5 ms·

it's an interesting way of contributing, but, the mathematics are clear: there's not enough space in the world to ethically raise $animals_to_slaughter so it's

it's an interesting way of contributing, but, the mathematics are clear: there's not enough space in the world to ethically raise $animals_to_slaughter so it's not realistic for the larger problem at hand: how consuming animals is contributing to environmental catastrophe and all it entails (factory farming leading to pumping animals full of pesticides, runoff ruining oceans, clearing rainforests to name some) i think it's inevitable that lab grown meat and/or plant based alternatives get enough economic and environmental momentum to relegate "grass fed"/ethical whatever to a really high price niche forever, so i'd personally just focus efforts at arriving to that point ASAP, be it working for one of these companies, investing, or what have you.

wildduck 7y ago
any reference on the math by any chance? Really like to know about these things. Tks.
wool_gather 7y ago
> there's not enough space in the world to ethically raise $animals_to_slaughter Well, also including the caveat "at current levels of consumption". As far as I can tell, the incredibly low cost and high consumption that's come from these farming practices is a historical aberration. What was once a luxury became a commodity and then an expectation. The meat from ethically-raised animals is expensive only by comparison, and to my mind it should be regarded as a re-adjustment that reflects the true cost -- and worth -- of the product. If the societal expectation could be reformed to treat meat as a special food, rather than an essential component of every meal, the need for intensive and harmful animal farming would decrease a lot (hopefully by 100%).
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I feel like when people talk about "the true cost" of things, they probably haven't done any calculation. What does that, and glib talk about externalities really mean? I remember wondering just how much the estimated cost of global warming would be, in terms of dollars per gallon of gasoline, so I looked up what the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated the costs per year would be in a few decades, and divided them by the amount of fuel used in a year. The number I got was on the order of a few dollars a gallon, something like the difference between US gas prices and European gas prices. Or the difference between the peak and valley of recent market fluctuations. Whether or not you have a problem with doing a cost benefit calculation on preventing global warming, that's not my point. My point is when you think about the numbers, making meat prohibitively expensive and justifying it by internalizing externalities, would mean you're assuming there are externalities that are orders of magnitude larger than global warming. That seems implausible to me. If everybody paid $6/gallon for gas, it seems obvious to me it wouldn't be nearly enough to reduce meat consumption to what it used to be. As, of course, people in Europe do continue to eat meat.
belorn 7y ago
There is a lot of environmental friendly food that is underutilized because it does not scale to current level of consumption. We have lakes that because of eutrophication is overpopulated. We have biodiversity important grass regions where nation use fossil fueled machines to keep open. We have regions where the only farming possible is animals that eat lichen. There is invasive species which nation pay hunters to kill and throw away the meat because its not economical to sell it. We are no where near tapped out on unscaleable food sources that has a positive effect on the environment, and yet we put zero resources on it just because we consider it unscaleable. The result is that we do nothing and put all our hope that in the future some scaleable solution will fix everything. That does not sound rational approach when the problem of environmental catastrophe is already here.
ctdonath 7y ago
I just spent 3 weeks driving the American Midwest. There is vast grasslands uninhabited by anything but cows, and plenty of space for a great many more thereof. The environmental impact is negligible, as they turn a small fraction of human-inedible natural foliage into nutrients/calories/proteins with practically no other effects. Earth can bear a much larger livestock load than y'all give it credit for.
- Kuinox 7y ago
  The cows have a big environmental impact. And it's far from negligble. They generate a lot of methane.
  - simonsarris 7y ago
    Is that a big impact? The biomass of cows in the USA is comparable to the biomass of Bison that we killed in the 1800's. Seems like a great methane-neutral substitution for feeding 300m people.
  - ctdonath 7y ago
    What's the methane etc produced by rotting grass equivalent to bovine intake? Plans die; everyone seems to forget this.
    - lccarrasco 7y ago
      Plants do not produce methane themselves. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2009/01/methane-emissions-dont-blame-plants https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2009/01/methane-emissions-do...
- moreranchplease 7y ago
  the water and feed needed to sustain not something we can keep scaling.
  - ctdonath 7y ago
    Natural grass is the feed.

wildduck 7y ago

any reference on the math by any chance? Really like to know about these things. Tks.

wool_gather 7y ago

> there's not enough space in the world to ethically raise $animals_to_slaughter Well, also including the caveat "at current levels of consumption". As far as I can tell, the incredibly low cost and high consumption that's come from these farming practices is a historical aberration. What was once a luxury became a commodity and then an expectation. The meat from ethically-raised animals is expensive only by comparison, and to my mind it should be regarded as a re-adjustment that reflects the true cost -- and worth -- of the product. If the societal expectation could be reformed to treat meat as a special food, rather than an essential component of every meal, the need for intensive and harmful animal farming would decrease a lot (hopefully by 100%).

perl4ever 7y ago
I feel like when people talk about "the true cost" of things, they probably haven't done any calculation. What does that, and glib talk about externalities really mean? I remember wondering just how much the estimated cost of global warming would be, in terms of dollars per gallon of gasoline, so I looked up what the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated the costs per year would be in a few decades, and divided them by the amount of fuel used in a year. The number I got was on the order of a few dollars a gallon, something like the difference between US gas prices and European gas prices. Or the difference between the peak and valley of recent market fluctuations. Whether or not you have a problem with doing a cost benefit calculation on preventing global warming, that's not my point. My point is when you think about the numbers, making meat prohibitively expensive and justifying it by internalizing externalities, would mean you're assuming there are externalities that are orders of magnitude larger than global warming. That seems implausible to me. If everybody paid $6/gallon for gas, it seems obvious to me it wouldn't be nearly enough to reduce meat consumption to what it used to be. As, of course, people in Europe do continue to eat meat.

belorn 7y ago

There is a lot of environmental friendly food that is underutilized because it does not scale to current level of consumption. We have lakes that because of eutrophication is overpopulated. We have biodiversity important grass regions where nation use fossil fueled machines to keep open. We have regions where the only farming possible is animals that eat lichen. There is invasive species which nation pay hunters to kill and throw away the meat because its not economical to sell it. We are no where near tapped out on unscaleable food sources that has a positive effect on the environment, and yet we put zero resources on it just because we consider it unscaleable. The result is that we do nothing and put all our hope that in the future some scaleable solution will fix everything. That does not sound rational approach when the problem of environmental catastrophe is already here.

ctdonath 7y ago

I just spent 3 weeks driving the American Midwest. There is vast grasslands uninhabited by anything but cows, and plenty of space for a great many more thereof. The environmental impact is negligible, as they turn a small fraction of human-inedible natural foliage into nutrients/calories/proteins with practically no other effects. Earth can bear a much larger livestock load than y'all give it credit for.

Kuinox 7y ago
The cows have a big environmental impact. And it's far from negligble. They generate a lot of methane.
- simonsarris 7y ago
  Is that a big impact? The biomass of cows in the USA is comparable to the biomass of Bison that we killed in the 1800's. Seems like a great methane-neutral substitution for feeding 300m people.
- ctdonath 7y ago
  What's the methane etc produced by rotting grass equivalent to bovine intake? Plans die; everyone seems to forget this.
  - lccarrasco 7y ago
    Plants do not produce methane themselves. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2009/01/methane-emissions-dont-blame-plants https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2009/01/methane-emissions-do...
moreranchplease 7y ago
the water and feed needed to sustain not something we can keep scaling.
- ctdonath 7y ago
  Natural grass is the feed.