutritional content of a gram of grass that cows eat.
This is because cows live off fat. The plenitude of stomachs allows the bugs to consume the fiber and turn it into short chain fatty acids, which the cow absorbs.
A unit area of grassland supporting one cow, with the cow being eaten or milked yields more human nutrition per unit time than planting grains and eating them.
Then there's the issue of killing all the wildlife to turn grassland into cropland that requires carbon-heavy fertilizing - you aren't going to fertilize with shit if you aren't eating cows.
Or you can believe unscientific nonsense.
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So they get fat (with the wrong type of fat) and sick. That's cows in the US.
Grains fatten humans too. Again, the US leads the way.
Re:Laughing out loud (Score:5, Funny)
PETA is on board the global warming hoax, apparently.
You tell'em Billybob! I live here in Buttfuck, Potatohoe, US of Fucking A! Ain't no one gonna take my gas/Diesel guzzling pickup truck, guns, burgers, Bible, and football! It's all a hoax to destroy Capitalism!
And those Liberuls, gays, and immigrants want to take all that away from us God Fear'in 'Muricans!
I'm just glad that there's a billionaire who inherited most of his money in the Whitehouse who is gonna watch out for my white working class ass interests! You know he will!
I can tell! My standard of living isn't declining as fast as we originally thought. And "free" health insurance? Fuck that! The free markets will take care it! So what that the insurance in my Medicaid non-expansion state costs twice as much as a make in a month. Our Republicans had to put a stop to that Socialist Obamacare and not accept federal money to help make it affordable. Because Barack HUSSEIN Obama! (Notice how clever I sound when I yell his middle name like it means something bad.)
Yours,
Elroy (Bubba) Jediah Jones.
"Government Sucks!"
*Posted from the Libraries free computers*
Re:Laughing out loud (Score:5, Insightful)
"Aren't those rednecks funny with their redneck culture, they're not like real people"
"Aren't those gays funny with their gay culture, they're not like real people"
"Aren't those Jews funny with their Jewish culture, they're not like real people"
"Aren't those Blacks funny with their Black culture, they're not like real people"
None of these statements is OK. None of those jokes are funny. It is never OK to "unpeople" someone. It's not a fair tool in a political argument.
Anyone who reads history has seen what lies at the end of that path, and it's not a destination we want to revisit.
Re: Laughing out loud (Score:4, Insightful)
This would be the hoax started in 1890 by a global elite that didn't exist for another hundred years, thus proving Doctor Who is real.
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And you're going down with 'em. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Meat Made US What We Are (Score:5, Informative)
As a new study in Nature makes clear, not only did processing and eating meat come naturally to humans, it’s entirely possible that without an early diet that included generous amounts of animal protein, we wouldn’t even have become human—at least not the modern, verbal, intelligent humans we are.
Layman Terms [time.com]
If you want to get into the weed [nature.com]
Re: (Score:2)
We can eat meat, we just need to produce less of it. Or come up with methods to raise meat with less of an impact.
Also in terms of environmental impact not all meat is equal. Meat from small animals that grow up rather quickly and don't need to eat so much have a better impact per pound of meat then a larger animal does.
Also we as spoiled Americans only like to eat particular parts of the animal while we toss out other parts of if we lucky we try to ship it oversea.
Also we should consider vegetarian meals a
Re:Stop eating meat? (Score:5, Funny)
Over my dead body.
Depends on how well cooked your body is.
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What's being advocated is reducing the animal population to allow a matching increase of human population..
The end result is the same, humans also produce quantities of shit and piss just like animals.
Animal waste is also generally used to fertilise crops, whereas human waste generally is not. With a massive reduction in the production of animal waste, you'd require an increase in artificially produced chemical fertilizers.
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It's not about stop eating meat dumbass, it's about reduction. Eating meat isn't really the issue, depending on the place you live in, meat is the only really viable source of calories anyway, because humans can't process the shit that grows there naturally. Thinking that eating a bucket of chicken wings every day should be the norm is a problem.
Mass livestock farming of pigs, cows, or even chicken is an environmental issue because it wastes a huge amount of resources that could be used otherwise and creates huge amounts of waste in form of animal shit and piss. But who cares about clean water, right?
I could really do this. I could easily cut half... three quarters of meat out of my diet. I love meat- but there are lots of meatless dishes that are good too. India has some fantastic vegetarian dishes. I could quite happily eat some vegetarian Indian meals a couple days a week. I love red beans and rice (and black beans and rice too).
I love meat- but I could adapt to eating less without it impacting my life in a major way.
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