Would you rather scores of others die than give up on irrational habits like eating beef?
Would you rather be counted amount the attrition?
Would you rather be counted amount the attrition?
That's a completely false dichotomy.
There's nothing irrational about eating beef from a resource standpoint. For example, if we were to allow the Market to act efficiently (which we might not (which would actually be irrational, from my standpoint)), the resource requirements of raising beef would 100% guaranteed make it impractically expensive to eat, and there would be no issue. As it stands, beef is already rising in cost much faster than other forms of meat! See http://www.buedelmeatup.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/chart...
It's a market problem. Because of the way water rights were allocated, it's cheap to do wacky things like farm the desert. You can very easily farm beef cattle in places where water is abundant... Places like New York, Kentucky, etc, just not at the scale as on massive plots of empty land.
It's specifically Beef that is the massive drain. Chicken/Pork/other meats are magnitudes of orders more water-conscious per calorie. (Pork uses 75% less, and is yet the most wasteful of water outside of cows/bovine)[1]. Beef is astoundingly wasteful of water. You could take an hour-long shower and it would use about the same amount of water needed for a pound of beef. [2] and [3]. [1] http://gracelinks.org/blog/1143/beef-the-king-of-the-big-wat.... [2] http://www.wsscwater.com/home/jsp/content/water-usagechart.f.... [3] http://blog.epa.gov/healthywaters/2012/03/virtual-water-real....
Those scale that you can operate on with modern, subsidized agriculture is unstoppable. A farm in upstate NY is 50-500 acres. A ranch in the high desert may be 50 miles^2. Also, the land isn't empty in the east, and people won't put up with the smell of thousands of cattle.
Stop giving away water to desert farmers. Prices will rise, and demand will shift to places where water is plentiful.
Do I have a choice?