Vegetarian diets are not going to save the planet

Quality of the article aside, local agriculture is usually worse environmentally due to its smaller size: http://freakonomics.com/2011/11/14/the-inefficiency-of-local...

No quibbles with most of it. But meat eating is sustainable in a limited way: Some land is well suited as pasture but not usable for much else.

Ie. a 200g steak per day isn't sustainable, but pasta sauces with a few slivers of pancetta are.

> And meat eating is simply not sustainable.

I don't know about this. Eating meat as a staple like Americans currently do is certainly not sustainable. But you can raise meat in such a way that it makes use of resources that you can't otherwise use. For example, pigs can live quite comfortably on waste like vegetable peelings. Cows can live on land that is not arable like meadows. Lamb is a by-product of raising sheep for wool.

> On the east coast, the solution is large numbers of smaller (50–500 acres) cultivated food forests surrounding our urban centers, forming the backbone of a production system augmented by urban gardens growing on nearly every rooftop, balcony, vacant lot, road median, yard, public park, and empty warehouse floor. The solution involves brick & mortar markets and food hubs being supplanted by producer/consumer exchanges* that allow computers to handle the aggregating without obscuring the relationship between grower and eater.

I am suspicious of this - especially the part about rooftop gardens. I remember someone telling me that small gardens are quite carbon intensive because they don't get the economies of scale that large farm operations do. Can anyone confirm that? Do permaculture farms get economies of scale?

The true solution is very, very simple. A crippling carbon tax. It needs to be large enough that it becomes unprofitable to have tomatoes in winter, and for food to travel long distances.* We don't necessarily need to buy directly from directly from producers if middlemen supermarkets can transport food efficiently.

Perhaps such a heavy carbon tax would force supermarket chains to downsize and source more food locally and in season, but the real optimisations would come from the things we haven't thought of yet. Every business would be looking to for ways to cut their carbon costs, necessity is the mother of invention of course. This would require a huge restructuring of the world economy. That's possible, just a hard sell - think how much the world economy changed during WW2.

I've been in a pretty apocalyptic kind of mood lately (feeling my vibe? F#A#∞ is a great album to day dream this stuff to.). Melting permafrost in Siberia and Alaska will cause a a vicious circle of carbon being released, further warming temperatures. Political action is the only thing that can stop climate change and with the way Trumps first week has gone, my hopes for that are the bleakest they've ever been. Are we past the tipping point? I'm kind of wondering if we should just give up and use the rest of our oil to move people away from coastal areas. Perhaps militarisation of national borders is the logical thing to do to prepare for waves of climate refugees that can't be supported (that's a very, very sad thought). Will starving nations resort to nuclear war? What do people here think?

* Worried about how the poor would handle such a rise in food costs? You should be. I imagine the bulk of the tax would need to be transferred to the poor, as they spend the largest proportion of the income on basic necessities caused by a heavy carbon tax. On a global scale, a heavy carbon tax would need to result in large transfers from the developed nations to the underdeveloped. A political pipe dream...