Meat Is Horrible
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
If there's a meat tax, then farmers will have an incentive to cut even more corners, which might lead to even more cruel conditions.
Instead, maybe it makes sense to set a price floor for any operation over a certain number of animals. (IE, if you have more than 200 animals on your farm, you can't charge less than $10 a pound or something).
Maybe we could do both? Tax the beef and use the money to enforce minimum quality of life for animals?
Even manufacturers could be not that upset because they could significantly increase price per unit.
Only group that would be angry could be beef consumers at least the ones that prefer quantity over quality and/or can't pay for quality.
I am not even convinced that it will be more expensive - the US is vast, there is lots of stuff to graze, instead of disposing of the manure it will be used as fertilizer and so on.
1. Matter is conserved. Before carbon can be farted out of a cow, it has to get in to the cow from somewhere else. I expect most of it was in the atmosphere a year beforehand, then got absorbed by pasture grass and eaten. So this year's farts will end up in next year's cows, and aren't like fossil fuel emissions.
2. Methane decays to carbon dioxide in a decade or two, so today's methane emissions are not really a worse problem than today's carbon dioxide emissions.
2. CH4 may not have a long half-life, but it has 29x the warming potential of CO2. Methane is thought to contribute about 20% of the current anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing. Because of the anticipated positive feedbacks from warming, this is very important indeed.
To be clear, methane has 451x the heat trapping ability, the 29x figure is the 100year impact that takes into account the methane breaking down.
It would be great if we could make a material difference to the greenhouse effect just by eating less meat, but that sounds a bit too good to be true.
Hmm... I guess I'll trust the experts quoted in the article rather than some rando's vague impressions of first-year physics.
Are there significantly more grazing animals on earth now than there was ever before, for instance?
It could very well be: I found this xkcd strip alarming as I had no idea that most animals where actually either people or their livestock. https://xkcd.com/1338/
But anyway. It's not the cows that are the problem, it's that the human population is growing. This is probably fixable, unless something like reactionary Islamists sends us back to the stone age. ( Right now that is the only scenario where I could see that the population would explode and then collapse into endless suffering, perhaps in Africa first.)
The fix is education, education and education.
In particular, it comes from the plant matter they digest. Which would otherwise be holding onto those carbon atoms, by and large. (Or releasing them to other organisms via natural decomposition processes). You know, like trees do.
Instead being shot into the atmosphere through the cows' hind quarters.
Now I am interested if this is in fact true. I have certainly heard this argument made, and it is often alluded to e.g. in describing the problem in China of producing enough meat to satisfy an increasingly affluent society (the subtext being, 'with the same constrained resources').
Going to poke around a bit...
QED if you are not vegetarian and have no interest in being, the 'greenest' thing to do is to reduce or eliminate beef consumption.
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full is glum.
(I looked at resource usage, not the ethical side; fwiw I'm an ethics-motivated vegetarian myself.)
E.g., what's the difference in price between a burger made from ground beef vs a similar sandwich with grilled chicken?
In smaller, more diverse farms, animals contribute to the overall output because they improve land that is fallow, turn waste into food and manure and provide food that complements plants effectively in our diet.
We have the technology to farm this way, at scale, but it is politically infeasible and there won't be any demand for it until the specialized products of our current system become much more expensive.
Not to me, but let's see.
>2 degrees carbon budget limit
Woo... 2 degrees. We can totally consider establishing settlement in Mars but God forbid there is 2 degree change in climate on earth. It will be uninhabitable. NOT.
>Agriculture consumes 80 percent of water in the United States.
Oh yeah, because we were otherwise going to drink the river... or maybe it disappears when it is used in agriculture. Except it doesn't. Water is the most recyclable resource there is.
>carbon output from food production has increased by 47 percent from 2000 to 2012 — that’s an increase of 150 million tons of carbon dioxide
Except carbon that is emitted to the atmosphere doesn't stay there. It's called carbon cycle. If we are producing more meat, we will also have to produce more food for the animals... which comes from plants... which take CO2 from the atmosphere to grow.
You're fooling nobody. Don't get into our kitchen.
If all pasture was magically turned into carbon sinks (in my home country about 5% of natural pastures could be called carbon sinks. in some countries it is almost as high as 30%) we would still have to cut our meat consumption considerably - and that would be for sustaining the meat consumption of today and not meet the growing consumption in Asia.