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Comment by throwawaylinux | Hacker News Reader

That's not a "hint", meat is a desirable food, a very good source of protein, can be a good income for poor farmers and can be raised in places that aren't suitable for cropping.

But even if you set aside meat, modern lifestyles necessitate the killing of other life.

Take your protein-rich plant food, for example. Do you know how modern cereal and vegetable farming is carried out? The idea is basically to create a holocaust of chemical poisons that exterminates all animal, plant, and fungal life except the crop, over millions of acres, and that is after the land has been cleared and the native plants and animals killed and wiped away. Housing, water, energy, mining, all that costs lives as well.

You can't absolve yourself just by not eating meat.

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You don't need absolution, just reduction.

If the option is eating cows that eat some grass and feed from a couple of acres of desolation vs. eating beans and grains from a quarter acre of desolation, then the option is obvious. You can still eat the tenth of the cows that can survive on the grass alone.

Reducing the desolation and increasing the yield by building an ecosystem rather than monocrop is better, but that is a harder transition.

I have to say it takes some chutzpah for a person to just out and say their level of consumption is the correct amount and someone else's is not.

Sure you can eat the beans and grains instead. You can also stop driving, stop heating and cooling your house, stop buying computers and phones and cars, stop air travel, live in a small apartment you share with several other people.

I don't have a problem with the idea of reducing environmental footprint or moving consumption patterns to more efficient products. Great ideas. What I have a problem with is making choices for or passing moral judgement on other people.

Your lifestyle results in the death of life and animals, and you do not do everything physically possible to minimize that, therefore you simply do not have that moral high ground. If killing animals is "wrong", then we are all wrong. "Oh but I try to minimize" is not an defense because you are minimizing according to what is convenient or valuable to you. You'll accept some killing of animals because you fly to Europe once a year or have a smartphone or heat your house and that's okay, but somebody who chooses to eat more meat than you would prefer?

If you're consuming 19x as many resources than someone else, and the sustainable level is 10% of the current level, then demanding they reduce their 5% share to a 1% share is not just arrogant, unfair, and greedy. It also doesn't do anything to solve the problem.

Your implicit thesis is that you should not be held to account to do the extremely easy things if anyone else is asserting their right to exist at all is transparent reprehensible.

> You can also stop driving, stop heating and cooling your house, stop buying computers and phones and cars, stop air travel, live in a small apartment you share with several other people.

If I already do all those things (with the exception of a second hand phone I use with a 10yo monitor when I need a desktop). Then do I get to tell you to maybe drive a slightly smaller SUV or stop opposing renewable energy?

> If you're consuming 19x as many resources than someone else, and the sustainable level is 10% of the current level, then demanding they reduce their 5% share to a 1% share is not just arrogant, unfair, and greedy. It also doesn't do anything to solve the problem.

If.

> Your implicit thesis is that you should not be held to account to do the extremely easy things if anyone else is asserting their right to exist at all is transparent reprehensible.

No it isn't.

Not eating meat, by itself, does not give you any moral high ground about killing animals or consuming resources or impacting the environment.

I'm not asserting any moral high ground.

I'm saying we should stop factory farming cattle that are fed with heavily subsidized, fossil fuel grown crops, stop clearing land for more cattle, return about half of the land currently used for feed and ethanol to conservation, and hold the meat industry to some basic environmental and animal welfare standards.

You're welcome to continue eating what meat is available in such a world and should thank anyone you meet who eats less so that your combined share of a sustainable world can meet your personal demands.

> I'm not asserting any moral high ground.

Wonderful.

> I'm saying we should stop factory farming cattle that are fed with heavily subsidized, fossil fuel grown crops, stop clearing land for more cattle, and hold the meat industry to some basic environmental and animal welfare standards.

Oh, I didn't see where you were saying that.

Almost all global food production has large fossil fuel based inputs, land clearing is the unfortunate reality of growing population and consumption but at least the market allocates it somewhat efficiently, and its quite fungible, so it makes no more sense to say no more land to be used for cows than it does to say no more land to be used for almonds or tomatoes or quinoa. And in the western world at least animal farming and the meat industry is held to some basic environmental and animal welfare standards.

> You're welcome to continue eating what meat is available in such a world and should thank anyone you meet who eats less so that your combined share of a sustainable world can meet your personal demands.

I don't know or care about your fantasy world, but I am quite welcome to eat meat that is available in the world I find myself living in. Just like you are quite welcome to buy a new iphone every year or go on frivolous vacations to ski or sight-see whenever you choose to.

> Almost all global food production has large fossil fuel based inputs, land clearing is the unfortunate reality of growing population and consumption

Well no it's not. Said population (which we should be stabilizing) can be sustained on a fraction of the land used today by eliminating the inefficient uses such as ethanol, cattle and almonds.

> but at least the market allocates it somewhat efficiently,

Nice slight of hand. Markets optimise for the goals of the people with capital. Efficiency is only meaningful once an objective is selected, and wellbeing of the majority is a different objective to increase in wealth of the already wealthy.

> And in the western world at least animal farming and the meat industry is held to some basic environmental and animal welfare standards.

This is patently untrue. The penalties for even recording or photographing factory farm operations are much bigger and more consistently enforced than the penalties for violating what scant animal welfare laws there are.

> I don't know or care about your fantasy world, but I am quite welcome to eat meat that is available in the world I find myself living in. Just like you are quite welcome to buy a new iphone ever year or go on frivolous vacations to ski or sight-see.

So we're back to you having no accountability for your personal actions and no change to the system that enables and subsidizes them being permissable. This is just a reframing of you getting to do whatever you want if you are powerful enough to do it.

So I guess I am asserting the moral high ground after all. Because I'm not lying and gasghting and demanding you subsidize my lifestyle while I and the systems I support destroy the lives of everyone around you.

> Well no it's not.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-crop-yield-vs-fert...

Yep, fossil fuel based fertilizers and other chemicals aren't going away.

> Said population (which we should be stabilizing) can be sustained on a fraction of the land used today by eliminating the inefficient uses such as ethanol, cattle and almonds.

How about computer games and instagram and google searches and air travel and cars including EVs, electricity, more than 50 square feet of housing per person, etc etc.? We're back to judgements excusing our own preferences and consumption and denouncing others.

> Nice slight of hand. Markets optimise for the goals of the people with capital. Efficiency is only meaningful once an objective is selected, and wellbeing of the majority is a different objective to increase in wealth of the already wealthy.

It's not a slight of hand, you brought it up. I don't think markets are perfect or even all that great, but they sure are better than you (or I).

> This is patently untrue.

Your wild conspiratorial fringe theories and claims are just false. For example The US Animal Welfare Act (AWA) was signed into law on August 24, 1966. Name any country and you'll be able to find laws and regulations for basic environmental and animal welfare standards.

> So we're back to you having no accountability for your personal actions and no change to the system that enables and subsidizes them being permissable. This is just a reframing of you getting to do whatever you want if you are powerful enough to do it.

No, we're at everybody else not being accountable to you.

> So I guess I am asserting the moral high ground after all.

Yes it always seemed so.

> Because I'm not lying and gasghting and demanding you subsidize my lifestyle while I and the systems I support destroy the lives of everyone around you.

Yes, it is exactly because you claim that you are not doing that and that I am.

> Yep, fossil fuel based fertilizers and other chemicals aren't going away.

Yes that sentence was definitely about the fossil fuel bit and not the land use of cattle vs other protein sources.

Try a piece of intellectual honesty. How much human edible protein can be produced on an acre of land being used for corn and soy cow feed? Now how much on the same land with the same fertiliser input with a combination of plants and free range chickens? How much even if you sacrifice some yield to use organic methods?

> Your wild conspiratorial fringe theories and claims are just false. For example The US Animal Welfare Act (AWA) was signed into law on August 24, 1966. Name any country and you'll be able to find laws and regulations for basic environmental and animal welfare standards.

And almost all of those countries have laws specifically criminalising whistleblowing or documenting violations or turns the burden of proof for libel onto the defendant. Here's one that criminalises having footage.

http://coolice.legis.state.ia.us/Cool-ICE/default.asp?Catego...

> Yes that sentence was definitely about the fossil fuel bit and not the land use of cattle vs other protein sources.

You directed it generally. Now you're upset that I replied to what you wrote.

> Try a piece of intellectual honesty. How much human edible protein can be produced on an acre of land being used for corn and soy cow feed? Now how much on the same land with the same fertiliser input with a combination of plants and free range chickens? How much even if you sacrifice some yield to use organic methods?

I don't know the numbers. Chicken is a very cheap source of protein, much cheaper than a huge range of plant based protein actually. Are we moving the bar for sinning to "thou shalt not consume any plant protein more expensive than chicken"? How about bugs? You have to kill them to eat them, right? Or does the holy book have some kind of complicated sin taxonomy here?

> And almost all of those countries have laws specifically criminalising whistleblowing or documenting violations or turns the burden of proof for libel onto the defendant. Here's one that criminalises having footage.

That does not support your false claim that these countries do not have basic animal right or environmental regulation though.

> You directed it generally. Now you're upset that I replied to what you wrote.

More dishonesty.

> I don't know the numbers. Chicken is a very cheap source of protein, much cheaper than a huge range of plant based protein actually. Are we moving the bar for sinning to "thou shalt not consume any plant protein more expensive than chicken"? How about bugs? You have to kill them to eat them, right? Or does the holy book have some kind of complicated sin taxonomy here?

Yes. That's the entire point. Grain fed factory cattle farming is cruel and unsustainable. Option two is much less cruel and can be done for the same cost with solar derived hydrogen and takes a fraction of the land. There are organic methods that would see the same yield as option two with a slightly larger fraction of the land and would do less damage to the soil.

> That does not support your false claim that these countries do not have basic animal right or environmental regulation though.

A law that is never enforced and which whistleblowing of is criminalised is not holding anyone to any standard. I never claimed there was no law. I correctly claimed that farms were not held to account.

> More dishonesty.

Reality says otherwise, check the thread.

> Yes. That's the entire point.

So we're back here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33368082

Do you admit you choose to inflict pain and suffering and death on animals for your own comfort, as you condemn others for doing the same?

> A law that is never enforced

Source on the wild conspiratorial claim that environmental and animal rights laws are never enforced? Don't make me google a counter example that proves you wrong for the nth time.

> "meat is a desirable food"

Yet I do not desire it.

> "Do you know how modern cereal and vegetable farming is carried out?"

I do know. The food I eat is not, in fact, produced that way.

I do not need or want absolution. But I know my carbon footprint is a tiny fraction of yours. You are, in other words, personally responsible for overwhelmingly more suffering in the world than I know, by direct experience, is necessary for your level of comfort.

> Yet I do not desire it.

Irrelevant.

> I do know. The food I eat is not, in fact, produced that way.

Maybe. Maybe not grown in a way that's sustainably capable of feeding the world's population or even accessible to many.

> I do not need or want absolution. But I know my carbon footprint is a tiny fraction of yours.

You think it is, I'm sure. And you believe yourself to have the moral high ground.

> You are, in other words, personally responsible for overwhelmingly more suffering in the world than I know, by direct experience, is necessary for your level of comfort.

And so are you. Unlike your assumptions about my carbon footprint, I actually do know that with certainty because you are posting this message here which consumes energy. What's more your level of comfort itself is almost certainly far beyond most people on earth, and far beyond what you need to barely keep yourself alive, therefore you have made choices for your own comfort at the expense of many other life forms.

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