In a warming world, New England’s trees are storing more carbon
news.harvard.edu
news.harvard.edu
1) How many existing forests we wouldn't have to cut down if we transitioned away from meat & dairy ?
2) How much extra space that would also give us to plant more trees?
3) How much green house gas are from animal farming in the first place?
https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets:
- There's 104 million km^2 of habitable land on earth
- 40 million km^2 goes to meat & dairy (includes grazing land + land used for crops for animal feed)
- 11 million km^2 goes to plants to feed humans
- 83% of the global calorie supply for humans comes from plants vs 18% from meat (i.e. meat is very inefficient)
- Demand for meat is going to continue going up so deforestation is going to keep going up: "As we get richer, our diets tend to diversify and per capita meat consumption rises; economic development unfortunately exerts an increasing impact on land resources. If we want per capita meat consumption to be able to rise sustainably at lower incomes, per capita meat consumption at high incomes will have to decrease."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...:
> the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has estimated that agriculture (including not only livestock, but also food crop, biofuel and other production) accounted for about 10 to 12 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (expressed as 100-year carbon dioxide equivalents) in 2005[58] and in 2010.[59]
Planting trees and new technology might buy us some time, but if our idealised lifestyle is fundamentally unsustainable, we'll be back in the same situation again soon enough. I feel this uncomfortable truth is ignored by well meaning people. Waiting for lab grown meat isn't a realistic option either.
Dairy farm street view:
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.4449329,-100.8322638,3a,75y,...
You will notice the trees in the above view are clustered around the offices.
Feedlot street view:
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9084198,-100.5339579,3a,75y,...
I suspect on average, we will eat less meat in the future, but that we won't get rid of meat totally simply because it's the only way to get food from some areas.
Perhaps in the some places, but 80% of deforestation of the Amazon rainforest is for cattle ranching. [0]
Here in New Zealand, European settlers managed to clear 27% of all forest in just 10 years [1], replacing it with farming, which is what it's still used for (especially cattle, these days, and obviously they didn't stop clearing forests at 27%, they kept right on going). This is land described by early European explorers as "immense woods, lofty trees and the finest timber" [2]
Also, land doesn’t have to be productive for business. We could take the cows away from land that’s not viable for other farming and just let the land be. (My guess: given sufficient recovery time we might be surprised at what does grow)
[0] https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/ama...
[1] https://www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/environmental-reporting....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_New_Zealand#:...
But yeah, I was mainly referring to natural grasslands where the original grazers have been replaced by grazing cattle. De-forested land should be re-forested if it can't be used for anything else.
Then we should begin transferring animal agricultural lands to plant agricultural lands because plant agriculture produces more calories per acreage.
Kansas is perfect for growing many legumes, grains, and vegetables. Instead it is largely used to grow beef and dairy.
The point is that Kansas is used largely for plant agricultural, and actually isn't wall to wall cattle production.
And if you stop eating meat yourself there is absolutely no guarantee that it has any impact at all. If enough people do it they may marginally decrease the demand for meat and lower its price but for this price some people will start eating more meat and the net result is null.
Can you back this up? It defies logic to me that giving up meat, increasing the market for non-meat products and setting an example to others around to follow doesn't reduce animal farming. Not the best source but:
https://uk.veganuary.com/blog/one-person-going-vegan-wont-ma...
> We can see tangible changes in the farming industry specifically because people are going vegan. In the UK in 2016, sales of fresh meat fell by £328 million, fresh milk by £54 million and cheese by £73 million just in one year! Since then red meat sales have continued to fall. And the UK with its more than half a million vegans is not alone.
> In the US, sales of meat have been declining for a decade, plant-based milk sales are worth $4.2 billion, and thinktank RethinkX predicts that both the beef and dairy industries will be defunct by 2030.
> In Canada, meat consumption has been described as being 'in a decades-long slump' with 38 per cent of Canadians now saying they have reduced their meat consumption.
> In Australia, which is the third-fastest growing vegan market in the world behind China and the United Arab Emirates, sales of dairy are in decline as young people turn their backs on cheese and cows’ milk. Now, 2.5 million Australians are either fully or almost vegetarian. And in Germany, 10 per cent of people are already meatless.
That's hard to argue against.
One counter argument would be that his/her analysis doesn't take into account any other effects of reducing consumption, such as one's friends and family also reducing consumption as direct consequence.
The idea is that if someone able to afford a cow 1000$ does not buy it, then it will be sold to someone willing to to buy it 999$ and who could not afford it before. To have a real impact on the market and the incentives to raise cattle, you'd need a real lot of people to become vegan.
The link you shared is very weak on evidence (there are none) and a decrease in sales can be caused by a lot of factors.
> thinktank RethinkX predicts that both the beef and dairy industries will be defunct by 2030
is hilariously absurd! No way.
The prime beef ranching lands in Canada have not been forests at least within the last several hundred years, likely longer. Mid- and southern Alberta is largely grass plains
There are various ways of making meat more expensive that are relatively easy to sell to the voters. For example requiring higher standards for animal welfare.
That seems like quite an exaggeration for a virus with a survival rate of 99.95% for those under 70 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v...
(You've dismissed doing something easy to reduce the number of people impacted by a disease that you believe kills 1 in 2000 infected by it)
We are already at the point where 50% of all lakes in Asia, Europe, North America, and South America are eutrophic with decreased biodiversity and toxicity as a result. In addition the Baltic Sea is fast turning into the dead sea, releasing additional greenhouse gases in the process. Global warming also act as an accelerator in combination with eutrophication.
The best direction that we can current go would be to transition diets towards including a significant amount of seaweed and shellfish. Insect farms are also an alternative with low foot print.
Why not just plants? We're destroying the ocean as well and you don't have to resort to insects for protein.
Seaweed and shellfish farming has one of the lowest production footprint of all foods, don't need herbicides and pesticides, don't need fresh water, and don't need fertilizers produced by fossil fuels, and do not use up high quality land. The only other kind of farming that beats its efficiency in land and CO2 are insect farms.
Shellfish can also be used to clean polluted water, but for health reasons they then can't then be sold as food. The output can however be used as an organic fertilizer, depending on the amount of toxins they have absorbed and additional cleaning process, so there is some potential for an combination between plant crops and shellfish farms.
If 50% of all land was turned into man-made desert we would notice and get worried. That we have already done this to the worlds lakes shows how insanely harmful modern high yield agriculture is. Add that with the massive decline in global insect populations, with 75% loss in 26 years, and we can't just replace one harmful diet with an other.
> 83% of the global calorie supply for humans comes from plants vs 18% from meat (i.e. meat is very inefficient)
This isn't the correct statistic to make the point you want to make. If anything this would encourage more meat consumption to balance out the calorie intake. The statistic you really want is something like: "For beef it takes 54 calories of fuel to produce 1 calorie of protein." (Yes, this is also incomplete, meat has fat as well, "fuel" is very broad and vegetables use fuel as well etc., but I don't have time to find the proper stats). Essentially cows are not very efficient at turning sunlight into food.
What percent of animals does this cover though? This is clearly not true for all cases in the UK e.g.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/29/revealed...:
"Research by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has established that the UK is now home to a number of industrial-scale fattening units with herds of up to 3,000 cattle at a time being held in grassless pens for extended periods rather than being grazed or barn-reared."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/farm-climate...
Either way, this doesn't contradict that deforestation is happening globally to meet global demand for animal meat.
This dogmatic view to end meat consumption is a horrible mistake, as it’s predicated on us understanding the human body in its entirety. There’s really no studies that investigate with causality a human diet. It would be unethical/expensive to properly study causality. We have epidemiological studies that find correlation, which has been wrong many times (red meat causes cancer, saturated fats are bad, etc). Epidemiology is meant to point towards a correlation for us to separately study causality, instead of these statistics game of conflating the two via attempting to remove confounding variables.
Further, you’re assuming all land that’s currently used for livestock had no prior use. Much of the land was formally used for crops (until the soil was depleted from poor farming practices, injected with nitrogen/fertilizers, then essentially decimated) if the topsoil was nutrient dense.
Deforestation is needed for crops as well, it’s not exclusively done for animal agriculture. Removing all meat sources would still require some amount of land to fill in the caloric gap. You can’t just subtract all livestock land and say you can plant trees, and thus a net gain.
https://theconversation.com/yes-eating-meat-affects-the-envi...
- Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Vegetarian Diets
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is the largest group of professional nutritionist in the world. People putting doubt that plant-only diets can be healthy are showing the same level of anti-science that climate change deniers are.
The paper goes on to say that having a plant based diet reduces risks of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and obesity. A vegan diet is one of the most healthy diets an individual can choose when measured by the health outcomes of people that choose the diet.
Here is a recent (2018) starting point into large (200k, etc.) studies, with various pooled analysis, meta analysis, RCTs, etc.:
This review summarizes the current evidence base examining the associations of plant-based diets with cardiovascular endpoints, and discusses the potential biological mechanisms underlying their health effects, practical recommendations and applications of this research, and directions for future research.
Healthful plant-based diets should be recommended as an environmentally sustainable dietary option for improved cardiovascular health.
The potentially beneficial role of plant-based diets in cardiovascular health has been increasingly recognized, with a vast and accumulating evidence-base documenting their health effects ...
Most recently, based on a comprehensive review of these studies, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2015–2020 included a healthy vegetarian-style dietary pattern in its recommendations of dietary patterns that can be adopted for improved health. In the present review, we will provide an overview of the cardiovascular benefits associated with plant-based diets, while discussing the biological pathways potentially involved, as well as clinical applications and public health implications of these findings.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6089671/
See Table 1 for RCTs and Figure 3 for emerging ‘causality’:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6089671/figure/...
Also read up on Blue Zones, and note the notion in this meta analysis of...
... the ”pro-vegetarian diet score”, defined by Martinez-Gonzalez et al. (6) as a diet which positively weighs plant foods while negatively weighing animal foods. They conceptualized such a diet as “a progressive and gentle approach to vegetarianism… that incorporates a range of progressively increasing proportions of plant-derived foods and concomitant reductions in animal-derived foods”...
... then think about the blue zones and balance/moderation and confounding variables in that light. It’s not a eating rice or olives or fishing and herding goats from a walkable village, versus sitting on couch watching TV and driving cars to the strip mall thing. Americans act American, so you can narrow down the causality to a kind of temperance.
https://www.bluezones.com/exploration/loma-linda-california/
Diet breakdown with “ancillary” meat: 10% dairy, 4% meat, 1% fish:
https://www.bluezones.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/303664_...
This isn't particularly true. We have a very solid idea of our nutritional requirements.
For instance, we eat (approximately) kilograms of food every day and know about lots of things where we need about 1 millionth of a kg per day.
There's long term health outcomes (like obesity) that we hope to influence using nutrition, but it's likely enough that Pepsi and Doritos (and so on) are the problem rather than some subtle thing. Those products are designed to by very palatable, and to not be overly satisfying (the producers have long since achieved market saturation and increasing individual consumption is a valuable avenue for growth).
We do know on a very, very granular level that we need some nutrients in some quantities to function at all. But we have almost zero clue on how to actually optimize our nutrition. And the biggest reason is that there are no studies actually trying to find this out.
It's appealing to think that we haven't even started of course, but malnourishment has become an economic disease.
If we just let trees spread themselves around instead of championing venture backed startups to use drones or something equally bizarre to do what nature would do if we just sit back we might be able to channel our guilt or desire to control nature into some other area.
I'm astonished that there aren't national programs globally aimed at en-forestation.
(Trees also provide building materials - what a great way to sequester carbon!)
If you expand forests it's a one-time sequestration. That's my point.
> One doesn’t count rainforests or boreal forests as “zero carbon” capture. They have an ongoing capturing capacity.
Each ecosystem has a turnover time. For rainforests it's like 20 years. For tundra it's as long as 65+ years. But in a stable state these carbon "sinks" are net zero carbon capture. For every ton of carbon they capture, a ton of carbon is released through decomposition.
A recent study published in 2019 said that if total emissions, agricultural land use, and other factors remained steady, planting trees might buy us 20 years: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2927/examining-the-viability-o...
The problem is that we're pumping out alot of carbon: about 10GtC/year. The entire Amazon rainforest sequesters only about 100-200GtC. Actually, the biggest problem as I said is that we're pumping out carbon from a resource (Carboniferous period deposits[1]) that can never again be recreated, at least not without significant geoengineering.
[1] Carboniferous deposits occurred at a golden period, immediately after woody trees first emerged, but before microorganisms evolved that could decompose them; trees could be buried long enough to fossilize before microorganisms could release all the carbon back into the atmosphere. That can't happen today naturally, at least not at any scale that could help us.
Plus, a place like the United States has 0 population growth absent immigration. Are we supposed to start tearing down houses just to build new ones? That's the kind of math that begat corn ethanol.
The dynamics here are just horrible. Can we slow emissions growth this way? Sure. Can we stop growth this way? Eh... okay, maybe, since we're pretending. Can we reverse global warming, removing carbon from the atmosphere? Not a chance. The only way to turn the dynamic from zero sum to positive sum is with other, major technological advances, at which point playing games with trees and home construction would very likely be the least meaningful use of such new technology.
EDIT: Here's a study that looks at various different models for wood processing and disposal. TL;DR: See figures #2 and #3. 100 years post harvest there's at best 5% net carbon sequestration, while most models show 0% net carbon sequestered. https://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/Conservation/Fi...
Oh, and also, there's always going to be a need for new construction even with 0 population growth. Better to use wood than concrete, as concrete is a large source of carbon emissions.
I agree, many small solutions can help. More efficient use of existing resources is a large reason why American per capita energy consumption has remained steady for the past decade. (At least if we ignore our outsourced carbon emissions.) But many, small efficiencies is a privilege only rich countries with strong institutions are likely to achieve. Certainly historically that has been the case. Yet such countries have enormous carbon footprints. Similarly, reforestation can be helpful in a strict sense, but our primary problem is deforestation in developing countries, and even with global warming increasing the growth of temperate and boreal forests, it's rather difficult to make up the loss of tropical forests.
More importantly, none of these measures can help nearly as much as nuclear energy or renewables like wind and solar, which are both necessary and at least theoretically sufficient on their own. I think we just need to be clear about the efficacy of various measures. By all means, plant more trees. We can certainly walk & chew gum at the same time. But when people think these activities are even remotely similarly efficacious, and when the lesser one is easier to accomplish policy-wise than the other (e.g. in a country where we've effectively already accomplished an efficient market for wood products), I worry about misdirected attention.
More specifically, we need to discard this widespread notion that trees (naturally, or even in an industrial life cycle) are perpetual carbon sinks. That's really what I was getting at by pointing out the Carboniferous period--that the fundamental dynamic of carbon sequestration by trees does not and cannot work as commonly believed. The article for this thread is interesting (though only experimentally showing what was already well predicted), but it's misguided to believe it's of any consequence in the fight against global warming. The oceans are a different matter, though I don't know how greater is the long-term sequestration potential--I don't think we understand the carbon cycle as well as we do on land; for example, we know less about the microbiota, especially on the ocean floor.
But that leaves it in the biosphere, and new forest is vulnerable to rapid deforestation and conversion to CO2 (fires, cultural change, etc.). We would ideally shift some of that highly mobile bio-sphere sequestration to far less mobile geologic sequestration. Most likely with technology that we haven't yet invented.
[1] chapter 2, afforestation is part of AFOLU carbon dioxide removal (CDR) https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
Wonder what it is about?
You're using <noscript>, why not use that space to actually talk about what you are doing?
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but maybe companies should brand non-recycled paper products as carbon-sequestered paper instead, and tell people to send it to landfill rather than recycle it for maximum sequestration purposes.
I wonder if we should compost paper instead of recycling it? Or try to vitrify it?
Also, wouldn't composting it release as much carbon as putting it in landfill? And landfills are bad in many ways.
Recycling it seems a better idea.
Forests can be used to sequester carbon because of the large number of trees continuously in existence even if individual trees come and go.
For paper, the sequestration angle is more dubious but should also be considered based on the total amount of paper continuously in existence, not on the longevity of a single sheet of paper.
Every time I see a pack of paper, it proudly says "MADE IN INDONESIA." So long as cheap paper made from clear-cut rainforests and monkey massacres exists, I think I'd rather stick to (somewhat) locally recycled, even if it's not a perfect solution.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200521-planting-trees-d...
Two other issues:
1) Technology is the wrong way at looking at this for most of the planet. It's only in small areas of the globe where nature needs a guiding hand via irrigation and fertilization for example. Just leaving stuff alone will work for most places.
2) Tree planting efforts are great for publicity and marketing which is mainly a human benefit. The urge to meddle and "fix nature" is both a symptom and cause of the situation we got ourselves in.
It's like buying hair transplants on your head when you could just stop shaving.
It's a very short article just read it
They measure carbon release from the soil of tree's, and data shows that the trees are storing more carbon (actually, releasing less carbon if I understand correctly) as they get older and larger, the trees referenced are 200+ years old now. I don't see anything to justify the 'warming world' mentioned in the title, but trees capture more carbon as they grow larger fwiw.
Artificial selection pressures created by humans have a way of greatly speeding up evolution.