7 ms·
Meat Is Horrible
- VT_Drew 10y agoThe title should read "Industrial Farming is Horrible". Industrial crops aren't much better for the environment.
- aaroninsf 10y agoMy data-free immediate thought was, '...but industrial meat farming uses N times as many resources [land, water, petrochemicals] to produce the same number of nutrients/calories...' Now I am interested if this is in fact true. I have certainly heard this argument made, and it is often alluded to e.g. in describing the problem in China of producing enough meat to satisfy an increasingly affluent society (the subtext being, 'with the same constrained resources'). Going to poke around a bit...
- aaroninsf 10y agoTL;DR: it is in fact true. Best would be vegetarian diet; failing that, eliminating beef is a huge win. QED if you are not vegetarian and have no interest in being, the 'greenest' thing to do is to reduce or eliminate beef consumption. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full is glum. (I looked at resource usage, not the ethical side; fwiw I'm an ethics-motivated vegetarian myself.)
- pavel_lishin 10y agoIn my experience, out of the commonly-eaten meats, beef tends to be the priciest anyway.
- chetanahuja 10y agoBut not nearly proportional to the ratios of energy/land/water consumption between vegetarian (or say chicken/fish) based food items and beef. E.g., what's the difference in price between a burger made from ground beef vs a similar sandwich with grilled chicken?
- ams6110 10y agoIt's also one of the best for you to eat, assuming it's grass-fed.
- zardo 10y agoSource for that? I've never heard of any beneficial effect of red meat consumption.
- aorth 10y agoJane Goodall's book "Harvest for Hope" had some great statistics about the amount of water alone required to raise a kilogram of beef compared to chicken, rice, etc. I read it over ten years ago but I remember the numbers being jaw dropping. Health issues aside, beef puts a horrible load on the environment.
- 1123581321 10y agoIt is true in our overspecialized food production system, especially when byproducts like manure aren't counted as output. In smaller, more diverse farms, animals contribute to the overall output because they improve land that is fallow, turn waste into food and manure and provide food that complements plants effectively in our diet. We have the technology to farm this way, at scale, but it is politically infeasible and there won't be any demand for it until the specialized products of our current system become much more expensive.
- tgb 10y agoCitation needed? Others have already provided citations against your claim and the naive reasoning makes it seem obviously untrue: industrial livestock are fed industrial crops and so are worse than eating industrial crops oneself, and probably by a factor of at least 2.
- jMyles 10y agoI agree that meat farming, at least in the factory-style, is horrific. But this solution seems like it might make things worse. If there's a meat tax, then farmers will have an incentive to cut even more corners, which might lead to even more cruel conditions. Instead, maybe it makes sense to set a price floor for any operation over a certain number of animals. (IE, if you have more than 200 animals on your farm, you can't charge less than $10 a pound or something).
- venomsnake 10y agoI think that government mandated minimum quality of life for the animal. Space, roaming, feed, water etc.
- paulryanrogers 10y agoI'm no fan of more government regulation. Yet it seems clear that totally unregulated markets with uneducated consumers makes a mess of things
- scotty79 10y agoThat would be good and humane way to reduce beef production and increase prices to reduce the demand but it would be costlier for government than setting up new tax. Maybe we could do both? Tax the beef and use the money to enforce minimum quality of life for animals? Even manufacturers could be not that upset because they could significantly increase price per unit. Only group that would be angry could be beef consumers at least the ones that prefer quantity over quality and/or can't pay for quality.
- venomsnake 10y agoI don't care about the price of beef - I only care about the animals living life free of needless cruelty. I am not even convinced that it will be more expensive - the US is vast, there is lots of stuff to graze, instead of disposing of the manure it will be used as fertilizer and so on.
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- paulddraper 10y agoThis isn't about meat, but rather farming methods.
- Johnny_Brahms 10y agoWell, not really. meat is horrible in many ways, and the very few systems that aren't bad for the environment won't scale. If all pasture was magically turned into carbon sinks (in my home country about 5% of natural pastures could be called carbon sinks. in some countries it is almost as high as 30%) we would still have to cut our meat consumption considerably - and that would be for sustaining the meat consumption of today and not meet the growing consumption in Asia.
- thisrod 10y agoI'm sceptical about this, for a couple of first-year-physics reasons. 1. Matter is conserved. Before carbon can be farted out of a cow, it has to get in to the cow from somewhere else. I expect most of it was in the atmosphere a year beforehand, then got absorbed by pasture grass and eaten. So this year's farts will end up in next year's cows, and aren't like fossil fuel emissions. 2. Methane decays to carbon dioxide in a decade or two, so today's methane emissions are not really a worse problem than today's carbon dioxide emissions.
- jlmorton 10y ago1. The CO2 issue is not that the cow eats carbon and its manure turns back into CO2. The issue is the land use changes and fossil fuel-derived energy used in the production and transportation of feed. Because the feed to usable meat ratio of beef is somewhere between 7:1 to 20:1, this is significantly more impactful than other foods. 2. CH4 may not have a long half-life, but it has 29x the warming potential of CO2. Methane is thought to contribute about 20% of the current anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing. Because of the anticipated positive feedbacks from warming, this is very important indeed.
- zardo 10y ago>CH4 may not have a long half-life, but it has 29x the warming potential of CO2. To be clear, methane has 451x the heat trapping ability, the 29x figure is the 100year impact that takes into account the methane breaking down.
- thisrod 10y agoThanks, that makes a big difference. Apparently you can't trust newspapers even on the orders of magnitude for these things.
- thisrod 10y agoI'm sure that's true, but the article explicitly says that 60% of the emissions it quotes are from digestion. It's hard to tell if there is a real problem hidden under the irrelevant data, or if this is propaganda from the animal welfare or energy industry lobbies. It would be great if we could make a material difference to the greenhouse effect just by eating less meat, but that sounds a bit too good to be true.
- pvaldes 10y agoHum, Some people still think that they are made of gold?
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- auganov 10y agoCould some countries realistically just phase out (outlaw) most classes of meat production and consumption? IMO that's much more interesting than any taxation/disincentivization scheme.
- krisdol 10y agoNo, for the same reason they couldn't phase out alcohol and drugs
- prawn 10y agoI think public education could be enough here. Obviously, a campaign to reduce beef consumption would be far more successful than one to reduce or eliminate meat consumption. I eat meat and like it. I'd struggle to cut out all of it, but I could easily see myself making beef a thing to have at restaurants or special occasions only. More than happy to stick with chicken, pork and lamb (which I think is far more popular in Australia than the US?).
- Kephael 10y agoCountries should cease trying to increase their populations at the expense of quality of life. This is but one example of many where quality of life suffers and Soylent Green diets are suggested to accommodate the infinite growth crowd. I have a better idea - rather than creating a society that looks like some dystopian nightmare, we simply keep populations in check with the environment.
- zepto 10y agoCountries with balanced or decreasing populations can't compete economically.
- khattam 10y agoOr government could let people decide how many children they want to have and let them pay for their kids. It will automatically solve the problem in the long run. Governments trying to control it will lead to problems like they have in China (because having children was largely de-incentivised, they are going to have a big hole in the working population soon and have a lot of old people to support) and Europe (because they are incentivising population growth now, they are bound to increase a generation of population burst which will be a problem in the long run).
- yellowapple 10y agoI feel like this problem would solve itself if livestock producers were encouraged (read: mandated) to move from factory farming to more traditional ranching. Lower density of livestock, more humane conditions, at least some carbon offset from pastures, etc. Prices might go up, which will likely hurt low-income carnivores, but that'll be the case with the proposed taxation approach, too.
- khattam 10y ago>It may be delicious Not to me, but let's see. >2 degrees carbon budget limit Woo... 2 degrees. We can totally consider establishing settlement in Mars but God forbid there is 2 degree change in climate on earth. It will be uninhabitable. NOT. >Agriculture consumes 80 percent of water in the United States. Oh yeah, because we were otherwise going to drink the river... or maybe it disappears when it is used in agriculture. Except it doesn't. Water is the most recyclable resource there is. >carbon output from food production has increased by 47 percent from 2000 to 2012 — that’s an increase of 150 million tons of carbon dioxide Except carbon that is emitted to the atmosphere doesn't stay there. It's called carbon cycle. If we are producing more meat, we will also have to produce more food for the animals... which comes from plants... which take CO2 from the atmosphere to grow. You're fooling nobody. Don't get into our kitchen.
- mirimir 10y agoThere are also carbon emissions from producing ammonia fertilizer.
- khattam 10y agoYes, in which hydrocarbons, mostly methane, which is a biproduct of fossil fuel production, (which either has to be used or released to the environment), is used for getting the Hydrogen. If it's used, CO2 is emitted, which is much better than releasing CH4 to the environment.
- mirimir 10y agoYes, methane leaks are a huge problem. But is it really accurate to consider methane etc used in ammonia production as waste?