Domain: onegreenplanet.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to onegreenplanet.org.
Comments · 9
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Well, that's quite over-the-top.
Talk about hyperbole. But you sound pretty serious about your feelings, so let me address each of your points one at a time.
1) We've been evolving into omnivores for at least a million years.
Not quite. Homo sapiens has been evolving for about 250,000 years, give or take. And we evolved into omnivores mostly because gathering plants and fruits was easier, safer, more reliable, and a more dependable source of food. Meat from hunting was a high-risk-high-reward method of feeding oneself; while more caloric-dense, hunting took days, risks, and many people to do, and many times the hunters came back empty-handed. Evolving into omnivores allowed us to diversify our diets, giving us a greater chance of survival.
2) You can't just decide you're going to be strict vegetarian and not expect to have health problems related to that.
Says who? There's plenty of research supporting the benefits of vegan diets. As long as people watch what they eat to make sure they're consuming appropriate amounts of vitamins, proteins, and lipids, it really doesn't matter what diet they consume.
3) How about instead of screwing with people's diets, we create a timeline to eliminate fossil fuel use entirely, and stick to it?
No complaints. Maybe eliminating fossil fuel use entirely is a bit of a stretch, especially given our dependence on plastics and petro-chemicals, but a significant reduction needs to start now. But when thirty-six percent of the food we grow is fed to livestock, you're fooling yourself if you think that you can do that while advocating for meat consumption.
4) Also how about we stop destroying existing forests and start re-planting them?
Great idea. But then, where will we get the farmland for animal feed?
5) And start controlling our population growth, seeing as how the planet can clearly and objectively only support so many humans at once?
Well, good luck convincing everyone on the planet to stop procreating. Though, in a pure sense of supply-and-demand economics, it's our ability to improve agriculture production that allows us to sustain our population. After all, humans can't live if we can't grow food to feed them. Probably the most important man that nobody's ever heard of is Fritz Haber. It's his invention of the industrial production of nitrogen fertilizer that allowed the population of the planet to quadruple in one hundred years.
6) Why do we need 10 BILLION people alive at the same time? Can we get the nutjob 'quiverfull' religious types to knock it the hell off?
While -some- religious groups have population growth greater than average, most do not. The most influential variables in the United States are youth, fertility, and immigration. So, feel free to complain about the Mexicans, but the religious nutjobs, not so much.
Now that I've addressed your points, I'll take just a moment to make a few of my own. We eat far more than we need to. Given how many resources it consumes, as the parent article references, reducing our meat intake is not a bad t
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Re:We need more of this ...
No. Not even close, no. In fact, 100% opposite wrong.
Totally removing meat would require much more farm land to be devoted to edible crops to the point it may actually be impossible.
It takes more farmland to raise cattle for consumption than it would plants. That is, the cows eat more plants than we do -- acting as middlemen in the food production process. The actual land use for farming, if animals as food were eliminated, would go DOWN.
Plant foods such as rice, beans, potatoes, leafy greens, grains, and cruciferous vegetables are significantly cheaper than meat products. The only expensive part is trying to create something that so simulates meat that it is difficult to tell the difference.
Being primarily a meat eater, in the end, is a luxury, not a necessity and only rich people can truly afford it.
https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/facts-on-animal-farming-and-the-environment/
Don't like that one? There are many, many other links. Feel free to go back to original sources, such as government statistics on land use, water use, fertilizer use and cost, etc. Meat is damned expensive compared to plants.
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It's bad. Worse than they realize...
http://www.newser.com/story/19... http://www.newser.com/story/24... http://www.newser.com/story/20... http://www.newser.com/story/23... http://www.newser.com/story/21... http://www.newser.com/story/23... http://www.onegreenplanet.org/... Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Then sign this petition: https://www.thepetitionsite.co...
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Re:If it's a good substitute, it should replace be
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Don't eat meat. Complicated adjustment, healthy.
Yes, don't eat meat or fish.
Eating meat causes destruction to the environment due to the many bad effects of raising animals. Two of the many bad effects: 1) Misuse of antibiotics, and 2) Keeping animals extremely close to each other develops new viruses and bacterial diseases.
Eating fish is causing depopulation of the oceans, with many, many bad and unknown results.
Links:
Harmful Environmental Effects Of Livestock Production On The Planet 'Increasingly Serious,' Says Panel (Feb. 22, 2007)
The Triple Whopper Environmental Impact of Global Meat Production (Dec. 16, 2013) Quote: "Livestock production may have a bigger impact on the planet than anything else."
How does eating meat harm the environment? (No date.) One of the many interesting ideas: "Raising animals for food consumes more than half of all water used in the U.S. It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat but only 25 gallons to produce a pound of wheat."
5 Ways Factory Farming is Killing the Environment (Sept. 16, 2017) The 5: 1) Air Pollution, 2) Deforestation, 3) Water Pollution, 4) Monocultures, 5) Fossil Fuels and Carbon Emissions.
11 Facts About Factory Farms and the Environment
I stopped eating meat and fish in 2008. Avoiding eating flesh seems to have contributed to my good health. It is, of course, complicated to make new adjustments to eating habits. Those adjustments were learned during childhood. -
Re:Rise of the "civil union".
What will really matter is the mental state of the robot. If it can qualify as a True Artificial Intelligence, having free will and other things associated with personhood (such that dolphins have been claimed to qualify, and any Star Trek or Star Wars fan expects various extraterrestrial aliens to qualify as persons), then there should be no problem. They would be two persons getting married. Big deal.
But if the robot cannot qualify as a person, then the notion of marriage, which is a partnership between persons, right?, just can't be a correct description of the relationship. The robot would just be a machine, and the human would just be a user. -
Re:No amount of evidence is enough
So to promote nuclear they need to set a clear warning, a radical tipping point from that point on where serious coastal population harm will occur. So real science is needed on permafrost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... because when that start significantly thawing it will release a massive amount of methane a much worse green house gas which will cause a very significant short term (relatively short versus CO2 as it breaks down) surge in warming ("traps up to 100 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide within a 5 year period, and 72 times more within a 20 year period." http://www.onegreenplanet.org/...".
So science on what that tipping point is and how close to it we are because those forecast of long term average sea level rise do not take that major surge into account at all. So a mass release of methane will cause a major short term tempreture surge, resulting in massive melting and sea level rise will surge before the methane breaks down and we go back to averages. You could end up with a metre rise in sea levels in just one season, depending upon how quick that permafrost melt is and how large that methane surge is. Could be lucky, if it is large enough it could ignite and it's just CO2 but that atmospheric fuel air bomb could cause a real huge problem all on it's own, mega kaboom.
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Basic biology what?
The science behind what he's saying isn't really adding up. While there's naturally studies on both sides, this study indicates greater CO2 levels can inhibit growth http://news.stanford.edu/pr/02...
Moreover, methane is significantly more responsible for global climate change because it traps 100 times more heat than CO2. http://www.onegreenplanet.org/...
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Re:Better late than never, Slashdot
You would be hard pressed to find a thirstier crop than meat. Almost half of our water goes to animal agriculture. http://www.onegreenplanet.org/...
It makes sense to switch to a plant-based diet rather than continue to deplete (and contaminate with manure) our precious water resources.