151–160 of 344 posts
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Better than being headed into a new medieval era because climate change caused civilization to collapse.
There is no universe where climate change causes the literal collapse of civilization. Exaggerating the risks of something just destroys the credibility of the people doing the exaggerating: consider DARE and drugs.
this is a half-baked ‘solution‘ that just makes eating meat a luxury. a thing only for the rich. it’ll be like crimes that are punished by a fine - they just become the ‘fee’ that allows the propertied class to do whatever they want. beef is deadly for humanity because of destructive water and land usage (Vice had a great video showing the Amazon deforestation due to beef production). edit: my point is that the prope…
If only allowing the rich to eat beef will help save the planet then I'm for it.
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> When you grow plants, you take carbon out of the atmosphere. When you eat it, you release it back into the atmosphere. So the electricity and diesel that are involved in growing plants come from the atmosphere? That's new to me.
They didn't say that. > In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged. I cannot say anything wherever cows really are inconsequential wrt the warming effect, but it definitely goes against what's general…
As someone in the Gen X demographic who has never smoked, I've watched the anti-smoking campaigns and shift in attitudes towards smoking with interest - particularly how resistant smokers were to initially giving up smoking. I feel like eating meat is going to be my generations equivalent of smoking. Intellectually, I agree that eating meat is bad for the environment, cruel to animals (esp industrial farming) etc ...…
Did you notice what drove the change in attitudes towards smoking?
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Revealed preferences don't match that rhetoric. - People are not migrating North in droves. They are not preparing in any way. - Nuclear energy, the only realistic solution to climate change, is not being supported. It's actually being retired early in many cases and replaced with coal of all things. - Property prices on the coastline are going up. President Obama, who has access to the best information and experts,…
> People are not migrating North in droves Yes, because - you might be surprised to hear - people actually like to life where they are born and raised and require catastrophic hardship (such as the Syrian civil war) to actually start a migration.
Hm, this seems to be missing the point that plant monocrops destroy the soil and are not nearly as efficient a source of food for the human body as fresh animal meat. Regenerative agriculture, which ideally requires both animal and plant cultivation, would be a better path forward if it could scale. If I remember correctly the papers that originally thought cattle were a big contributor to global warming turned out t…
In this story the supermarkets say "We'll give consumers the choice", but for them that means choosing eco products that have ~40% higher price and they don't do that (~5% of sales is eco-friendly), so this doesn't work.
Once again it is politicians who need to take some tough measures, but they find powerful lobbies in their path plus they do not dare to take impopular measures that make products more expensive, for fear of losing votes. So for 50 years things got worse and worse.
One solution mentioned was what social enterprise True Price [0] is trying to establish: explicitly pricing the detrimental externalities that until now are shoved as costs to future generations. A pack of regular coffee with externalities priced in would go from, say, $5 to become $10, while a pack of eco-friendly coffee would go to $6.50. The surplus to the price should be reserved in a fund with which farmers can make the transition to sustainable agriculture.
> The simplest way to cut beef output is for people to eat other animals instead, or become vegetarians. That’s like, in 1900, saying “the simplest way to prevent road deaths is for everyone to drive slower.” That’s not simple at all - that’s an intractable group behavior problem. What you really need is for the government to come along and put up speed limits. Most people will push those rules, a few will flout them…
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This implies that the land used to grow cow feed couldn't be used to instead grow human-consumable crops or left fallow as a carbon sink. I'm not aware of any studies showing that.
You make a strong argument. I think this is a case where we'll find the global optimum somewhere in the middle. Deforesting the amazon to grow corn for cows is something I'm sure we can all agree is bad. Should we use livestock to eat cover crops and waste products like corn husks and cobs? This way we reuse waste and produce high quality protein to supplement our diets. Should we graze cattle on natural grasslands l…
So sure, go for 100%-grass-and-not-human-edible-food-fed beef, but that's not the current system.
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There is a certain amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and a certain amount of carbon in the ground. When you burn oil, you take carbon from the ground and introduce it into the atmosphere. This increases the total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere. When you grow plants, you take carbon out of the atmosphere. When you eat it, you release it back into the atmosphere. The total amount of carbon resident in th…
I've always thought along the same lines. But whatabout methane being 10 times the pollutant?
Compare this to cars. Even if the number of cars remains constant, their contribution to the C02 pool grows every day.
So we should avoid increasing cattle population 100x, but we wouldn't want to do that anyway because we'd have nowhere to put them, and I certainly wouldn't support deforestation.
After all, replacing all we eat with tasteless gruel and water is acceptable by this logic.