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I mean why isn't ethical enough? Meat processing is one of the single worst industries for climate change, a surprising amount of the energy production field.
by DoctorOW 4y ago
I mean why isn't ethical enough? Meat processing is one of the single worst industries for climate change, a surprising amount of the energy production field.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- prepend 4y agoIt seems evident why ethical isn’t enough as we could just eat meat and only consume a nutrient slurry for ethical reasons. There needs to be an economic reason and it doesn’t make sense that an impossible whopper costs more than a whopper. For that price, I’d rather have a sustainably raised, organic whopper that tastes the same or better.
- ianai 4y agoThere probably is enough economic reason if the externalities were properly accounted. If it’s not in the price (and worse-subsidized) there’s no hope of the market reaching a suitable equilibrium.
- prepend 4y agoImpossible meat is substantially subsidized right now and it’s still expensive. I think veggie food is cheaper (rice and beans) it’s just this synthetic fake meat stuff that costs more.
- plmpsu 4y ago> I mean why isn't ethical enough? It is. GP is just saying that different people have different ethics.
- wpietri 4y agoAnd let's not forget the cows. I'm in no way a vegetarian. And I'm too set in my childhood-established food biases to make huge changes. (I tried for a year or two. It didn't take.) But the Impossible and Beyond burgers are close enough for me. Could I tell them apart in a patty taste test? Probably. But once it's on a bun with cheese and barbecue sauce and whatnot, I don't notice a difference. So at that point, I'm like, "Cows are nice animals." I have made the acquaintance of a few and I like them. For an equivalent experience, I can either kill the cow or not. So we've been gradually shifting toward the high-grade fake meats. I look forward to further improvements on this front.
- Elinvynia 4y agoEvery vegetarian should look up "Dairy is scary" on YouTube. Wouldn't be one for much longer.
- swiley-gin 4y ago
- wpietri 4y agoAh, reality. As defined by somebody so unable to function in it that he can't make it 24 hours here without getting 3 flagged/dead comments and a negative karma score. But thank you for the comment. It's nice to know that the people opposed to crazy things like human rights are this dysfunctional. You give me hope for the future.
- Lammy 4y agoI don’t like the push to define humanity as a thing somehow separate from the Earth and all that entails. Cows wouldn’t exist at all if humanity didn’t depend on them. The most pro-cow stance is to raise them with love and respect and use all they offer us without wasting.
- wpietri 4y agoDo you really believe that if everybody turns vegetarian tomorrow cows will just stop existing? If so, India would like a word.
- pessimizer 4y agoTax meat, then, and get the prices into parity. I know it's literally violence to have to pay for your externalities, but that's a couple of the main things that governments are for: to do violence and tax externalities.
- DoctorOW 4y agoI feel like you're making fun of me but I am genuinely okay with implementing a carbon tax.
- pessimizer 4y agoI am not. I am agreeing with you enthusiastically.
- belorn 4y agoThat is great since a carbon tax is not a meat tax. Taxing the natural gas that goes into artificial fertilizers would increase the cost of a particular method of maximizing the growth speed and weight just before slaughter, but its not a method that farming must employ. They could just let the animals graze land that have vegetation naturally grow without artificial fertilizers, avoiding the tax and accepting a slower growth speed. Any food that require artificial fertilizers would have to pay the carbon tax, making carbon-neutral food better in comparison.
- starkd 4y ago"a couple of the main things that goverments are for: to do violence and tax externalities" huh? Maybe in authoritarian countries, but not in countries whose constitutions are geared for individual liberty. Your fascist tendencies are showing.
- Dylan16807 4y agoWhat? It's the people that focus really hard on individual liberty that call government action violence, my dude.
- forgetfreeman 4y agoWould you care to source that claim? All of the research I've encountered suggests agriculture in toto contributes around 8% of total GHG emissions, with meat production responsible for at most 60% of that number. Even if meat production was eliminated that would not in yield a 5% reduction in GHG as additional plant-based food production would be required to pick up this slack. Given the current state of play of arable land globally (near maximum utilization, available land shrinking rapidly, unrecoverable topsoil depletion rampant globally) one wonders where proponents of this idea think all of this extra agricultural output is supposed to come from.
- Bakary 4y agoLivestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories. See the source for a list of nations with globally unsustainable diets in terms of land. https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets 36% of crops globally are used for animal feed. This climbs to 67% in the USA. https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel-animal-feed https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...
- maximus-decimus 4y agoMeasuring food production by calories feels like measuring programmer productivity by lines of code. How does it compare to other sources of proteins with full amino acid profiles?
- pittmajp 4y agoIrrelevant. You can get a full amino acid profile by combining plant based sources. It is basic high school biology that there’s less energy available the higher up on the food pyramid you go. Farming Lions for meat would be less economical than farming cows. Farming cows is less economical than farming wheat.
- 4y ago
- solarkraft 4y agoIt feels like most people don't have ethics most of the time. You have to convince them on other grounds. Price would be a part of that.
- kennend3 4y agoEthics is subjective. Is it ethical to eat dogs? Some societies do, some don't. Should we judge lions for eating meats? Perhaps convince them to move to a vegan diet? What you are advocating is forcing your views on others, and that "price" should be the factor. What if others don't want you do to do something, would you enjoy having it priced out of your reach? Why do you "have to convince them" in the first place? wouldn't it be easier to do what makes you happy and keep your opinions to yourself and your like-minded friends?
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago> Meat processing is one of the single worst industries for climate change Wild claim! Despite all the media coverage on farming/meat industry, coal-powered power plants remain the single most polluting industry in terms of GHG. Followed by all the hydrocarbon fuel based Transportation and (by a large step margin) the steel industry. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/09/Emissions-by-sector-%E2%80%93-pie-charts.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/09/Emissions-by-sect...
- DoctorOW 4y agoI'd likely to have to do more research before I'm confident to address everything you've said. However, I have issues with the way things are categorized because meat production is more than just livestock. It uses a lot of energy and transportation both of which are huge categories on your source. I spoke to a climate scientist I'm friends with a while back and it's my memory of the conversation that gave me the anecdote above. I'll have to do more research before weighing in any further than that.
- DoingIsLearning 4y agoTo be clear I am 100% in agreement that the meat industry is both unsustainable and unethical. However, specifically on GHG it really is not the worst offender. Effectively if you would stop commuting with a car, reduced AC/Heating to bare minimum and simply bought less 'stuff' (non-essential goods), you would be doing more for the environment than not eating meat. The unconfortable truth is that once we start discussing these things very few people are willing to curb their 'standard of living', in reality it is a first world luxury not a given right. Nevertheless if you tell me that we need to curb meat consumption to avoid animal suffering than I am equally on board with you. But the environmental angle in my view is a distraction from the other elephants in the room.
- philwelch 4y agoThe better question is whether or not meat can be produced sustainably. Humans have been raising livestock for millennia, and climate change only seemed to start after the Industrial Revolution, so meat isn’t obviously necessarily causative of climate change. To my understanding, the climate problem is basically one of not having closed loops. For instance, burning fossil fuels is a problem because you’re taking carbon that’s buried underground and pumping it into the atmosphere. So to the degree that meat is a problem, there’s probably a loop we need to close. Energy and transportation are instances of the same burning-fossil-fuels problem that we need to solve anyway. As for the livestock themselves, I know they produce methane as a byproduct of digestion, but that seems like a potentially closed loop to me. Wasn’t it a closed loop during all the centuries that humans raised livestock before the Industrial Revolution? If so, what changed? The way we produce fertilizer, for one. But we also need fertilizer to grow vegetables, so we need to solve the fertilizer problem anyway. Plus, livestock are also the primary source of organic fertilizer, so maybe they’re part of the closed loop. They sure used to be.
- philwelch 4y agoBecause most people don’t agree with the ethical premise that it’s bad to eat meat.