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Comment by azakai | Hacker News Reader

> by many accounts wasn’t any better environmentally

This is false according to every serious analysis I've seen.

For example:

> The most popular plant-based alternatives, Beyond [Meat] and Impossible Burgers, produce about 90 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions in comparison with beef [..] They reduce land use by at least 93 percent and water use by 87 percent to 99 percent. They also generate no manure pollution.

https://www.rd.com/article/plant-based-meats/

Beef is by far the worst option (see the graph there); it isn't hard to beat.

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I read articles like that and they talk about reducing land usage by not having cattle or sheep. How they cause groundwater pollution.

Then I walk on the moors or the highlands with scattered livestock and I struggle. I believe the problem is mass production, factory farming, not meat. The issue is trying to keep meat insanely cheap such that it can be eaten every meal.

I think if I source grass fed meat properly my impact is minimal. But. Maybe I am wrong!

Having viable meat substitutes is a path towards reducing the need for mass meat production.

Hard disagree, eating veggie is perfectly fine and does not require meat substitutes.

However, the solution to mass meat production is regulation imo. But it is politically untenable because it amounts to pricing people out of their lives

There are a lot of variables when it comes to the environment. Grass-fed cattle grazing in the Great Plains would be tremendously better for the environment than the mass soybean/canola/corn agriculture permanently destroying the entire Midwest.

The reason the Midwest is so fertile and has so much topsoil is because of thousands of years of ruminant grazing. We’re destroying millennia of ecological development and topsoil in decades. Not to mention what all the fertilizers and herbicides do.

Your article just blanketly declares animals bad for the environment and plants good, which is absurd. Are we better off for having killed nearly all the buffalo? Clearly feeding cows M&Ms and canola/soy is bad. But so is mass agriculture in the first place. Responsible animal husbandry can be an actual ecological positive.

You can reduce beef's greenhouse gas emissions by just mandating a different animal feed that results in less methane production by the cattle. But that would require governments to actually do something.

Do you feel that governments would be better at farming than farmers? If so I assume you feel that government bureaucrats can do your job better than you.

I am against all farm subsidies BTW.

I personally think that governments would be better at making decisions of what to farm and where to farm it than farmers. Farmers have a profit motive whereas governments can have other non-profit motives.

Look at history and tell me where governments deciding these things has worked. Bonus points for understanding how this worked out in China, the Soviet Union, the French Revolution, and South Africa right now. Bureaucrats never, never make these decisions without corruption, greed, and ignorance taking over. I assume you believe that they would be able to make decisions about your job better than you?

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