131–140 of 322 posts
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We could do that with all food too. If you look at the subsidies, they are typically in grants/payments to farmers. When the produce is exported, we are essentially subsidizing a foreign country with our tax money.
And often killing the domestic production in that country, because they can't compete with the highly subsidized import.
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My recent observations of HN is that many here take their own experience, and extrapolate that they are common and therefore anybody else could've also done it, and would be willing to. But there's empirical evidence that not many people want to stop eating meat. Look at how few vegetarians there are, compared to non-vegetarians. Do you really think those people don't know it's possible to live healthily as vegetaria…
I routinely encounter people who believe it is not possible to live healthily as vegetarians. I hired a developer who was a Hindu a couple of years back and half my team could not believe that he had never eaten meat, in part because he was very active and healthy.
Worth noting that methane is up to 84 times as damaging as CO2 in the atmosphere upon release. ( https://www.edf.org/climate/methane-other-important-greenhou... ) That means that (ironically I guess) this has the potential to be just about the biggest bang-for-buck weapon we have against climate change in the next decade. I don't envy the researchers having to explain it to their kids later though. "What'd you do in…
"this has the potential to be just about the biggest bang-for-buck weapon we have against climate change in the next decade." Now we only need to get cars 'n' lorries etc, ships and aeroplanes to eat the stuff and it's job done. Obviously, coal and gas fired power stations are already changing their diet and farting and belching less methane already. The Great Barrier Reef is already de-bleaching and the Greenland ic…
Or maybe I said “best bang-for-buck” and you heard “planes eat seaweed”.
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Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for the green revolution and understood the misguidance of efficiency as a strategy better than anyone. As a tactic it works under the strategy of managing population, as he said in his acceptance speech: > "The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can…
>overshoot, which leads to collapse Imagine, in 50 or so years, a fairly substantial human colony is established on another planet, and it figures out how to become self-sustaining. This self-sustenance act is what we need to refine - not the going to Mars bit, of course - but what I am trying to say is that the pressure is on to find self-sustaining ways to feed humans (hint: grow local or gtfo) at the very high end…
Hold up its the disgusting things we're feeding cattle that's contributing to their immense environmental impact? HUH. Maybe someday we'll realize that raising them in feedlots on 100% processed packaged food made from things like how they forage in nature is most of the problem as well, and if you raise them in distributed networks so they interact with their ecosystem instead of trampling it, and then not have to s…
Cows do not eat 100% packaged food if they eat any at all. In fact, 80% of what cows eat cannot be eaten by humans.[1] If you could add seaweed to drastically reduce emissions not would be a win for everyone. > They learned that most cow diets contain the following: Grass: More than 50 percent of cow feed is actually grass (farmers call it hay and silage). While people often think dairy cows are fed a high-grain diet…
How is this any different from hybrid vehicles still burning FF? Yes, it makes it slightly better, but eating certain protein sources is a choice, whereas transportation infrastructure is an economically-limited choice. Animal ag still causes: - climate change - inefficient allocation of calories and fresh water - water, air, and ground pollution (lakes of poo, runoff into rivers) - pandemic and other zoonotic diseas…
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In Australia a significant amount (can't remember the specifics) of cattle is raised on land that is unsuitable for crop production. My own experience confirms this. I've seen many cattle farms around Queensland - some with low stocking density and no deforestation, others very poorly managed with no trees at all or full of invasive species. It's not as simple as eating meat = bad, but that's the message most people…
> In Australia a significant amount (can't remember the specifics) of cattle is raised on land that is unsuitable for crop production. I'm not sure how that makes anything better. It will still require more carbon emissions than growing elsewhere. In fact raising cattle in a spot like you describe still well require growing the feed elsewhere. Wouldn't it be much better to just eat the soup or other crop directly, sa…
No. Feeding bovine meat cattle with commercial crops is uneconomical. It only happens as a small complement to the main diet or in emergencies. Nearly all of the cattle food grows on the terrain where they are created.
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You can perfectly live on eating meat once or twice a week. Especially if your job isn’t that physically demanding. You reduce meat consumption to 1/7 if you do so. If most of us did that a lot of problems would be moot.
You assume that the only reason people eat meat is either sociological or physical workout. You have multiple subsets of population that may find it more difficult to quit meat than the others. For women (especially pregnant), meat is a source of Iron. For people with adhd, there is a correlation with meat eating (and we can assume causation as well, since adhd is genetic). Meat is a source of vitamins that have been…
I also think all the talk of missing protein, iron, and vitamins is significantly overblown. Every blood panel I've ever had has been normal with iron on the high end and I can maintain an active lifestyle quite easily.
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> In Australia a significant amount (can't remember the specifics) of cattle is raised on land that is unsuitable for crop production. I'm not sure how that makes anything better. It will still require more carbon emissions than growing elsewhere. In fact raising cattle in a spot like you describe still well require growing the feed elsewhere. Wouldn't it be much better to just eat the soup or other crop directly, sa…
> In fact raising cattle in a spot like you describe still well require growing the feed elsewhere. No. Feeding bovine meat cattle with commercial crops is uneconomical. It only happens as a small complement to the main diet or in emergencies. Nearly all of the cattle food grows on the terrain where they are created.
How much could this reduce the total environmental food print of cattle? I.e. including all the energy used to grow the crops they eat, the deforestation to make room for the crops + cattle, the waste the cows produce. Animal farming creates vast damage because of how inefficient it is and seaweed won't address how much feed cows need or that the world is eating more and more meat as countries get richer: > The energ…
In Australia a significant amount (can't remember the specifics) of cattle is raised on land that is unsuitable for crop production. My own experience confirms this. I've seen many cattle farms around Queensland - some with low stocking density and no deforestation, others very poorly managed with no trees at all or full of invasive species. It's not as simple as eating meat = bad, but that's the message most people…
72% of all deforestation in Queensland and 94% in the Great Barrier Reef catchment areas is a direct result of land clearing for beef production.
Edit: One source was missing.
https://www.wilderness.org.au/images/resources/Beef-Deforest...
https://www.wilderness.org.au//images/resources/The_Drivers_...