Beef in itself is not bad for the environment. It's the scale of demand that is bad. And that demand is fueled by the combined effects of global population growth and global increase in standards of living.
We tend to stop at the symptoms instead of going after the root cause.
> Beef in itself is not bad for the environment. It's the scale of demand that is bad.
Wasting crops feeding cattle is inherently worse than the alternative, feeding directly on the crops and avoiding the wasting of calories when going up one trophic level.
"A large amount of beef is grown in areas that are not suitable for crop farming in the United States. In fact, 85% of the land used to graze cattle in the U.S. is marginal land, which means it's not suitable for growing crops. Marginal land is either untouched or used for grazing livestock, mostly cattle"
Grain finishing is another matter. But it's not a 1 grain : 1/10th beef type situation.
Now chopping and burning down the amazon to create grazing land for cattle? yeah that's going to probably kill us all.
They're gonna chop and burn it down either way, it'll either be for cattle or if you make eating meat illegal they'll chop and burn it for something else like palm oil.
Like it's obvious the people who own and control that land don't care about it anywhere near as much as you do so if you want them to stop chopping it down essentially you're gonna need to start paying them not to. Just seems naive to think stopping specifically poor people from eating meat is the solution to this.
If you take away one of the profitable reasons to chop down the Amazon, it’ll reduce people doing it at the margin - that is simply facts.
> Poor people from eating meat
Yeah and a carbon tax will stop poor people from using as much gas, etc. - if we want to solve climate change we cannot just insulate all poor people from externality pricing.
At global scale we can't solve the environmental crisis in general (climate is only one aspect) and solve poverty at the same time with 10 billion people.
Solving the environmental crisis means reducing our consumption of resources. Solving global poverty means a significant increase in consumption of resources.
So the only way forward is to let the global population decrease ASAP so that we can both live well and preserve the planet.
Resource intensity may or may not be decreasing but that's not solving the issue if you look at global numbers of poor people versus economic and consumption growth needed to bring everyone to, say, European level of living standard.
We are already wreacking havoc on the planet and marginal decrease in resource intensity is not going to make a difference because our total impact needs to be slashed.
I never understand the insistence of some of ignoring population in the equation, which is the key parameter.
We're seeing more than simply marginal decreases - if we can successfully transition our power. The gap in per capita CO2 emissions between developing, middle-income, developed is not nearly as great as what you are suggesting [0] and will decrease even further in the time that it takes to raise people in poverty now to developed-world standards.
> I never understand the insistence of some of ignoring population in the equation, which is the key parameter.
A few reasons:
1. Population is projected to peak in the coming decades.
2. "Slashing" population counts requires a global deployment of force that is both not practically feasible right now and incredibly unpopular. There is no practical path to "slashing" population. This is the primary reason, imo.
3. People in the West always imagine that it would be other people/nations slashing their population count when the biggest marginal impact (especially given climate lags) would be slashing their own population. These solutions are eugenicist in nature.
Also - taking a step back for a moment, I am confused as to how this in any way justifies beef. Beef contributes to the gap between rich and poor in CO2. If we reduce reliance on beef, it means we can support a larger population sustainably?
CO2 emissions for power generation, or in general, are only a small part of our impact. The environmental crisis is not only caused by this, but by our total consumption of resources and production of many pollutants.
And so we are screwed.
Now the West is already slashing its own population, birth rates have crashed. The issue is that it's refusing to let it go because it's not the easy option, and at global scale this is a taboo subject.
There’s limitless profitable reasons to chop it down.
Don’t understand why people want to play whack a mole to get to the end goal all while making everyone’s lives worse, esp on the lower income levels who can’t afford organic meat.
When if you want the trees saved then pay them to keep them and hold them to it. Like that’s the actual goal no? And easier than completely retooling society as a backwards way to cause that change.
> When if you want the trees saved then pay them to keep them and hold them to it. Like that’s the actual goal no? And easier than completely retooling society as a backwards way to cause that change.
REDD+ programs (which is what you are describing) are massive failures at preventing deforestation or carbon decreases.
> There’s limitless profitable reasons to chop it down.
No, there are costs and profits and if you decrease the profits and increase the costs it changes peoples behavior at the margin. The Amazon rainforest isn't the one thing that is exempt from basic economics.
You stop them using it for meat they’ll use it for palm oil you stop them using it for that they’ll use it for something else. It’s just so naive to expect it just to switch to something they can sell. Like they own it they can do what they want with it, if you want it to be trees pay them for it to be trees. Just because some NGO likely scam failed to do it under a climate banner doesn’t mean it’s impossible, someone pays them to use the land for meat right? So pay for it to be trees in the same channels.
Yes, but now give out the statistics on how much of the calories fed to cows in total in the US or worldwide is actually grazing and how much is from crops that need extra area apart from where the animals graze. Even cattle that grazes is often supplemented with grain, and the grain is of course much more calorie-dense.
So the answer to "what would we do with all that land we can't put crops on" is "whatever we want". For example, we could just leave it be nature, since we don't need it for farming.
Seriously, the is a big problem in the US. Cattle are grazed on BLM land and they trample all the stream banks to such an extent that riparian ecosystems are totally destroyed. And in exchange the grazing fee is only $1/head/month! If you stand at the point where a stream crosses from a fenced conservation area into a grazing area, the difference across the boundary is stark.
How did did the riparian ecosystems thrive when there were tens of millions of bison? There is the same order of magnitude of cows in the US today (90 million) as bison hundreds of years ago (30-60 million.) Bison are also generally much heavier, meaning they eat more and trod the ground more deeply.
The historical range of the American bison was largely not overlapping with BLM grazing lands. The bison, a sensible animal, wasn't found in California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.
I think we are safe in describing the pre-columbian bison range as not marginal, and the post that started this thread is about how most of our cattle grazing is on marginal lands. The way Americans do this is the worst possible way: grow feed on the excellent grazing range, and feed it to an animal that spends most of its life either grazing a desert or standing in parking lot. We'd get more of everything, easier and cheaper, if we just grazed bison where we currently grow corn.
> Now chopping and burning down the amazon to create grazing land for cattle? yeah that's going to probably kill us all.
How?
I mean, I'm not a fan of destroying forests, etc, but around here, there is no unmanaged land so presumably all the forests were already burnt etc for farmers... But we're all around, right? I don't get how burning the Amazon for food people want will actually kill us.
Because the rainforest is important in regulating global temperature and oxygen production, much more so than the (probable) temperate climate forests you are from.
You are living in a post destruction area, with new forests planted to supplement the destruction that was there before. Most of these forests aren't more than 70 years old, that's about when we finally made an effort to fix how badly we totally fucked up and why people needed clean air to not die from lung cancer (among other things). The loss of biodiversity, air quality, etc. already occurred. You are a survivor. What's more, your survival was in part supported by the air quality of other virgin forests further away from you that weren't yet cut down. But now that they are being cut down, there's less left to support you.
In short, you're asking yourself why you shouldn't shoot yourself in the foot again, because you managed to survive the first shot and it looks to you like it healed just fine (it didn't).
To substantiate your point, I was thinking about deforestation for farming in Indiana (where I live) and Ohio last week and learned that Indiana was 90% forest until taxes got in the way. It's crazy that something as silly as taxes can cause most of your forests to become farmland.
Yeah, it's crazy to insentivise deforestation. But people need to eat. And, depending on who you listen to, there is even some evidence that the rainforest may have been a cultivated environment itself, in the dim and distant past.
That's essentially what we do with cows. Do you see the hypocrisy? We don't inflict this on humans so why do it to other creatures which can know terror and pain just as we do?
Because empathy being applied to other species is an evolutionary bug, not a feature. Bug probably triggered by the luxurious abundance and the accompanying decadence acting on brains a bit too disconnected from the reality of the animal kingdom.
And if you want intellectual justifications: because we're the apex predators and we do what we want when we want; that includes raising and eating beasts that are of no other value to us. The other carnivorous animals wouldn't act in any other way, in our position.
Sometimes there isn't anything one can do to sugarcoat something: this is stupid. For one thing, even if we were to take your bald assertion that empathy is somehow an evolutionary bug at face value, though you've provided no evidence for this or even really any suggestion of what it could mean, it doesn't follow that lacking it is the optimal behavior relative to "evolutionary goals" (which are nothing) or whatever unstated goals you presume we all share.
Like on of the most wonderful things about human beings is that we can reflect upon our behavior, form moral and aesthetic opinions about how we'd like the future to be, and make appropriate adjustments to our behavior to achieve those ends.
In any case, the material circumstances that produced us have absolutely no meaning at all. The essence of the evolutionary explanation is that life really is random, given that, we may just as freely reject evolutionary understandings of what we want from the world as we may accept them. Surely they are of practical value, in the sense that if we want to optimally act on the world we have to understand it, but they impose no necessary moral or aesthetic demands upon us. It is deeply confused to believe that the mere evolutionary circumstances that produced you ought to constrain how you want the future to look.
"Species" is, in and of itself, a man made construct. To define your own morals by an arbitrary distinction isn't just simplistic, it's downright dangerous.
It wasn't long ago that certain people were considered "subhuman", and therefore open to all kinds of abuse. Did you learn nothing from that?
And of course, the same is true for your ridiculous "might makes right" argument. Have you considered making other horribly uneducated arguments, like "it's natural"? Maybe add some "we've always done it that way".
Most of the human suffering in this concept comes from being able to think, compare and ideas about the good life and then those thoughts create the suffering. The actual physical suffering is limited, although present.
Cows can‘t do that and don‘t have the point of reference to compare. I doubt even humans could unless they are raised to be taught all the cultural norms and what‘s good and bad.
> Cows can‘t do that and don‘t have the point of reference to compare. I doubt even humans could unless they are raised to be taught all the cultural norms and what‘s good and bad.
By that logic, would it be ethical to eat humans who do not have a point of reference to compare and have not been taught cultural norms and what's good and bad?
I was not talking about eating, I was talking about living conditions.
Furthermore (again regarding living conditions): Still no, because those humans likely have loved ones or family and additionally no because of what this would do to the other humans who housed them so.
I wouldn't eat beef if it was raised in those conditions but it doesn't reflect the reality of most British beef rearing operations. Most British beef is fed predominantly a forage based diet, outside in pasture except during the winter months and perhaps during the period before slaughter where they are flattened up.
That's an uneeded "optimisation". There is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle. Again, the issue is that the environment has a limited, finite capacity, which we exceed when we are 10 billion with good standards of living.
To reduce quality of life (because it's not limited to meat, it's comprehensive restrictions) simply to accomodate ever more humans on the planet is madness and unsustainable, anyway.
PS: Let's also remember, for example, that 50-60 million bisons roamed North America before European settlement, whereas there are about 28 million beef cows in the US today (according to Google).
> There is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle.
You're not doing a whole lot to explain why there is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle. I can think of a whole host of reasons why it is wrong in matters of ethics and mercy. Who is there to advocate for the cow? We know cows feel a gamut of emotions just as we do. They are not insensate. Most humans, when given a knife or a captive bolt gun and told to go kill that cow on yonder would not. So we externalize the death-making to slaughterhouse workers who coincidentally also suffer:
> ...SHWs had significantly higher levels of depression compared with office workers, but not butchers. The difference in depression rates differed from study to study, ranging from 10% to 50% [1]
There's really no good, ethical argument to be made for the killing of animals for food or pleasure. Did we need to do it once to survive as a species? Yes. Are we largely living in a post-scarcity world where those practices should now be challenged? Yes.
> You're not doing a whole lot to explain why there is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle.
Why should explain why something is NOT bad ? It's up to you to convince him (or others) that it is bad, and the reasoning "according to MY ethics it is bad" is not a good argument.
There is a good argument to be made that in the West we should eat less meat, but that doesn't mean removing it completely: it is harder to make a balanced vegan diet, so for most people that would mean a less healthy outcome that just eating a moderate amount of meat.
> There is a good argument to be made that in the West we should eat less meat, but that doesn't mean removing it completely: it is harder to make a balanced vegan diet, so for most people that would mean a less healthy outcome that just eating a moderate amount of meat.
You're making something of a jump there - not eating meat equates to a vegetarian diet, not a vegan diet. One can argue about the merits of a vegan diet over a vegetarian one, but a vegetarian, non-vegan diet is already a big step up over a meat-heavy one, and a vegetarian diet including eggs and dairy doesn't really have any challenges in being balanced/healthy compared to a moderate-meat diet.
There is nothing wrong or unethical with eating meat. It is a natural behaviour, which we are evolved for, and in fact a necessary animal behaviour within the environment at large.
If you do not wish to eat meat for personal reasons you are free to do so of course but I object to the current trend of minority groups trying to impose their views to the whole of society and to paint those who disagree as 'wrong'.
> I object to the current trend of minority groups trying to impose their views to the whole of society and to paint those who disagree as 'wrong'.
I'm curious what you mean by "impose their views" with respect to meat-eating. Has a vegan ever tried to stop you from eating meat for example through physical force, threatening your livelihood, making meat illegal in their state, etc?
Don't get me wrong, I also dislike when strangers impose their moral, ethical, racial, political, or religious views on me.
But of all the groups that concern me, vegans are low on my list as their weapons mostly seem to be uncomfortably strong arguments on the internet and the occasional preachy Netflix documentary.
We are omnivores and we have plentiful sources of plant nutrition. Eating meat is mot necessary for either health or happiness, and any appeal to it being “natural”, even if true (primitive human diets varied enormously) is irrelevant.
One could argue that meat eating is necessary for taking part on some people’s culture, which is true, but also shifting. And spreading the idea of vegetarianism is helpful in making that shift happen.
Maybe the GP did engage in the naturalistic fallacy, but nobody has been able to demonstrate why eating meat is wrong either, they just say "I personally feel killing animals to eat them is so evil that it should be illegal." OK, that's fine, but why should I also feel that way? I don't.
There's no fallacy there. There is nothing wrong with eating meat and writing that this a perfectly acceptable and natural behaviour is just stating a fact, really.
This is all proving my point that a vocal minority is poisoning the issue in order to impose their views by accusing others of fallacy, wrongthink, and even according to the person you're replying to (and that's a new one) by bringing rape into it...
It's obviously that they became vegetarian due to this personality trait rather than the other way around. Your study doesn't indicate otherwise. Vegetarians and vegans become so precisely because they are depressed about the state of affairs in animal welfare, human health, and the environment.
Another way to cast the meat vs crops debate is "true pricing": the growing demand for meat is not simply a result of growing population or growing standards of living, but caused by ignoring "externalities".
I.e.: if the true impact of turning crops into meat were reflected in the price of a hamburger, demand elasticity would eventually result in much less production. Or: growing meat consumption is mostly a result of implicit subsidies to maintain status quo, ignore climate change,etc.
Why is it always impossible to have an adult discussion on this issue? (An interesting question for academics, I think)
Obviously we are all people. The question is do we keep chasing an ever increasing population or do we accept that it cannot keep growing and should in fact probably decrease?
Most developed countries have birth rates below replacement rate so this is already happening. We need to accept it and adapt.
>The question is do we keep chasing an ever increasing population
We aren't.
Every bit of evidence is that Human population is on the path to stabilizing. Developing countries plateau, and all that "India and china are going to outreproduce us!" rhetoric was stupidity; people extrapolating an S curve as if it were an infinite exponential curve.
All you have to do is give women an education and legal access to birth control and it turns out most humans do not want 50 kids. Women happily manage population control, with no moral problems.
Oh we are. While global birth rates are indeed down this is seen as a catastrophe. Governments have policies to increase birth rates and in Europe we're also madly opening the doors to massive immigration to keep the population growing.
I have yet to see a government declare that they will let population decrease and initiate programs to adapt. Perhaps Japan comes close but we'll see.
WE should keep the history of the world in mind. How things shake out when people say "there's too many people". Who gets killed first? Who gets involuntarily sterilized?
WE should consider that in the equation of "overpopulation", the other variable, "resource consumption", is far easier and more ethical to reduce.
The issue, of course, is that option 1 hurts others that aren't us, while option 2 will require changes from US, like not eating meat, reducing personal cars, reducing consumption and infinite growth in general.
Agreed. Check out /r/keto and /r/zerocarb for some great research about the natural human diet. Humans have eaten beef (exclusively even) for billions of years.
We tend to stop at the symptoms instead of going after the root cause.