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.

Comments

KNEW it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Climate change is a plot by vegetarians and PETA to force the rest of us to follow their views! Seriously, though, if we've infested this globe to the point where the only way to avoid destroying it is to alter our eating habits to only be plant based, perhaps population control should be a priority.

Re:KNEW it.

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:KNEW it.

[MobyDisk]

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.

[Darinbob]

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.

Re:KNEW it.

[TechyImmigrant]

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.

 

Re:KNEW it.

[q_e_t]

It depends where/how. If you are talking sheep on steep uplands raised for meat, you aren't going to really be replacing that with crops, so you might continue to raise sheep that way, but you might reduce corn production for feeding beef cattle, although you might continue to raise corn-fed chicken. There are some instances where grazing is required to maintain certain habitats (some upland ones being examples).

Horse-manure prediction

[mi]

The "Horse-manure panic" 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...

Not going to work

[pak9rabid]

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.

Re:Cue the next disaster

[Mashiki]

And has been going for 30 years?

So...the UN didn't author Agenda 21? Am I in an alternate timeline again? Why not go read the 300 page document, and then compare the things listed, suggested, or should be imposed against actions of various governments over that same time period. Sure there's some good things in it, but then there's the government policies that act in a coercive manner to force them through. Which of course moves it out of the realm of UN mandated conspiracy theories.

Politics does not plan for that long...

Brilliant ignorance, most countries have 50-100 year plans. China being a bit odd out has 200-300 year plans.

No, the threat is real and imminent. People like you just demonstrate why it will likely be the end of the human race.

So, you're all in favor of imposing structure, order, and governance on say Africa in order to make it into the bread basket of the world, while forcibly modernizing their societies to make them more environmentally friendly? How about the same for many countries in South America?

Re:If God didn't want us to eat animals...

[Pinky's Brain]

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.

Another false binary choice

[WillAffleckUW]

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

[bjdevil66]

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

Opportunity cost

[Solandri]

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 - 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, whereas most meat consumption is in developed countries. In fact several developed nations are experiencing population declines . 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.