This is not really a news anymore, is it. Methane levels are setting new records, co2 levels are settings new records, total GHG emissions are rising, temperature is rising, everything is rising, every freaking year. Year after year. This news sounds a little bit like saying "The age of the universe rises to the highest level on record. It got older. Again." The news will be when global GHG levels stop rising and start decreasing.
With Tesla being one of the best investments of the last decade (after Bitcoin and NVidia maybe), large investors have to take CO2 emissions seriously. People are already paying extra money for sustainability, and in the future it will be the only rational business decision as well.
How is the population not the "main problem" here?
Take a look at the locust, and how in [1], they say:
"Cheke’s team is recommending a fungus called Metarhizium anisopliae, which kills a locust by growing inside its body."
Typically, when a population becomes unsustainable, as humans are because of their immense requirements over vast decades, we tend to find a way to 'control' that population. Typically, this is by killing them.
Yet, because we have the capability to rationalize we understand vast swarms of locusts are terrible yet vast swarms of humans are just something we have to accept. The idea that we need to kill billions of humans would be unfathomable, yet, reducing our numbers will be the only way to make life on earth sustainable - for all living things. This is something Sir David Attenborough also agrees with [2]. This planet is not, was not and will never be capable of sustaining 8 billion healthy, prosperous humans with fair and equal access to food, water and shelter.
We need to kill, or in some way reduce the number of humans on this planet. Anything else is a gigantic waste of time and will only serve as a distraction and way to make us feel better that we can somehow overcome this earth threatening disease called "human kind". Because of our constant encroachment into nature, we are pushing animals to their limits, which is how great pandemics are developing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future (e.g wet markets).
Coronavirus is not the worst pandemic we're dealing with right now.
Humankind is.
And whilst we're constantly taking space away from nature, nature will fight back and take away ourselves.
Despite Pakistan being 212 million people vs Romania 19 million. Pakistan emits 178mt of Co2, vs Romania 79mt (2016). Pakistan's CO2 output is 2.2x greater, but their total GDP is only 1.31x bigger.
When you look at emissions against output, its clear that the West and East Asia are substantially more efficient than other regions on the planet.
The point is that instead of looking to reduce the population of the West and East Asia, which will have an impact on humanity's economic, cultural, scientific output, we should look at reducing populations (though education and family planning for women) in less-productive areas.
Look, even if all countries except of say US suddenly magically disappear tomorrow, the planet will still keep warming up. Even if you reduce the world population to whatever your acceptable level is, you still need to build zero carbon infrastructure/industry for the people that remain. Net zero per person is net zero per person. Doesn't matter how many people there are. And right now, that building is not happening. Or at least not fast enough.
Efficiency is something I can get behind, but of what? Forgetting dollars and cents for a moment, what if we measured the health and happiness of a population. Using those measures times the population would be the plus side with environmental impact on the minus. This only works for a closed system and import/export and sharing of scientific results plays a part.
I guess my point is if Pakistan were able to keep their population healthy and happy with less GDP per capita, scientific input or output, and less environmental impact per capita than Romania, I'd say they were doing alright.
I don’t know if Pakistan is quite comparable with Romania on the healthy and happy metrics, but the real efficiency comparison is between Pakistani and Indian Punjabs on groundwater depletion and tube wells. Indian Punjab may be better at getting the groundwater out and irrigation intensity but at what cost to the aquifer? (This is not saying Pak doesn’t need to move away from wasteful canals and build water storage for rain - they do)
I was only using Pakistan and Romania since they were in the original example. The important bit was to not optimize a proxy for a thing without recognizing that it's a proxy and may lead to undesirable conclusions or actions.
From the article, the solution is obvious, but no one has the courage to implement it.
An artificial virus, deadly and highly contagious, with long incubation periods, forcing people to stay home and sending high CO2 emission industries crumbling into bankruptcy. Look what something as weak as COVID has done in a short amount of time. Also make another virus that can spread through high methane emitting livestock and kills them quickly, and anyone who eats an infected animal.
At the same time if you create a vaccine against the virus, you can sell it to powerful and wealthy individuals on the black market for vast sums of money. There might be riots, but why contain it? Let it spread through the schools and churches.
I'm going to agree this a solution, but I think we should probably tick through the first thousand or two more reasonable ones before we get to mass murder.
As for what the solutions are: Reduce meat consumption, particularly beef, develop better meat/milk/cheese alternatives, replace fossil fuels, for the time that won't be completely possible fix methane leakage in fossil fuel production.
There is a pretty simple solution to the meat problem. Most of that methane comes from cows, and some seaweed thrown into their diet eliminates their methane emissions.
Every time I looked it up it seems this is based on some very small studies. As far as I know noone has ever implemented this at scale (if you know otherwise - please provide links) and is selling meat produced that way.
Look, I'm not against researching such stuff. But calling that "a pretty simple solution" before this has ever been tried out for real doesn't seem valid.
Simpler than convincing the globe to change their eating habits, certainly.
I don’t have any better idea than you how the science works out, and the supply chain thing sounds nontrivial, but that’s nothing compared to getting masses of people to change their habits.
We can’t talk red staters into take wearing masks for a few months, and next we are going to make them give up bbq?
Over a billion cows are spread over the world. They eat over 10 billion kg of dry food each day. Estimating a 0.5% seaweed supplement, we're talking about 50 million kg of dry seaweed. Assuming a 90% water content, we're talking about 500 million kg of one particular type of seaweed that need to be harvested, dried and shipped all over the world.
Every single day.
And we have to be careful about not depleting natural resources, nutrients and destroying natural habitats.
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that there's nothing simple about that.
Maybe instead we could find out why this type of seaweed reduces methane generation?
changing people's eating habits in the west is super easy: tax undesirable products. price rises, demand drops. this also notably applies to everything else, e.g. gas/diesel, sugar, plastic.
I still wonder about cap and trade on meat, each human gets X steaks per year but they can sell their steaks on an exchange. Having the quota separate from the price would be about help people who don’t have much money quite a bit. It would also lead to higher meat quality; what would the point of buying McDonalds with a piece of your quota worth fifty bucks.
It would be easier to add small quantities of industrially produced bromoform to cattle feed than to cultivate enough seaweed to get the same effects. However, the sort of producers who cater to environmentally conscious meat consumers may want to be able to tout "seaweed dietary additive" rather than "bromoform dietary additive" in packaging and promotional material.
Also there may be regulatory barriers to adding pure bromoform. AFAIK there are few regulations on introducing new plants into cows' diet, but pure chemicals may be regulated. Even if the only reason to add certain plants is to add chemicals into their diet.
> It would be easier to add small quantities of industrially produced bromoform to cattle feed than to cultivate enough seaweed to get the same effects.
If I recall correctly there are two issues with that
a) bromoform itself is a GHG, you don't want to create more of it that gets released into the environment and use natural sources instead
b) the researchers tried this and at least simple additives didn't have the same effect, perhaps it has something to do with how it gets released during digestion
If you had a link confirming B, I would be interested. To the first point: more bromoform will also be released in the environment if we deliberately cultivate large quantities of the kelp that produce it. A quick search doesn't show it as a greenhouse gas. It can deplete stratospheric ozone, but it is very short lived in the atmosphere.
https://sci-hub.tw/10.1071/AN15576 page 6
They're citing prior research showing declining efficiency of bromochloromethane additives "due to ruminal flow" while not observing that in their research using seaweed. But it's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison since one was an in vivo and the other an in vitro study. So I may have overstated the impact.
> A quick search doesn't show it as a greenhouse gas. It can deplete stratospheric ozone, but it is very short lived in the atmosphere.
Looks like you're right, I must have confused it with some other bromide.
Why? It also says that population is the problem, just that talking about it makes you sound like a nazi, so let's not talk about it.
Then it points out that educating women and "eat the rich" are the most effective ways to reduce environmental impact without explicitly talking about population.
One major part of the solution is applied ecology, such as Permaculture or Syntropic agriculture. We can grow all our own food (and even carbon-neutral alcohol fuel) in gardens in ecologically harmonious ways.
(The historical rule is: If your civilization destroys soil it fails.)
The population is leveling off and is projected to stabilize by 2100.
I don't have a link handy, I'll try to find it again and post it, but there's an article or video about Ernst Gotsch, the founder of what he calls "Syntropic" farming, where it talks about how his farm produces the best cocoa in the world at 3x the crop of conventional farms of the same quality with no inputs.
It's important to remember that the modern mega-farms are only cost-effective due to massive subsidies. A typical modern farm loses something like a dollar an acre per year and would fail immediately without subsidies. They're not profitable.
While they are certainly highly efficient for a narrow range of species, they are physically incapable of producing the vast majority of food species at all.
Comparing an acre of modern farmland growing modern corn in the modern way with modern subsidies to an acre of a Permaculture or Syntropic food forest:
The modern farm will produce far more of that corn than the eco-farm. But it will require inputs: fertilizer, irrigation, and everything concerned with the farm machinery, etc., and only produce that corn. Everything else: water, land, machinery, people, gets used up or polluted by the process.
In contrast the acre of food forest might not produce any corn at all, or it may contain four or five or more species of it, as well as fruit and nut trees, bananas and plantain plants, climbing fruiting vines, berry bushes, root crops, flowers, cucurbits, bamboo, etc. resulting in dozens of different yields. It requires no inputs.
It's more labor intensive and cannot (yet) be automated. But it's fun, easy, profitable, and it produces the material needed to make more of itself, so it's scalable.
Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea of it, I think grains are lowest-tier food and I would much prefer to eat the produce you describe.
However, grains are the staple food, not just in the US, but around the world. To my knowledge no other method than having fields of grains buffed with fertilizer comes close to its caloric output.
You're saying it requires "no inputs", but it actually requires a lot of land. The inputs you describe are plentiful, land is scarce.
If soil really does get used up as some scientists predict, we might naturally shift towards these kinds of farming, but we might also figure out a way to replenish the soil.
Sorry, I missed your reply. You can still grow grain. This technology converts deserts and other land unsuitable to grain farming into food forests. It creates soil. Cf. "Greening the Desert". Cheers.
Overheard banter on this topic at work a few weeks ago: "yeah 'coz everyone's sitting at home farting in the sofa every evening since the f*ing corona happened instead of going about their spare time as usual".
We eat more meat than ever. We subsidize meat production at every level so that all taxpayers pay for cheap meat, even vegetarians and vegans.
We can reduce subsidies, or even reverse them to accurately account for the externalities of pollution and global heating.
While population growth rate is lowering, humans are still increasing in population. We can make contraception and education more available globally.
The United States' science education has declined for generations so people don't understand nature and how we affect it. We can improve science education.
Meat is not the problem. Long before people there was more animals alive on this planet and they pooped, farted and ate each other at a scale that we can't imagine. Just think about the bison, or passenger pigeons.
Absolutely this as a native American one of my biggest dreams is to view America before all of the forest was completely removed from the entire country and to see all of mega herds of whitetail deer and bison roam free. Carrier pigeon phlox so large they block out the sky for half a day
Citation needed? They ate grass instead of corn, and spread their waste over vast areas of wilderness, ready to be incorporated back into the plantlife.
Also, a quick Google search says there were 30-60 million bison roaming the plains. Today, there are 95 million cows, and another 70 some million pigs.
Not all cows are used for meat.
Bison, and pigeons are just two examples, but as you can imagine, all over planet there were billions of animals that are not either extinct or close to being extinct. How about european bison, aurochs, wild pigs, and many many more.
Cows are just one example of the bovine family.
I don't claim that farmed meat does not contribute anything, but it's not the only, or even main problem of the climate change.
Start a garden, and see for yourself how much resources it takes to grow enough plant food to feed your family,and compare that to a number calories you can get from one cow.
No offense, but you appear to be just making up your numbers and inventing the conclusions from whole cloth. Nobody would dispute that the biosphere was richer and more diverse in the past, but all of those animals were part of a global equilibrium (at least on the order of 10s of thousands of years, nothing is permanent).
Currently, the animals in our food system are not. I do garden extensively, and I know how difficult it is to produce food for a whole year. I also know that feeding carbon intensive corn to cows to eat is a thermodynamically loosing game calorie-wise. If you want to pay for regeneratively raised, grass fed beef from farms with integrated waste management, good for you. If you think your 99c hamburger at a fast food restaurant isn’t part of a climate and ethical catastrophe, I think you’re being willfully ignorant.
Personally I’m a vegetarian, but the main thing I care about is that people eat less meat, which was more sustainably and ethically raised.
>all over planet there were billions of animals that are not either extinct or close to being extinct
There used to be more diversity amongst animals but that doesn't change the fact that there is 3 times more cattle in North America now than there used to live in the wild.
>I don't claim that farmed meat does not contribute anything, but it's not the only, or even main problem of the climate change.
Climate change does not have a "main problem", it's multiple minor causes that each need to be addressed (and agriculture is a big one).
If we were farming sustainably (only grass fed etc.) we wouldn't be able to produce as much meat as we do today. Which implies that on average everybody would eat less meat. Much less.
Grasses that have been developed for pastoral farming still lead to more methane burps. Current research seems to be focused on breading grasses / other pasture crops, and breading animals that produce less methane, Vaccines that could be given to animals, Inhibitors that could be added to their diet[1], and modeling of the methane formation process. But yes, the simplest way to reduce it would be to reduce the number of animals, by eating less meat.
"I'm glad that I can eat a meat-and-dairy-based diet and am not forced to fill my calories with garbage plant-based substitutes."
Must they be garbage substitutes? Must your vegetabilic food look and taste like a meat facsimile? I hear this perspective often from meat-eaters when they contrast their diet to a vegetarian diet, and I cannot understand it.
I certainly understand it, but surely you have more on your plate than just eggs, cheese and steaks to provide calories. For what it's worth I've come across several excellent meat facsimiles. I don't worry about any potential harm coming from a smaller portion of a proper cooked meal being a processed product.
Keep in mind that it takes much more fertilizer to feed a cow that is then converted to food than it would to just grow the food. The 30% likely doesn't take into account the gigantic portion of fertilizer emissions that wouldn't exist if we weren't feeding so many cows, etc.
I'm aware of that, but beef is a vastly superior food than the produce that is fed to the cows. If it was just about calories, you could just drink HFCS all day.
I don't believe there's such a thing as a healthy plant-based diet. That's just me speculating though, nobody even knows what a healthy diet is.
From a nutritional perspective however, animals can do things for us that we can't even do in the lab, let alone at industrial scale.
It might be possible to create some sort of fortified plant-based diet that has all the nutrients in a form that the body can actually absorb, but even then, that doesn't mean this is the route free people will go.
Even if you could change western food culture to make people to stop eating animal-based-food in favor of that plant-based Frankenfood, you will not change the food culture of rest of the world, which is shaking its head at white saviorism.
Are you of the impression that if everyone just ate beef, chicken, cheese and milk that we would cut emissions drastically? You know that animals eat food, and the food they eat is grown in crops, and the crops use fertilizer ... right? Even if emissions associated with growing crops are higher than expected, if the number of people that they feed is higher than the number that can be fed through meat, then reducing meat consumption is a win. If 30 percent of methane comes from industrial meat farming and 20 percent comes from industrial rice farming but our industrial meat feeds 1 billion people and our industrial rice feeds 2 billion people, I don't understand how that's an irrelevant concern. It's very convenient to form opinions in such a way so that no personal changes in consumption are ever required.
> Are you of the impression that if everyone just ate beef, chicken, cheese and milk that we would cut emissions drastically?
No.
> You know that animals eat food, and the food they eat is grown in crops, and the crops use fertilizer ... right?
Yes.
> Even if emissions associated with growing crops are higher than expected, if the number of people that they feed is higher than the number that can be fed through meat, then reducing meat consumption is a win.
I disagree, because plant-based food is inferior, therefore it is a loss. From a pure nutrition perspective, meat and dairy isn't as inefficient as you might think.
You could probably cut down on some emissions by feeding people Soylent or some other food that had better been served to livestock instead, perhaps you can even brainwash people into doing that voluntarily. That doesn't mean it is a better outcome.
> If 30 percent of methane comes from industrial meat farming and 20 percent comes from industrial rice farming but our industrial meat feeds 1 billion people and our industrial rice feeds 2 billion people, I don't understand how that's an irrelevant concern.
It's not just about feeding people, but feeding them well. White rice is probably responsible for the huge rates of Diabetes in Asia. Brown rice is poorly digestible. Altogether, it is not very nutritious either.
> It's very convenient to form opinions in such a way so that no personal changes in consumption are ever required.
Don't get me wrong, my opinion is borne out of self-interest, it's not about moral grandstanding.
Even if a meat-based diet was better for no other reason than being more delicious, it wouldn't change my position fundamentally.
You're very welcome to change your consumption, just don't force it on me.
With the meat packaging plant closures and the "shortage" of beef, the cattle herds are probably growing in numbers, which could cause the spike of methane.
As a vegetarian I am still expected to subsidize, even receive meat on the dish, with a smile. Yet, just eating my food, this is an affront to most people around me. We fought for 20 years, but people still just don't give a fuck!
Interestingly, Burger King just announced that they're changing the diet of their cattle to reduce emissions by 33% (of their cattle, not worldwide). Apparently lemongrass leaves will accomplish this.
Fjolsvith suggests a possible answer in another thread:
> With the meat packaging plant closures and the "shortage" of beef, the cattle herds are probably growing in numbers, which could cause the spike of methane.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23858601
86 comments
[ 7.4 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadWhile population may be a concern, it's not the main problem.
> The richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for around 50% of global emissions
https://oi-files-d8-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-pub...
Take a look at the locust, and how in [1], they say:
"Cheke’s team is recommending a fungus called Metarhizium anisopliae, which kills a locust by growing inside its body."
Typically, when a population becomes unsustainable, as humans are because of their immense requirements over vast decades, we tend to find a way to 'control' that population. Typically, this is by killing them.
Yet, because we have the capability to rationalize we understand vast swarms of locusts are terrible yet vast swarms of humans are just something we have to accept. The idea that we need to kill billions of humans would be unfathomable, yet, reducing our numbers will be the only way to make life on earth sustainable - for all living things. This is something Sir David Attenborough also agrees with [2]. This planet is not, was not and will never be capable of sustaining 8 billion healthy, prosperous humans with fair and equal access to food, water and shelter.
We need to kill, or in some way reduce the number of humans on this planet. Anything else is a gigantic waste of time and will only serve as a distraction and way to make us feel better that we can somehow overcome this earth threatening disease called "human kind". Because of our constant encroachment into nature, we are pushing animals to their limits, which is how great pandemics are developing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future (e.g wet markets).
Coronavirus is not the worst pandemic we're dealing with right now.
Humankind is.
And whilst we're constantly taking space away from nature, nature will fight back and take away ourselves.
We are the worst problem this planet has.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00725-x
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-45741482/sir...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global...
Keep in mind that this richest 10% contribute the majority of humanity's value-added commerce and production, cultural output, and scientific output.
For example, Romania has an equal scientific output to Pakistan: https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs
Despite Pakistan being 212 million people vs Romania 19 million. Pakistan emits 178mt of Co2, vs Romania 79mt (2016). Pakistan's CO2 output is 2.2x greater, but their total GDP is only 1.31x bigger.
When you look at emissions against output, its clear that the West and East Asia are substantially more efficient than other regions on the planet.
I guess my point is if Pakistan were able to keep their population healthy and happy with less GDP per capita, scientific input or output, and less environmental impact per capita than Romania, I'd say they were doing alright.
An artificial virus, deadly and highly contagious, with long incubation periods, forcing people to stay home and sending high CO2 emission industries crumbling into bankruptcy. Look what something as weak as COVID has done in a short amount of time. Also make another virus that can spread through high methane emitting livestock and kills them quickly, and anyone who eats an infected animal.
At the same time if you create a vaccine against the virus, you can sell it to powerful and wealthy individuals on the black market for vast sums of money. There might be riots, but why contain it? Let it spread through the schools and churches.
But people don’t change. They have to be forced to changed.
You're talking like a character from a bad sci-fi movie. And I should know. I've been binge-watching MST3K for a week solid.
As for what the solutions are: Reduce meat consumption, particularly beef, develop better meat/milk/cheese alternatives, replace fossil fuels, for the time that won't be completely possible fix methane leakage in fossil fuel production.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/23/1826/how-seaweed...
Every time I looked it up it seems this is based on some very small studies. As far as I know noone has ever implemented this at scale (if you know otherwise - please provide links) and is selling meat produced that way.
Look, I'm not against researching such stuff. But calling that "a pretty simple solution" before this has ever been tried out for real doesn't seem valid.
I don’t have any better idea than you how the science works out, and the supply chain thing sounds nontrivial, but that’s nothing compared to getting masses of people to change their habits.
We can’t talk red staters into take wearing masks for a few months, and next we are going to make them give up bbq?
Over a billion cows are spread over the world. They eat over 10 billion kg of dry food each day. Estimating a 0.5% seaweed supplement, we're talking about 50 million kg of dry seaweed. Assuming a 90% water content, we're talking about 500 million kg of one particular type of seaweed that need to be harvested, dried and shipped all over the world.
Every single day.
And we have to be careful about not depleting natural resources, nutrients and destroying natural habitats.
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that there's nothing simple about that.
Maybe instead we could find out why this type of seaweed reduces methane generation?
“Maybe instead...” yes, the researches who came up with this are doing that, it’s their job.
Mass-scale seaweed production has been thrown around as a method for sequestering CO2.
Methane itself could be sequestered as well.
Either way, I'm fine with a beef tax to cover some of those costs, but lower-income groups might. I'm not keen on forcing an inferior diet on them.
I am not forcing my standards on lower income people anyway, but supporting a tax that hurts them and not me seems wrong.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/feeding-seaweed...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5270371/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromoform
It would be easier to add small quantities of industrially produced bromoform to cattle feed than to cultivate enough seaweed to get the same effects. However, the sort of producers who cater to environmentally conscious meat consumers may want to be able to tout "seaweed dietary additive" rather than "bromoform dietary additive" in packaging and promotional material.
Also there may be regulatory barriers to adding pure bromoform. AFAIK there are few regulations on introducing new plants into cows' diet, but pure chemicals may be regulated. Even if the only reason to add certain plants is to add chemicals into their diet.
If I recall correctly there are two issues with that a) bromoform itself is a GHG, you don't want to create more of it that gets released into the environment and use natural sources instead b) the researchers tried this and at least simple additives didn't have the same effect, perhaps it has something to do with how it gets released during digestion
> A quick search doesn't show it as a greenhouse gas. It can deplete stratospheric ozone, but it is very short lived in the atmosphere.
Looks like you're right, I must have confused it with some other bromide.
Why? It also says that population is the problem, just that talking about it makes you sound like a nazi, so let's not talk about it.
Then it points out that educating women and "eat the rich" are the most effective ways to reduce environmental impact without explicitly talking about population.
(The historical rule is: If your civilization destroys soil it fails.)
The population is leveling off and is projected to stabilize by 2100.
[citation needed]
Not sure what kind of garden you are talking about, I like gardens to plant vegetables and such, but their caloric output is very low.
It's important to remember that the modern mega-farms are only cost-effective due to massive subsidies. A typical modern farm loses something like a dollar an acre per year and would fail immediately without subsidies. They're not profitable.
While they are certainly highly efficient for a narrow range of species, they are physically incapable of producing the vast majority of food species at all.
Comparing an acre of modern farmland growing modern corn in the modern way with modern subsidies to an acre of a Permaculture or Syntropic food forest:
The modern farm will produce far more of that corn than the eco-farm. But it will require inputs: fertilizer, irrigation, and everything concerned with the farm machinery, etc., and only produce that corn. Everything else: water, land, machinery, people, gets used up or polluted by the process.
In contrast the acre of food forest might not produce any corn at all, or it may contain four or five or more species of it, as well as fruit and nut trees, bananas and plantain plants, climbing fruiting vines, berry bushes, root crops, flowers, cucurbits, bamboo, etc. resulting in dozens of different yields. It requires no inputs.
It's more labor intensive and cannot (yet) be automated. But it's fun, easy, profitable, and it produces the material needed to make more of itself, so it's scalable.
However, grains are the staple food, not just in the US, but around the world. To my knowledge no other method than having fields of grains buffed with fertilizer comes close to its caloric output.
You're saying it requires "no inputs", but it actually requires a lot of land. The inputs you describe are plentiful, land is scarce.
If soil really does get used up as some scientists predict, we might naturally shift towards these kinds of farming, but we might also figure out a way to replenish the soil.
#1 is reduced food waste
We eat more meat than ever. We subsidize meat production at every level so that all taxpayers pay for cheap meat, even vegetarians and vegans.
We can reduce subsidies, or even reverse them to accurately account for the externalities of pollution and global heating.
While population growth rate is lowering, humans are still increasing in population. We can make contraception and education more available globally.
The United States' science education has declined for generations so people don't understand nature and how we affect it. We can improve science education.
Also, a quick Google search says there were 30-60 million bison roaming the plains. Today, there are 95 million cows, and another 70 some million pigs.
I don't claim that farmed meat does not contribute anything, but it's not the only, or even main problem of the climate change. Start a garden, and see for yourself how much resources it takes to grow enough plant food to feed your family,and compare that to a number calories you can get from one cow.
Currently, the animals in our food system are not. I do garden extensively, and I know how difficult it is to produce food for a whole year. I also know that feeding carbon intensive corn to cows to eat is a thermodynamically loosing game calorie-wise. If you want to pay for regeneratively raised, grass fed beef from farms with integrated waste management, good for you. If you think your 99c hamburger at a fast food restaurant isn’t part of a climate and ethical catastrophe, I think you’re being willfully ignorant.
Personally I’m a vegetarian, but the main thing I care about is that people eat less meat, which was more sustainably and ethically raised.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C16&q=cow...
>I don't claim that farmed meat does not contribute anything, but it's not the only, or even main problem of the climate change. Climate change does not have a "main problem", it's multiple minor causes that each need to be addressed (and agriculture is a big one).
>Start a garden, and see for yourself how much resources it takes to grow enough plant food to feed your family,and compare that to a number calories you can get from one cow. Are you implying the cow doesn't need to be fed? Cows need a lot more water and land per gram of protein or per calorie than fish, poultry or legumes. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014Natur.515..518T/abstra... https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987
[1] https://www.pggrc.co.nz/files/1501479614891.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...
I'm glad that I can eat a meat-and-dairy-based diet and am not forced to fill my calories with garbage plant-based substitutes.
If you want to work on reducing enteric fermentation emissions with technology, I'm all for it.
If you want me to cut my consumption of meat to save a few percent of methane that will do next to nothing for climate change, then get off my lawn.
Must they be garbage substitutes? Must your vegetabilic food look and taste like a meat facsimile? I hear this perspective often from meat-eaters when they contrast their diet to a vegetarian diet, and I cannot understand it.
From a nutritional perspective however, animals can do things for us that we can't even do in the lab, let alone at industrial scale.
It might be possible to create some sort of fortified plant-based diet that has all the nutrients in a form that the body can actually absorb, but even then, that doesn't mean this is the route free people will go.
Even if you could change western food culture to make people to stop eating animal-based-food in favor of that plant-based Frankenfood, you will not change the food culture of rest of the world, which is shaking its head at white saviorism.
No.
> You know that animals eat food, and the food they eat is grown in crops, and the crops use fertilizer ... right?
Yes.
> Even if emissions associated with growing crops are higher than expected, if the number of people that they feed is higher than the number that can be fed through meat, then reducing meat consumption is a win.
I disagree, because plant-based food is inferior, therefore it is a loss. From a pure nutrition perspective, meat and dairy isn't as inefficient as you might think.
You could probably cut down on some emissions by feeding people Soylent or some other food that had better been served to livestock instead, perhaps you can even brainwash people into doing that voluntarily. That doesn't mean it is a better outcome.
> If 30 percent of methane comes from industrial meat farming and 20 percent comes from industrial rice farming but our industrial meat feeds 1 billion people and our industrial rice feeds 2 billion people, I don't understand how that's an irrelevant concern.
It's not just about feeding people, but feeding them well. White rice is probably responsible for the huge rates of Diabetes in Asia. Brown rice is poorly digestible. Altogether, it is not very nutritious either.
> It's very convenient to form opinions in such a way so that no personal changes in consumption are ever required.
Don't get me wrong, my opinion is borne out of self-interest, it's not about moral grandstanding.
Even if a meat-based diet was better for no other reason than being more delicious, it wouldn't change my position fundamentally.
You're very welcome to change your consumption, just don't force it on me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23840670
What do you mean? I never heard any official recommendations.
With the meat packaging plant closures and the "shortage" of beef, the cattle herds are probably growing in numbers, which could cause the spike of methane.
https://www.smartenergydecisions.com/blog/2020/07/15/burger-...