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Comment by tdb7893 | Hacker News Reader

One small way consumers can help is to reduce animal consumption. As an industry it releases a decent amount of greenhouse gasses, it creates antibiotic resistance, and it uses a ton of land and water (many of the people burning the Amazon are cattle ranchers). It's also very closely tied to actual consumer demand so consumers can affect it pretty easily.

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Interestingly, antibiotics like Rumensin are used to kill off methane-producing gut bacteria and promote other gut flora that are more efficient at digestion.

You say that but we are also creating huge monoculture corps susceptible to a single disease wiping them out long term. Skipping meat is only part of the problem. The real solution is there needs to be long term control of meat and agricultural production to avoid self-inflicted devastation of the food supply.

I never said skipping meat will fix everything, just that it's an easy thing that actual consumers can do to help. The monoculture problem exists but not really relevant at all to the problem I'm talking about seeing how I'm not even saying people should cut out meat completely and there are better ways to diversify the supply of food than to add meat (especially since large amounts of animals are fed off of a monoculture of feed grain).

No, that's the consumers in emergent economies. In the 1st world things are working properly.

That's the all gist about meat consumption: let's look at all the problems meat production has in emergent and 3rd world countries and then tell people in the West they shouldn't eat meat.

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