Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.