11 ms·

Don't forget CBDCs with smart contracts, plus your social credit score hanging over you like a sword. "You Will Eat The Bugs" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v

by scrlk 4y ago

Don't forget CBDCs with smart contracts, plus your social credit score hanging over you like a sword. "You Will Eat The Bugs" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_8LTUmHWP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_8LTUmHWP0 edit: I should add that the video above is a joke, but what scares me is the fact that the technology to make this reality already exists, and is a large political crisis away from being imposed.

notinfuriated 4y ago
The scam contract in this video reminds me of playing Eve Online.
ravenstine 4y ago
I know the video is a joke, but the whole thing about meat having an unacceptable carbon footprint pisses me off to no end. The fact that eating insects is being suggested as an alternative makes it even worse. Meat is a part of the carbon cycle. The carbon in plants is largely atmospheric. The plants eat the carbon, the animals eat the plants, the animals belch CO2 and methane, and that methane becomes CO2 again after ~12 years. The kind of carbon rising in the atmosphere isn't even that of animals (by stable isotope testing). Guess what, those who believe that bugs are the answer. Bugs eat plants. Bugs don't burp, but to grow insects at scale, the plants need to be processed and brought to them. Guess what that means? Burning fossil fuels in transportation. Cows, on the other hand, can feed on grassland. As someone who is has eaten plenty of bugs, I sincerely hope that the globalists try something other than bugs. The "science" behind it is extremely flimsy. You can't just take livestock out of the carbon cycle and think that's going to do anything for climate change.
- scrlk 4y ago
  >Guess what, those who believe that bugs are the answer. Bugs eat plants. Bugs don't burp, but to grow insects at scale, the plants need to be processed and brought to them. Guess what that means? Burning fossil fuels in transportation. >Cows, on the other hand, can feed on grassland. That's a feature, not a bug (hah) for them. As you point out, bug farming requires a large number of inputs and a complicated process. This makes it highly amenable to centralisation & control. Whilst modern livestock farming is similar in complexity, in theory, it can go back to having more decentralised inputs, with a drawback of lower yield.
- mlyle 4y ago
  We just need to tax CO2 (and perhaps methane). Accounting for CO2 intensity is all squishy-squashy. But if we tax the actual emissions then the true energy impact will be reflected in prices and the market will adapt to whatever actually really is optimum--whatever lends the most utils of resource use.
  - lend000 4y ago
    +1 but generalize to all major pollutants, with the taxes levied being theoretically equal to the cost to "undo" that pollution.
    - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
      So who gets to define "pollutant" and "cost"? That kind of exercise is far more likely to get kinetic than defining "truth" (or whatever) because it is more directly linked to peoples livelihoods and standards of living.
      - lend000 4y ago
        Pollution is probably the most objectively measurable of externalities. Much more so than say economic externalities/deciding what the exact values should be for tax brackets. We could just start with the easiest case, which is a product/process that inherently releases pollutants (anything that releases gases) that may have some negative effects on others or the environment (the threshold should be low), then determine the market rate for capturing that pollution back from the environment and tax accordingly. This would also apply to medicines and lotions that don't get metabolized by the users and are inherently are going to end up in the ocean. It gets trickier when we consider things that directly harm some people nearby, like smoking, and at a certain level of harm, these things should just be banned outright (i.e. you can't really undo lung cancer or mercury poisoning). Or things that aren't inherently pollutants (plastic containers), but in practice end up causing a lot of pollution. Our government is too incompetent to approach the problem in a first-principles based way like this, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Banning individual things after they get out of control and doing complex mental gymnastics like cap and trade are much worse solutions.
- protonbob 4y ago
  They can eat grass. But they don't. They eat corn that is subsidized by the government. It's a fact that Americans eat more meat than they should and that it has a non negligible environmental impact.
  - nradov 4y ago
    A fact? Really? What is the correct amount of meat that we should eat?
    - paulryanrogers 4y ago
      The amount that won't deforest the earth, fill the air with methane, and overflow rivers with cow shit.
      - nradov 4y ago
        Sounds good. So what is that amount exactly? Please give us a specific number, and show your work. Are you familiar with the recent developments in regenerative agriculture including livestock integration? https://montanafreepress.org/2021/07/06/regenerative-agriculture-evitalizing-rural-montana-economies/ https://montanafreepress.org/2021/07/06/regenerative-agricul...
        paulryanrogers 4y ago
        8 billion people on earth, takes 6 months to raise a cow for food. If each person wants ~50 lbs of beef each year that's about 400 million cows assuming a perfect system. That'll require 800 million acres just so people can eat cows. Not to mention the byproducts. Sustainable livestock sounds great. But it won't scale far enough to meet even the current US demand, at least not if grown domestically. So maybe just subjugate a bunch of other countries, and ensure they do it sustainably! Can't be clear cutting rainforests we might need to breath or anything.
        nmeagent 4y ago
- rapind 4y ago
  > The carbon in plants is largely atmospheric. I think the issue is that we’re artificially increasing feed crop yields with massive use of synthetic fertilizer. And beef is a very inefficient use of those resources. I don’t know if bugs is the solution, but when our answer to everything is “more gas!” I’m willing to entertain and try alternatives.
- MikeHolman 4y ago
  Beef is an extremely carbon inefficient source of calories. They require a large amount of land, either directly or indirectly (e.g. from corn fields). Pastures and farmland are not effective carbon sinks. Most land used by cattle was earlier forestland or other land that served as a carbon sink. For example, one of the major causes of rainforest destruction in Brazil is cattle ranching.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    You know what's actually "calorie" inefficient? Eating leaves. Because that's exactly what humans are poor at and animals like cows are very good at (though technically they're digesting the bacteria that eat the predigested vegetation). Plants are largely composed of cellulose, which is not digestible by humans. Just because we pass it through and just because a study found trace amounts of cellulose-consuming bacteria in our gut doesn't mean we are well developed to handle cellulose. Those are "calories" we are pooping out. If you were to just look at the carbohydrate content of plants, well, if we reductively look at the energy density of macronutrients, sorry, carbs of any kind are not as energy dense as the fats from meat. As an aside, this is one chief reason why calories, which are a measure of heat, are a poor metric for nutrition. > Pastures and farmland are not effective carbon sinks. Neither is any kind of farmland, whether it's cows that are being raised or tomatoes. Carbon sinks only mean something in the case of fossil carbon being introduced to the atmospheric carbon cycle, but that doesn't matter anyway because no amount of trees added to the earth are going to offset anthroprogenic climate change in any appreciable way. > Most land used by cattle was earlier forestland or other land that served as a carbon sink. Not all forest land is a carbon sink, and not all forest land is woodland. Also, I would really appreciate some evidence for this. > For example, one of the major causes of rainforest destruction in Brazil is cattle ranching. As if demolishing the Amazon is a prerequisite to cattle ranching, as opposed to something people do because the economic incentives are there, which has nothing to do with whether raising cattle in and of itself is harmful to the climate. Tons of beef are is raised on the Great Plains and has been for over a century, and the Great Plains is nothing close to the kind of carbon sink you're thinking of.
  - ericd 4y ago
    As a sibling commenter alludes to, should we ban lettuce? Trying to tackle sources one by one is going to be a mess and give us a crap solution full of holes, and tons of argument and inaction as people fight for their preferred solutions. Tax the carbon entering the carbon cycle and let the costs of that flow through all the supply chains, soften the blow for people via rebates and by ramping the amount up over time to a well-telegraphed future target, and things will adjust. The poor will generally come out ahead after the rebate, since they tend to generate a lot less carbon, the rich will pay much more. Things like flying will probably triple in price, or more, if we set it at the price for durable sequestration, and so people will fly much less for recreation. And maybe we'll survive as a species to see another couple generations.
- Fargoan 4y ago
- snewman 4y ago
  This glosses over a lot of important considerations. For instance: methane, despite having a limited lifetime, has much greater climate impact than CO2. So by converting some of the carbon they ingest into methane, cows add a substantial warming impact. Calorie for calorie, every serious analysis indicates that beef has very high greenhouse impact. Saying things like "bugs eat plants" is not a substitute for crunching the numbers.
- windexh8er 4y ago
  > I know the video is a joke, but the whole thing about meat having an unacceptable carbon footprint pisses me off to no end. But... It does. 220lbs of methane per cow on average. Annually. > Guess what, those who believe that bugs are the answer. Bugs eat plants. Bugs don't burp, but to grow insects at scale, the plants need to be processed and brought to them. Guess what that means? Burning fossil fuels in transportation. This is a bit absurd. Now I'm not saying I'm not in said "bug camp" - but you're arguing that transport of plants, using fossil fuels, even remotely touches the amount of fossil fuels, not to mention water, that is required for transport of livestock / processed meat? > Cows, on the other hand, can feed on grassland. True. Cows feed on grassland that could be significantly more productive acre for acre. Not only the space they need to live but the space required to grow the feed corn, the water that is consumed and the fossil fuels that get burned. The argument is fantasy at best. The final thing being - cows don't exist without humans in their current capacity. Insects, on the other hand do. We don't need meat. We have access to plenty of what we need to thrive via plants without bugs. It's unfortunate that meat is looked at as a staple with overconsumption of specific meats even being touted as healthy (e.g. chicken).
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    I was totally with you until: "We have access to plenty of what we need to thrive via plants without bugs". Has there ever been research done on this? Historically humans depended on animal protein for essential amino acids. It seems far-fetched to suggest we could scale up quinoa to 7+ billion humans given current global realities. Humans naturally consume animal protein out of biological necessity. This has only changed for people who have the necessary resources to follow incredibly regimented and expensive vegan diets.
    - rootw0rm 4y ago
      Hemp seeds contain all essential amino acids and are famously easy to produce.
      - sph 4y ago
        How many grams of hemp seeds would you have to ingest to receive the same amount of amino acids in weight compared to a beef steak? And how much phytate does hemp seed contain? 4g/100g. Good luck with mineral absorption. Proportion of amino acids isn't the only important metric.
- tejohnso 4y ago
  > the whole thing about meat having an unacceptable carbon footprint pisses me off to no end. Well, as far as I've looked into it, the production of meat is significantly more water and energy (carbon) intensive than if we were to consume plants directly. And there's also the carbon output via methane. The meat production is completely unnecessary and it's not an efficient conversion. > The fact that eating insects is being suggested as an alternative makes it even worse. I don't know why someone would suggest eating insects at all. We don't need either of those things. Just eat the plants directly. There's no need for an inefficient conversion mechanism from plants to something else. > As someone who is has eaten plenty of bugs Interesting. Why did you do that?
  - upsidesinclude 4y ago
    It's about protein at a bare minimum. Plant diets are lacking, we are not herbivores
    - tejohnso 4y ago
      > Protein...Plant diets are lacking No, they are not lacking. Have you tried a plant based / meat-free diet and found this to be the case? "Studies at Harvard University as well as other studies conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and various European countries, confirmed vegetarian diets provide sufficient protein intake as long as a variety of plant sources are available and consumed" [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism#Protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism#Protein
      - upsidesinclude 4y ago
        Sufficient for what? You are making assumptions and otherwise fail to realize that a lifetime diet has more impact than can be understood with a contrived, likely biased, study designed to find the answer sought. Inuits lived primarily on whale blubber. It's entirely possibly to live on a diet nearly devoid of nutrition. No I won't provide you with a study. It is evident from the modern western diet of processed foods
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  But cows don't feed on grassland. They feed on soy and corn that was grown using twice its mass in fossil fuels and transported further than it would be to the insects. They the multiply its ghg severity by turning a bunch of it into methane. The carbon mass of cattle comes from the gas wells, (including fugitive methane which dwarfs the burps). They don't live on grassland either. They live on freshly burnt down old growth rainforest. We can, however, cut the number of cows down to just the ones that can graze, and eat vegetarian for the other 9/10 days. This frees up 70% of the corn and soy land too. If you really need extra high quality protein then insects are an option, and can eat some of the crop byproducts we cannot.
  - ericd 4y ago
    Some cows do. If you want to eat cows that were pastured, you might consider joining a local CSA.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      And some deisel is produced from waste streams of carbon free agriculture which is equally irrelevant. It's not the referent when someone says "beef has high emissions"
      - ericd 4y ago
        You picked some outlier cows that live on freshly burnt rainforest. That’s not representative either, that’s the hyperbolic extreme.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      > If you want to eat cows that were pastured If everyone eats cows that are pastured, you will have 1 small burger a month. Because that's how much beef pastures can support divided by the number of people that want it. The rest if bred on soy and stuff
- onion2k 4y ago
  Guess what that means? Burning fossil fuels in transportation. Why does it mean that? Alternative methods of operating would be either electric vehicles, or farming the bugs in the same place as growing bug food.
- sph 4y ago
  > the whole thing about meat having an unacceptable carbon footprint pisses me off to no end What pisses me off is people complaining about my local, free-range meat consumption while chomping on fruit and grain grown in more temperate countries and flown here. EDIT: But I have to admit, as a meat eater, I support the research into bugs for food. Because animal protein is unrivalled compared to vegetable protein. Although squeamish, I'd rather eat cricket flour than trying to make a vegan diet work.
  - rowanajmarshall 4y ago
    > What pisses me off is people complaining about my local, free-range meat consumption while chomping on fruit and grain grown in more temperate countries and flown here. Not sure if you're being serious here, but the _extreme_ vast majority of food is shipped, not flown. It's something like 0.16% [1], and I'll bet that's low-volume, high-worth food. And your local meat _probably_ has a higher carbon footprint than meat imported from a better climate; lamb from New Zealand, plus shipping to the UK, has a lower carbon footprint than lamb from the UK eaten in the UK [2], because the New Zealand climate is better. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-transport-by-mode https://ourworldindata.org/food-transport-by-mode [2] https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lamb/ https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lam... People really underestimate how efficient shipping has gotten over the last 50 years or so.
    - sph 4y ago
      Do boats not consume diesel? They might be efficient, but is it as efficient as not travelling thousands of miles by sea? The idea that importing lamb from NZ is better than locally grown is absolutely ridiculous I wouldn't even know where to start.
      - rowanajmarshall 4y ago
        Yes, quite a lot more efficient. You can call it ridiculous, but we're incredibly good at efficiently shipping things.
- birksherty 4y ago
  > Meat is a part of the carbon cycle. No, that carbon is also human generated. All these cows are created only for human use. They are not here by natural process.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
claytongulick 4y ago
I got to thinking about this a lot. It brings to mind the scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where they were all sitting at the high table eating huge beetles. As a kid, I was super grossed out when I watched it. Now, I'm not so sure. I eat a ton of crawfish, and love them. Pretending that they aren't bugs is just marketing. Are there other bugs I'd like with the appropriate amount of Zatarain's? Probably.

by scrlk 4y ago

notinfuriated 4y ago

The scam contract in this video reminds me of playing Eve Online.

ravenstine 4y ago

I know the video is a joke, but the whole thing about meat having an unacceptable carbon footprint pisses me off to no end. The fact that eating insects is being suggested as an alternative makes it even worse. Meat is a part of the carbon cycle. The carbon in plants is largely atmospheric. The plants eat the carbon, the animals eat the plants, the animals belch CO2 and methane, and that methane becomes CO2 again after ~12 years. The kind of carbon rising in the atmosphere isn't even that of animals (by stable isotope testing). Guess what, those who believe that bugs are the answer. Bugs eat plants. Bugs don't burp, but to grow insects at scale, the plants need to be processed and brought to them. Guess what that means? Burning fossil fuels in transportation. Cows, on the other hand, can feed on grassland. As someone who is has eaten plenty of bugs, I sincerely hope that the globalists try something other than bugs. The "science" behind it is extremely flimsy. You can't just take livestock out of the carbon cycle and think that's going to do anything for climate change.

scrlk 4y ago
>Guess what, those who believe that bugs are the answer. Bugs eat plants. Bugs don't burp, but to grow insects at scale, the plants need to be processed and brought to them. Guess what that means? Burning fossil fuels in transportation. >Cows, on the other hand, can feed on grassland. That's a feature, not a bug (hah) for them. As you point out, bug farming requires a large number of inputs and a complicated process. This makes it highly amenable to centralisation & control. Whilst modern livestock farming is similar in complexity, in theory, it can go back to having more decentralised inputs, with a drawback of lower yield.
mlyle 4y ago
We just need to tax CO2 (and perhaps methane). Accounting for CO2 intensity is all squishy-squashy. But if we tax the actual emissions then the true energy impact will be reflected in prices and the market will adapt to whatever actually really is optimum--whatever lends the most utils of resource use.
- lend000 4y ago
  +1 but generalize to all major pollutants, with the taxes levied being theoretically equal to the cost to "undo" that pollution.
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    So who gets to define "pollutant" and "cost"? That kind of exercise is far more likely to get kinetic than defining "truth" (or whatever) because it is more directly linked to peoples livelihoods and standards of living.
    - lend000 4y ago
      Pollution is probably the most objectively measurable of externalities. Much more so than say economic externalities/deciding what the exact values should be for tax brackets. We could just start with the easiest case, which is a product/process that inherently releases pollutants (anything that releases gases) that may have some negative effects on others or the environment (the threshold should be low), then determine the market rate for capturing that pollution back from the environment and tax accordingly. This would also apply to medicines and lotions that don't get metabolized by the users and are inherently are going to end up in the ocean. It gets trickier when we consider things that directly harm some people nearby, like smoking, and at a certain level of harm, these things should just be banned outright (i.e. you can't really undo lung cancer or mercury poisoning). Or things that aren't inherently pollutants (plastic containers), but in practice end up causing a lot of pollution. Our government is too incompetent to approach the problem in a first-principles based way like this, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Banning individual things after they get out of control and doing complex mental gymnastics like cap and trade are much worse solutions.
protonbob 4y ago
They can eat grass. But they don't. They eat corn that is subsidized by the government. It's a fact that Americans eat more meat than they should and that it has a non negligible environmental impact.
- nradov 4y ago
  A fact? Really? What is the correct amount of meat that we should eat?
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    The amount that won't deforest the earth, fill the air with methane, and overflow rivers with cow shit.
    - nradov 4y ago
      Sounds good. So what is that amount exactly? Please give us a specific number, and show your work. Are you familiar with the recent developments in regenerative agriculture including livestock integration? https://montanafreepress.org/2021/07/06/regenerative-agriculture-evitalizing-rural-montana-economies/ https://montanafreepress.org/2021/07/06/regenerative-agricul...
      - paulryanrogers 4y ago
        8 billion people on earth, takes 6 months to raise a cow for food. If each person wants ~50 lbs of beef each year that's about 400 million cows assuming a perfect system. That'll require 800 million acres just so people can eat cows. Not to mention the byproducts. Sustainable livestock sounds great. But it won't scale far enough to meet even the current US demand, at least not if grown domestically. So maybe just subjugate a bunch of other countries, and ensure they do it sustainably! Can't be clear cutting rainforests we might need to breath or anything.
        nmeagent 4y ago
rapind 4y ago
> The carbon in plants is largely atmospheric. I think the issue is that we’re artificially increasing feed crop yields with massive use of synthetic fertilizer. And beef is a very inefficient use of those resources. I don’t know if bugs is the solution, but when our answer to everything is “more gas!” I’m willing to entertain and try alternatives.
MikeHolman 4y ago
Beef is an extremely carbon inefficient source of calories. They require a large amount of land, either directly or indirectly (e.g. from corn fields). Pastures and farmland are not effective carbon sinks. Most land used by cattle was earlier forestland or other land that served as a carbon sink. For example, one of the major causes of rainforest destruction in Brazil is cattle ranching.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  You know what's actually "calorie" inefficient? Eating leaves. Because that's exactly what humans are poor at and animals like cows are very good at (though technically they're digesting the bacteria that eat the predigested vegetation). Plants are largely composed of cellulose, which is not digestible by humans. Just because we pass it through and just because a study found trace amounts of cellulose-consuming bacteria in our gut doesn't mean we are well developed to handle cellulose. Those are "calories" we are pooping out. If you were to just look at the carbohydrate content of plants, well, if we reductively look at the energy density of macronutrients, sorry, carbs of any kind are not as energy dense as the fats from meat. As an aside, this is one chief reason why calories, which are a measure of heat, are a poor metric for nutrition. > Pastures and farmland are not effective carbon sinks. Neither is any kind of farmland, whether it's cows that are being raised or tomatoes. Carbon sinks only mean something in the case of fossil carbon being introduced to the atmospheric carbon cycle, but that doesn't matter anyway because no amount of trees added to the earth are going to offset anthroprogenic climate change in any appreciable way. > Most land used by cattle was earlier forestland or other land that served as a carbon sink. Not all forest land is a carbon sink, and not all forest land is woodland. Also, I would really appreciate some evidence for this. > For example, one of the major causes of rainforest destruction in Brazil is cattle ranching. As if demolishing the Amazon is a prerequisite to cattle ranching, as opposed to something people do because the economic incentives are there, which has nothing to do with whether raising cattle in and of itself is harmful to the climate. Tons of beef are is raised on the Great Plains and has been for over a century, and the Great Plains is nothing close to the kind of carbon sink you're thinking of.
- ericd 4y ago
  As a sibling commenter alludes to, should we ban lettuce? Trying to tackle sources one by one is going to be a mess and give us a crap solution full of holes, and tons of argument and inaction as people fight for their preferred solutions. Tax the carbon entering the carbon cycle and let the costs of that flow through all the supply chains, soften the blow for people via rebates and by ramping the amount up over time to a well-telegraphed future target, and things will adjust. The poor will generally come out ahead after the rebate, since they tend to generate a lot less carbon, the rich will pay much more. Things like flying will probably triple in price, or more, if we set it at the price for durable sequestration, and so people will fly much less for recreation. And maybe we'll survive as a species to see another couple generations.
Fargoan 4y ago
snewman 4y ago
This glosses over a lot of important considerations. For instance: methane, despite having a limited lifetime, has much greater climate impact than CO2. So by converting some of the carbon they ingest into methane, cows add a substantial warming impact. Calorie for calorie, every serious analysis indicates that beef has very high greenhouse impact. Saying things like "bugs eat plants" is not a substitute for crunching the numbers.
windexh8er 4y ago
> I know the video is a joke, but the whole thing about meat having an unacceptable carbon footprint pisses me off to no end. But... It does. 220lbs of methane per cow on average. Annually. > Guess what, those who believe that bugs are the answer. Bugs eat plants. Bugs don't burp, but to grow insects at scale, the plants need to be processed and brought to them. Guess what that means? Burning fossil fuels in transportation. This is a bit absurd. Now I'm not saying I'm not in said "bug camp" - but you're arguing that transport of plants, using fossil fuels, even remotely touches the amount of fossil fuels, not to mention water, that is required for transport of livestock / processed meat? > Cows, on the other hand, can feed on grassland. True. Cows feed on grassland that could be significantly more productive acre for acre. Not only the space they need to live but the space required to grow the feed corn, the water that is consumed and the fossil fuels that get burned. The argument is fantasy at best. The final thing being - cows don't exist without humans in their current capacity. Insects, on the other hand do. We don't need meat. We have access to plenty of what we need to thrive via plants without bugs. It's unfortunate that meat is looked at as a staple with overconsumption of specific meats even being touted as healthy (e.g. chicken).
- chitowneats 4y ago
  I was totally with you until: "We have access to plenty of what we need to thrive via plants without bugs". Has there ever been research done on this? Historically humans depended on animal protein for essential amino acids. It seems far-fetched to suggest we could scale up quinoa to 7+ billion humans given current global realities. Humans naturally consume animal protein out of biological necessity. This has only changed for people who have the necessary resources to follow incredibly regimented and expensive vegan diets.
  - rootw0rm 4y ago
    Hemp seeds contain all essential amino acids and are famously easy to produce.
    - sph 4y ago
      How many grams of hemp seeds would you have to ingest to receive the same amount of amino acids in weight compared to a beef steak? And how much phytate does hemp seed contain? 4g/100g. Good luck with mineral absorption. Proportion of amino acids isn't the only important metric.
tejohnso 4y ago
> the whole thing about meat having an unacceptable carbon footprint pisses me off to no end. Well, as far as I've looked into it, the production of meat is significantly more water and energy (carbon) intensive than if we were to consume plants directly. And there's also the carbon output via methane. The meat production is completely unnecessary and it's not an efficient conversion. > The fact that eating insects is being suggested as an alternative makes it even worse. I don't know why someone would suggest eating insects at all. We don't need either of those things. Just eat the plants directly. There's no need for an inefficient conversion mechanism from plants to something else. > As someone who is has eaten plenty of bugs Interesting. Why did you do that?
- upsidesinclude 4y ago
  It's about protein at a bare minimum. Plant diets are lacking, we are not herbivores
  - tejohnso 4y ago
    > Protein...Plant diets are lacking No, they are not lacking. Have you tried a plant based / meat-free diet and found this to be the case? "Studies at Harvard University as well as other studies conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and various European countries, confirmed vegetarian diets provide sufficient protein intake as long as a variety of plant sources are available and consumed" [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism#Protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism#Protein
    - upsidesinclude 4y ago
      Sufficient for what? You are making assumptions and otherwise fail to realize that a lifetime diet has more impact than can be understood with a contrived, likely biased, study designed to find the answer sought. Inuits lived primarily on whale blubber. It's entirely possibly to live on a diet nearly devoid of nutrition. No I won't provide you with a study. It is evident from the modern western diet of processed foods
Schroedingersat 4y ago
But cows don't feed on grassland. They feed on soy and corn that was grown using twice its mass in fossil fuels and transported further than it would be to the insects. They the multiply its ghg severity by turning a bunch of it into methane. The carbon mass of cattle comes from the gas wells, (including fugitive methane which dwarfs the burps). They don't live on grassland either. They live on freshly burnt down old growth rainforest. We can, however, cut the number of cows down to just the ones that can graze, and eat vegetarian for the other 9/10 days. This frees up 70% of the corn and soy land too. If you really need extra high quality protein then insects are an option, and can eat some of the crop byproducts we cannot.
- ericd 4y ago
  Some cows do. If you want to eat cows that were pastured, you might consider joining a local CSA.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    And some deisel is produced from waste streams of carbon free agriculture which is equally irrelevant. It's not the referent when someone says "beef has high emissions"
    - ericd 4y ago
      You picked some outlier cows that live on freshly burnt rainforest. That’s not representative either, that’s the hyperbolic extreme.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > If you want to eat cows that were pastured If everyone eats cows that are pastured, you will have 1 small burger a month. Because that's how much beef pastures can support divided by the number of people that want it. The rest if bred on soy and stuff
onion2k 4y ago
Guess what that means? Burning fossil fuels in transportation. Why does it mean that? Alternative methods of operating would be either electric vehicles, or farming the bugs in the same place as growing bug food.
sph 4y ago
> the whole thing about meat having an unacceptable carbon footprint pisses me off to no end What pisses me off is people complaining about my local, free-range meat consumption while chomping on fruit and grain grown in more temperate countries and flown here. EDIT: But I have to admit, as a meat eater, I support the research into bugs for food. Because animal protein is unrivalled compared to vegetable protein. Although squeamish, I'd rather eat cricket flour than trying to make a vegan diet work.
- rowanajmarshall 4y ago
  > What pisses me off is people complaining about my local, free-range meat consumption while chomping on fruit and grain grown in more temperate countries and flown here. Not sure if you're being serious here, but the _extreme_ vast majority of food is shipped, not flown. It's something like 0.16% [1], and I'll bet that's low-volume, high-worth food. And your local meat _probably_ has a higher carbon footprint than meat imported from a better climate; lamb from New Zealand, plus shipping to the UK, has a lower carbon footprint than lamb from the UK eaten in the UK [2], because the New Zealand climate is better. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-transport-by-mode https://ourworldindata.org/food-transport-by-mode [2] https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lamb/ https://www.ecoandbeyond.co/articles/british-new-zealand-lam... People really underestimate how efficient shipping has gotten over the last 50 years or so.
  - sph 4y ago
    Do boats not consume diesel? They might be efficient, but is it as efficient as not travelling thousands of miles by sea? The idea that importing lamb from NZ is better than locally grown is absolutely ridiculous I wouldn't even know where to start.
    - rowanajmarshall 4y ago
      Yes, quite a lot more efficient. You can call it ridiculous, but we're incredibly good at efficiently shipping things.
birksherty 4y ago
> Meat is a part of the carbon cycle. No, that carbon is also human generated. All these cows are created only for human use. They are not here by natural process.
- deleted 4y ago
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claytongulick 4y ago

I got to thinking about this a lot. It brings to mind the scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where they were all sitting at the high table eating huge beetles. As a kid, I was super grossed out when I watched it. Now, I'm not so sure. I eat a ton of crawfish, and love them. Pretending that they aren't bugs is just marketing. Are there other bugs I'd like with the appropriate amount of Zatarain's? Probably.