As stated in the article, the reason that this is happening is because of the increasing demand for animal products, so the forest is cleared for cattle and soy, most of which is used as feed for livestock.
When we read daunting articles like this and feel a sense of panic or urgency, there is at least one small thing we can do to prevent this issue from worsening: eat as few animal products as possible, which should ideally be none. It has a real effect, and is (in almost all cases) trivial to start.
I watched some documentaries on exactly this effect years ago and went full veggie because of it. Prior I would eat meat when I was out on special occasions but even that was not worth it.
There are projects out there to rebuild and regrow the forest. I hope with strong policy and social movements to reduce our demands for animal products that it may recover one day.
Let me play devil's advocate here. Because I worry a lot about this.
In as much as it affects the outcome of climate change you're wrong: not eating meat, driving and flying less, etc. will not, in any meaningful way, save us from what are increasingly alarming predictions regarding climate change. What you're talking about are straw men.
In fact I worry that the effect is negative because everyone pats themselves on the back for these kinds of activities and thinks they've done everything they can when, as I say, the impact of what they've done is essentially negligible and draws attention from what really is driving climate change (and noone seems to talk about).
And what really is driving climate change (and numerous other environmental issues - see massive over-fishing, environmental destruction by dredging for sand / mining for minerals, etc.) is the massive shift out of poverty of billions in people in China and India and their demands for housing, cars, travel, construction, etc. The US and Europe have had (fairly dramatically) decreasing carbon emissions for some time now, but all of those decreases (and then some) are erased by the increases in India and China. Particularly China which built 184 new coal plants in 2020 and increased its own CO2 emissions by 4% in the second half of 2020 alone: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-idUSKBN2A308U .
Hopefully it does not need to be said that you cannot fault these countries for massively improving the welfare of their citizens or say that this is a bad thing. To be fair to both India and China: both are aware of (do not deny) the problem and are devoting large amounts of resources to finding solutions.
But those are the facts. You can virtue signal all you like about being vegan but really you are doing nothing to address the actual problem (and may actually diverting attention away from it).
Yes, the things you described also have a profound effect on our carbon emissions. Agriculture also accounts for a large portion (those people leaving poverty gotta eat! And they wanna eat meat), and a large portion of agriculture is animal agriculture. So if eliminate or drastically reduce our reliance on animal agriculture, it stands to reason that we'd have an effect on overall carbon emissions.
Are there other things that can be done alongside reducing our demand for harmful products? Totally, and a lot of those things will involve regulation of industry, not individual changes in habits.
But the good thing is that we don't need to do one or the other, we can do both. I invite you to start doing what you can.
> and may actually diverting attention away from it
I find it hard to believe that trying to get people to change their consumptions habits in order to reduce our reliance on CO2 and Methane heavy industries is going to result in more carbon and methane. Do you have anything that actually says that folks who are motivated to make changes like this are somehow _less_ motivated to address climate change after?
It seems more likely that folks who want to virtue signal ("Climate change is awful, but _I_ won't do anything to help") are those who already weren't gonna do shit, so no loss there, really.
Here's the only solution that's going to solve the climate crises: every person of the world is going to have to realize they they are responsible for their own CO2 output. The goods you buy, the transportation you use, how you heat and cool your home - these are all your choices and all impact your C02 output. Americans on average produce double the amount of CO2 than the Chinese do on average. Americans produce more C02 than Europeans, who in turn also produce more CO2 than the Chinese.
Once you realize your CO2 output is your personal responsibility then you can take care of your own business and strive to make changes to reduce your output. You can create demand for green power (not demand, create demand - actually buy green energy), you can make choices as to your thermostat settings, you have choices in what you eat, you have choices in what your purchase - all of these are within your control. Small changes made by hundreds of millions of people can have dramatic impact - in fact that's how we got into this mess in the first place.
What doesn't look good is Americans, who produce more C02 than anybody else in the world - by far - throwing up their hands and saying it's hopeless because of India and China, who's citizens are producing far less CO2. It's time for us to clean up our act and lead by example.
Horrible argument. You make it sound like you stopping is going to cause more people to start eating, when in fact you know that's not the case.
Perhaps you're trying to articulate that it's futile - since "there are many people who do not care", but that's like stabbing a baby saying "well, in our culture many people do this already".
Individual choices matter: buying less meat reduces supply (it's what economists call elastic) - your supermarket will buy less meat when you stop consuming it, and that propagates up the chain. If not 1-to-1, it may be 1/1000 chance of reducing the next 1000 lb order - which is basically equivalent to 1-to-1 response (especially in the long run).
And finally, with all the alternatives of substitute meats (on the market now) and cultured meats (coming to market soon), you have numerous options to reduce your meat consumption. So don't hide behind panic to do something bad - that's like seeing looting in the store and saying "well, I want some of that free stuff I haven't earned - at someone else's expense, and others are doing it".
Can I also add that one person doing something has a knock on effect on other people's behaviour. Similar to the drink-drive argument before which was 'everyone does it' whereas these days, where I live, it absolutely isn't. If I drive at 30mph through a residential road that most people speed through, I might actually influence other people's behaviour who may feel it isn't appropriate to speed if other people aren't.
I guess I'm trying to say individuals can help normalise things that previously wasn't normal.
I went through the whole cowspiracy, went vegetarian for 2-3 years thing and I commend it, but it's pretty hard to get enough protein without being starving and vegetarian cooking takes way longer.
Idealy, you'd like to think that we can all just quit meat, but IMO it's for poeple who can afford the time and money to do so.
How rude - especially since you don't understand the article you just quoted.
Of course consumption falls if I give something up. That's not Supply.
Your original statement was "buying less meat reduces supply", while the quote you just gave as evidence talked about "consumption", which is the demand side of the equation (technically "quantity demanded", but I'm simplifying).
If you don't like my knowledge, maybe this will help [0]. Please don't tell me I'm "just claiming things based on theory I remember" - or anyone else on HN - it's rude.
Sorry it was rude of me to assume what the source of your claim was. It is inappropriate of me to make it sound like I have a deep understanding of economics - I certainly don't.
If you have the patience, perhaps you can explain to me where the mechanism I describe fails.
If in a town 10% of people stop buying beef, grocery store will stop stocking their shelves as much as they did prior. Going up the supply chain, when more stores do this, the supplier will decrease production. Of course this takes time, but given a few-years time horizon, the effects of lower consumption do propagate to the supply.
Is your comment just a nitpick with my misunderstanding the technical language economists use? Perhaps you're commenting with an assumption of a shorter time horizon than what I have in mind?
I wasn't nitpicking. This is actually a confusing part of economics, and the language of economics (which I'm trying to avoid) makes it worse. :)
Let me give you a few real examples, but with contrived numbers for illustration.
1 - Suppose you can buy either chicken or beef. Both cost $1. Now, due to some reason, the price of beef rises. What will happen, is that some people will buy more chicken, even though the price of that didn't change. (Maybe they can't afford the beef now, maybe they're frugal, etc.)
2 - Next, suppose the same $1 for each, but the price of beef drops. Now, since it is the cheaper source of protein, some people will buy the beef instead of the chicken, simply because it's cheaper.
3 - Third example (a bit more involved): The prices of both are again $1. You and a bunch of friends decide to go without beef for a month. The price of beef will drop. Now (and this is the key part), because the price of beef is now cheaper, some number of people will buy it instead of chicken.
What has happened in example 3, is that the second half of that example is actually the same as example 2. In your example of the town buying 10% less beef, then supply will eventually self-correct, but only if nothing else (prices, prices of substitutes, supply of substitutes) changes. This push-pull action on prices and quantities tends to bounce around - that's why prices of beef, chicken, oil, timber, etc tend to change frequently.
Thank you for the explanation. I guess we all know that if 100% of people stop buying beef, companies will stop growing cows (with minor exceptions of leather etc). A challenge for a group of us, people who would like others to reduce their meat consumption, is to communicate clearly that ever without 100% reduction in supply, there will be positive change (fewer animals raised in factory farms).
The argument I lay out is that even if supermarkets aren't 100% sensitive to demand, on average, reduction of consumption does propagate through the market, and at least a part of the effect is lower "production" (fewer animals raised in the future).
I think you're 100% right that when there's more supply than consumers, it's likely that the price will drop, and with lower price, more people will be eager to buy. But I still see all this as short-term effects. When looking across a lifetime of action (consuming literally TONS less meat), an individual's choice to eat less meat makes a difference.
Perhaps I should stay away from "elasticity" in my wording, as it brings in needless attention to economic theories that can make thinking about this issue harder, not easier.
One approach to look at is a tax (the tobacco tax as an example). By increasing the price of tobacco products, people will naturally migrate away from them.
Although the taxes were/are astronomical in the US, some people continue to buy them. Many fewer people, but still $ billions in sales every year.
You can take this approach with pretty much anything - tobacco, beef, soft drinks, carbon-based energy, foreign imports, etc., and it keeps it simple.
I'm all in favor of meat taxes. I suspect that most people (in the US at least) are in favor of change of how animals are treated in factory farms. But their refrain from changing anything about their behavior is "the government should do something about it". While government action would be the best scenario (outlawing battery cages, adding taxes on meat, etc), doing nothing isn't an appropriate personal response.
Before I reduced my meat consumption to virtually zero, my last concern was "how could I, a tiny individual, make any difference?" And then I heard the expected value argument (where my purchase could result in an extra bulk order from the supplier - so even if low probability, it was still better to abstain).
Yes, there are many people who will continue to demand these products. That's exactly why its so important for everyone else to start now. It's not binary; we can reduce the scale of the issue as more and more people stop demanding these things, and that will have a tangible effect on the emissions.
The life time carbon footprint of an average American exceeds 20 tons, it's important that you don't have children, you could save the planet even more!
People try to show symbols of wealth by wasting resources . It should be a sign of wealth if you can avoid polluting your environment. China has one of the richest vegetarian traditions and just recently has developed this absurd craving for meat IMHO, so this is no automatism.
We should start putting customs duties on all meat products. German chicken e.g. have destroyed eg. the African chicken market. Live stock is transported over high ways because it is too expensive to slaughter locally. Free trade of animal products just leads to the most absurd effects.
Well the real answer is large-scale political action. But the (American) political system is designed on the assumption that a tendency to do nothing is safer than a tendency towards action/change.
Unfortunately doing nothing isn't the safe choice now, and even worse many of the checks and balances intended to be brakes now just act as a stick through the spokes.
Not helped by how many people are blatantly propagandized into objectively false positions by Fox News & similar.
> Not helped by how many people are blatantly propagandized into objectively false positions by Fox News & similar.
I dunno, I think that’s confusing cause and effect. The solutions being proposed (e.g. be vegetarian) aren’t what people want. The same goes for lots of problems it seems. In my mind, somebody turning to Fox News et al. is a kind of effect of that.
People aren’t going to suddenly want to become vegetarian if Fox News goes away. There will probably always be somewhere people can listen to talking heads rant about the solutions they feel are being shoved down their throats.
I think there are, for lack of a better concept, tiers to climate change actions.
Eating less meat would be something very personal, and I think you're right on there being an aversion totally unrelated to news, or propaganda of any kind.
On the other hand, there are measures like increasing investment in climate research, green energy, carbon capture, etc. These have a much smaller personal effect on each individual.
These two categories both, on Fox News and contemporaries, exist under the same umbrella. If the demand was really going from ground-up, then we might see segments about how eating meat doesn't really contribute to global warming next to segments about how we could create jobs with green energy investment. But we don't.
Instead we see a widespread denial of climate change itself on the top level, falling back to denial of man-made climate change, then to some idea that climate change isn't worth fixing, then to climate change is real and dangerous but it's the plastic straws & personal responsibility that we need to think about.
This, in my mind, strongly implies that it is not a bottom-up demand for climate change denial, but a mix of bottom-up and top-down demand, but with a heavy lean towards top-down. And much of the bottom-up demand has been created artificially (in the Manufacturing Consent style of "artificially")
To be clear, I agree with the narrow point you actually made, I don't expect Fox News has some controlling factor over how many people want to be vegetarian. Vegetarianism isn't even a majority in deeply left-wing communities. Fortunately there's a lot of ground to be gained on switching to bird meats, or even just dodging the issue entirely with cultured meats. It's a shame Fox News disdains these options too.
You make an excellent point; according to the United Nations [0], in 2021 there are 957 million people across 93 countries who do not have enough to eat.
Clearly extraordinary times require extraordinary measures, while some efforts are being proposed (e.g. recent EU Climate Action [1]), it is far too too little, much too late.
Something people don't think about enough is the exponential effects of this kind of disaster. None of these effects are reversible - once the carbon and heat are in the atmosphere, they stay in our atmosphere. Which makes disasters such as category 5 hurricanes and 500 year floods more and more likely in the coming days.
Why not? It sounds like you are saying the carbon released by cutting/burning one mature tree is more than that captured by the planting and eventual growth of one tree. It seems non-sensical on the surface, but maybe I'm missing something. Maybe you're arguing that the carbon release is instantaneous but the carbon capture takes decades?
From an atmospheric CO2 standpoint, perhaps all trees (of a given carbon mass) are equivalent. But the monocultures that we plant are a pathetic, precarious substitute for natural habitat.
We're erasing countless species to replace them with cows and soy.
I've tried often to convince people to care more about biodiversity. I don't focus on the chemical/pharma angle because I'm not grounded in those sciences, and because while I think they're important, they're not what's most important. Biodiversity is simply the best thing in the known universe. Nothing else holds a candle to the beauty, the wonder, the awe that the living world engenders.
I've met people who agree, and people who disagree, but I've never seen anyone change their minds.
On the bright side (if you can call it that), whereas the positive value of biodiversity doesn't seem to motivate much change, the negative value of potential catastrophic species collapse might ...
I've met people who agree, and people who disagree, but I've never seen anyone change their minds.
I've had the same experience. There are people who will not give up (or even reduce) meat no matter what - they are fully aware of the effects of the meat industry on the environment. It is pointless to even engage them in a conversation. Instead, it is better to spend the time and energy on people who are not aware of the effects, but I'd guess these are smaller numbers compared to the I know but I don't care group.
Nothing else holds a candle to the beauty, the wonder, the awe that the living world engenders.
Much of the urban population hasn't seen this beauty, except on TV. I guess it is hard for them to have that personal connection to nature, when all the animals they know (except perhaps the ones they keep as pets and some urban dwelling birds) they have only seen on TV.
> Biodiversity is simply the best thing in the known universe. Nothing else holds a candle to the beauty, the wonder, the awe that the living world engenders.
If the beauty argument doesn't sway others, there's a very strong argument to be made that biodiversity is one of the biggest strengths life on earth (or anywhere else) has. To the extent someone cares about the process of life persisting onwards through time, they should care about biodiversity.
You should expect this to be true of any shrinking rainforest. A growing rainforest will absorb more CO2 than it emits. A rainforest that remains the same size will be carbon neutral.
The idea that the rainforest removes a significant net amount of CO2 from the atmosphere is simply false. The rainforest even emits methane.
People are using the euphemism large scale political action. But what does this large scale political action mean for the billions that only now are starting to get a decent standard of living and wont accept a no?
Sadly, the sort of "large scale political action" that really needs to happen to solve these sorts of issues will simply not happen, because it would involve governments working together for the good of all humanity everywhere, and it would involve eliminating poverty altogether worldwide, and it would involve providing clean renewable energy to people whereever it's wanted, and so many other things that politicians nowhere on Earth appear to be capable of doing.
Honestly I'd be stoked if they went to Mars since quality of life would inevitably be awful, since at minimum the lower gravity will cause compounding health issues.
(my comment was hyperbole. it meant that 'solving' the climate crisis will become a problem for the 99% cuz the rich will not stop making money for the sake of the future of the planet. if they had to stop, they would've by now)
Ultimately, our current economic system is based on superexponential growth, and this cannot be sustained. Really bad things are going to happen if we don’t change this.
The world economy doesn't really have any single basis, but its bases would be things like property rights, the permitted opportunities to trade, outlandish government subsidies for particular sectors, etc. Exponential growth is an outcome, and has indeed become part of our expectations, but it's not fundamental.
What parts of economics seem Western and not objective to you? Supply and demand? Game theory? Fractional reserve lending? The effects of monopoly? Of rent control? Of pollution taxes? Of immigration restrictions?
I got a master's in economics. Everything in the textbooks is positive (what is, what happens) rather than normative (what should be). Individual professors have their individual beliefs regarding justice, of course, but those beliefs don't really constitute what economics is. Economics is a set of methods for anticipating how people will respond to incentives.
"What parts of economics seem Western and not objective to you?"
I don't think the western part is relevant to the point I was making. I probably should have left it out. I was inartfully trying to point out that our current system has only existed for a small portion of human history, but most of us have internalized it so much that we can't imagine an alternative.
Let's break down the other part of your question, and your last sentence.
"What parts of economics seem ... not objective to you? ... Economics is a set of methods for anticipating how people will respond to incentives."
I think this is the crux of our different perspectives. The current global economic system is one that creates incentives that are somewhat arbitrary. For example, the fact that economists freak out if a country like Japan stops increasing it's population exponentially. This is an incentive that the system we've chose, of many possible systems, has created some what arbitrarily. There is no law of nature or physics that forces exponential population growth, but our economic system as it stands is predicated on it. In fact, I would say it's quite the opposite, nature typically has constraints that stop exponential growth, but we've managed to break for of those constraints, at least for a limited time. My big fear is that it will only be for a limited time. A system based on superexponential growth requires infinite growth, to date that would require infinite resources. Maybe there is a way to break free of the physical constraints of growth (Ray Kurzweil's singularity), but I fear there is not and the arbitrary incentive of superexponential growth (or just exponential) will lead to very bad times ahead if we don't choose to change our current system.
Now, maybe human psychology is incapable of changing in response to clear impending doom, and economics is simply a statement of this. Our response to the pandemic has not given me hope that human kind can adapt to clear approaching existential danger. I.e. will we cut down the entire rainforest and destroy our ecology before we have enough physical incentive to change? And again, I do believe that our current system which demands superexponential growth is an arbitrary incentive that we can choose to change.
I agree almost completely. We certainly can't continue to be this voracious and expect happy times ahead.
My only disagreement is in the concept of "the system". I mean, institutions are critically important, yes. But most of the system is just individual people doing their somewhat predictable thing.
The major innovation of economics has been microfoundations -- our predictions come from what individuals are motivated to do by their circumstances and their personal values. The models economists use tend to attribute painfully simple values to people -- more often than not, simple personal greed and nothing else. The horror is that those models are accurate.
Japan's a good example. What's so bad about the population loss in Japan? It's that the society is used to having more on a per-person basis than it can now expect to have. What's a government to do? Reduce pension amounts? Increase ages of retirement? Replace the shrinking hospital staff, not to mention the once-abundant family that used to visit their elders, with robots? Whatever they choose, the people will be really unhappy.
Yeah, I think we mostly agree, but we do have this one small disagreement. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that human nature naturally leads to a system that demands superexponential growth. Let me know if I'm misunderstanding.
I don't think this is the case, but I could be wrong. The case I'll make is that many societies were going along just fine without a system like this, many for longer than this current system has existed before colonial powers invaded them (or missionaires "converted them) and imposed this system. I just got back from Hawaii, so I have the pacific islands on my mind. Their societies before european powers reached them were very very different, and human nature hadn't led to the same system with the same incentives. Our current system may be more akin to cancer, it starts in one small place then grows uncontrolled until it ultimately takes over everything and kills itself.
Edit: having said that, I don't think we have to end up in this dire place, but it will require us to end the incentive of superexponential growth which I don't believe is some kind of law of physics that we can't change. To steal of Geoffrey West, we need a unified theory of sustainability.
I'm not sure I believe in any particular fixed human nature. There do exist some radically different conceptions of ownership out there, such as the demand sharing of certain tribes in Namibia. That is to me somewhat hopeful.
The "system change" I would hope for is that a lot of people individually change what they choose to do. Top-down mandates could help. Making consumers pay the full costs of their actions rather than subsidizing damaging ones like fossil fuels or meat would be a reasonable start.
The trouble with blaming colonization is it coincides (roughly) with the arrival of the ability to grow like we do now. People have been greedy for as far back as our written records illuminate. But before factory methods, mechanization, theories of management, institutions like the limited liability corporation, etc. there was only so much scale that any society's production could achieve.
To stop increasing the scale of human production while so much of the world is still so poor seems cruel to me. It wouldn't if I thought redistribution was politically feasible, but I don't.
I don't know, it's a hard problem.
> will require us to end the incentive of superexponential growth which I don't believe is some kind of law of physics that we can't change
If it were a law of physics at least we could pinpoint it. There's no single incentive for exponential growth, any more than one process could be blamed for Moore's Law while it held. There's just a lot of individuals facing a lot of distinct incentives, and they all want to do better than they did last year, and want their kids to do better than them, and they measure "better" in terms of things like how many calories they consume, how many miles they're able to travel, etc ...
That’s a deep question, I’ll try to answer later when I have time to do it justice. On the off chance I don’t, the book “Debt: The First 5000 Years” is pretty close to my view of it.
Also, if you want a less “economics” view of it, I’d recommend “Scale” by Geoffrey West
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27843049