ShlomoS

Of those two options, trees. Compost does not sequester carbon in and of itself. That's a wishful thinking myth that is based on a lack of understanding of soil. Compost is organic matter, in various stages of life, death and decay. We want soil to have more organic matter. So people assumed adding compost to dirt would accomplish this. It does not. The organic matter is decomposed into CO2 and returns to the atmosphere. We need to increase STABLE organic matter in the soil, and compost does not do that simply by adding it to dirt. The only thing that creates stable organic matter is microbes living in the rhizosphere in symbiosis with plants. In order to increase soil SOM, we need more root mass. The way compost can help is to plant a forest or meadow and keep soaking it in compost tea so that the roots get deeper and deeper, expanding the rhizosphere and the depth of the soil. Normal roots will only grow as deep as there are symbiotic microbes, and yet those microbes will only live where there are roots, so there's a catch-22. We can use the microbes in compost, dissolved into water as compost tea, to get microbes deeper than the roots, so the roots go deeper, and then keep doing that. There's people with grass that has 20 foot deep roots from doing this.

2. Not really. None of the temperatures we're recording anywhere around the country are special. We've had extreme variations in seasonal temperatures forever.

3. Commercial bees aren't africanized.

4. And just like with #1, the industry refuses to make any changes to accomodate the fact that bees are bees. They want to continue to treat them as machinery and then complain that they keep "mysteriously" dying.

5. I have to be fair to the beekeeping industry here in that they really have no say in this. Industrial agriculture is a disaster.

No they absolutely do not. There is nothing to suggest this, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

>but purebreds will have genetic deficiencies.

No, some subset of purebreds will have genetic defects. Just as some subset of mutts will.

>As silly as "labradoodle" sounds, these people have the right idea.

Why? They are doing the same thing you are complaining about, just using a specific cross of two breeds rather than a specific single breed.

I did not claim that. I stated the objective and indisputable fact that England began deliberately burning women and children alive before Germany started bombing British civilians. The British terror campaign against German civilians began on 11 May 1940. The first German retaliation in kind was 4 September 1940.

Yes. After we started firebombing German civilians. I didn't say Germany did not bomb civilians, I said England (the supposed "good guys") did it first.

No it does not. It is a blog post. Tons of people have blogs on that domain. There is absolutely no standard of authority or correctness involved. You are falsely inferring that there are trusted experts involved. There is no factual basis for that belief.

They mainly seem interested in making emotional appeals, although they are probably right in that it is a better return on investment for them.

>And btw you linked an article with the following conclusion

Yes. The point is that even plenty of vegans, who agree with his premise, know he openly lies to promote veganism.

https://www.thatnerdysciencegirl.com/2015/11/13/the-case-aga...

Does arithmetic count? The stats are available to look up yourself, the math is simple to do. But there's nobody funding publishing "debunk vegan nonsense" papers like there are people funding "make up vegan nonsense". So the only people you can find doing the math for you are just random people like the blog I link to later in this post.

>I agree that we don't eat much corn directly, but if it weren't used to feed livestock, we could use the land for something else, like potatoes or lentils or whatever grows in similar climate to corn, which are actually eaten

Most of those alternatives produce far fewer calories per acre than corn, which is the issue. An honest comparison shows most plant crops produce very low calories per acre, and require lots of diesel to produce and transport. Yes, you could grow something else. And almost all of those something elses are worse than corn fed chicken from an energy efficiency standpoint. If vegans want to argue the impact of meat vs plants in this way, then they need to apply the same standard to plants, and that means demanding that the vast majority of crops being grown are abandoned in favor of the tiny number that meet corn's energy output: corn, sugarcane, potatoes, palm. There's your acceptable vegan diet if we're going to limit things for being less efficient than corn.

>The usual rule of thumb for going up one level in the food chain is that you lose 9/10th of the energy

We're not talking about a natural ecosystem, which is what that rule of thumb is for. We're talking about animals that have been bred specifically to grow very large very quickly on very little food.

>and corn only produces on the order of 12 million calories per acre

No, corn produces 12 million calories per acre in human edible calories when converted to corn oil and HFCS. It produces 15 million calories per acre as livestock feed.

>This random google result here [2] indeed claims about 1.4 million calories per acre for chicken.

And it is very wrong. It is making up a silly number by using the human figure for corn calories per acre not the livestock feed figure. Then assuming chickens are fed 50/50 corn and soy when in reality their feed is almost entirely corn. It is also assuming a feed conversion ratio of 3, which is nearly double the actual ratio of 1.6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Poultry

Here's a post that shows math for why this vegan meme is wrong: https://bovinepracticum.weebly.com/ruminations/the-beef-vs-v...

That isn't actually true. It is a very misleading claim spread to promote veganism. It comes from comparing the raw caloric value of field corn, to the caloric value of beef. In reality, We do not actually eat field corn, we turn it into HFCS and corn oil, this reduces the energy efficiency of corn dramatically. A plant based diet also should not be based on HFCS and corn oil.

Second, beef is the worst meat to compare to, it is not an accurate representation for meat in general. Chicken being fed on corn based feed produces 5 million calories per acre, more than almost all the plant based crops a vegan diet would generally be based on, including soy, and equal to staples like wheat.

Third, even in comparing beef they do it wrong. They are comparing to hypothetical beef raised entirely on corn. There is no such beef. All beef is grass fed for the first year, they are only finished on grain.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-illnes...

What is the basis for this belief?

>Load up on fresh vegetables and fruits instead.

Many fresh vegetables are inflammatory. Plants evolved chemicals to hinder herbation. Roots/tubers and fruit are generally fine, but leaves/stems/flowers are generally full of inflammatory anti-nutrients and should be cooked.