The word "just" in this sense is a signal that you might easily be underestimating the difficulty or cost of something.
> We just need to make meat cost prohibitive enough to force the majority of people to eat the majority of their meals vegetarian.
If you were talking about persuasion, this would be fine.
When you start talking about forcing people to change their habits, it is time to take a step back and get curious about those other people's perspectives. In this case, you're talking about the daily or weekly dietary habits of more than 2 billion people.
Before moving forward, you should have a clear answer to the question of how many megadeaths you are willing to cause through war and famine.
>Before moving forward, you should have a clear answer to the question of how many megadeaths you are willing to cause through war and famine.
War and famine is what we currently get with the current dietary trend. Going back to a mostly vegetarian food supply would liberate so much land mass that you would have fewer issues feeding the world.
>In this case, you're talking about the daily or weekly dietary habits of more than 2 billion people.
Humanity hasn't had such a high meat consumption ever before, it's an aberration of the last century that is unsustainable. We changed the dietary habits of a lot of people over the last century. There's no reason we couldn't change them back.
No, we allowed people to change their own dietary habits and they chose to do so.
> There's no reason we couldn't change them back.
There is a reason: The probability that they would respond with violence that would spiral into a massive humanitarian crisis.
Remember that the Syrian civil war was kicked off in large part by the prices of food in the Arab world putting pressure on pre-existing fault lines.
> Going back to a mostly vegetarian food supply would liberate so much land mass that you would have fewer issues feeding the world.
You're not wrong about the destination...but the path to get there matters if you want to avoid making things worse. Also, there is a massive difference between freeing up the alfalfa fields of California and the grazing lands of Afghanistan or Pakistan.
>No, we allowed people to change their own dietary habits and they chose to do so.
Because it became vastly cheaper. But you still called it a choice. So why do you keep referring to the opposite scenario (people eating less meat because it's more expensive) like it's not?
1. People making choices which feel unpleasant often consider themselves to be forced. Those people can be willing to use violence to avoid those choices.
2. I’m responding to someone who talked about forcing behavior change.
> Humanity hasn't had such a high meat consumption ever before, it's an aberration of the last century that is unsustainable.
Humanity hasn't had 7 billion people before. It grew by 6 billion in said century. Is that sustainable, you think? Every extra person has a carbon footprint and consequently contributes to increase in land-use and resource exploitation, and by extension environmental destruction. Modifiers like fossil fuels exacerbate the rate of destruction but ultimately the scaling remains with whatever we replace with. The only sustainable course is for growth to stagnate entirely. This is popularly predicted on the horizon, but it seems too optimistic. So long as there is global poverty and inaccessibility to contraceptives there will be growth.
High meat consumption isn't exactly novel, it just hasn't been done to this scale. During Victorian period of inequality it may have been lower among workers, but that hasn't always been true. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_dining_in_the_Roman_E...
I'm with you for the most part. I'm vegetarian myself, chiefly for environmental reasons. And certainly we could change people's habits back, but there's an obvious reason this would be very hard: it's easy to give people something they want; it's hard to take it away. People feel loss more keenly than gain, so they will feel return to the status quo ante to be a greater loss in quality of life than leaving it was a gain.* And most people everywhere just aren't that pro-social. They want to eat meat. They don't particularly care about the well being of others or their future selves. I think this is malleable, but most people would prefer not to change their attitudes. I'm not sure what the solution is.
* Also, we discount utility by distance. A gain one year ago or one year from now feels less important than the same gain today. And if we're talking about a gain felt by a previous generation, the utility drops down another notch. Someone else's imprisonment or freedom just doesn't matter as much to you as your own. Change is hard in part because you feel the pain now and the gain is sometime in the future.
> And most people everywhere just aren't that pro-social.
As we've seen with COVID, a significant number of people aren't willing to wear a mask in Walmart to avoid killing grandmas; they certainly aren't giving up their McDonalds and BBQ steaks without some kind of squabble.
A few things here, some to other posts upstream of yours.
1) There is absolutely no shortage of arable land. None.
Even with the immense amount of "the best growing land ever" being covered with cities, for cities formed where the living / land was good, there is an incredible amount of farming land purposefully fallow.
In the EU, people are paid not to farm. In Canada, land use is restricted by quotas on who and how land can be used. Market pressures are used elsewhere.
I can't overstress how much land is just not being used.
This has a secondary benefit -- if times get "tough", environmental, or just many dry seasons, fallow land can be brought into use. This is vital, for this is what prevents wars!
2) We currently through away massive amounts of food, due to spoilage.
Many different discussions about this, but I've seen numbers from 33% to 50% lost in silos.
Again, this is what prevents war. Starvation. You don't plant crops, and decide "OK, I need $x food per person, I'll plant $y crops."
Pests are cyclical, and even with pesticides, take a toll. Water (rain) is random, and too much is just as bad as too little. How cool or hot, how sunny or cloudy, all effect output.
So, we must grow excess crops in order to keep people reliably fed.
3) Due to the above, and how much corn, and others are redirected into fuel manufacturing, the problem feeding people isn't food supply, it's "Will they pay us for our food".
Almost every year, the above spoiled food just rots. More is thrown away. Why? Pay me or I won't give you things."
Right or wrong, that's the reality of it. We could feed, if we really wanted to, 100 billion people, including meat, without even going to advanced farming methods. And population growth looks to be, soon, on a downward* trend. We've reached peak people.
4) But...!, I'll try to answer some 'buts'.
* crop rotation, and the science behind it, including soil testing is well understood. It often isn't done, because crop $x is worth good money, and $y is worth meh, but without fertilizer this is the way to go. And it works. Well. It's all about cost here.
* cattle can easily graze, and there is almost unlimited land here. The real issue with cattle is grain feed, combined with petro-chemicals (fertilizers) to grow that grain. That is where "cattle = bad".
Many places outside of the US do indeed grass/free graze feed. There is absolutely no environmental cost here. If those cattle didn't exist, then wildlife would grow abundant, and feed instead.
Only through some false, artificial means, eg humans fencing off land, and then killing anything which intrudes, prevents everything from rabbits, to goats, deer, etc from eating that grass.
* meat is the most environmentally friendly way to transport energy, due to its density. Trains space, boat space, is often not about weight, but space. Grain takes a lot more than just meat.
* the problems which are cited in this article are really simply put.
A cow, sheep, goat, etc does all the work for you, of collecting energy. Grow your own meat, and you must supply all that energy!
When it comes to free-range cattle, nothing could be more energy efficient for making meat.
> Many places outside of the US do indeed grass/free graze feed. There is absolutely no environmental cost here.
In Brazil huge tracts of the Amazon are converted into grassland every year for cattle grazing. This is not environmentally free. This has turned the Amazon from a carbon sink to a carbon source. And the density of ruminants on grasslands is vastly different if those ruminants are raised for meat instead of fending for themselves. And, of course, ruminants emit methane. Just burning the grass every year would be better for the environment than feeding it to cattle.
> Many places outside of the US do indeed grass/free graze feed. There is absolutely no environmental cost here. If those cattle didn't exist, then wildlife would grow abundant, and feed instead.
That replacement does sound like something that could reasonably described as a cost. To the environment.
> When it comes to free-range cattle, nothing could be more energy efficient for making meat.
It's also far less cruel than more sensitive people here imagine it to be.
Animals die in the end, true, but eventually everyone dies. They live a decent life, walk in the pastures, play with their kin, get treated if injured. This is better than life of animals in the wild by a huge margin. Some of them also get to have a long life; many cows that are used for milk usually are not slaughtered until they get old.
Factory farmed meat is fucking genocide and should be banned forever.
From agricultural point of view, it is nonsense. There are places that generate more human edible calories by having animals. For example Mongolia, or nordic regions.
> Humanity hasn't had such a high meat consumption ever before, it's an aberration of the last century that is unsustainable. We changed the dietary habits of a lot of people over the last century. There's no reason we couldn't change them back.
If people will decide to eat less meat then be so. Forcing them would be disgusting.
>From agricultural point of view, it is nonsense. There are places that generate more human edible calories by having animals. For example Mongolia, or nordic regions.
Exceptions that prove the rule. Also nomadic hunters will not pay higher taxes on food in stores, because they're hunting it themselves, limiting the amount to what they can hunt, and limiting their fertility to the amount of calories they can get from the land. We have had unlimited growth of the human population elsewhere, which is what's worrysome, not the minuscule amount of leftover hunter-gatherers.
>If people will decide to eat less meat then be so. Forcing them would be disgusting.
Forcing humanity to march into inhostiptable environments because a portion of humanity doesn't care is I would say more disgusting than telling somebody, you have to eat food that's better for you and the environment.
I guess places that would implement these policies (taxing meat consuption for environmental reasons) are exactly regions that get older, are shrinking or are likely to shrink in the future (EU, USA). While in places like India, China, Africa, such a regulation is unlikely and increase of the living standard there will compensate (more likely overcompensate) for eliminated meat consumption in Europe and the US.
> because a portion of humanity doesn't care
People care. I doubt there is even one adult in this world who has never heard about vegetarianism, climate, emissions. They do care. But their values are complex and their influence on the climate is just part of the decision making process. It is not their fault they would decide differently from you.
> to eat food that's better for you and the environment
If they are adults, they can decide for themselves. How could you be so sure that switching over to vegetarianism would make their life longer, more satisfying and environment significantly better?
I doubt it is healthier diet. Researches showing vegetarians are healthier have a problem that puts vegetarians to one group and omnivores to the second group putting people eating at fast foods altogether with people eating for example Paleo or mediterranean diet.
Greek diet is healthy, still they eat fish, seafood and meatballs.
Japanese cuisine is healthy, still they eat fish and seafood.
Korean cuisine is healthy, still they eat pork, fish.
Mediterrean diet is healthy, still they eat all types of meat.
Speaking of sustainability, there are regions where animal product is better (Mongolia, nordic regions). Besides that, sustainability is one of measures in the equation. People want sustainable diet, but not by all costs.
2. Adapted to local cultures -- Such as the startup/industrial culture of California and much of the US.
We can significantly reduce the environmental impact without sparking large conflicts.
Talking about enforcing a change on the world is so large as to be counterproductive. Talking about influencing an area the size of California, Texas, or the UK has a chance to improve things.
The healthy aspect is in not overeating meat, which is well proven by modern science to be a significant public health risk in various developed countries.
First, thanks for raising that. Good-faith discussion matters.
The strongest interpretation I was able to come up with is "Meat has enough environmental impact that it is worth public interventions to raise the prices of meat in enough communities around the world that billions of people notice the increased cost and feel forced to give up meat"
Is there a more charitable interpretation that I am missing?
Does anything in my words indicate that I think carlmr desires the deaths of people? (I don't think he wants that. I hope we all know we're talking about unintended consequences here).
The word "just" in this sense is a signal that you might easily be underestimating the difficulty or cost of something.
> We just need to make meat cost prohibitive enough to force the majority of people to eat the majority of their meals vegetarian.
If you were talking about persuasion, this would be fine.
When you start talking about forcing people to change their habits, it is time to take a step back and get curious about those other people's perspectives. In this case, you're talking about the daily or weekly dietary habits of more than 2 billion people.
Before moving forward, you should have a clear answer to the question of how many megadeaths you are willing to cause through war and famine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars_casualties#Tot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequence...