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Science

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.
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Huge Reduction in Meat-Eating 'Essential' To Avoid Climate Breakdown

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  • Better idea (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:04AM (#57461228)

    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.

    • Random lottery. Every year 3% of the population is harvested and eaten.
    • Re:Better idea (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:15AM (#57461336)

      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.

    • 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).

  • 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?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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.

      • The wild conspiracy theory phase is actually how it started.

        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.
    • by mspohr ( 589790 )

      Just keep wearing your tin foil hat and you'll be safe.

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @12:27PM (#57462016)
      who agree that climate change is both real and a threat seem to fail to grasp that. Here's the obligatory XKCD comic [xkcd.com]

      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.
    • by jeff4747 ( 256583 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @01:47PM (#57462644)

      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)

    by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:05AM (#57461244)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. People will keep voting themselves bread and games until both are used up. Then they will die.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Brett Buck ( 811747 )

      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!

      • by skam240 ( 789197 )

        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.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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.

      • 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.

      • 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.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          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.

  • by Kazymyr ( 190114 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:05AM (#57461246) Journal

    Invest in Beano!

  • 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.

  • by mi ( 197448 ) <slashdot-2017q4@virtual-estates.net> on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:05AM (#57461252) Homepage Journal

    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...

    • by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Thursday October 11, 2018 @12:06PM (#57461828) Homepage Journal

      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.

  • by ToddN ( 190561 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:07AM (#57461262)

    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?"

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      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.

    • Japan is still working on their "Godzilla" solution.

  • Not going to work (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pak9rabid ( 1011935 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:07AM (#57461264)
    Getting large swaths of people to agree on anything, much less actually changing their ways, isn’t going to happen, and any plan that relies on that will fail miserably and shouldn’t even be considered as a viable option.

    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.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I don't think so. New technology is advancing far too slowly, because old tech is making some people still extreme amounts of money.

  • 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

    • 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 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.

    • 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.

    • by mspohr ( 589790 )

      The indigestible fibrous material in beans (also vegetables, grains, etc.) is actually good for you. It soaks up the toxins and prevents bowel cancer.

  • by siege72 ( 1795922 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:10AM (#57461302)

    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.

  • Let's assume that particulate carbon increases the retained atmospheric heat.

    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.
  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:13AM (#57461326)

    If the human race does not get that problem under control fast, nothing else will save it.

    • 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. ;)

  • by anegg ( 1390659 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:19AM (#57461382)
    Let me guess... the folks who already think everyone else should stop eating meat, I bet.
  • More seriously: didn't they figure out that adding seaweed to cow feed results in a massive decrease in cow methane production?

  • by aepervius ( 535155 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:30AM (#57461506)
    There is no way whatsoever I am giving up meat. I am ready to reduce many things leading to CO2. But food enjoyment ? I am rioting if anybody try to pass a law stopping beef raising.
  • 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)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:45AM (#57461634)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @12:05PM (#57461818)

        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.

        • 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.

  • Population control is essential to fight this. Meat is not the problem.

  • No thanks... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ewhenn ( 647989 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:58AM (#57461750)
    From the Article:
    "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?
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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

  • by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @12:06PM (#57461826) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • by bjdevil66 ( 583941 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @12:08PM (#57461840)

    Per this TED Talk [youtube.com], this is 100% backwards. We need to eat MORE cows.

    • by danlip ( 737336 )

      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)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @12:27PM (#57462022)
    Study suffers from a common mistake - failing to account for opportunity cost. It incorrectly compares the environmental impact of livestock versus no livestock.

    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.
  • by ClarkMills ( 515300 ) on Thursday October 11, 2018 @04:32PM (#57463800)

    ...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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