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Comment by PlattypusRex | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, I predict that even when faced with these facts, people will continue to increase their meat consumption over the coming years, as the current trend shows no signs of stopping.

It's also unlikely the government would touch this issue with a ten-foot pole; Imagine the nonstop, angry calls a congressperson's office would be flooded with for even suggesting the most mild of regulations for beef consumption.

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The trend will continue until 100% of Earth's arable land is used for growing food for humans and their cattle (I heard it's currently around 70%) and then the poorest people will be culled so the richer people can have even more meat.

This is a tempting story to believe, but the actual trend is that global agricultural land use is almost flat over the past 30 years and land under cultivation per capita is decreasing almost everywhere due to improved yields [1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

That's actually incredible - and it has just barely grown since the 60s, when we had just 3 billion people. That means we can now feed nearly 3x the humans on virtually the same amount of land. That's fantastic, I had no idea the efficiencies had been that significant.

Back in the 1800’s people linearly extrapolated farmland usage, and concluded we’d run out in the early 1900’s.

It was about as ridiculous as the degrowth movement is today. Improving efficiency and decreasing environmental impact is almost always a better bet than embracing artificial scarcity.

Improving efficiency sometimes comes with other externalities. See, for instance, massive CAFOs where cows basically live on mountains of their own shit. Or gestation crates, where pigs cannot even turn around.

These things are more efficient, but many people consider them inhumane.

Efficiency is always a tradeoff, it's not always better. It needs to be considered, and done with intention, not with mindless drive towards efficiency for efficiency's sake.

I like to remind people that the Lord of the Rings is about a villain named Sauron, who was a wizard/angel/god whose domain was crafting. He was originally a beautiful person, who just wanted to build more and more. But he wasn't satisfied with the efficiency of the humans, elves, and dwarves. Convincing them was much slower than just telling them to do what he wanted. So he made some rings to control them. And he started breeding orcs who would do what he wanted without question.

Sauron became highly efficient, but he lost his beauty. I'm not anti-efficiency, but I am "think about the tradeoff you are making first. Understand what you are giving up."

It is probably good news, but to be fair land use and GHG emissions are not the same thing, especially given that fertilizers are involved.

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