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Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

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Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#21

Post by willcipriano »

_3u10 wrote: post #18
willcipriano wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the first one. The second has a lot of spin that is obvious once you have the context from the first article. The entire planet is greener. Everywhere. The planting did little. > Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect One of those Inconvenient Truths.

Exactly, the US and Europe are free to reforest but choose not to for some unexplained reason. Brazilian beef is frankly way less deforested than anything from the U.S. or Europe. The three most forested countries in the world are Russia, Canada and Brazil in that order. In all honesty I’m perfectly fine with the bans / boycotts it keeps farmers here poor and beef cheap.

North America (and the US) is greener than 20 years ago.

Europe is greener than 20 years ago.

Asia is greener than 20 years ago.

Africa is greener than 20 years ago.

The entire planet is greener than 20 years ago.

It has nothing to do with people planting trees and everything to do with Co2 being what plants eat.

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#22

Post by virtue3 »

Qem wrote: post #7
mytailorisrich wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beef in itself is not bad for the environment. It's the scale of demand that is bad. And that demand is fueled by the combined effects of global population growth and global increase in standards of living. We tend to stop at the symptoms instead of going after the root cause.

> Beef in itself is not bad for the environment. It's the scale of demand that is bad. Wasting crops feeding cattle is inherently worse than the alternative, feeding directly on the crops and avoiding the wasting of calories when going up one trophic level.

"A large amount of beef is grown in areas that are not suitable for crop farming in the United States. In fact, 85% of the land used to graze cattle in the U.S. is marginal land, which means it's not suitable for growing crops. Marginal land is either untouched or used for grazing livestock, mostly cattle"

Grain finishing is another matter. But it's not a 1 grain : 1/10th beef type situation.

Now chopping and burning down the amazon to create grazing land for cattle? yeah that's going to probably kill us all.

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#23

Post by pickleberto »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #3
matt_daemon wrote: post #2

For anyone interested in the numbers behind how bad beef and deforestation are for the environment, see Hannah Ritchie’s great new book Not the End of the World .

Beef in itself is not bad for the environment. It's the scale of demand that is bad. And that demand is fueled by the combined effects of global population growth and global increase in standards of living. We tend to stop at the symptoms instead of going after the root cause.

[dead]

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#24

Post by repelsteeltje »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #10
Qem wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Beef in itself is not bad for the environment. It's the scale of demand that is bad. Wasting crops feeding cattle is inherently worse than the alternative, feeding directly on the crops and avoiding the wasting of calories when going up one trophic level.

That's an uneeded "optimisation". There is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle. Again, the issue is that the environment has a limited, finite capacity, which we exceed when we are 10 billion with good standards of living. To reduce quality of life (because it's not limited to meat, it's comprehensive restrictions) simply to accomodate ever more humans on the planet is madness and unsustainable, anyway…

Another way to cast the meat vs crops debate is "true pricing": the growing demand for meat is not simply a result of growing population or growing standards of living, but caused by ignoring "externalities".

I.e.: if the true impact of turning crops into meat were reflected in the price of a hamburger, demand elasticity would eventually result in much less production. Or: growing meat consumption is mostly a result of implicit subsidies to maintain status quo, ignore climate change,etc.

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#25

Post by [deleted] »

themk wrote: post #20
Qem wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greening != Recovery > China’s outsized contribution to the global greening trend comes in large part (42%) from programs to conserve and expand forests. These were developed in an effort to reduce the effects of soil erosion, air pollution and climate change. Another 32% there – and 82% of the greening seen in India – comes from intensive cultivation of food crops. If the green of pristine forests is replaced by the…

Also: greening != biodiversity

[deleted]

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#27

Post by emptysongglass »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #10
Qem wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Beef in itself is not bad for the environment. It's the scale of demand that is bad. Wasting crops feeding cattle is inherently worse than the alternative, feeding directly on the crops and avoiding the wasting of calories when going up one trophic level.

That's an uneeded "optimisation". There is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle. Again, the issue is that the environment has a limited, finite capacity, which we exceed when we are 10 billion with good standards of living. To reduce quality of life (because it's not limited to meat, it's comprehensive restrictions) simply to accomodate ever more humans on the planet is madness and unsustainable, anyway…

> There is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle.

You're not doing a whole lot to explain why there is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle. I can think of a whole host of reasons why it is wrong in matters of ethics and mercy. Who is there to advocate for the cow? We know cows feel a gamut of emotions just as we do. They are not insensate. Most humans, when given a knife or a captive bolt gun and told to go kill that cow on yonder would not. So we externalize the death-making to slaughterhouse workers who coincidentally also suffer:

> ...SHWs had significantly higher levels of depression compared with office workers, but not butchers. The difference in depression rates differed from study to study, ranging from 10% to 50% [1]

There's really no good, ethical argument to be made for the killing of animals for food or pleasure. Did we need to do it once to survive as a species? Yes. Are we largely living in a post-scarcity world where those practices should now be challenged? Yes.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10009492/

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#29

Post by defrost »

willcipriano wrote: post #6
matt_daemon wrote: post #2

For anyone interested in the numbers behind how bad beef and deforestation are for the environment, see Hannah Ritchie’s great new book Not the End of the World .

> deforestation https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/co2-is-making-... https://terra.nasa.gov/news/modis-shows-earth-is-greener

"Green" is a 2-D layer of colour in a photograph.

"Forest" is a 3-D bulk tonnage of captured (for now at least) carbon dioxide.

This increase in the colour green that you tout hasn't made a dent in reducing the ever increasing amount of insulating CO2 in the atmosphere.

Otherwise yellow grasses being greener due to increased CO2 is of some small interest, but it's not the same as a similar area X height of large trees in terms of capture.

Just pragmnatic facts, not a "convenient" or "inconvenient" "truth".

Nice attempt at a tangent, pity it fell flat.

Re: Tracking Illicit Brazilian Beef from the Amazon to Your Burger

#30

Post by _3u10 »

willcipriano wrote: post #21
_3u10 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, the US and Europe are free to reforest but choose not to for some unexplained reason. Brazilian beef is frankly way less deforested than anything from the U.S. or Europe. The three most forested countries in the world are Russia, Canada and Brazil in that order. In all honesty I’m perfectly fine with the bans / boycotts it keeps farmers here poor and beef cheap.

North America (and the US) is greener than 20 years ago. Europe is greener than 20 years ago. Asia is greener than 20 years ago. Africa is greener than 20 years ago. The entire planet is greener than 20 years ago. It has nothing to do with people planting trees and everything to do with Co2 being what plants eat.

Fully agree. The world was greenest during the Carboniferous when avg temps were 0 above modern levels and CO2 was 800ppm.
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