4 ms·
By removing meat more people would starve. Now that can be a good thing because fewer people means less energy consumption, however you still need to make that
by fetbaffe 6y ago
By removing meat more people would starve. Now that can be a good thing because fewer people means less energy consumption, however you still need to make that moral argument that starvation is an acceptable solution for reducing energy consumption.
- mac01021 6y agoI've missed something. If I stop eating meat then people will starve? Are you talking about the meat farmers?
- fetbaffe 6y agoI’m talking about that the society as a whole will produce less food if we all would go vegan.
- mac01021 6y agoIt would be a big change for sure, but maybe less of a problem than you imagine: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-calories-from-animal-protein-vs-gdp-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-calories-from-an... Also there's the fact that, per calorie, producing beef requires an order of magnitude more arable land than producing <insert-your-favorite-vegetable-here>, since cattle eat so much more than humans do.
- fetbaffe 6y agoSee my reply here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24514430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24514430
- 3131s 6y agoOnly a small percentage of US beef production is grass fed and worldwide grazing systems supply about 9 percent of the world's production of beef, the rest are crop fed in addition! https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-m... https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
- ArnoVW 6y agoThe real killer is beef. Simply replacing beef with almost anything else will have huge impacts (see page by FAO). If elimination is too much of an effort to make for our kids, doing it n% of the time will still bring n% improvements. I might add that the generation of my parents (born in the 40's) ate meat once or twice a week, at least during the 40's and 50's, and they turned out fine. http://www.fao.org/gleam/results/en/ http://www.fao.org/gleam/results/en/
- fetbaffe 6y agoNutritional and greenhouse gas impacts of removing animals from US agriculture https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5715743/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5715743/ In the simulated system with no animals, estimated agricultural GHG decreased (28%), but did not fully counterbalance the animal contribution of GHG (49% in this model). This assessment suggests that removing animals from US agriculture would reduce agricultural GHG emissions, but would also create a food supply incapable of supporting the US population’s nutritional requirements. Assuming agricultural emissions account for 9% of total US emissions (47), and assuming that emission estimates here are representative of national emissions, eliminating animal agriculture would decrease total US emissions by an estimated 2.6 percentage units.
- fetbaffe 6y agoThe thing is that soil used for grazing cattle can’t be used for planting vegetables efficiently. There is a reason why we have different farming, because of different soil quality. So the effect would be to reduce the area of where we can produce food. And if you would remove cattle you no longer have natural fertilizer. Mineral fertilizer has a big environmental impact on ground water.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago> The thing is that soil used for grazing cattle can’t be used for planting vegetables efficiently. This is true, but it's not how modern meat is produced. A lot of high-quality land is used to produce meat that could be used to produce vegan food, no?