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Huge Reduction in Meat-Eating 'Essential' To Avoid Climate Breakdown (theguardian.com)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?"
This is really simple math here. To feed livestock, we have to first raise plants. To raise those plants we have to invest time, water, space, fertilizer, etc. Then we have to get the plants to the animals to feed them. 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.
We may recall that for a while we tried feeding the fattiest part of the cows back to other cows to speed up development, 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.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If the human race does not get that problem under control fast, nothing else will save it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Of course it makes sense to feed lifestock with food that we humans can't digest anyway. Cows, chicken, sheep, goat, and rabbits are ideal candidates here. Having spent a third of my life on a homestead, I understand pretty well what kind of effort goes into growing 'meat'. We used chicken and rabbits as our biological lawn mowers, that would eat grasses and shrubs that would have been otherwise useless to us. And they provided us with eggs and meat. Meat is a nice source of food. You can cure it and make it last for a long time, when you need it. For example in winter, when other food sources are scarce.
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.
But, isn't it also true that the vast, vast majority of the polluters is energy, manufacturing, and transportation? The environmental cost of food of any source is a rounding error compared to the energy industry. Transitioning to cleaner sources of energy - not this clean coal that is being pushed in the US - would be far more effective. This isnâ(TM)t a race of meters but of miles and these sorts of optimizations are far too little and too late to the point of being distracting of the real issues by making suburban liberals feel like âoeI can make a difference by eating healthyâ while driving to the store in their Subaru hatchback.
Thirty four characters live here.
CONTROL is what it's all about. A bunch of globalist trying to control US. I'm not doing it. If the meat all goes away, I'll eat some politicians.
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?
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
a) That's not a problem; b) people switched to cars because they are better.
The point is, we do not need to use the force of government to compel ourselves to change. 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.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
who agree that climate change is both real and a threat seem to fail to grasp that. Here's the obligatory XKCD comic
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.
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It's THE protein with a wonderful taste.
If all of the whiners that cry about the climate want to do something, they should be sterilized. It's an easy fix with that will do wonders for this planet.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
"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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Bacon.
Next question!
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