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Comment by myshpa | Hacker News Reader

Or we could switch to eating plants now.

We already get 82% calories and 63% proteins from plants. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

We could stay on our 1% of habitable earth, lower our agricultural footprint from 48% of land to 15%, use quarter of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, double forest area and store entire 1.5C carbon budget (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4) in the process, and enable return of wildlife and sealife (also storing a lot of carbon in them https://www.oneearth.org/how-restoring-key-wildlife-species-...).

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The solutions of "everyone just needs to do <x>" are a dime a dozen. We could solve war if everyone just stopped fighting.

It's better to fix incentives such as making meat more expensive through taxes or fewer subsidies on meat or feed grains (corn). Or making vegetables cheaper. I could see a serious PR campaign to support farmers/small business (conservative hook) and eat local planet variety combined with fulfilling recipes or even tax breaks for fast food items that are vegetarian.

To make things work at society scale you need incentives, let the free market work for you.

This isn’t an either/or proposition.

Long term goals (“everyone just needs to do <x>”) can (must) coexist alongside shorter term incentives and PR campaigns.

To your point, hyper fixation on the long term goal makes it seem unachievable.

But conversely, short term incentives must necessarily be informed by long term goals if there’s hope of establishing a useful incentive structure.

Success will require focus on both ends of the spectrum.

Ultimately what we’re talking about is society-scale habit change, and habit change relies on both a belief in a long term outcome and a commitment to daily progress towards it.

The comment they were replying to didn’t sound long term. It specified “now” in the first sentence, so at best short-medium term.

The “everyone just needs to do <x>” part wasn’t a reference to a long term idea, it was them replying to somebody expecting that immediately (or, with a more forgiving reading, in a shorter term)

Both comments were essentially endorsing a binary position. My point was that reality must be some combination of both.

I’d read my comment as addressed to both parent comments.

> To your point, hyper fixation on the long term goal makes it seem unachievable.

It's not even a feasible long term goal, though. There are plenty of places where steady progress will lead to achievements in the long term that seem unbelievable now - science may yet reverse climate change, achieve nuclear fusion at scale, cure cancer (and aging), etc.

This isn't one of those things, though. There's no path from where we are now to nobody eating animals that involves us just making incremental progress, a bit at a time. Long-term goals are great, but long-term goals that can't plausibly be achieved are bad.

> There's no path from where we are now to nobody eating animals that involves us just making incremental progress, a bit at a time.

It sounds like you’re imposing a specifically slow set of increments here.

We know that these goals can’t be met overnight, so the only option is some kind of incremental progress.

But the size of those increments certainly isn’t set, and will be increased (voluntarily or not) as our situation becomes more dire.

> Long-term goals are great, but long-term goals that can't plausibly be achieved are bad.

I think it’s problematic to conclude that what we’re discussing can’t be plausibly achieved. Insanely difficult, sure, but at some point these decisions will be made for us, and abandoning hope is one option that seems guaranteed to lead to failure.

Going further and calling these kinds of goals “bad” seems actively harmful.

> making meat more expensive through taxes or fewer subsidies on meat or feed grains (corn).

But how is that any less dime a dozen? In theory, I agree with you. But the reality is, we don't have the politicians with the backbone or the will to say "I'm going to make your food more expensive." People lost it when eggs shot up in price. Imagine that across the entire diary and meats section at the supermarket?

Incentive work, but this Fed gov solution is DOA.

Why don't we make greenhouse gas release in general more expensive. Why focus on a specific form of greenhouse gas release?

Because that too is going to spike prices somewhere somehow. And no "leaders" wants to be on the hook for that. The longer we kick the can waiting for a less pain solution the more we need that solution to be even more effective.

No one steps up to be accountable for waiting. No one steps up to be accountable for a painful solution.

What could go wrong? We're living it.

Salads carry a huge profit margin at restaurants.

Everyone loves to eat healthy or at least believe that they're doing so. A salad is a great healthy choice (until you slather it with dressing, which is nutritionally awful stuff.)

But a house salad is composed of the cheapest ingredients ever: you've got tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots, cucumbers, a little shredded cheese and croutons. But you can charge at least $7.99 for something that simple. And you can offer a protein to go on top for extra profit.

And truthfully there's very little nutrition of any kind in that ingredients list. When you've grown your lettuce in impoverished soil, and your tomatoes are picked green and "ripen on the vine" or artificially induced, there's not much they can offer. Someone once said to me, "How do you kill an iguana? Feed it nothing but iceberg lettuce."

Now don't get me wrong, salads are a great part of anyone's diet and we should never neglect salads, because they're certainly preferable to a burger and fries every day. But vegetables, being cheap to produce and profitably marked up, are hindering many a plan to stay healthy.

Developed countries do not build food plans based on the good nutrition of the populace, they're based on maximizing shareholder value for the agribusiness conglomerates, and subsidizing the most strategically important crops. We could eat corn until we are literally blue in the face.

As long as your corner convenience store is jammed with corn chips, beef jerky, and beer, Americans will never eat healthy, even if the Food Pyramid is rehabilitated. I have seen some good progress made on bringing fresh produce to food desert areas. I hope those initiatives succeed and continue.

I don't understand talking about salads for 50% of your comment unless you think iceberg lettuce salads are the one alternative to meat or that you think restaurant vegetarian food is just salad rather than any combo of things like beans and grains.

Also, https://www.myplate.gov is very reasonable. The problem with food guidelines aren't that they're wrong. It's that nobody adheres to them the same way they don't adhere to a guideline like "get daily exercise".

USDA guidelines are designed to benefit those who produce processed food.

My source here is 10 years old, so it does not have up-to-date information on whatever MyPlate is pushing. But it says: "[the pyramid] no longer gives any clear recommendations whatsoever. It is fairly open to artistic interpretation."

Previous food pyramids were demonstrably "perverted", such as one where a major food group component consists of sugars and fats. Carbohydrates were the base of that pyramid.

Luise Light, Ed.D., explained that "3-4 daily servings of whole grains were changed to 6-11 at the base" as a concession to the processed wheat and corn industries. The processed white-flour, low-nutrient products which she had placed at the peak, were moved to the base, encouraging a foundation of sugars, fats, and highly-processed sweets. The wording was changed from "eat less" to "avoid too much".

The food industries and their allies in Congress were pissed because they said the USDA shouldn't be telling citizens to "eat less" of anything!

Many health guides are written by pharmaceutical companies, and therefore everyone in hospitals here gets Jell-O. Cool stuff.

Did the typical American work and lifestyle change? I could definitely see eating more carbs back when most people worked manual labor.

> a major food group component consists of sugars and fats.

How many servings of sugar and fat does it say?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/USDA_Foo...

This one doesn't even give servings, it says to use sparingly.

Well, see for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)#Criti...

The Wikipedia copy derides and downplays some of the criticisms, but at least they admit that criticism exists.

Salads and corn? Your idea of what vegans eat is very much off.

Vegans consume a variety of plant-based foods such as fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, and plant-based alternatives.

Most of the recipes you know and love can be modified to have a vegan version.

> To make things work at society scale you need incentives, let the free market work for you.

The free market created and continues the problem.

>"The solutions of "everyone just needs to do <x>" are a dime a dozen. We could solve war if everyone just stopped fighting."

As evident from your (absurd) comparison you're responding to the parent from the perspective of another completely different problem. Consuming less meat and more plant-based foods, including going fully vegetarian, is absolutely within grasp for a substantial amount of people in the west.

Only if they were forced, is the point. For most it's a significant reduction in quality of life they're not going to choose.

Is a little bit of umami taste really a significant part of your quality of life? When other parts go or die (health, friends, meaning), one can easily realize how little that actually matters for one's happiness.

>"For most it's a significant reduction in quality of life they're not going to choose."

I'm convinced that it takes a very special consumer (minority) to actually suffer a significant reduction of quality of life from being forced to give up meat.

>serious PR campaign to support farmers/small business (conservative hook)

This has not worked for a long time in the US. Conservatives have repeatedly cut their nose to spite their face. Plenty of states have still refused to expand medicare simply because it's a liberal policy, and the conservatives in these states have not wavered in their support of those politicians despite directly suffering as a result of poor access to healthcare. They will simply boot up a GoFundMe and muse about "why can't we just set up one big GoFundMe for everyone?" without an ounce of self reflection.

Consider Florida: Thousands of conservative voters died from covid needlessly, while cheering on Desantis as he made it a crime to not allow someone in your private business who didn't take precautions.

Subsidies (for fossil fuels and animal agriculture) are not free market.

And "free market" got us where we're now.

Or we could just ditch beef and get more than half the benefit with little compromise:

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#dis...

Where I'm from most domestically consumed beef comes from diary cows. It's sort of chewy, but at least all this meat didn't go to waste.

No need for extreme measures.

If we are going to impose a cultural change on the world population, adding sea weed and shellfish would be better from an ecological perspective with lower footprint. Rather than using 75% of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, aqua farming is closer to 0%. It also dont contribute to killing the oceans like argiculture does.

If we want to scale up food production on earth leaving as much land as possible for nature and humans, the ocean offer plenty of space for food production.

And if we just master nuclear fusion, we can solve pretty much all of our problems!

The issue, of course, is that we're not going to master nuclear fusion in the near future, just as we're not going to all switch to eating plants now. (And I say this as someone who's gone from eating beef as my main source of protein to something like 50% fish/20% chicken/30% veggie meals.)

Arguments that take the form of "If we just do <thing that there is no plausible chance that we will do>, that would solve the problem!" aren't helpful. Inasmuch as they discourage people from researching plausible but less extreme solutions, they're harmful. People are going to keep eating meat, so it's a good idea to research ways to reduce the carbon footprint of raising it and getting it to them.

I noticed that many people who propose this are not aware of a plethora of health issues that people have that make eating plant-based foods extremely difficult.

For many people eating plants only is extremely difficult - e.g. for me personally, with a plethora of food allergies (soy, almonds, various kinds of nuts, apples, peaches and other fruits) and intestine issues causing irritation when consuming multiple other things.

Ditto people that require a low/slow carb diet - there is a limit of how much nuts you can eat a week without getting sick ;)

Just for fun, what percentage of the population is in your situation? Meaning cannot eat plant based because of allergies - I can't imagine it's much more than 1% ( I might be wrong!)

If that's the case, wouldn't a world where you get lab grown meat and everyone else eats plants make more sense? Since it's a medical issue you get special treatment, it seems to make more sense than supporting an entire industry just for you!

I don't see how it matters just like if the only meat you could digest was human meat. You would have to find some other permutation of an elimination diet that works for you just like Jeffrey Dahmer would have to find some human meat alternative.

It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.

- American Dietetic Association

A vegetarian or vegan diet can be suitable for everyone, regardless of their age.

- NHS UK

It is possible to follow a well-planned, plant-based, vegan friendly diet that supports healthy living in people of all ages, and during pregnancy and breastfeeding.

- British Dietetic Association.

For adults, protein from two or more plant groups daily is like to be adequate.

- WHO

The American Heart Association recommends eating 2 servings of fish (particularly fatty fish) per week.

- American Heart Association

A healthy, balanced diet should include at least 2 portions of fish a week, including 1 of oily fish.

- NHS UK

You should try and include both types of fish in your usual diet. Some foods have DHA added (fortified). Human milk contains DHA and infant formulas must have this fat added. The best way of ensuring we are getting enough omega-3 is to eat foods rich in these fats.

- British Dietetic Association

Among the general adult population, consumption of fish, particularly fatty fish, lowers the risk of mortality from coronary heart disease.

- WHO

Yes, because people can't be bothered to change their diets. But it's different now, when there is 8 billions of us. Everything changes.

And we can obtain Omega-3 from algae, which is the same source that fish rely on.

---

The oceans are home for up to 80% of all life on Earth.

Today only 3% of Pacific bluefin tuna remain.

Overfishing puts $42 billion tuna industry at risk of collapse.

For the first time, sharks are going extinct because of us.

Species like thresher, bull, and hammerhead sharks have lost up to 80-99% of their populations in the last two decades.

Seabird populations have declined by 70% since the 1950s.

Sharks kill 10 people per year. Comparatively, people kill 11,000-30,000 sharks are killed per hour.

Approx. 50 million sharks are killed every year as bycatch.

Studies estimate that up to 40% of all marine life caught is thrown overboard as bycatch.

An Iceland fishery in one month killed approx. 269 harbor porpoises, 900 seals of four different species, and 5000 seabirds.

The Iceland fishery was awarded the blue tick by the MSC.

There are 4,600,000 commercial fishing vessels in the world.

10,000+ dolphins are killed as bycatch off the coast of France every year.

Over 300,000 whales, dolphins, and porpoises are killed as bycatch every year.

46% of the Pacific garbage patch is fishing nets.

There is enough long line set every day to wrap around the planet 500x.

Six out of seven species of sea turtles are either threatened or endangered due to fishing.

The fishing industry kills more animals in a day than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill did in months.

Fishing has become a major threat to coral reefs from the Middle East to the Caribbean, where 90% of large fish have disappeared.

In the 1830s, a typical fishing boat caught 1-2 tons of halibut per day, but today the entire fishing fleet catches 1-2 tons across the entire year.

2.7 trillion fish are caught every year, or up to 5 million caught every minute.

Fish populations are in decline to near extinction.

Virtually empty oceans by 2048.

- https://www.seaspiracy.org/facts

Are you saying that American Heart Association, NHS UK, British Dietetic Association and WHO recommendations are wrong because people can't be bothered to change their diets.

One can not have their cake and eat it too. Either we defer truth to the experts and cite what they say as if that was the end of discussion, or we use the word of experts to advance the discussions with the caveat that experts recommendation exist in the context of culture and concessions that those expert individuals made. This apply to both a vegan diet and fish.

Current industry farming technique is terrible and belong to a time when we did not care about animal welfare nor did we understand the destructive an inhumane nature of large scale industry. Sadly this apply to every form of farming, from animals, to agriculture, to fishing. As a society we don't know how to generate a lot of food at the lowest price possible without the side effect of massive harms.

And for many people eating plants only is extremely difficult. Metabolic illnesses have significant increased in the last 100 years (or those who suffer from them have managed to survive and reproduce). A likely contributing cause is our current lifestyle of using artificial light (harming the circadian clock) and Sedentary lifestyle. All this contribute to a smaller selection of diets that any individual can eat and stay healthy on, and it mostly up to trial and error to determine which diet work with any particular individual. Beans and grains works for some people and in others it will cause drowsiness, allergic reaction, and/or pain.

As an random example, look up FODMAPs and check around how different people react to those foods. Take a random vegetarian diet and how many items list high or low, and then compare it to a random non-vegetarian diet. Diet and health are complex issues with few simple answers, and most dietitians seem to operate on a extremely individualistic level.

> Are you saying that American Heart Association, NHS UK, British Dietetic Association and WHO recommendations are wrong because people can't be bothered to change their diets.

Those recommendations are not inherently incorrect. If obtaining Omega-3 from algae were not an available option, it would be a viable choice. If fish populations were not severely depleted, it would be a suitable choice. If there were considerably fewer humans, it would be a reasonable option. However, it appears that environmental impacts were not adequately considered in their viewpoints.

I have selected a citation affirming that plant-only diets are a viable way forward.

> experts recommendation exist in the context of culture

Culture is just stories we tell ourselves. Those stories may not be true or moral or right. It's better explained in this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7JE8j5Ncmw

> As a society we don't know how to generate a lot of food at the lowest price possible without the side effect of massive harms.

But we do know how to generate a lot of food without excessive harms. The only problem is ... price. But there we're getting to the problems of our current system. That would be even harder and longer discussion.

> Metabolic illnesses have significant increased in the last 100 years ... likely contributing cause is our current lifestyle of using artificial light and Sedentary lifestyle

Other possible culprits for the increase in metabolic diseases in past decades include factors such as changes in dietary patterns, increased consumption of processed foods high in sugar and unhealthy fats and lack of physical activity.

We're eating much more meat/dairy that we've been eating in centuries before, and we're using too much poisons in our food production.

> for many people eating plants only is extremely difficult

Many individuals have depleted gut microbiomes due to Western dietary patterns (e.g., processed foods, sugar, lack of fiber), but this can be resolved through dietary changes. The number of individuals who require a diet solely comprised of animal-derived foods would be extremely small. Veganism's definition also includes a practicality clause.

"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."

Even plant farming isn't without issues. Plant farming eventually strips the nutrients from the soil, and then they end up having to use lots of man made chemicals to "fix" the problem.

We have to find a way to be more sustainable in our agriculture.

Absolutely. A great way to reduce the impact of plant farming is to do less of it. Something like 1/3 of farmland is used to grow crops that are fed to animals. https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture

How many more things will we have to plant to offset the meat eating?

If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

We could double forest area, stop biodiversity loss and store whole 1.5C carbon budget with subsequent reforestation effort. Studies confirming this exist. It's the easiest and surest way how to stop climate change.

> Plant farming eventually strips the nutrients from the soil

Crop rotation predates the wheel by about two millennia.

We're using the synthetic alternative because it's really amazing not because we don't have alternatives.

> because it's really amazing on the timeframes and liability frameworks that govern industrial decision-making

Small but critical detail.

I'd say more "government" timescale; food may technically be from private farms selling on free markets, but they're heavily subsidised because of the fundamental importance to society of making sure we never, ever, under any circumstances, have a famine.

Not after what happened last time.

(What happened last time varying between country, of course).

That's fine and all, but you're not accounting for the fact that we'd need much fewer crops if we fed those crops directly to humans.

All of the problems you perceive about crops apply even more to animal agriculture due to trophic level efficiency loss. You're inadvertently making the case against animal ag.

Chickens turn kitchen waste and other garbage into nutrient dense eggs.

I raise chickens and feed them my kitchen and yard waste. They also eat bugs.

Two chicken eggs can power me all day.

Reason about that "trophic energy loss [gain]".

I'm not sure what your "not muh eggs!" story has anything to do with a discussion about animal ag industry and scaling meat production to global levels.

For example, how much do your backyard chickens contribute to global egg consumption, and what would the egg market look like if all eggs came from chickens living like yours? That's the kind of topic going on here.

Animals converting plants to meat/protein is more efficient than humans directly eating an entirely plant based diet.

It sure isn't.

Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...

The climate benefits of veganism and vegetarianism

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220429-the-climate-bene...

https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1600x900/p0c41hws.webp

Estimating the environmental impacts of 57,000 food products

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2120584119

Sustainable eating is cheaper and healthier - Oxford study

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-chea...

Why the food system is the next frontier in climate action

Virtually all paths to a net-zero-emissions food system rely on consumers in high-income countries shifting to a more plant-forward diet, according to a recent study.

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/04/why-the-food-syst...

Uhm... where do animals get these extra calories from if not their food? Can you explain this to me please?

How can the calories out be more than the calories in?

Or are you suggesting people don't get all the calories they eat from plans? I don't think this is true.

Cows eat 22 kg of plants to make 1 kg of meat, out of every 100 kcal you feed them you'll get 2 kcal of meat. Why not skip the inefficient intermediary?

And we could/should use nitrogen fixing plants and biodiversity instead of man made chemicals.

> If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

All of this is `fighting the last war'. World population is going to fall precipitously by the end of the century.

The scarcity thinking everyone is parroting is a relic of the 20th century and it gets in our way. It keeps us from thinking about creating abundance.

> World population is going to fall precipitously by the end of the century.

That would be too late.

Are you aware about the amount the destruction we cause?

Without functioning ecosystems our civilization will perish, 100%. Some think we have 50 years, some are expecting the collapse any day now.

UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...

Report Warns 1 in 8 Bird Species Now Facing Extinction

https://www.birdlife.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/SOWB2022...

Climate change: Six tipping points ‘likely’ to be crossed

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62838627

As many as one in six U.S. tree species is threatened with extinction

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/2...

Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70% since 1970, report reveals

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-7...

WTF is Happening? An Overview

https://climatecasino.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/NA_SST-...

https://climatecasino.net/2023/06/wtf-is-happening-an-overvi...

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Never-Environmental-Alarmi...

Don't look up!

Anytime you mention to people that maybe we shouldn't eat as many animals as we do you're going to get down-voted or politely scolded or yelled at. It's like any addiction, people won't admit there's a problem until they have some sort of break through of clarity.

It's not an addiction it's a matter of human biology. We are meat eaters. Shall we regulate the CO2 we exhale?

What's the ultimate purpose? To subsist using the minimal amount of resources? Have you considered that people may want to eat animals?

Every human activity consumes resources. We cannot make the reduction of consumption as a goal in itself. At the end of the road, what that line of thinking leads to is just existing for the mere fact of existing while occupying the minimal space and feeding ourselves enough to meet our required daily values. I do not think that is an existence that makes sense.

Going back to "agricultural land use". Much of the land use for raising animals would not become a lush forest if left alone. There's a reason it is being used for animals and not crops.

Do you think you might be onto a slippery slope here?

Eating animals is not a cornerstone of modern society, and none of the experience/ benefits of eating animals cannot be reproduced. Just like using lead in the gas, at some point as a society we might decide that the costs overweight the benefits.

I think we're waaaaaaay past the discussion - it's self evident that animal exploitation is a blight on the earth and on the animals, and the benefits are unclear (for 95% of the world).

So why keep going? Because "i want to"?

What would you think if people wanted to use leaded gas, or use DDT on their lawn? See the similarity?

I bought farmland and raise my own beef because of this type of thinking.

Absolutely, _no one_ is gonna control whether I eat beef or not.

See what I mean? " No one is gonna stop me from spraying DDT" no one is gonna stop me from dumping this chemical waste in this river" "No one will stop me from doing what I want to sentient animals"

Anyway. Enjoy the highest level of depression in any industry and the shit smell all around your house.

>Much of the land use for raising animals would not become a lush forest if left alone. There's a reason it is being used for animals and not crops.

With scrub land, that is about the only agricultural use for it. Putting cows on arid scrub land turns useless land into useful land. It's so easy to falsely reason about agriculture when one is so far removed from it.

>What's the ultimate purpose? To subsist using the minimal amount of resources?

That is the ultimate purpose to reduce the standard of living of the poor and middle class.

Pastures and ranches still rewild back into something populated by the ecosystem even if it just looks like devoid grassland to you. Not to mention how many forests are destroyed to turn them into ranchland.

Every activity and product has a cost and contributes to waste. If I enjoy that food and pay for the cost then whats the problem? Are we suggesting it's virtuous for its own sake to have a lower standard of living?

But you don't pay for the cost. Our continual struggle with environmental issues are substantially that (a) very meaningful externalities mean that costs are foisted onto others, either the public at large or specific unlucky communities and (b) industrial lobbyists get public policy to actively subsidize their behavior, so again, everyone pays to support destructive behavior.

In the case of meat production, apart from the direct agriculture subsidies, and the large carbon footprint, feedlots are a source of pollution that communities have to deal with, antibiotic resistance contributes to (costly) health risks for everyone, the Gulf of Mexico has that giant dead-zone, etc, etc.

It sounds like your issue is with our resources allocation system and meat is just a proxy for it that you don't care for.

... did you just call someone a communist for daring to disagree with you?

My problem is unnecessarily destructive practices which are causing giant and totally avoidable crises.

If we were running the same meat production system in a centrally planned economy under some "the proletariat deserves meat" party plan with the same concentrated waste from feedlots, reckless use of antibiotics, clearing of the Amazon for ranch land, feeding a large portion of crops like corn and soy to animals that we then slaughter, the resource allocation system would be different but the destruction would be the same, and my objections would be unchanged.

But the "I paid for it and I enjoy it so what's wrong" response seems in bad faith and will not die. Suppose I enjoy the aesthetic experience of seeing oil on ocean waves; it catches the light in such a unique way. On weekends, I buy a barrel of crude, head out in a boat and dump my barrel and just spend the day watching the sun glisten on struggling seabirds. I think most people would not accept the "I paid for the oil; what's the problem" response, because _obviously_ the problem is I'm wreaking unnecessary destruction, and while I owned the oil, I don't own the ocean, the sea-life etc. You might like meat, and you might exchange money for meat, but that doesn't mean you're paying for the problems that meat production is creating.

I didn't say anything about communists. I am arguing that people's complaints about meat or not unique and apply to most other economic goods.

In the sense of consumers worrying about their goods creating pollution, yes thats a common concern. Many consumers choose to evaluate goods based on their environmental impact.

But animal meat is different from most consumer goods in the sense that it’s alive and conscious. There isn’t much comparison to other goods there.

Yeah - kind of like leaded gas and DDT, or BPA plastics, no one pays the costs when they are externalised to the environnement/population.

No one paid for the damages caused by DDT - YOU are paying for it by having a crippled biosphere.

If the costs were brought down to you, the meat in a burger would be 20-25$ easy - not thibking about steaks and the like. This would cripple the economy - but it's heavily subsidised

So you agree that if I pay the cost it's not a problem? You just disagree about what that price is?

In other words, a plant based diet is primarily about your budget?

> So you agree that if I pay the cost it's not a problem? You just disagree about what that price is?

Not OC, but I don’t think that’s quite right.

When you create any good, like converting a tree into a piece of paper, you convert a natural state into a productive state. No amount of money can reverse this transformation. You can only attempt to offset the conversion. In this example people plant new trees to offset, but the forest remains altered. Then we argue about to what degree it’s been altered and if that’s better or worse.

So I think the debate is more like: Can we offset our consumption of A by doing B? Because B never equals A, some people will naturally always say no and advocate against consuming A in the first place. Others will debate the price/effectiveness of B.

Oh no - not my point at all.

You can't pay the price. If the subsidies are stopped, the farmers have to sell their animals to slaughterhouses order of magnitude more, the slaughterhouses have to do the same with distributors, and those guys do the same to restaurants/grocery stores.

No restaurant/grocery store would buy meat at that price (edit: restaurants and grocery stores make 1-4% profits on their sales) this is a PERISHABLE good. It's way too much risk - and what consumer would buy that?

Not forgetting that everything else remains the same price - McDonalds makes money off of dollar meals - that's not gonna work if a quarter pounder is 20$+.

So no - it's not about budget. This is to explain that the "status quo" is heavily supported and is more akin to a sinking ship that is being propped up by subsidies.

A plant based diet is justified many ways by many individuals. To me, sentient animals are not food and have the right to freedom, so that's why I eat plants. Some are motivated by the environnement, some budget, some health benefits, some other reasons.

> If I enjoy that food and pay for the cost then whats the problem?

Very few activities have costs that can be paid in full by the participant.

In your example, the burden of transforming the land, the carbon footprint of producing the food + transporting it is shared in varying degrees by the community, yet the enjoyment goes only to the purchaser. The cost paid at the store does not offset these other costs.

A free market is wonderful and the best economic system we have, but I think it’s also worth considering the impact our purchases have on the community.

Monoculture agriculture is terrible for wildlife. Going plant based doesn't save the planet.

Many of the statistics quoted in your last paragraph are wrong. They are based on the premise that rewilding this land will naturally sequester carbon. That premise is completely contradicted by a study found two links down in the relevant links:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-023-00349-8

"Comparable GHG emissions from animals in wildlife and livestock-dominated savannas"

> Pastoralism in Old World savannas is known to emit a significant share of global livestock-sourced greenhouse gases (GHG). Here, we compare calculated emissions from animals in a wildlife-dominated savanna (14.3 Mg km−2), to those in an adjacent land with similar ecological characteristics but under pastoralism (12.8 Mg km−2). The similar estimates for both, wildlife and pastoralism (76.2 vs 76.5 Mg CO2-eq km−2), point out an intrinsic association of emissions with herbivore ecological niches. Considering natural baseline or natural background emissions in grazing systems has important implications in the analysis of global food systems.

In other words, wild animals living in a natural savanna ecosystems emit an equivalent amount of greenhouse gasses to domestic animals being grazed. Much of the land currently under agricultural use for animal agriculture would revert to savanna and grassland, with wild grazers replacing the domestic grazers.

Don't even get me started on the degree to which these arguments ignore key issues in plant agriculture. Things like the fertilizer necessary to achieve its outputs is all fossil fuel based and carbon emitting for conventional or by products of animal agriculture for organic. We have to get to net zero - you can't reach net zero in plant agriculture any more than in animal agriculture.

I've seen these sort of thing again and again and again in the push to drop animal agriculture in an attempt to decarbonize our agriculture. This failure to take a systems approach leading to the wrong conclusions.

My read of the situation is that the push to drop animal agriculture did not originate with decarbonization, but rather originated with people who want to drop animal agriculture for ethical reasons (animal rights) who are then running studies attempting to show that dropping animal agriculture also has carbon benefits, or economic benefits, or wildlife rehabilitation benefits, or what have you. The problem with doing this - of course - is that they have a predetermined outcome that they want to find (animal agriculture bad) so naturally, they make omissions that lead them to that outcome.

Abandoning animal agriculture is not a silver bullet for decarbonizing our agriculture. Its advocates really need to get off their horses and start taking a systems view if we want to come up with solutions that could actually decarbonize our agriculture in a realistic way.

The systems that seem most promising for reaching a truly sustainable agriculture are agroecological systems. These systems often combine animal and plant agriculture in ways that mimic real ecosystems. And they often provide ecosystem services very similar to those of natural ecosystems. They can potentially interweave with natural habitat in a way that current agriculture systems - either plant or animal - cannot. And again, they depend on the animal portions of them to be productive. They still need a lot of research, but they show the most promise in terms of an agriculture that gets us to true sustainability.

>That premise is completely contradicted by a study found two links down in the relevant links

No, it's not.

>In other words, wild animals living in a natural savanna ecosystems emit an equivalent amount of greenhouse gasses to domestic animals being grazed. Much of the land currently under agricultural use for animal agriculture would revert to savanna and grassland, with wild grazers replacing the domestic grazers.

I think you misunderstand the meaning of pastoralism - you let the animals out on the land, they eat, you bread some, then you eat some. The actual "in other words" here is that the only way to reduce the GHGs of animal agriculture is to reduce animal agriculture itself. These animals are purposefully bred to eat. All it confirms is that if you breed less animals, you produce less GHGs. The wildlife live out their whole lives, the bred animals do not.

>Don't even get me started on the degree to which these arguments ignore key issues in plant agriculture. Things like the fertilizer necessary to achieve its outputs is all fossil fuel based and carbon emitting for conventional or by products of animal agriculture for organic. We have to get to net zero - you can't reach net zero in plant agriculture any more than in animal agriculture.

Animal agriculture requires plant agriculture to exist, but the same isn't true for the reverse. It's not necessary to eat animals to get the benefits of having the animals in the system. For example, you don't have to eat honey for bees to pollinate. How do we know that? Because honeybees aren't native to the US and the native bee population got along just fine pollinating before honeybees were introduced.

Reforming and using fossil-fuel-free fertilizer is already something people are working on.

>I've seen these sort of thing again and again and again in the push to drop animal agriculture in an attempt to decarbonize our agriculture. This failure to take a systems approach leading to the wrong conclusions.

>Abandoning animal agriculture is not a silver bullet for decarbonizing our agriculture. Its advocates really need to get off their horses and start taking a systems view if we want to come up with solutions that could actually decarbonize our agriculture in a realistic way.

I think if anyone needs to start using systems thinking, it's you. The systems approach here is not to overuse one particular resource. So taking animals, a resource, out of the system continuously is not systems thinking. It is unsustainable use of a resource. You erroneously claim that the food system needs animal agriculture to exist, but it doesn't. It just needs animals to exist. There is no way to make the continuous breeding and killing of animals emit less GHGs than just not doing that.

Cattle raised in an environment suited to them have a lower carbon footprint than raising them on former rainforest pasture, and by outsourcing cattle production to Brazil, who are actively clear-cutting the Amazon for the purpose of expanding the cattle industry, we also lose our carbon sink. Young trees are nowhere as effective at taking carbon out of the air as older trees, so replanting trees where there is current pasture is losing sight of the target, because we're busy turning old-growth-forest into pasture elsewhere in the world.

https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/news-views/defras-plans-for...

Good luck enforcing a world-wide “plant-only” diet. I know people who would go to war just over that.

They are already at war against nature

I wouldn't. Instead I would simply switch to cannibalism, and start eating vegetarians :)

Why does everything have to be all-or-nothing? Start by stop subsidizing meat.

Corn would like to have a talk with your meat subsidizes.

Corn subsidies provide animal ag with cheap feed. Cut the corn subsidies and prices for meat will better reflect the cost of producing it.

Corn subsidies also go to producing ethanol. Which is arguable a gigantic waste when compared to using it for animal feed. Roughly 40% of corn is used to produce ethanol[1]

[1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-c...

If lab grown meat produces far more CO2 than conventional and we cut corn subsidies I could see it backfiring and pushing more meat to be lab grown causing total CO2 to actually increase.

40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol

36 percent of U.S. corn, plus distillers grains left over from ethanol production, is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens

Much of the rest is exported.

Only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, much of that for high-fructose corn syrup.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-to-rethink-c...

Every climate solution I've seen that started with the word "just" has been woefully inadequate, and modestly raising the price of meat is no exception. People would still eat plenty of it.

You're right, changed "just" to "start by". Part of my point is that so many solutions go straight into forcing people to drastic immediate change, which is bound to be unpopular and only increases division and resistance.

Why do you go directly to the extreme implementation? No one said anything about "enforcement". There are ways to push society towards a better paradigm without enforcement. We also shouldn't let the lowest common denominator have a say in the direction of society. People that "would go to war" over the fact that they should eat less red meat are not exactly of sound mind.

>Why do you go directly to the extreme implementation

> We also shouldn't let the lowest common denominator have a say in the direction of society.

I guess it's human nature, I don't know.

> We also shouldn't let the lowest common denominator have a say in the direction of society.

Interesting. Do you see this as defending democracy?

I'm not sure your question has enough context. But yes, not allowing the most illogically angry people (defined by me as the lowest common denominator in this Context) to start wars (aka crime and violence) over their hurt feelings is most definitely a way to defend democracy.

So your answer is "we'll just manipulate people without them noticing"?

How will that not backfire?

> People that "would go to war" over the fact that they should eat less red meat are not exactly of sound mind.

I see nothing in their position that indicates they aren't of sound mind. They're inconvenient to your own position, and you're willing to manipulate them if you can manage the trick.

Maybe you're worried that they will choose to "go to war" as manipulated people do so often once aware of the ruse?

Who said anything about "manipulation"? Do you know that influence is not tantamount to manipulation? Do you know that many of your own behaviors are most likely subsidized by government and therefore you are being economically influenced (or in your perspective "manipulated")? Have you ever heard of a Sin Tax? Have you ever realized that Expansionary Policy is often put into place in order to influence (your perspective is "Manipulate"). I would encourage you to learn a little about economics before trying to hypothesize why and what makes people go to war.

Black-and-white thinking, think in gradients!

You eat meat X times a week? Try X -1 or more.

Even a little bit helps tremendously. Everyone reading this who eat meat every day, try cutting down even one day, it will help.

I will not, thank you for your input.

Instead of beating your wife seven times a week, consider implementing "Beat-less Mondays" as a compassionate alternative.

I'd go to war over that, but first, I'd start with a peaceful protest, like throwing plant based garbage into the harbor dressed as Ronald Mcdonald and fast food mascots

Yeah, I blogged about that 4 years ago and classified that under “stupid ideas”

Have we made any progress on the coal problem?

https://h4labs.org/ive-got-another-stupid-idea-to-deal-with-...

Nope.

Maybe we can limit these silly discussions to one day a year to avoid these “Groundhog Day” discussions.

In other news, 1.5C is guaranteed within a decade. To keep it interesting, Let’s come up with a few more miracles that won’t work.

China is permitting 2 new coal plants a week[1]. Yet it's cow flatulence that is the problem.

How people get convinced to act against their own self interest I'll never understand.

[1] https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-...

Why is china being a bad actor mean we should ignore the real damage climate change is already causing? How are we supposed to stop china from building coal plants? They were leading the way with cheap renewable energy until recent economic contractions.

"Someone else is lighting a fire in the building so we shouldn't try putting out this grease fire we have here" is a stupid, accelerationist take that doesn't even make sense on it's face.

We were warned about the coal problem in China/India 40 years ago.

https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI

We were also warned that even if the United States solved the problem that it wasn’t enough. People think they can convince several billion people to give up meat but replacing several thousand coal power plants is too hard…

“Local governments in China approved more new coal power in the first three months of 2023 than in the whole of 2021, according to official documents”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/24/china-ramps-up...

> People think they can convince several billion people to give up meat but replacing several thousand coal power plants is too hard…

No, energy and transport is easy.

Changing agriculture and diets/habits is hard. Unfortunately we have to do everything, not just this or that.

The science is clear.

And CO2 / warming is not our only problem. Biodiversity is equally important problem to be solved.

The climate crisis and biodiversity crisis can't be approached separately, says study

https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-ap...

Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...

Australians far less aware of biodiversity loss than climate crisis, research finds

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/20/australi...

> If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares

The only way I can even remotely believe that is that 'agricultural' includes pastures which are useless to humans for any other purpose.

Land used for plants intended for human consumption would need to be expanded along with everything bad they require.

I also wonder how high would be the health cost of inappropriate diet because eating meat is brain-dead way of supplying yourself with some very crucial substances. And I don't believe that switching to plant diet would automatically make everybody eat smart.

> The only way I can even remotely believe that is that 'agricultural' includes pastures which are useless to humans for any other purpose.

This is really interesting! I didn't know that pastures cannot support crops and/or buildings.

Why are pastures so limited in their usability?

Historically speaking, hillsides and mountains are awkward for both homes and combine harvesters. Such land is currently where pasturing is most common.

But such things are always conditional and depend on the tech. If Boston Dynamics robots start building the houses, or picking fruit and herbs on hillside orchards, such concerns probably stops mattering.

I think that it's mostly combination of location, soil and terrain shape. Letting cows graze on a plot of land isn't worth much. If you let the cows graze somewhere that's because you have no way of getting anything more from that piece of land.

Lumping pastures with high class, farming suitable land is a bit dishonest.

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