Chicken tax
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
These intensive farming methods basically involve treating chickens as protein factories with no regard for their welfare. Packing as many of them as possible into a small space and breeding them to put on weight so quickly that their legs often can't support their bodies.
I wish more people would face up to the reality that cheap meat is only possible by mistreating animals in quite horrific ways. If we treated chickens properly, their meat would still be considered an expensive delicacy.
Then again, if you treat animals well it's likely worse for the environment (more land required for agriculture etc) so there's really no escaping the fact that humanity needs to eat less meat.
Less concentration also leads to less use of antibiotics, which isn't a traditionally environmental concern. But an unwanted side effect (like pollution) of mass antibiotic use is reduction in antibiotic efficacy.
You can think of an animal as a way to convert a whole lot of plant matter into a little meat. Growing plant matter for feed, itself, pollutes in various ways. A given animal might be less healthy eating corn than eating grass, but if it needs to eat 10x the weight in grass in its lifetime... that animal, raised that way, is now likely responsible for 10x the pollution.
1) Why must it be grown? Shouldn't there just be less animals in places that can't support their grazing?
2) Why are you applying pesticides and fertilizer?
You can't just have there be "less animals", without feeding less people than have the money to pay to be fed—which is effectively impossible without abandoning capitalism: a new company would always come into existence to capture that surplus.
Looking at things through a demand-driven lens, #1 and #2 are one-another's answers: if all the existing companies restrict themselves to non-"enriched" agriculture, then the market can only support a certain number of those companies—but there is still demand, so a new company will come into existence that uses (or one of the existing companies "innovate" to use) pesticides and fertilizer, to squeeze more feedstock out of the same land, to produce more meat from a given agricultural base, to answer the unmet demand.
(The real "problem" with this system is that demand isn't fixed; the more food there is available in an area, the more new people the people in that area tend to make, creating a positive feedback loop where demand will never be fully satisfied, necessitating a "race to the bottom" of who can squeeze their natural resources the hardest. Fix that, rather than abandoning an allocation system for operating too well.)
Lab-grown meat isn't important because it's "cruelty-free"; it's important because it's possible to make it far, far cheaper in externalities (and, hopefully, in real dollar-value costs as well) than the alternative. That means more people fed balanced diets per carbon-dollar.
Sadly, the majority of the population doesn't care about immorality.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/01/25/511663527/episo...
They simply did not feel that smaller/lighter trucks & vans would be profitable, or profitable enough. This goes off and on; often one of the Detroit makes will go years without having an entry in the small truck market.
There are advantages to using a pickup-style perimeter frame to make a van, that said, unlike Ford & Chevy, the Dodge B-series vans were unitized from the '70s on.