I think that if everyone gave up air travel, individual automobile transport, and meat and dairy and lived in a max 110m2 apartment you could say that. But it seems that there are a lot of people who simply don't care.
Because preventing climate change is a collective action problem, and the comment suggests a solution that would require every individual to spontaneously make the right decision.
I am actually in the same boat. I have limited myself to the things I list, yet the problem is still there. And The human population doubles every 50 or so years even after I had a vasectomy [1], and yet my emissions aren't going to cut in two in that time.
Yeah - individual changes will never change anything - I think the discussion has been poisonned, and we are blind to the actual solutions, which all seem unthinkable even though they are self evident
> Yeah - individual changes will never change anything - I think the discussion has been poisonned
The idea that individuals have no responsibility or power is part of how it has been poisoned. I've known people who genuinely would say something like "did you know a half dozen companies put out the majority of emissions? so we don't need to consume less or differently, everything is those companies' fault".
Eh - people's power isn't in lower their impact on the environnement, it's in stopping the corporations that are doing in by all means.
We act like all the options are is
a)Being mindful of your emissions (Which will change nothing for the planet)
b)Do nothing (Also changes nothing)
While the actual option is to stop the corporations by any and all means. Native americans have a history of doing this with little support form the rest of americans.
If global warming is a real issue, is ''buying an EV'' or ''taking the bus'' an acceptable solution to you? Sincelrely, is it at the height of the problem? Shouldn't you have more - say - radical, views?
Doing something is objectively better than actively making the problem worse while pretending you have no responsibility.
Calling for other people to do things you yourself won't do (how many acts of ecoterrorism have you done lately?) isn't really helping, it's the same self-serving logic I was complaining about.
My actions are my own - and ad hominems aren't all that fruitful in conversation I believe.
Funny you went to ecoterrorism - I wouldn't have called what Native Americans were doing eco terrorism - they were defending their way of life.
There are many things you can do that are more impactful than taking the bus and that aren't blowing up pipelines - chatting with representatives, working with journalists to help undercover situations, working with activists you support the actions and reasoning of....see what I mean?
I think your logic is self serving - if everyone thinks like you, are things going to change? Because they sure don't seem like they will. But you feel comfortable in your daily life.
(And to add - objectively better can be right even if the ''positive value'' is imperceptible. Are you doing actual efforts to solve the issue or just enough to not feel like it's your responsibility?)
That's weird. I grew up in a big house and my parents had plenty of cars, meat and travel, but I wasn't particularly happy. I'm happier now in my small apartment. I don't really understand how a big house will make you happy. Really, doing electronics is more fun in a hacker space than at home, and you can always go to a park.
Funny enough, owning the apartment doesn't actually fix all of the other problems of living in an apartment.
I don't want every facet of my life outside of my home to be public and shared. I want a private yard, not a communal park and garden. I want a private shop, not a public maker space. I want peace and quiet and a bit of distance from my neighbors, not shared walls.
Because I've lived the apartment life and it honestly did make me want to kill myself. I don't know how people just live like that.
No, I am fully aware I'd most likely be in the 90% that died and if I did live I probably wouldn't enjoy life much after because it would be incredibly hard.
I am expressing that I would rather die than live in the miserable, joyless sounding purgatory that was described.
Peter Singer's Famine Affluence & Morality (1972) argued similarly, that we allow human suffering & don't do anything, even though we could. And he said that makes us provably evil.
Just so we're clear, realistically "everyone gave up air travel" means the government shutting down airlines, not people voluntarily not buying plane tickets. I would vote in favor of massively limiting airline travel across the board, but until that happens I'm not going to make my life worse for absolutely no benefit.
There are essentially three not entirely disjoint options. 1) Sacrifice yourself for the good of the whole. 2) Take advantage of those who sacrifice themselves for the good of the whole. 3) Nobody sacrifices and it's thunderdome time and the losers starve.
A lot of people care but can't make a huge impact. A few people could make a huge impact but don't care (or worse, want to worsen things for short-term profits).
I was trying to be conservative, but given the rate of coral bleaching and mass die offs happening on the world's coral reefs, I'm afraid you might be right.
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...
One of the leading reasons why we're in such deep mess are our systems of food production, esp. animal agriculture (75% of agriculture lands, uses more land than forests) & fishing.
- The majority of deforestation (particularly in the Amazon), is driven by livestock farming. By reducing demand for animal products, we could slow or even reverse the trend of habitat destruction, thus preserving biodiversity.
- Growing plants to feed animals and then consuming those animals is an inefficient way of obtaining calories and nutrients. Shifting to a plant-based diet would allow us to feed more people with less land, reducing the pressure on wild habitats.
- Animal agriculture is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
- Overfishing is a major threat to marine biodiversity. By reducing our consumption of fish, we can help protect marine ecosystems.
- Animal agriculture is also a significant source of pollution, including runoff from farms that can create dead zones in oceans and rivers, harming aquatic species.
- Intensive animal farming can create conditions ripe for the emergence of new diseases (zoonotic diseases), some of which could potentially leap to humans and cause pandemics, as well as decimate animal populations.
The real difference will be made by abolishing Europe's cities and returning that entire continent to Nature. All the forests and animals should be restored and the cities razed.
Extant emissions from the people there dwarf the Amazon's deforestation so it's a much better fix.
In Roman times, Germany had 70% forest cover. Conveniently chosen timelines of the last 100 years after half of all forest cover was razed are all very nice but ultimately, the Earth pays the price.
What the Germans did then, the Brazilians do a fraction of now.
40% forest cover lost. And now, Germany has almost no primary forest. And Germans burn oil and coal and gas like no other.
The net effect of Germany on the Climate is the effect of an Environmental WMD.
Whatever biodiversity (and therefore whatever resilience) was lost by the destruction of Europe's forests is gone forever. There are important species in the Amazon that can still be saved.
That's fair. Europe should therefore pay Earth Reparations to those who have the opportunity to preserve the Earth. While Europe cannot afford to make good, she can try to hit the market clearing price to keep the Amazon unperturbed. This will likely be a debt never successfully paid, but sufficient hundreds of billions every year will likely work.
Materially, helping is helping whatever the reason. But rhetoric matters. You're going to get a lot more participation if you're trying to make the world a liveable place for the children being born right now, and a lot less participation if you're trying to get people to pay off a debt taken out by their ancestors.
Thinking in terms of money and debt is what got us into this situation. I'm doubtful that it will get us out of it.
In fact, turning our backs on the logic of the market is probably part of the fix. We need a jubilee so that the people made powerful by causing these problems aren't powerful anymore.
A jubilee would only help those who caused these problems since they've reaped the rewards. I, too, would like all my debts forgiven while I retain the profits.
Typical of discourse today is to let off the societies that industrialized first with no complaint while simultaneously moralizing against those who are industrializing now.
Europe hoards nuclear technology and won't share it with the developing world. Europe burns oil and gas and coal in vast quantities to live. All while Europe says that all past carbon emissions must be considered forgiven debt and all present carbon emissions must be considered sin.
The developing world will do as Europe did to get to Europe's standard of living. The developing world will not listen to the moralizing of Europeans who won't do their part. And Europeans can clutch their pearls about the Amazon, but the people who live there will raze it for industry just as the Europeans did. And it will be right.
> A jubilee would only help those who caused these problems since they've reaped the rewards
Maybe jubilee wasn't the right word. I'm saying we stop accepting money for money's sake. So the reaped rewards would no longer be valuable.
Instead we need a system backed by something auditable, so that when a stranger offers it to you, you can investigate and decide if you actually value the activity that created it. Thus creating an incentive to work on projects that are more solution than problem.
To add some additional point to yours on animal waste, "barnyard run-off" into our water supplies has led to rapid degradation of our lakes, rivers, oceans, and ground water. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and pathogens are the most common water pollutants from manure. Nitrates that leave Minnesota through the Mississippi River add to the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. Added nitrates cause an excess of ocean plants and algae to grow. When the plants and algae die, they are decomposed by bacteria that use up dissolved oxygen. This causes areas of low oxygen to form where ocean plants and animals cannot live. Phosphorus is a major concern because it causes excessive plant and algae growth in lakes and rivers. This causes an oxygen-depleting reaction similar to what happens in the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. E. coli, Cryptosporidium, and Giardia are just a few pathogens that can cause serious health problems in people and animals that come in contact with contaminated water.
>Growing plants to feed animals and then consuming those animals is an inefficient way of obtaining calories and nutrients. Shifting to a plant-based diet would allow us to feed more people with less land, reducing the pressure on wild habitats.
Not true. Ruminant grazing animals (like cows) use land that generally is not fit for farming plants that humans would consume. They make land productive that otherwise would not be. Also, farming for the staples of plant-based diets annihilates animal life. In order to farm soy beans or whatever plant you eat, you have to tear up the soil and in doing so you will kill every ground squirrel, ground nesting bird, snake, vole, groundhog and rabbit that lives in that plot. Then you have to spray chemical pesticides that will annihilate anything you haven't already mechanically killed with the combine. Not to mention ruminant grazers enhance the soil through their compaction, manure and urine while plant farming has to constantly add external fertilizer to maintain yields.
>> Growing plants to feed animals and then consuming those animals is an inefficient way of obtaining calories and nutrients. Shifting to a plant-based diet would allow us to feed more people with less land, reducing the pressure on wild habitats.
> Not true. Ruminant grazing animals (like cows) use land that generally is not fit for farming plants that humans would consume.
You are arguing a different point from GP. They were talking about growing and farming animal food, feeding that to the animals, and then eating the animals. You're talking about feeding animals directly from the land.
> grazing animals use land that generally is not fit for farming plants ... make land productive that otherwise would not be
Not every land has to be "productive". This thinking got us where we are.
> In order to farm soy beans or whatever plant you eat, you have to tear up the soil and in doing so you will kill every ground squirrel, ground nesting bird ...
Crop fields do indeed disrupt the habitats of wild animals, and wild animals are also killed when harvesting plants. However, this point makes the case for a plant-based diet and not against it, since many more plants are required to produce a measure of animal flesh for food (often as high as 12:1) than are required to produce an equal measure of plants for food (which is obviously 1:1). Because of this, a plant-based diet causes less suffering and death than one that includes animals.
This is your brain on veganism. You have no concept of how cattle are actually raised. They are grazed on grassland. No farmer is cultivating food plots of soy beans and bringing them to the cattle. You are thinking of feedlots which cattle go to before slaughter where they are fed corn or soy for a short period of time in order to fatten them up. The existence of a feedlot does not change the fact that for the vast majority of the animal's life it is on a grassland eating grass that would otherwise just grow and die in the winter. The vast majority of the energy that goes into growing cattle would otherwise go completely unused without them. That is why ruminants are special. They turn grass into protein, which is necessary for life, especially brain function. You just want to eat your disgusting soyburger and treat it as some kind of penance so you can then parade around as if you are morally better than people who eat meat. Sorry, we will never stop eating meat and you will never acknowledge the reality that ruminant grazing is good for the environment. You will never consider why there were tens of millions of ruminant bison covering North America for thousands of years. They were a tool of the balance of nature that helped the ecosystem. Keep killing small animals and pretending you're better than everyone else. It will work out really great for you.
> You have no concept of how cattle are actually raised. They are grazed on grassland. No farmer is cultivating food plots of soy beans and bringing them to the cattle. You are thinking of feedlots which cattle go to before slaughter where they are fed corn or soy for a short period of time in order to fatten them up.
While it's true that cattle are often raised on grasslands, the global demand for beef has led to many operations utilizing grain-based feedlots, which do have environmental implications. It's estimated that about a third of the Earth's arable land is used to grow crops for animal feed.
Furthermore, the conversion of forests and other natural habitats to grassland for cattle grazing is a significant driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss, particularly in places like the Amazon.
> The existence of a feedlot does not change the fact that for the vast majority of the animal's life it is on a grassland eating grass that would otherwise just grow and die in the winter. The vast majority of the energy that goes into growing cattle would otherwise go completely unused without them. That is why ruminants are special. They turn grass into protein, which is necessary for life, especially brain function.
Indeed, ruminants play a unique role in converting grass into protein. However, the issue isn't as straightforward as just utilizing grasslands. The environmental footprint of raising cattle, even on grasslands, includes water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and land degradation. This, combined with the growing global demand for meat, creates a sustainability challenge that cannot be overlooked.
> You just want to eat your disgusting soyburger and treat it as some kind of penance so you can then parade around as if you are morally better than people who eat meat. Sorry, we will never stop eating meat and you will never acknowledge the reality that ruminant grazing is good for the environment.
It's not about moral superiority but about finding sustainable and ethical ways to meet our nutritional needs. While ruminant grazing can have some environmental benefits, it's not universally "good" for the environment given the issues like:
- Greenhouse gas emissions
- Deforestation
- Land degradation
- Water pollution
- Water overconsumption
- Loss of biodiversity
- Antibiotic resistance
- Ocean dead zones
- Inefficient land and resource use
- Ethical concerns regarding animal welfare
- Contribution to zoonotic diseases
- Air pollution
- Eutrophication
- Soil erosion
- High energy consumption
- Chemical runoff from pesticides and fertilizers
- Destruction of habitats and ecosystems
- Inequality in global food distribution
- Public health risks from foodborne illnesses
- Nutrient pollution
- Strain on waste management systems
> You will never consider why there were tens of millions of ruminant bison covering North America for thousands of years. They were a tool of the balance of nature that helped the ecosystem.
The comparison between modern cattle farming and historic bison populations is not entirely valid. Bison roamed freely, contributed to nutrient cycling, and didn't contribute to the same environmental problems associated with large-scale livestock farming.
For anyone reading this, for having seen and chatted with a farmer raising AAA Angus beef for McDonalds, everything the above commenter is saying is wrong.
The beef are in lots as soon as they are taken from their mothers and are fed from soy and other crops.
Most of the beef production is not fed grass - or it is a byproduct of giving them access to outside, but isn't their main nutrition.
Ruminant grazing on natural grasslands is not sufficient to meet the demand for meat. This is why chunks of the Amazon are burned down to create more land for raising livestock. And raising crops for people is much more efficient (in terms of calories per acre) than raising those same crops for animals. Any arguments highlighting the destructive effects of industrial crop farming apply ~10x for meat since much of the meat we eat is raised on soy and other feed crops.
Why were there tens of millions of bison in North America before human development?
>value
This entire discussion is about the proper use of land. That discussion is impossible without some notion of value, or highest and best use. Any other consideration just ends in "all humans should die". If that's your position then its a waste of time even discussing the situation with you.
I'm not saying that grazing animals are a problem, I'm saying that markets and regulators are doing a bad job of managing their location and population size, and that wolves would do it better. Those markets and regulators have a certain values system: they want certain numbers to go up, certain people to be re-elected, etc.
Most humans also want their grandchildren to grow up in an environment that isn't teetering on collapse--which is not something that the dominant values system is considering. So my issue with "value" is not that it's useless, but that we're using it in a way that fails to acknowledge that different people value different outcomes. We're instead encouraged to seek value of an unspecified type and leave it to other people to decide which outcomes actually result from that seeking. It's a sort of blindness and it's leading us off a cliff.
> Growing plants to feed animals and then consuming those animals is an inefficient way of obtaining calories and nutrients. Shifting to a plant-based diet would allow us to feed more people with less land, reducing the pressure on wild habitats.
Regarding this point, it's important to remember that animals have the ability to transform materials we can't get any sustenance from, because they're not edible, into food. To get the idea, think how pigs have been historically such a popular food in many countries. They would basically eat anything, the owners get the pig fat, then they eat the pig.
Another thing to remember is that proteins coming from vegetables are low quality compared to their animal counterparts. For the great majority of the world population a vegan diet is inaccessible. You simply don't get all the nutrients you need from vegetables alone. Friends who maintain a vegan diet for ideological reasons have to supplement it with a heavy dose of pills and other compounds lest they have have problem maintaining their energy levels, even if they have calorie rich diets.
I'm aware. Not necessary in 21st century (in most of the world).
> proteins coming from vegetables are low quality
Protein "quality" relates to the presence of essential amino acids. Animal proteins contain all nine essential amino acids and are thus considered "complete."
Plant proteins often lack one or more essential amino acids. However, they aren't "low quality" - you just need to consume a variety of plant proteins (like legumes, nuts, seeds, whole grains) to get all the essential amino acids.
This process is called protein combining. As long as you're eating a varied diet throughout the day, your body can assemble the necessary amino acids. Plus, plant proteins provide other nutritional benefits like fiber and antioxidants (as opposed to inflamation-inducing effects of meat and dairy).
> Friends who maintain a vegan diet for ideological reasons have to supplement it with a heavy dose of pills ...
Also not true - only B12 is necessary. It's often a part of animal feed anyway, so why not skip the intermediary.
They are low quality precisely because they are less rich in types of amino acids. Given the option of having animal or vegetable-based proteins you would always pick animal, all other things being equal.
Having a “varied” diet is much easier said than done. Even people who are well off, living in rich and developed countries have difficulty maintaining this balance. This is a personal observation, but I suspect a lot of people underestimate how hard it is to maintain this lifestyle.
Another aspect that I don’t see discussed anywhere is that you need to have diversity of vegetables just to maintain a functional diet, what will happen to people when for some reason there are problems in the supply chain of a specific crop, you have a bad year with low yields and the price goes to the roof?
Another false assumption is that everyone can accommodate a purely plant-based diet.
But all other things will never be equal because animal protein costs 10x more energy to produce.
> what will happen to people when for reason there’s a problem in the supply chain of a specific crop or you have a bad year with low yields and the price goes to the roof?
Have you been to a produce department? Most of them in the US could be reduced to 25% their current size and still have 200% the diversity of the meat department. Being unable to find one or more amino acids is just not a problem that vegetarians have.
The problem is constantly having to cook for yourself because vegetarian options at most restaurants (or prepared by well-meaning carnivore friends) are just "leave the meat off" and not designed from the ground up to be nutritional without meat. Cultural change would make it easy.
> Having a “varied” diet is much easier said than done
I think you overestimate what varied means in this context, usually two or three different protein sources are enough.
Consider a random day where I tracked my food intake: I ate some oatmeal for breakfast and dinner, and noodles with chickpeas for for lunch. In the end I had between 120% to 250% of the RDA for the different essential amino acids.
Edit: Also "Another false assumption is that everyone can accommodate a purely plant-based diet". Do you have a source on that, with maybe an estimation to what percent of the population this applies to?
To your second point, we'll agree that a plant-based diet with supplements is feasible for human health.
Your first point is misleading because we currently grow a lot of food to feed animals to eat, and clear out forests to make pasture.
- "More than three-quarters (77%) of soy is used as feed for livestock."[1]
- "Seventy per cent of formerly forested land in the Amazon, and 91% of land deforested since 1970, is used for livestock pasture."[2]
- 38.7% of Corn produced in the US is for livestock feed.[3]
I fail to see the point of your thought experiment
In reality people are not isolated 10 acres plots of land, they eat what is available at the grocery store, which is part of an industry and a global chain of production. If you remove that, you should provide a valid reason. You're also welcome to go watch gamechangers to see what they have to say about nutrition, they have Phds I believe
I'm not carried away by credentials. There are some morons around with Phds. And I'm sure that you will find some Phds who will find fault with with what is espoused in gamechangers. My point is just because you look at a documentary, or even published papers, you as an individual cannot decide easily, because there are opposing views even among people with a lot of credentials. Of course most people choose to go with consensus. But then consensus itself can be quite wrong.
That's great - feel free to inform yourself about nutrition, Gamechangers is a good source of information about nutrition, using all kinds of evidence. I myself am healthy and have now been vegan for 8 or 9 years, eating a vast majority of cheap and local-ish food
(Edit: local ish in the sense that I eat banans and stuff like that like a normal human being)
The fact that they had to make a movie showing that people can have muscles following a plant-based diet proves my point. If it was widely feasible, they wouldn't have to create propaganda to support the point.
That's kinda circular isn't it? "Since they made a movie it has to be fake"?
Come on my friend, at least try. And without even thinking about my nutrition I am a healthy vegan since 9 years, not taking supplements and eating cheap localish food.
I think you're absolutely right, but this message is greeted with open hostility in many parts of the internet. Availability of cheap meat is almost seen as a god-given right in developed countries.
> - Growing plants to feed animals and then consuming those animals is an inefficient way of obtaining calories and nutrients. Shifting to a plant-based diet would allow us to feed more people with less land, reducing the pressure on wild habitats.
I think about this all the time. We need to get the US to stop subsidizing beef so that it can be priced according to its trophic level and not according to its favor with lobbyists.
I am doing my part by deciding not to have kids: imagine the incredible amount of resources I just saved with my decision. Thousands of chickens, dozens of cows, pounds and pounds of fertilizers, etc.
This is the kind of forward thinking we need. The issue is explained, in great detail, what happens in the future in the documentary called “Idiocracy” by the prophet Mike Judge.
I do respect your opinion, but having kids just because "less smart" people would be having kids anyway is, in my humble opinion, the perfect example of a tragedy of the commons situation, where the resource at play is our scarce planet.
Not my opinion, it’s exactly what will happen. Unless the whole world decides to do birth control, which isn’t likely seeing that half the USA just made abortion illegal. They’re making it happen right now.
Alternatively, you spend your life helping and teaching other children, which could even result in better outcomes than only caring about your own ones.
This is the only way out of this, education. Teaching. Educating. Passing that along to the next generation. Genetics plays a role, yes, but collective intelligence can and will grow.
If everyone stopped, at some point it would become environmentally feasible (by some metric, I'm sure) to have offsprings again, in which case I would certainly amend my decision (clearly hypothetical, because I wouldn't be alive anymore by then).
It's the same non-sense argument of "imagine if everyone invested in index funds". It cannot happen, because at some point the right arbitrage opportunity becomes too obvious to ignore. Here is the same, at some tipping point there would be so many resources available per capita that it would make complete sense to have kids again without screwing up the environment.
All the downvotes simply prove, in my opinion, that people get really offended when confronted with the uncomfortable fact that having kids is, by far and on average, the single most negatively impacting choice they will make on environmental resource consumption in their lives, but they'd rather blather about not taking that one flight or eating organic quinoa for lunch, missing the forest for the tree. I don't blame anyone for that, it's very much biological.
Me too, and for the same reason. But I don't think an air of solemn responsibility to the environment is the right way to frame it.
I hope you're having a great time in a way that others (especially children) can see and emulate. I hope you're enjoying projects that will be appreciated after you're dead, especially if they're the sort that people with kids don't have time for.
If we care about the children of the future, we've got to make this look good for its own sake.
At least in the case of the 200,000 Saiga Antelope, the cause appears to be bacteria/environment related:
> We ... thus concluded that P. multocida serotype B was the primary cause of the disease. [1]
> P. multocida is a ubiquitous organism, most probably widely present in the saiga antelope population in its latent form. The potential pathogenicity is inherent in the organism and can be triggered opportunistically at any time in response to environmental triggers. [1]
I used to think "environment changes" -> "animal populations must adapt, not always successfully". But what seems to be killing entire populations at a time is not mal-adaptation to environment per-say, but an otherwise dormant life-form that we live with every day, suddenly waking up and deciding its time to change the world.
It's not that 3C increase might make the globe too warm to be a comfortable place to life. It's that 3C increase might wake up an incredible evil that has been sleeping for a quarter million years. Evolution is a long-con - some of the billions of strains of dormant, boring, inactive bacterium we've yet to study may actually be the most sophisticated weapons the world has ever developed - just waiting for the right time to deploy themselves. We know there have been mass extinctions we've yet to understand, and we know most of them happened when the world was considerably warmer than it is today.
Does anyone have a realistic comment that isn’t some Malthusian doomerism? There must be a solution to this problem besides drastically curtailing people’s lifestyle, even if it involves technologies that aren’t quite here yet like genetic engineering, space travel and fusion power.
Not really - you come with the presupposition that our way of life is right and should supersede nature - that's nit how that works. We're supposed to adapt to earth, not the other way around (big surprise, humans are not able to control the environnement - you can look at how fisheries are organised for a look at where we are going - claiming sustainability while fish stocks are plumetting
It's wild how when it comes to the biggest problems, people will say "let's not be so emotional about this" and then produce suggestions borne exclusively of their emotional coping mechanism.
Because we'll see government propaganda encouraging us to carpool or meet remotely to reduce emissions. And then we'll see this shit[0], which dwarfs whatever contribution we could have made by carpooling and it becomes rapidly clear that our individual contributions do nothing.
Also, 2020 should have been a huge reversal of emissions fortune with the low amount of travel and recreation. If 2020 didn't make a dent in climate change, then you're never going to convince me that individual contributions can accomplish anything.
That doesn't really address the question, though. Even if this can't be solved with individual contributions, it's still likely that any societal changes we could make would have enormous impacts on our lifestyles. Think "cutting meat production/air travel/personal automobiles/etc by 95%". That's what OP is calling "Malthusian doomerism" — saying we need to instead look for solutions that don't involve drastic measures. Except there's not really evidence that such solutions actually exist.
If you aren't serious at all about doing anything to avoid doom that makes you the doomer. Non-doomers take reasonable precautions to avoid such things.
No. There's not. Listen to the scientists, engineers, and experts if you can't be bothered to learn the basics of resource consumption on a finite planet with billions of people. Space travel to where? We're not moving to Mars in droves, ever. It's more inhospitable than the worst environments on Earth. Genetic engineering isn't going to stop pollution and change things measurably. It's not doomerism, it's basic science, math, economics, etc.
These comments are realistic because that's how bad the situation has gotten. Decades ago there were solutions because we would have had more time. But the warnings by the experts were willfully ignored. Now we're here. Have fun while you can.
Pragmatically, we need way more investment in environmental engineering and policies that put conservation first.
Since collectively we can't be bothered because we all need the newest electric vehicle, you can also accept that mass extinction is a byproduct of humanity.
What's the baseline though? My understanding is that wild animals have always died in droves, which is why the make a ton of offspring reproductive strategy is so popular.
That's not to downplay the impact of habitat loss and other factors, but if say for example 40% of bird randomly get themselves killed every year then the marginal increase in deaths from wind power looks very different than if they don't.
I also wonder how much of this is due to better measurement and tracking and is an actual aberration. I fundamentally believe it is an aberration but improved measurement has to account for some degree of the effect.
multiple unrelated and extreme statements in response here, are telling of the psychological overwhelm individuals feel when seeing this news. There are several angles to respond to, but lets try this one
This is not an individual choice problem, so neither people who live in tiny apartments and don't drive NOR people who compete relentlessly to have and use more than others, are the topic.
Science of measurement and analysis has advanced faster in the last thirty years than the 300,000 years before it. Yet, we have quite a lot of science on say, body burden "forever" chemicals, the accumulative destruction of pesticides or the dust of tires from highways. The economic engines associated with making consumer products are not relenting their favorable economic niches. So this is a political problem.
The kind of "stall and crawl" solutions produce some short-term stability, but obviously, it is not making a significant dent. Secondly, frenzied all-out protest and disruption rarely make positive change over time in themselves, so "complete teardown" kinds of solutions are also not the thing.
Media mechanisms are part of political change, but this YNews place (high tech with ads) seems like it has over-stimulated media, and filled it with short-sighted content.
The training wheels for the species are offically "Off" now.
Maybe there should be a government mandate like a mandatory military service but where you instead go farm stuff and hunt food for a year. I say that partly in jest but I'd imagine having that perspective would change a lot of minds and help us understand where our food comes from.
In the spirit of 'science' here is a potential experiment that can be conducted to resolve the debt:
1)Individual 1 is a vegan. he is given 10 acres of land, He is free to grow whatever he wants and eat. The restriction here is he cannot raise any animals whatsoever including insects for food.
2) Individual 2 is a animal products eater, is also is given 10 acres of land, he can raise whatever he wants: pigs, chickens, cows etc. The restriction here is he cannot any eat any vegetation directly. He can eat only meat, eggs, milk etc.
Conditions:
Both these individuals should be independent, that is there should be no external resources provided to them. For example the person who raises cows, should not be provided with hay. Or the vegan should not be provided with pesticides.
Assume that both these farmers have identical resources otherwise: same type of land, access to the same amount of water etc.
Questions:
1) Who among the 2 do you think will will be more healthy?
2) Who among the 2 do you think will be more destructive to the environment?
If it were 100 farmers and 10000 acres, the it would be 1) vegan 2) carnivore.
This is because you need more diversity to be healthily vegan than you do to be healthily carnivore.
Carnivore is more damaging in both cases because however your slice it, you're going to have to dedicate more overall land to farming if you're eating animals, and that's a greater footgun probability re: eliminating a keystone species and disrupting your food supply.
If you repeated this experiment until you had no more room on the planet, then I think the carnivores would go extinct because of problems either re: the soil chemistry or re: the pollinators. The vegans would survive because so much less of the overall space would be dedicated to farmland.
>The vegans would survive because so much less of the overall space would be dedicated to farmland.
Are you really sure about the "overall space" part? I mean have you really examined it? Do you have direct experience, as in having lived in a farmland, Or have you talked to a farmer? Or have you closely listen to accounts of farmers on videos or essays?
No direct experience, just biology class. This was on the final that I took today :)
Given a fixed amount of sunlight and a fixed time window, you've got W available Joules. Only X makes it into plant biomass. If you're eating a consumer, only Y makes it into animal biomass, and then only Z is available to the human.
In all known cases W > X > Y > Z, generally by factors of 2 to 20. The vegans are going to need X/Y times less farmland to meet their energy needs. Maybe they need a bit more than that to account for the nutritional diversity they require, but I doubt that'll offset it.
The biggest loss is gonna be W, and if you compare crops to grazing land it's pretty clear which one has more sun-facing chlorophyll.
And, even if it did offset it, you've still achieved less antibiotics resistance and zoonotic pathogen (like COVID) risk. The closer our food is to us, the closer its pathogens are to our pathogens. Mammals are very close to us, biologically. Plants are about as distant as we can get. They're crawling with viruses, but we don't notice them since they're all designed for plant cells!
__MatrixMan__ , the biology class is a fair start. But isn't one of the core principles of what is considered 'good' science, experimentation, or what happens in practice?
Are you proposing that there's an ongoing experiment somewhere in practice that might inform my view? I'm open to that, but my impression of actual farmers is that they're bound by so many artificial constraints that their experience is unlikely to align with sound experiment design.
>Are you proposing that there's an ongoing experiment somewhere in practice that might inform my view?
Yes, there are. Or at least relatively close to the thought experiment. I have seen them over the years. If I find a good article or a video I will post it.
(X - Z) is not necessarily < (Y - Z) for a given individual's choice of X vs Y though. If a vegan is judicious about picking nutritious food, (X - Z) > a lazy junk food-eating person who doesn't understand nutrition, only what tastes good's (Y - Z).
I might be missing something, but the healthy-vs-unhealthy choices axis seems orthogonal here. Vegans and meat eaters both have their fair share of healthy and unhealthy people. The matter at hand is the necessary acreage that they have to dedicate to farming.
> Vegans and meat eaters both have their fair share of healthy and unhealthy people.
I don't take that as a given. Of course there are vegans who are unhealthy, but eating vegan is not straightforwards. You do actually have to do some amount of research to not develop problems eating vegan (B12 deficiency is a common side-effect of yolo eating vegan) and have some idea about nutrition. There is no such requirement to eating whatever. Unless you eat one thing exclusively (like an all-beef-and-only-beef diet), as an omnivore you'll get all the nutrients you need.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadEdit: it looks like the ratio has shifted now
Furthermore, the challenge isn't in figuring out the individual changes you list it's figuring out how to convince everyone to adopt them.
I don’t know how to make everyone do that, so, I still don’t know what to do.
- somebody
Ghandi also started a massive political movement so I think he did a lot of doing in between his being.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth
The idea that individuals have no responsibility or power is part of how it has been poisoned. I've known people who genuinely would say something like "did you know a half dozen companies put out the majority of emissions? so we don't need to consume less or differently, everything is those companies' fault".
We act like all the options are is a)Being mindful of your emissions (Which will change nothing for the planet) b)Do nothing (Also changes nothing)
While the actual option is to stop the corporations by any and all means. Native americans have a history of doing this with little support form the rest of americans.
If global warming is a real issue, is ''buying an EV'' or ''taking the bus'' an acceptable solution to you? Sincelrely, is it at the height of the problem? Shouldn't you have more - say - radical, views?
Calling for other people to do things you yourself won't do (how many acts of ecoterrorism have you done lately?) isn't really helping, it's the same self-serving logic I was complaining about.
Funny you went to ecoterrorism - I wouldn't have called what Native Americans were doing eco terrorism - they were defending their way of life.
There are many things you can do that are more impactful than taking the bus and that aren't blowing up pipelines - chatting with representatives, working with journalists to help undercover situations, working with activists you support the actions and reasoning of....see what I mean?
I think your logic is self serving - if everyone thinks like you, are things going to change? Because they sure don't seem like they will. But you feel comfortable in your daily life.
(And to add - objectively better can be right even if the ''positive value'' is imperceptible. Are you doing actual efforts to solve the issue or just enough to not feel like it's your responsibility?)
My life does not fit within walking distance of a 110m2 box.
(As an aside, it seems a lot of people unwittingly are making this choice which I find both curious and very depressing)
The house doesn't make me happy.
Not hearing my neighbors music blasting through the floor at 2am makes me happy.
Not hearing my neighbors screaming at each other every day makes me happy
Being able to paint my walls any color I want makes me happy.
Having a plot of land I can dig up and plant stuff on or build a workshop on makes me happy.
Having a place that is my own that I can do basically anything I want with makes me happy.
Renting apartments is shit. Even condos, which you own on paper but cannot just do whatever you like with, sucks.
Hacker spaces don't exist everywhere by the way, and the ones I have been to sucked.
I don't want every facet of my life outside of my home to be public and shared. I want a private yard, not a communal park and garden. I want a private shop, not a public maker space. I want peace and quiet and a bit of distance from my neighbors, not shared walls.
Because I've lived the apartment life and it honestly did make me want to kill myself. I don't know how people just live like that.
I am expressing that I would rather die than live in the miserable, joyless sounding purgatory that was described.
Recent submission, a video on Singer's paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718342 https://youtu.be/KVl5kMXz1vA
Animal: goes extinct
Humanity: Why would nature do this!?
- The majority of deforestation (particularly in the Amazon), is driven by livestock farming. By reducing demand for animal products, we could slow or even reverse the trend of habitat destruction, thus preserving biodiversity.
- Growing plants to feed animals and then consuming those animals is an inefficient way of obtaining calories and nutrients. Shifting to a plant-based diet would allow us to feed more people with less land, reducing the pressure on wild habitats.
- Animal agriculture is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
- Overfishing is a major threat to marine biodiversity. By reducing our consumption of fish, we can help protect marine ecosystems.
- Animal agriculture is also a significant source of pollution, including runoff from farms that can create dead zones in oceans and rivers, harming aquatic species.
- Intensive animal farming can create conditions ripe for the emergence of new diseases (zoonotic diseases), some of which could potentially leap to humans and cause pandemics, as well as decimate animal populations.
Extant emissions from the people there dwarf the Amazon's deforestation so it's a much better fix.
What the Germans did then, the Brazilians do a fraction of now.
40% forest cover lost. And now, Germany has almost no primary forest. And Germans burn oil and coal and gas like no other.
The net effect of Germany on the Climate is the effect of an Environmental WMD.
What we need is a Green Treaty of Versailles.
Thinking in terms of money and debt is what got us into this situation. I'm doubtful that it will get us out of it.
In fact, turning our backs on the logic of the market is probably part of the fix. We need a jubilee so that the people made powerful by causing these problems aren't powerful anymore.
Typical of discourse today is to let off the societies that industrialized first with no complaint while simultaneously moralizing against those who are industrializing now.
Europe hoards nuclear technology and won't share it with the developing world. Europe burns oil and gas and coal in vast quantities to live. All while Europe says that all past carbon emissions must be considered forgiven debt and all present carbon emissions must be considered sin.
The developing world will do as Europe did to get to Europe's standard of living. The developing world will not listen to the moralizing of Europeans who won't do their part. And Europeans can clutch their pearls about the Amazon, but the people who live there will raze it for industry just as the Europeans did. And it will be right.
Maybe jubilee wasn't the right word. I'm saying we stop accepting money for money's sake. So the reaped rewards would no longer be valuable.
Instead we need a system backed by something auditable, so that when a stranger offers it to you, you can investigate and decide if you actually value the activity that created it. Thus creating an incentive to work on projects that are more solution than problem.
Not true. Ruminant grazing animals (like cows) use land that generally is not fit for farming plants that humans would consume. They make land productive that otherwise would not be. Also, farming for the staples of plant-based diets annihilates animal life. In order to farm soy beans or whatever plant you eat, you have to tear up the soil and in doing so you will kill every ground squirrel, ground nesting bird, snake, vole, groundhog and rabbit that lives in that plot. Then you have to spray chemical pesticides that will annihilate anything you haven't already mechanically killed with the combine. Not to mention ruminant grazers enhance the soil through their compaction, manure and urine while plant farming has to constantly add external fertilizer to maintain yields.
> Not true. Ruminant grazing animals (like cows) use land that generally is not fit for farming plants that humans would consume.
You are arguing a different point from GP. They were talking about growing and farming animal food, feeding that to the animals, and then eating the animals. You're talking about feeding animals directly from the land.
> grazing animals use land that generally is not fit for farming plants ... make land productive that otherwise would not be
Not every land has to be "productive". This thinking got us where we are.
> In order to farm soy beans or whatever plant you eat, you have to tear up the soil and in doing so you will kill every ground squirrel, ground nesting bird ...
Crop fields do indeed disrupt the habitats of wild animals, and wild animals are also killed when harvesting plants. However, this point makes the case for a plant-based diet and not against it, since many more plants are required to produce a measure of animal flesh for food (often as high as 12:1) than are required to produce an equal measure of plants for food (which is obviously 1:1). Because of this, a plant-based diet causes less suffering and death than one that includes animals.
https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/vegans-kill-animals-too
> Then you have to spray chemical pesticides that will annihilate anything
Dtto.
> Not to mention ruminant grazers enhance the soil through their compaction, manure and urine
Use compost / compost tea / companion / nitrogen fixing plants.
While it's true that cattle are often raised on grasslands, the global demand for beef has led to many operations utilizing grain-based feedlots, which do have environmental implications. It's estimated that about a third of the Earth's arable land is used to grow crops for animal feed.
Furthermore, the conversion of forests and other natural habitats to grassland for cattle grazing is a significant driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss, particularly in places like the Amazon.
> The existence of a feedlot does not change the fact that for the vast majority of the animal's life it is on a grassland eating grass that would otherwise just grow and die in the winter. The vast majority of the energy that goes into growing cattle would otherwise go completely unused without them. That is why ruminants are special. They turn grass into protein, which is necessary for life, especially brain function.
Indeed, ruminants play a unique role in converting grass into protein. However, the issue isn't as straightforward as just utilizing grasslands. The environmental footprint of raising cattle, even on grasslands, includes water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and land degradation. This, combined with the growing global demand for meat, creates a sustainability challenge that cannot be overlooked.
> You just want to eat your disgusting soyburger and treat it as some kind of penance so you can then parade around as if you are morally better than people who eat meat. Sorry, we will never stop eating meat and you will never acknowledge the reality that ruminant grazing is good for the environment.
It's not about moral superiority but about finding sustainable and ethical ways to meet our nutritional needs. While ruminant grazing can have some environmental benefits, it's not universally "good" for the environment given the issues like:
- Greenhouse gas emissions
- Deforestation
- Land degradation
- Water pollution
- Water overconsumption
- Loss of biodiversity
- Antibiotic resistance
- Ocean dead zones
- Inefficient land and resource use
- Ethical concerns regarding animal welfare
- Contribution to zoonotic diseases
- Air pollution
- Eutrophication
- Soil erosion
- High energy consumption
- Chemical runoff from pesticides and fertilizers
- Destruction of habitats and ecosystems
- Inequality in global food distribution
- Public health risks from foodborne illnesses
- Nutrient pollution
- Strain on waste management systems
> You will never consider why there were tens of millions of ruminant bison covering North America for thousands of years. They were a tool of the balance of nature that helped the ecosystem.
The comparison between modern cattle farming and historic bison populations is not entirely valid. Bison roamed freely, contributed to nutrient cycling, and didn't contribute to the same environmental problems associated with large-scale livestock farming.
What would your response be to my question 1) and question 2)
The beef are in lots as soon as they are taken from their mothers and are fed from soy and other crops.
Most of the beef production is not fed grass - or it is a byproduct of giving them access to outside, but isn't their main nutrition.
What would your response be to my question 1) and question 2)
Sidenote: I am with you as to what happens to the brains of vegans :)
Productive according to our fictions re: "value", destructive according to the ecology of systems that we rely on for survival.
Why were there tens of millions of bison in North America before human development?
>value
This entire discussion is about the proper use of land. That discussion is impossible without some notion of value, or highest and best use. Any other consideration just ends in "all humans should die". If that's your position then its a waste of time even discussing the situation with you.
Most humans also want their grandchildren to grow up in an environment that isn't teetering on collapse--which is not something that the dominant values system is considering. So my issue with "value" is not that it's useless, but that we're using it in a way that fails to acknowledge that different people value different outcomes. We're instead encouraged to seek value of an unspecified type and leave it to other people to decide which outcomes actually result from that seeking. It's a sort of blindness and it's leading us off a cliff.
Regarding this point, it's important to remember that animals have the ability to transform materials we can't get any sustenance from, because they're not edible, into food. To get the idea, think how pigs have been historically such a popular food in many countries. They would basically eat anything, the owners get the pig fat, then they eat the pig.
Another thing to remember is that proteins coming from vegetables are low quality compared to their animal counterparts. For the great majority of the world population a vegan diet is inaccessible. You simply don't get all the nutrients you need from vegetables alone. Friends who maintain a vegan diet for ideological reasons have to supplement it with a heavy dose of pills and other compounds lest they have have problem maintaining their energy levels, even if they have calorie rich diets.
I'm aware. Not necessary in 21st century (in most of the world).
> proteins coming from vegetables are low quality
Protein "quality" relates to the presence of essential amino acids. Animal proteins contain all nine essential amino acids and are thus considered "complete."
Plant proteins often lack one or more essential amino acids. However, they aren't "low quality" - you just need to consume a variety of plant proteins (like legumes, nuts, seeds, whole grains) to get all the essential amino acids.
This process is called protein combining. As long as you're eating a varied diet throughout the day, your body can assemble the necessary amino acids. Plus, plant proteins provide other nutritional benefits like fiber and antioxidants (as opposed to inflamation-inducing effects of meat and dairy).
> Friends who maintain a vegan diet for ideological reasons have to supplement it with a heavy dose of pills ...
Also not true - only B12 is necessary. It's often a part of animal feed anyway, so why not skip the intermediary.
Having a “varied” diet is much easier said than done. Even people who are well off, living in rich and developed countries have difficulty maintaining this balance. This is a personal observation, but I suspect a lot of people underestimate how hard it is to maintain this lifestyle.
Another aspect that I don’t see discussed anywhere is that you need to have diversity of vegetables just to maintain a functional diet, what will happen to people when for some reason there are problems in the supply chain of a specific crop, you have a bad year with low yields and the price goes to the roof?
Another false assumption is that everyone can accommodate a purely plant-based diet.
But all other things will never be equal because animal protein costs 10x more energy to produce.
> what will happen to people when for reason there’s a problem in the supply chain of a specific crop or you have a bad year with low yields and the price goes to the roof?
Have you been to a produce department? Most of them in the US could be reduced to 25% their current size and still have 200% the diversity of the meat department. Being unable to find one or more amino acids is just not a problem that vegetarians have.
The problem is constantly having to cook for yourself because vegetarian options at most restaurants (or prepared by well-meaning carnivore friends) are just "leave the meat off" and not designed from the ground up to be nutritional without meat. Cultural change would make it easy.
I think you overestimate what varied means in this context, usually two or three different protein sources are enough.
Consider a random day where I tracked my food intake: I ate some oatmeal for breakfast and dinner, and noodles with chickpeas for for lunch. In the end I had between 120% to 250% of the RDA for the different essential amino acids.
Edit: Also "Another false assumption is that everyone can accommodate a purely plant-based diet". Do you have a source on that, with maybe an estimation to what percent of the population this applies to?
Your first point is misleading because we currently grow a lot of food to feed animals to eat, and clear out forests to make pasture. - "More than three-quarters (77%) of soy is used as feed for livestock."[1] - "Seventy per cent of formerly forested land in the Amazon, and 91% of land deforested since 1970, is used for livestock pasture."[2] - 38.7% of Corn produced in the US is for livestock feed.[3]
1: https://ourworldindata.org/soy#:~:text=More%20than%20three%2.... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_Brazil#Rates:.... 3: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-uses-of-cor...
How much of that land could be used for farming food for humans? Brazil has famously poor soil.
What would your response be to my question 1) and question 2)
I'm not carried away by credentials. There are some morons around with Phds. And I'm sure that you will find some Phds who will find fault with with what is espoused in gamechangers. My point is just because you look at a documentary, or even published papers, you as an individual cannot decide easily, because there are opposing views even among people with a lot of credentials. Of course most people choose to go with consensus. But then consensus itself can be quite wrong.
Come on my friend, at least try. And without even thinking about my nutrition I am a healthy vegan since 9 years, not taking supplements and eating cheap localish food.
What would your response be to my question 1) and question 2)
What would your response be to my question 1) and question 2)
I think about this all the time. We need to get the US to stop subsidizing beef so that it can be priced according to its trophic level and not according to its favor with lobbyists.
What would your response be to my question 1) and question 2)
All this without causing any pain or suffering.
It's the same non-sense argument of "imagine if everyone invested in index funds". It cannot happen, because at some point the right arbitrage opportunity becomes too obvious to ignore. Here is the same, at some tipping point there would be so many resources available per capita that it would make complete sense to have kids again without screwing up the environment.
All the downvotes simply prove, in my opinion, that people get really offended when confronted with the uncomfortable fact that having kids is, by far and on average, the single most negatively impacting choice they will make on environmental resource consumption in their lives, but they'd rather blather about not taking that one flight or eating organic quinoa for lunch, missing the forest for the tree. I don't blame anyone for that, it's very much biological.
I hope you're having a great time in a way that others (especially children) can see and emulate. I hope you're enjoying projects that will be appreciated after you're dead, especially if they're the sort that people with kids don't have time for.
If we care about the children of the future, we've got to make this look good for its own sake.
> We ... thus concluded that P. multocida serotype B was the primary cause of the disease. [1]
> P. multocida is a ubiquitous organism, most probably widely present in the saiga antelope population in its latent form. The potential pathogenicity is inherent in the organism and can be triggered opportunistically at any time in response to environmental triggers. [1]
I used to think "environment changes" -> "animal populations must adapt, not always successfully". But what seems to be killing entire populations at a time is not mal-adaptation to environment per-say, but an otherwise dormant life-form that we live with every day, suddenly waking up and deciding its time to change the world.
It's not that 3C increase might make the globe too warm to be a comfortable place to life. It's that 3C increase might wake up an incredible evil that has been sleeping for a quarter million years. Evolution is a long-con - some of the billions of strains of dormant, boring, inactive bacterium we've yet to study may actually be the most sophisticated weapons the world has ever developed - just waiting for the right time to deploy themselves. We know there have been mass extinctions we've yet to understand, and we know most of them happened when the world was considerably warmer than it is today.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6537709/
It's wild how when it comes to the biggest problems, people will say "let's not be so emotional about this" and then produce suggestions borne exclusively of their emotional coping mechanism.
Also, 2020 should have been a huge reversal of emissions fortune with the low amount of travel and recreation. If 2020 didn't make a dent in climate change, then you're never going to convince me that individual contributions can accomplish anything.
[0]https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/ghost-flights-pandemic-gr...
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
Capitalism says that's good because market is growing.
Since collectively we can't be bothered because we all need the newest electric vehicle, you can also accept that mass extinction is a byproduct of humanity.
That's not to downplay the impact of habitat loss and other factors, but if say for example 40% of bird randomly get themselves killed every year then the marginal increase in deaths from wind power looks very different than if they don't.
"you are next" !?
This is not an individual choice problem, so neither people who live in tiny apartments and don't drive NOR people who compete relentlessly to have and use more than others, are the topic.
Science of measurement and analysis has advanced faster in the last thirty years than the 300,000 years before it. Yet, we have quite a lot of science on say, body burden "forever" chemicals, the accumulative destruction of pesticides or the dust of tires from highways. The economic engines associated with making consumer products are not relenting their favorable economic niches. So this is a political problem.
The kind of "stall and crawl" solutions produce some short-term stability, but obviously, it is not making a significant dent. Secondly, frenzied all-out protest and disruption rarely make positive change over time in themselves, so "complete teardown" kinds of solutions are also not the thing.
Media mechanisms are part of political change, but this YNews place (high tech with ads) seems like it has over-stimulated media, and filled it with short-sighted content.
The training wheels for the species are offically "Off" now.
“700 million tons of dead tissue (a mass equivalent to one million Christ the Redeemer statues).”
1)Individual 1 is a vegan. he is given 10 acres of land, He is free to grow whatever he wants and eat. The restriction here is he cannot raise any animals whatsoever including insects for food.
2) Individual 2 is a animal products eater, is also is given 10 acres of land, he can raise whatever he wants: pigs, chickens, cows etc. The restriction here is he cannot any eat any vegetation directly. He can eat only meat, eggs, milk etc.
Conditions:
Both these individuals should be independent, that is there should be no external resources provided to them. For example the person who raises cows, should not be provided with hay. Or the vegan should not be provided with pesticides.
Assume that both these farmers have identical resources otherwise: same type of land, access to the same amount of water etc.
Questions:
1) Who among the 2 do you think will will be more healthy?
2) Who among the 2 do you think will be more destructive to the environment?
If it were 100 farmers and 10000 acres, the it would be 1) vegan 2) carnivore.
This is because you need more diversity to be healthily vegan than you do to be healthily carnivore.
Carnivore is more damaging in both cases because however your slice it, you're going to have to dedicate more overall land to farming if you're eating animals, and that's a greater footgun probability re: eliminating a keystone species and disrupting your food supply.
If you repeated this experiment until you had no more room on the planet, then I think the carnivores would go extinct because of problems either re: the soil chemistry or re: the pollinators. The vegans would survive because so much less of the overall space would be dedicated to farmland.
Are you really sure about the "overall space" part? I mean have you really examined it? Do you have direct experience, as in having lived in a farmland, Or have you talked to a farmer? Or have you closely listen to accounts of farmers on videos or essays?
Given a fixed amount of sunlight and a fixed time window, you've got W available Joules. Only X makes it into plant biomass. If you're eating a consumer, only Y makes it into animal biomass, and then only Z is available to the human.
In all known cases W > X > Y > Z, generally by factors of 2 to 20. The vegans are going to need X/Y times less farmland to meet their energy needs. Maybe they need a bit more than that to account for the nutritional diversity they require, but I doubt that'll offset it.
The biggest loss is gonna be W, and if you compare crops to grazing land it's pretty clear which one has more sun-facing chlorophyll.
Are you proposing that there's an ongoing experiment somewhere in practice that might inform my view? I'm open to that, but my impression of actual farmers is that they're bound by so many artificial constraints that their experience is unlikely to align with sound experiment design.
Yes, there are. Or at least relatively close to the thought experiment. I have seen them over the years. If I find a good article or a video I will post it.
I don't take that as a given. Of course there are vegans who are unhealthy, but eating vegan is not straightforwards. You do actually have to do some amount of research to not develop problems eating vegan (B12 deficiency is a common side-effect of yolo eating vegan) and have some idea about nutrition. There is no such requirement to eating whatever. Unless you eat one thing exclusively (like an all-beef-and-only-beef diet), as an omnivore you'll get all the nutrients you need.