7 ms·

We must change food production to save the world, says leaked report

47 points by perfunctory 7y ago

seren 7y ago
Even if climate change open up more land for agriculture near the Arctic circle, I don't think that fertile soil will magically move there. Are we going to try to move billions tons of soil ? That does not seem really feasible. So all in all we are going to see the total surface of arable land diminishes in the coming decades.
- valw 7y ago
  That said, about 40% of arable land is currently being used to grow cattle fodder. So there's a big opportunity here: if we drastically reduce our meat consumption (especially beef and lamb), which is not a huge effort, we can significantly reduce GHG emissions, stop deforestation, and reclaim arable land.
  - habnds 7y ago
    Every stat I hear about meat production is shocking. 40% is lunacy. For anyone interested, the book, Diet for a Hot Planet takes a close look at this topic.
- pygy_ 7y ago
  The wind and animals carry around the seeds and bacteria needed for soil to happen naturally. It takes some time though, not sure how long.
lnsru 7y ago
By not throwing away 1/3 of food in western world would make world saving much easier: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/aug/20/food-waste-alarming-rise-will-see-66-tonnes-thrown-away-every-second https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/aug/20/f...
alanwil2 7y ago
That will be a NO for me. Beef, bison, and eggs are my favorite. The premise that food production is causing climate change is wrong. The ship Indiana Harbor, 1,000 ft long, delivers coal from Superior to a power plant near Detroit 2 times a week. It hauls 6 train loads of coal at one time. That power plant receives 3-4 shipments a week. Just one plant...but, cows are the problem...LOL! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTWLbO9GgCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTWLbO9GgCc
- PSeitz 7y ago
  But I like coal, so coal can't be the problem either. ROLF!
- bamboozled 7y ago
  I have to say I agree with this sentiment somewhat, if there is anything we shouldn't change without a very good replacement, is good production. Let's stop burning coal and worry about he rest later. Note, I'm all for protecting forrests, reductionism etc, we should just stop making people guilty for eating food.
  - valw 7y ago
    A rational approach to climate change consists of accounting for GHG emissions where they are and cutting them where they are. Meat production and fossil energy are 2 large causes of GHG emissions, and so we must significantly reduce both. There's no debate to be had about this, it's just facts and numbers. The point is not to make people for eating meat, just like it's not to make people guilty for lighting and heating their homes with coal-powered electricity. It's just to live sustainably. Let's not deny the facts because we don't like to hear them. Is eating less beef a decrease in life comfort? Yes, it certainly is. It's still much, much better than living in a +2°C hotter world, in which getting any food at all will become challenging.
    - dtech 7y ago
      > A rational approach to climate change consists of accounting for GHG emissions where they are and cutting them where they are The problem here is that would require an enormous international agreement. I do not see the political will for this in the largest polluters (US, China) and corruption would be a major problem in large parts of the world. Doing this on anything less than a global scale would lead to unintended side effects where importing from country A get cheaper because A does not tax GHG emissions, just replacing the emissions. You could theoretically fix this at the border with tarifs, but determining how much emissions a particular product caused becomes real hard real quick.
dustinmoris 7y ago
Facts: - The meat over-production has a major impact on greenhouse gas emissions - Humans naturally didn't eat the amounts of meat which we consume today - Humans don't need to eat large quantities of meat for any health of fitness reasons - Eating large amounts of meat increase the chances of certain cancers Therefore, given that there is nothing natural about eating meat at the current levels and given that there is no health benefit of eating this much meat and even has some negative impact and given that the meat production is contributing to the demise of our planet, it's only logical to drastically reduce our meat consumption. Laws need to be drafted. Taxes on meat need to be risen, etc. All those fatsoes which claim they couldn't live without meat should be treated like smokers: a dying breed of humans inflexible of understanding the above logic. There's always going to be some fat guy who thinks that eating McDonals burgers every day is normal, but the reality is that it's not and one day these people will be dead and new generations will have grown up in a world where it's normal to eat more veg & fruit and will think "how weird is it that people once ate an entire cow just for breakfast", just like kids today think "how weird is it that someone was allowed to light up a cigarette on an airplane where the smoke is affecting everyone around them and where open fire is generally considered a risk".
- jotm 7y ago
  I'll quit meat completely (already eating less than 1 lbs/week, so it's easy) if someone else starts buying new devices only when the battery starts failing? Because that infuriates me to no end, "lololol I still have my S7, but the S8 looks better, and my laptop is out of storage space".
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    And then you will move the goalposts and nothing will change. Many people do that... Anyway, the point is to not strike at consumers, but the producers. Taxation and environmental targets are the way to do it.
    - jotm 7y ago
      What goalposts though? I can safely say "I'm doing my part". But overall it's nothing, not even a blip. There's more spoiled meat and broken phones in the local dump than I'd ever use. This only works if everyone does it, production will fall of there's no demand. Although that would bring economic problems in the current system... Taxation may work, but the best way is to change the culture. The alcohol and tobacco tax has skyrocketed, yet people still drink and smoke a lot. I think the mindset of "not smoking is better, I'd rather never start" worked better than the taxes.
blargmaster33 7y ago
Lets review an history book regarding the effects of government run food production.
autisticmind 7y ago
And its not only the food production. Its also the market who needs to be changed. And how this food is sold. Inport and export should be more wise. Rich countrys produce too much and too cheap. How can they earn money when they sell it to lower prices as in their own country? After they shipped it around the half world? They produce it, they ship it around the world and then sell it very cheap? Cheaper as the poorer countrys could produce it in their own country. Thats how exploitation works.
sanxiyn 7y ago
IPCC politely requested media not to quote or cite the draft report. Of course, media ignored it. Let's just wait a few days. Can't you wait? https://www.ipcc.ch/2019/07/16/media-reports-draft-special-report-climate-change-and-land/ https://www.ipcc.ch/2019/07/16/media-reports-draft-special-r...
nashashmi 7y ago
This makes me think of Alan Savory calling for the reduction of elephant population to save the land from overgrazing and then later regretting it. Today he preaches using cattle and herds to turn deserts green. "We were wrong before and we are wrong again." - Allan
- perfunctory 7y ago
  Unfortunately the majority of beef we eat does not come from grass fed cattle.
  - simonsarris 7y ago
    Most beef cattle in the USA are raised on pasture from birth in the spring until autumn (7 to 9 months). Then for pasture-fed animals, grass is the forage that composes the great majority of their diet. Many cattle are then fattened before slaughter in feedlots and are fed small amounts of hay supplemented with grain, soy and other ingredients in order to increase the energy density of the diet (fattiness carcass weight, etc). (And a lot of this cattle raising is done on huge tracts of land which used to be grazed by Bison, which we nearly eradicated, and replaced their biomass with cow biomass.) I think its somewhat disingenuous to say the majority of the beef we eat does not come from grass fed cattle. But if you want more purely pasture raised animals, that is mostly an economic argument which is somewhat separate from what's best for the land, etc.
nesadi 7y ago
We need to do a lot of things, not just change food production. We should do all of these things, not just change food production. I'm not sure why people are so laser focused on cattle when we need to make drastic cuts everywhere. This isn't an either-or. This isn't optional. "Preferences" are irrelevant when it's between an uninhabitable earth for large parts of the human population and a habitable one. I'd love to own a car and I'd love to eat 500g of beef everyday, but that's utterly unsustainable, so I don't.
- avip 7y ago
  The report is about land use, not CC mitigation in general. Also, the beef problem is conceivably solvable. It’s the lowest-hanging fruit around.
  - nesadi 7y ago
    It's no more easily solvable than transportation or travel habits or any number of other sources of GHG. I think you underestimate how hard it will be to force people to change their eating habits significantly, but it's a change that needs to be made, just like a lot of other changes.
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      Surprisingly easy. Just make it extremely expensive and most people will switch to Indian kind of diet. (Or Chinese before extreme availability of poultry.)
      - nesadi 7y ago
        You could do the same for a lot of things. And it still isn't as easy as you're imagining. Just look at Americans screaming about freedoms and gun ownership. It's the same clusterfuck. Pretending it's otherwise is just delusional.
Merrill 7y ago
The combination of climate change and increased competition from a growing population will make meat unaffordable for all but the very rich. "We're Already Starting To Ration Our Corn" - Perfect Storm Could Send Spot Prices Higher - https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-03/were-already-starting-ration-our-corn-perfect-storm-could-send-spot-prices-higher https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-03/were-already-start...

47 points by perfunctory 7y ago

Even if climate change open up more land for agriculture near the Arctic circle, I don't think that fertile soil will magically move there. Are we going to try to move billions tons of soil ? That does not seem really feasible. So all in all we are going to see the total surface of arable land diminishes in the coming decades.

valw 7y ago
That said, about 40% of arable land is currently being used to grow cattle fodder. So there's a big opportunity here: if we drastically reduce our meat consumption (especially beef and lamb), which is not a huge effort, we can significantly reduce GHG emissions, stop deforestation, and reclaim arable land.
- habnds 7y ago
  Every stat I hear about meat production is shocking. 40% is lunacy. For anyone interested, the book, Diet for a Hot Planet takes a close look at this topic.
pygy_ 7y ago
The wind and animals carry around the seeds and bacteria needed for soil to happen naturally. It takes some time though, not sure how long.

lnsru 7y ago

By not throwing away 1/3 of food in western world would make world saving much easier: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/aug/20/food-waste-alarming-rise-will-see-66-tonnes-thrown-away-every-second https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/aug/20/f...

alanwil2 7y ago

That will be a NO for me. Beef, bison, and eggs are my favorite. The premise that food production is causing climate change is wrong. The ship Indiana Harbor, 1,000 ft long, delivers coal from Superior to a power plant near Detroit 2 times a week. It hauls 6 train loads of coal at one time. That power plant receives 3-4 shipments a week. Just one plant...but, cows are the problem...LOL! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTWLbO9GgCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTWLbO9GgCc

PSeitz 7y ago
But I like coal, so coal can't be the problem either. ROLF!
bamboozled 7y ago
I have to say I agree with this sentiment somewhat, if there is anything we shouldn't change without a very good replacement, is good production. Let's stop burning coal and worry about he rest later. Note, I'm all for protecting forrests, reductionism etc, we should just stop making people guilty for eating food.
- valw 7y ago
  A rational approach to climate change consists of accounting for GHG emissions where they are and cutting them where they are. Meat production and fossil energy are 2 large causes of GHG emissions, and so we must significantly reduce both. There's no debate to be had about this, it's just facts and numbers. The point is not to make people for eating meat, just like it's not to make people guilty for lighting and heating their homes with coal-powered electricity. It's just to live sustainably. Let's not deny the facts because we don't like to hear them. Is eating less beef a decrease in life comfort? Yes, it certainly is. It's still much, much better than living in a +2°C hotter world, in which getting any food at all will become challenging.
  - dtech 7y ago
    > A rational approach to climate change consists of accounting for GHG emissions where they are and cutting them where they are The problem here is that would require an enormous international agreement. I do not see the political will for this in the largest polluters (US, China) and corruption would be a major problem in large parts of the world. Doing this on anything less than a global scale would lead to unintended side effects where importing from country A get cheaper because A does not tax GHG emissions, just replacing the emissions. You could theoretically fix this at the border with tarifs, but determining how much emissions a particular product caused becomes real hard real quick.

dustinmoris 7y ago

Facts: - The meat over-production has a major impact on greenhouse gas emissions - Humans naturally didn't eat the amounts of meat which we consume today - Humans don't need to eat large quantities of meat for any health of fitness reasons - Eating large amounts of meat increase the chances of certain cancers Therefore, given that there is nothing natural about eating meat at the current levels and given that there is no health benefit of eating this much meat and even has some negative impact and given that the meat production is contributing to the demise of our planet, it's only logical to drastically reduce our meat consumption. Laws need to be drafted. Taxes on meat need to be risen, etc. All those fatsoes which claim they couldn't live without meat should be treated like smokers: a dying breed of humans inflexible of understanding the above logic. There's always going to be some fat guy who thinks that eating McDonals burgers every day is normal, but the reality is that it's not and one day these people will be dead and new generations will have grown up in a world where it's normal to eat more veg & fruit and will think "how weird is it that people once ate an entire cow just for breakfast", just like kids today think "how weird is it that someone was allowed to light up a cigarette on an airplane where the smoke is affecting everyone around them and where open fire is generally considered a risk".

jotm 7y ago
I'll quit meat completely (already eating less than 1 lbs/week, so it's easy) if someone else starts buying new devices only when the battery starts failing? Because that infuriates me to no end, "lololol I still have my S7, but the S8 looks better, and my laptop is out of storage space".
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  And then you will move the goalposts and nothing will change. Many people do that... Anyway, the point is to not strike at consumers, but the producers. Taxation and environmental targets are the way to do it.
  - jotm 7y ago
    What goalposts though? I can safely say "I'm doing my part". But overall it's nothing, not even a blip. There's more spoiled meat and broken phones in the local dump than I'd ever use. This only works if everyone does it, production will fall of there's no demand. Although that would bring economic problems in the current system... Taxation may work, but the best way is to change the culture. The alcohol and tobacco tax has skyrocketed, yet people still drink and smoke a lot. I think the mindset of "not smoking is better, I'd rather never start" worked better than the taxes.

blargmaster33 7y ago

Lets review an history book regarding the effects of government run food production.

autisticmind 7y ago

And its not only the food production. Its also the market who needs to be changed. And how this food is sold. Inport and export should be more wise. Rich countrys produce too much and too cheap. How can they earn money when they sell it to lower prices as in their own country? After they shipped it around the half world? They produce it, they ship it around the world and then sell it very cheap? Cheaper as the poorer countrys could produce it in their own country. Thats how exploitation works.

sanxiyn 7y ago

IPCC politely requested media not to quote or cite the draft report. Of course, media ignored it. Let's just wait a few days. Can't you wait? https://www.ipcc.ch/2019/07/16/media-reports-draft-special-report-climate-change-and-land/ https://www.ipcc.ch/2019/07/16/media-reports-draft-special-r...

nashashmi 7y ago

This makes me think of Alan Savory calling for the reduction of elephant population to save the land from overgrazing and then later regretting it. Today he preaches using cattle and herds to turn deserts green. "We were wrong before and we are wrong again." - Allan

perfunctory 7y ago
Unfortunately the majority of beef we eat does not come from grass fed cattle.
- simonsarris 7y ago
  Most beef cattle in the USA are raised on pasture from birth in the spring until autumn (7 to 9 months). Then for pasture-fed animals, grass is the forage that composes the great majority of their diet. Many cattle are then fattened before slaughter in feedlots and are fed small amounts of hay supplemented with grain, soy and other ingredients in order to increase the energy density of the diet (fattiness carcass weight, etc). (And a lot of this cattle raising is done on huge tracts of land which used to be grazed by Bison, which we nearly eradicated, and replaced their biomass with cow biomass.) I think its somewhat disingenuous to say the majority of the beef we eat does not come from grass fed cattle. But if you want more purely pasture raised animals, that is mostly an economic argument which is somewhat separate from what's best for the land, etc.

nesadi 7y ago

We need to do a lot of things, not just change food production. We should do all of these things, not just change food production. I'm not sure why people are so laser focused on cattle when we need to make drastic cuts everywhere. This isn't an either-or. This isn't optional. "Preferences" are irrelevant when it's between an uninhabitable earth for large parts of the human population and a habitable one. I'd love to own a car and I'd love to eat 500g of beef everyday, but that's utterly unsustainable, so I don't.

avip 7y ago
The report is about land use, not CC mitigation in general. Also, the beef problem is conceivably solvable. It’s the lowest-hanging fruit around.
- nesadi 7y ago
  It's no more easily solvable than transportation or travel habits or any number of other sources of GHG. I think you underestimate how hard it will be to force people to change their eating habits significantly, but it's a change that needs to be made, just like a lot of other changes.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Surprisingly easy. Just make it extremely expensive and most people will switch to Indian kind of diet. (Or Chinese before extreme availability of poultry.)
    - nesadi 7y ago
      You could do the same for a lot of things. And it still isn't as easy as you're imagining. Just look at Americans screaming about freedoms and gun ownership. It's the same clusterfuck. Pretending it's otherwise is just delusional.

Merrill 7y ago

The combination of climate change and increased competition from a growing population will make meat unaffordable for all but the very rich. "We're Already Starting To Ration Our Corn" - Perfect Storm Could Send Spot Prices Higher - https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-03/were-already-starting-ration-our-corn-perfect-storm-could-send-spot-prices-higher https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-03/were-already-start...