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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.
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.
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...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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?"
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.
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.
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...
The CO2 impact of children is the equivalent of burning a 55 gallon drum of oil, per week, per child.
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.
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*
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...
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.
Over my dead body.
Depends on how well cooked your body is.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
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.
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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The population will level off as prosperity increases. Japan and several European countries are already below replacement levels.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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)
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/...
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.
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
Per this TED Talk, this is 100% backwards. We need to eat MORE cows.
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.
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
If you want to get into the weed
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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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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.
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.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
"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.
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.
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
People in war-zones move toward an r-selection reproductive strategy.
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:
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way