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Comment by virtue3 | Hacker News Reader

"A large amount of beef is grown in areas that are not suitable for crop farming in the United States. In fact, 85% of the land used to graze cattle in the U.S. is marginal land, which means it's not suitable for growing crops. Marginal land is either untouched or used for grazing livestock, mostly cattle"

Grain finishing is another matter. But it's not a 1 grain : 1/10th beef type situation.

Now chopping and burning down the amazon to create grazing land for cattle? yeah that's going to probably kill us all.

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They're gonna chop and burn it down either way, it'll either be for cattle or if you make eating meat illegal they'll chop and burn it for something else like palm oil.

Like it's obvious the people who own and control that land don't care about it anywhere near as much as you do so if you want them to stop chopping it down essentially you're gonna need to start paying them not to. Just seems naive to think stopping specifically poor people from eating meat is the solution to this.

If you take away one of the profitable reasons to chop down the Amazon, it’ll reduce people doing it at the margin - that is simply facts.

> Poor people from eating meat

Yeah and a carbon tax will stop poor people from using as much gas, etc. - if we want to solve climate change we cannot just insulate all poor people from externality pricing.

At global scale we can't solve the environmental crisis in general (climate is only one aspect) and solve poverty at the same time with 10 billion people.

Solving the environmental crisis means reducing our consumption of resources. Solving global poverty means a significant increase in consumption of resources.

So the only way forward is to let the global population decrease ASAP so that we can both live well and preserve the planet.

Resource intensity is decreasing. We can solve both at the same time, but we can’t solve both with maximum possible speed at the same time, true.

Resource intensity may or may not be decreasing but that's not solving the issue if you look at global numbers of poor people versus economic and consumption growth needed to bring everyone to, say, European level of living standard.

We are already wreacking havoc on the planet and marginal decrease in resource intensity is not going to make a difference because our total impact needs to be slashed.

I never understand the insistence of some of ignoring population in the equation, which is the key parameter.

> marginal decrease in resource intensity

We're seeing more than simply marginal decreases - if we can successfully transition our power. The gap in per capita CO2 emissions between developing, middle-income, developed is not nearly as great as what you are suggesting [0] and will decrease even further in the time that it takes to raise people in poverty now to developed-world standards.

> I never understand the insistence of some of ignoring population in the equation, which is the key parameter.

A few reasons: 1. Population is projected to peak in the coming decades. 2. "Slashing" population counts requires a global deployment of force that is both not practically feasible right now and incredibly unpopular. There is no practical path to "slashing" population. This is the primary reason, imo. 3. People in the West always imagine that it would be other people/nations slashing their population count when the biggest marginal impact (especially given climate lags) would be slashing their own population. These solutions are eugenicist in nature.

Also - taking a step back for a moment, I am confused as to how this in any way justifies beef. Beef contributes to the gap between rich and poor in CO2. If we reduce reliance on beef, it means we can support a larger population sustainably?

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

CO2 emissions for power generation, or in general, are only a small part of our impact. The environmental crisis is not only caused by this, but by our total consumption of resources and production of many pollutants.

And so we are screwed.

Now the West is already slashing its own population, birth rates have crashed. The issue is that it's refusing to let it go because it's not the easy option, and at global scale this is a taboo subject.

And so we are doubly screwed.

There’s limitless profitable reasons to chop it down.

Don’t understand why people want to play whack a mole to get to the end goal all while making everyone’s lives worse, esp on the lower income levels who can’t afford organic meat.

When if you want the trees saved then pay them to keep them and hold them to it. Like that’s the actual goal no? And easier than completely retooling society as a backwards way to cause that change.

I mean this is about the trees right?

> When if you want the trees saved then pay them to keep them and hold them to it. Like that’s the actual goal no? And easier than completely retooling society as a backwards way to cause that change.

REDD+ programs (which is what you are describing) are massive failures at preventing deforestation or carbon decreases.

> There’s limitless profitable reasons to chop it down.

No, there are costs and profits and if you decrease the profits and increase the costs it changes peoples behavior at the margin. The Amazon rainforest isn't the one thing that is exempt from basic economics.

You stop them using it for meat they’ll use it for palm oil you stop them using it for that they’ll use it for something else. It’s just so naive to expect it just to switch to something they can sell. Like they own it they can do what they want with it, if you want it to be trees pay them for it to be trees. Just because some NGO likely scam failed to do it under a climate banner doesn’t mean it’s impossible, someone pays them to use the land for meat right? So pay for it to be trees in the same channels.

Accountability seems impossible sending money alone. There have to be officials with guns enforcing the preservation. People who cannot be paid off.

Yes, but now give out the statistics on how much of the calories fed to cows in total in the US or worldwide is actually grazing and how much is from crops that need extra area apart from where the animals graze. Even cattle that grazes is often supplemented with grain, and the grain is of course much more calorie-dense.

The world wide land area for farming would reduce from 4 to 1 billion hectares if we didn't use livestock to feed humans. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

So the answer to "what would we do with all that land we can't put crops on" is "whatever we want". For example, we could just leave it be nature, since we don't need it for farming.

“Not suitable for crop farming” =/= “ecologically unimportant”

Seriously, the is a big problem in the US. Cattle are grazed on BLM land and they trample all the stream banks to such an extent that riparian ecosystems are totally destroyed. And in exchange the grazing fee is only $1/head/month! If you stand at the point where a stream crosses from a fenced conservation area into a grazing area, the difference across the boundary is stark.

How did did the riparian ecosystems thrive when there were tens of millions of bison? There is the same order of magnitude of cows in the US today (90 million) as bison hundreds of years ago (30-60 million.) Bison are also generally much heavier, meaning they eat more and trod the ground more deeply.

The historical range of the American bison was largely not overlapping with BLM grazing lands. The bison, a sensible animal, wasn't found in California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.

The historical range of the bison did extend into those states, but granted, not into most of that land area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_bison_belt

I think we are safe in describing the pre-columbian bison range as not marginal, and the post that started this thread is about how most of our cattle grazing is on marginal lands. The way Americans do this is the worst possible way: grow feed on the excellent grazing range, and feed it to an animal that spends most of its life either grazing a desert or standing in parking lot. We'd get more of everything, easier and cheaper, if we just grazed bison where we currently grow corn.

I'm all for that: bison is delicious.

> Now chopping and burning down the amazon to create grazing land for cattle? yeah that's going to probably kill us all.

How?

I mean, I'm not a fan of destroying forests, etc, but around here, there is no unmanaged land so presumably all the forests were already burnt etc for farmers... But we're all around, right? I don't get how burning the Amazon for food people want will actually kill us.

The Amazon is pretty important for the global climate

Because the rainforest is important in regulating global temperature and oxygen production, much more so than the (probable) temperate climate forests you are from.

You are living in a post destruction area, with new forests planted to supplement the destruction that was there before. Most of these forests aren't more than 70 years old, that's about when we finally made an effort to fix how badly we totally fucked up and why people needed clean air to not die from lung cancer (among other things). The loss of biodiversity, air quality, etc. already occurred. You are a survivor. What's more, your survival was in part supported by the air quality of other virgin forests further away from you that weren't yet cut down. But now that they are being cut down, there's less left to support you.

In short, you're asking yourself why you shouldn't shoot yourself in the foot again, because you managed to survive the first shot and it looks to you like it healed just fine (it didn't).

I didn't shoot myself in the foot.

Someone around here did clear the forests for farmland... and people are doing ok.

Its not that everyone died, as the comment I responded to said.

To substantiate your point, I was thinking about deforestation for farming in Indiana (where I live) and Ohio last week and learned that Indiana was 90% forest until taxes got in the way. It's crazy that something as silly as taxes can cause most of your forests to become farmland.

https://woodlandsteward.squarespace.com/storage/past-issues/...

We are still alive. I wish we had the forests, but we have survived and the environment has adjusted.

Yeah, it's crazy to insentivise deforestation. But people need to eat. And, depending on who you listen to, there is even some evidence that the rainforest may have been a cultivated environment itself, in the dim and distant past.

The US has increased in forest cover over the last 100 years. The loss in your state(s) is somewhat offset by gain in others.

https://www.wri.org/insights/tracking-global-tree-cover-gain

And, the Amazon is pretty damn big. The potential effects of its loss are detailed here:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-the-amazon...

Finally, tropical forests (/jungles) are a lot more productive in terms of growth (and carbon capture) than temperate forests.

https://news.mongabay.com/2011/06/tropical-forests-more-effe...

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