Fishing for oil and meat drives defaunation of deepwater sharks and rays
science.org
science.org
Here's a Forbes article that seems almost enthusiastic about this as a "green" energy source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissacristinamarquez/2020/03/...
What a strange article.
So sorry we accidently killed you. In order to give your life some meaning, we've come up with "unique opportunity to have their livers provide valuable products"
The difference is in Communism, there should always be 'some work'. If you are willing to work, there is work. Even if it is some public works project.
In Capitalism, maybe not. Nobody is looking out for you. If you don't have the skills for what is in demand right now, then so sorry, go ahead and die.
in the US, there are 'working poor'. under communism, there are 'working poor and starving'.
at the time when skilled blue collar workers in the US had two story houses and multiple cars per family, the same people in the USSR lived in communal apartments (with 3-4 people per room and 3-4 families per bathroom and kitchen) and commuted to work in overcrowded buses.
even towards the end, in the 80's, after several decades of relative peace and prosperity, even engineers and scientists had a standard of living far below the level of 'working poor' in the US. having a small concrete box in a commie block and a shitty car (that you had to wait several years for the privilege of being allowed to buy for a very sizeable amount of money) was the Soviet dream.
2. And. Different point. These quotes on working to eat, also are meant to apply to the rich. In the US, the rich can just sit by the pool and do not contribute to society. The communist quote is meant to mean, everyone contributes. Whereas in capitalism, you can live off inheritance or interest rates, and not contribute anything. Be a parasite.
If sharks are purposefully being killed like this then thats one thing. But that’s not being alleged.
If sharks are accidentally killed then it’s good that they’re making use of them to some extent. Hopefully they can make even more use of them.
Adding a financial incentive to continue harmful practices is NOT a good thing.
We should be punishing bycatch, not incentivizing it.
Similar vibe as replacing leather with microplastics or meat that can exist anywhere with deforesting the amazon for meat alternatives ingredients.
Is this the case? A major problem with beef is that so much of it comes from the cleared Amazon. Also, meat intrinsically takes more space than vegetables because we still have to clear land to grow feed for the meat, so a 1:1 replacement of Amazonian beef with soy and chickpeas or whatever would be a massive increase in yield.
It's no different with beef. Most beef in the USA comes from the USA, and you might raise various objections about the treatment of cattle, pollution from runoff, and so on, but it isn't contributing to rainforest deforestation, so that isn't a good reason to not eat it.
To expand on your metaphor, not only are the t-shirts made with slave labor, but the cotton grown is harvested and milled by slave labor and without supply chain transparency it’s impossible to know if the new brand is also using the slave-labor cotton.
In the end, all versions of beef production remotely possible are either insanely inefficient in yield or in resource usage or objectively cruel (aka factory farms). A vegan diet is absolutely going to be the better choice on every reasonable metric for the vast majority of people and life situations (aka Inuits don't count).
> A vegan diet is absolutely going to be the better choice on every reasonable metric for the vast majority of people and life situations (aka Inuits don't count).
Is that true of a vegan diet high in fake meat? Highly wasteful because it extracts and uses a small amount from the input material and often the waste is old as animal feed. On top of that extra transport and energy inputs required, etc.
ON the other hand cattle can be part of a natural carbon sink environment. In Scotland (and other places) they are releasing cattle into the wild as part of rewilding!
All of these apply to cattle as well and fake meat will still use less resources than real beef.
>On the other hand cattle can be part of a natural carbon sink environment
Not technically incorrect, but this is absolutely greenwashing
I believe you could make this "all" without loss of accuracy, at least to three significant figures. Might have to relax "domestic" to cover Canada and Mexico, neither of which is deforesting to produce fodder.
The US is a major exporter of the crops fed to cattle, and livestock in general. The lack of supply chain transparency your counter-analogy relies on is nowhere in evidence in US agriculture.
Yes it is, only indirectly, as it's driving climate change. It's also destroying local ecosystems which you might have an interest in? Beef is just insanely inefficient as a food source. It's like finding out all t-shirts are manufactured using a process that throws 10lbs of manufactured cloth into a landfill for every shirt made.
Not all beef is equal. Almost all the beef I eat is from the UK, and most of it grass fed.
I mean, all beef is equal in the sense that it's not an efficient use of resources, including space, to feed cattle vs growing crops that feed humans. That's basically true no matter where the land is.
Anyway, if we are talking about the Amazon, there is absolutely no conversation to be had that doesn't center on beef. Talking about Amazon deforestation specifically being driven by anything other than cattle ranching is so wrong it's evil, and plenty of UK beef also comes from the Amazon.
Our problem isn't tetris with land. We have way, way, way more land to produce food crops than we need to feed everyone, we don't need to optimize for the few places where we can raise a few cattle exclusively. We can feed the same amount of people using far less water, land, and power using a vegan-ish diet.
growing cattle keeps the land from turning into concrete. If you actually want to conserve land you want to use as much already deforested as possible for growing crops and then never deforest new land. Slowly you should work onto getting conservation NGOs to integrate it into government protected land.
Seems to me like a fools errand to optimize land use. The optimal use in the Americas for example was likely already there 14,000 years ago before humans arrived in Americas. We obviously can't go back, but we can improve land, but optimal ....
all the supermarkets i go to sell mostly British beef, and the butcher sells mostly local beef. most of of the rest is Irish.
https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/animal-food
I'm actually very surprised by these numbers, namely that all other top five importers except the UK are net exporters. My mental image of Netherlands and Germany (where I eat too much meat) was that of huge net importers, whose plant production output was in large parts an echo of the animal feed imports (feed gets converted into meat and dung...). Perhaps they are only net exporters by market value, but net importers by nutrient amount?
Like, not to knock on someone else's work, but I bet if we had globally enforced regulation while we may get nice bylines of "the blue fin tuna has made a rebound" the global fish populations would continue to plummet and the oceans acidify even further.
But it's also not a fair comparison, reducing shark bycatch and reducing human CO2 output are completely different problems with different scale.
I don't think giving up is acceptable either.
100% agree here.
The rate of enforcement is far too slow, and you have far too many nations as bad actors, there will never be effective enforcement.
Even those enthusiastic about economic growth are at least more likely to be honest with themselves that scaling up is creating pressure on the environment, despite the improvements in innovation. This is because of soaring global demand (particularly from the East). There are, of course, techno-optimists who want to believe that a sustainable future is a foregone conclusion. Even if we think we'll get there eventually, the damage in the meantime can be considerable.
I guess we'll find out if we're willing to eat less meat, or if we'd rather a certain % of the global population to starve... so far it's looking like the latter
All environmental encroachment and emissions scale with demand. It's reductionist to only talk about meat; it's not the only reason people want to migrate to the West. Notwithstanding, demands for alternatives have shot up in Western countries and land-use for cattle has not actually increased in the US. As countries in developing world lift themselves out of poverty, they consume more meat (and fuel, gadgets, etc).
Even if you hypothetically cut down meat consumption in the West, emissions would still rise to levels that would exacerbate climate change. It's not enough. And "degrowth" is such an injust hardship to demand of developing countries that it's amazing people consider it an actual possibility. Some combination of tough policy measures (in the short-run) and innovation is what we can expect, probably after things get worse.
Ultimately global population growth is going to stall, in less than 100 years. by then whether people eat meat will be a moot point. Demand won't grow, and renewables will have taken over the market.
the tax system can eliminate the extreme waste at the top and make the lives of vulnerable people better
we don’t need private jets, yachts, cruise ships, 3 ton personal vehicles, people who own multiple private homes, private golf courses, lawns in deserts, almond farms in deserts, iot garbage, plastic everything…
we refuse to stop opulent garbage, it’s mental illness
This is a wishful projection.
> the tax system can eliminate the extreme waste at the top and make the lives of vulnerable people better
I'm pro progressive taxation, but that really has no bearing here.
> we don’t need private jets, yachts, cruise ships, 3 ton personal vehicles, people who own multiple private homes, private golf courses, lawns in deserts, almond farms in deserts, iot garbage, plastic everything…
You don't need almost everything you own and take for granted to survive. Who's going to decide what people need, you? The great thing about liberal democracy is we can decide for ourselves.
At any rate, the increases in global emissions are owing to growing global demand particularly from East Asia as they are developing their middle class. You're overestimating the impact of things like private jets; the ultra-wealthy are few in number, and the new affluent class leans left (see: tech billionaires). Even if you put restrictions on these (and we can, why not), it would not make much of a difference.
Restrictions can be warranted (say, for SUV purchases, though this will be moot once they all switch to EV), but customers respond better to incentives. A good example of this is Green HOme subsidies in many countries, that give cash to citizens for improving their home insulation, which lowers heat/AC use, which lowers emissions. Milk alternatives and plant based products are also wildly popular with consumers even if they don't go vegan officially.
TLDR: Veganism is easier to advocate for than not having kids. I say that as a childfree vegan.
But lets just ignore that big of uncomfortable history.
https://insightcrime.org/investigations/argentina-plunder-da...
Reduce or stop eating factory farmed meat / industrial fishing products?
1. Violence against corrupt capital-owners (I'm not advocating this, for legal reasons, just saying it could be effective)
2. Organizing your fellow malcontents (that is: people who give a quarter of a fuck about human dignity), which is hard work but can really pay off systematically. Note though that you may still end up with some of the same legal risks as #1.
Conversely, all your examples also require individuals to make individual choices. Arguably, no systemic change has ever happened without individuals choosing to act.
Not really. Not if it's just a propaganda/awareness campaign. It would only matter if anti-industrial agriculturalists were organizing, defined as building resilient social-political structures which could change policy at increasingly large scales.
> Arguably, no systemic change has ever happened without individuals choosing to act.
I don't even think that's arguable except in the case of natural disasters bringing down systems entirely. The individual choices that matter, for the disenfranchised with revolutionary ideas, are the choices and actions that build organizational power. And building power is extremely grueling work when money is neither the goal nor vehicle, so that's why we see so little of it. That's why I'm not currently doing it, for the time being.
What actually works is political organisation that proposes solutions that actually work.
What revolutionaries are you referring to? It sounds like you're just making shit up and loosely attaching it to what I said.
> What actually works is political organisation that proposes solutions that actually work.
Like I already said in the last part of my comment, though I'm not sure you read any parts of it very closely.
My grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting ceased to be viable and was outlawed --- I worry my children will live in a world where fishing goes the same way, which given the percentage of the world's population which depends on seafood is existential.
The idea behind them, as he explained, was that since sharks are basically immune to cancer, (which they are not[0]), taking those supplements could therefore help prevent cancer. I remember thinking to myself, this is bullshit.
By that same logic I could pulverise a cheetah, take the resulting 'product', and outrun most living creatures.
By the very same logic pulverising scorpions and consuming supplements made from the powder should give us at least some resistance to ionizing radiation.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/97/21/1562/2521495
Idk man, we put up with a lot of horrible stuff up here, too. Not so much because we like it but because nobody who isn't a billionaire (or perhaps heads a powerful but privately owned company) has much say in any of it. Heck, even my city council does whatever the heck the businesses want, no matter how big a crowd shows up at their meetings and says "please no."
(We don't have any ocean, here, but we do have lakes that have been getting more and more polluted for decades because nobody has the backbone to tell folks upstream to keep their fertilizer out of the water, or whatever.)
So there's lots of new housing being built by big developers?
Now whether it'll actually make living here more affordable, we shall see, but I have my doubts.
Better maritime regulation is a must.
and a lot of the krill goes to dog food.
https://planetforward.org/story/the-dirt-on-beef-global-hung...
https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agric...
Also it's good to remember how much food we waste each year. We could easily feed the world already now but it doesn't seem to be priority for the people in charge.
That said I'm on a same side with vegans, I don't like the current way we produce food and I'd like to see a big systemic change there. But I think vegans don't take into account how complex problems we are dealing with - nature, agriculture's economics and eating habits and nutritional requirements of humans.
The article talks about Grasslands.
Farming cows on grass is something else (not grasslands) and fertisers are used and imported feed (or finishing feed in many countries). Without looking at the whole system you can't make any judgement.
~55% of New Zealand is being used for sheep and cattle.
The environmental cost of that is unbelievable.
Grass is not good. PS: I'm not a vegan.
You're talking about ammonia. This is currently irreplaceable in terms of scaling, certainly it would be impossible to feed 8 billion people without. Just look at how much more land-use "organic" plots require.
There are innovations in the works to synthesize ammonia without fossil fuels, but I don't see a future without fertilizer.