
Meat Is Horrible - sethbannon
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/30/how-meat-is-destroying-the-planet-in-seven-charts/
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jMyles
I agree that meat farming, at least in the factory-style, is horrific. But
this solution seems like it might make things worse.

If there's a meat tax, then farmers will have an incentive to cut even more
corners, which might lead to even more cruel conditions.

Instead, maybe it makes sense to set a price floor for any operation over a
certain number of animals. (IE, if you have more than 200 animals on your
farm, you can't charge less than $10 a pound or something).

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venomsnake
I think that government mandated minimum quality of life for the animal.
Space, roaming, feed, water etc.

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scotty79
That would be good and humane way to reduce beef production and increase
prices to reduce the demand but it would be costlier for government than
setting up new tax.

Maybe we could do both? Tax the beef and use the money to enforce minimum
quality of life for animals?

Even manufacturers could be not that upset because they could significantly
increase price per unit.

Only group that would be angry could be beef consumers at least the ones that
prefer quantity over quality and/or can't pay for quality.

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venomsnake
I don't care about the price of beef - I only care about the animals living
life free of needless cruelty.

I am not even convinced that it will be more expensive - the US is vast, there
is lots of stuff to graze, instead of disposing of the manure it will be used
as fertilizer and so on.

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scotty79
Wouldn't you want less animals to be exposed to necessary cruelty? Higher
price can help with that.

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Kephael
Countries should cease trying to increase their populations at the expense of
quality of life. This is but one example of many where quality of life suffers
and Soylent Green diets are suggested to accommodate the infinite growth
crowd. I have a better idea - rather than creating a society that looks like
some dystopian nightmare, we simply keep populations in check with the
environment.

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zepto
Countries with balanced or decreasing populations can't compete economically.

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kpil
Sure they can because the others will starve to death eventually.

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jakobdabo
Or they will be welcomed in your country as refuges.

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kpil
Absolutely! We have unlimited resources here in Sweden!

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thisrod
I'm sceptical about this, for a couple of first-year-physics reasons.

1\. Matter is conserved. Before carbon can be farted out of a cow, it has to
get in to the cow from somewhere else. I expect most of it was in the
atmosphere a year beforehand, then got absorbed by pasture grass and eaten. So
this year's farts will end up in next year's cows, and aren't like fossil fuel
emissions.

2\. Methane decays to carbon dioxide in a decade or two, so today's methane
emissions are not really a worse problem than today's carbon dioxide
emissions.

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jlmorton
1\. The CO2 issue is not that the cow eats carbon and its manure turns back
into CO2. The issue is the land use changes and fossil fuel-derived energy
used in the production and transportation of feed. Because the feed to usable
meat ratio of beef is somewhere between 7:1 to 20:1, this is significantly
more impactful than other foods.

2\. CH4 may not have a long half-life, but it has 29x the warming potential of
CO2. Methane is thought to contribute about 20% of the current anthropogenic
greenhouse gas forcing. Because of the anticipated positive feedbacks from
warming, this is very important indeed.

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zardo
>CH4 may not have a long half-life, but it has 29x the warming potential of
CO2.

To be clear, methane has 451x the heat trapping ability, the 29x figure is the
100year impact that takes into account the methane breaking down.

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thisrod
Thanks, that makes a big difference. Apparently you can't trust newspapers
even on the orders of magnitude for these things.

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VT_Drew
The title should read "Industrial Farming is Horrible". Industrial crops
aren't much better for the environment.

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aaroninsf
My data-free immediate thought was, '...but industrial meat farming uses N
times as many resources [land, water, petrochemicals] to produce the same
number of nutrients/calories...'

Now I am interested if this is in fact true. I have certainly heard this
argument made, and it is often alluded to e.g. in describing the problem in
China of producing enough meat to satisfy an increasingly affluent society
(the subtext being, 'with the same constrained resources').

Going to poke around a bit...

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aaroninsf
TL;DR: it is in fact true. Best would be vegetarian diet; failing that,
eliminating beef is a huge win.

QED if you are not vegetarian and have no interest in being, the 'greenest'
thing to do is to reduce or eliminate beef consumption.

[http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full](http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full)
is glum.

(I looked at resource usage, not the ethical side; fwiw I'm an ethics-
motivated vegetarian myself.)

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pavel_lishin
In my experience, out of the commonly-eaten meats, beef tends to be the
priciest anyway.

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ams6110
It's also one of the best for you to eat, assuming it's grass-fed.

~~~
zardo
Source for that? I've never heard of any beneficial effect of red meat
consumption.

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khattam
>It may be delicious

Not to me, but let's see.

>2 degrees carbon budget limit

Woo... 2 degrees. We can totally consider establishing settlement in Mars but
God forbid there is 2 degree change in climate on earth. It will be
uninhabitable. NOT.

>Agriculture consumes 80 percent of water in the United States.

Oh yeah, because we were otherwise going to drink the river... or maybe it
disappears when it is used in agriculture. Except it doesn't. Water is the
most recyclable resource there is.

>carbon output from food production has increased by 47 percent from 2000 to
2012 — that’s an increase of 150 million tons of carbon dioxide

Except carbon that is emitted to the atmosphere doesn't stay there. It's
called carbon cycle. If we are producing more meat, we will also have to
produce more food for the animals... which comes from plants... which take CO2
from the atmosphere to grow.

You're fooling nobody. Don't get into our kitchen.

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mirimir
There are also carbon emissions from producing ammonia fertilizer.

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khattam
Yes, in which hydrocarbons, mostly methane, which is a biproduct of fossil
fuel production, (which either has to be used or released to the environment),
is used for getting the Hydrogen. If it's used, CO2 is emitted, which is much
better than releasing CH4 to the environment.

~~~
mirimir
Yes, methane leaks are a huge problem. But is it really accurate to consider
methane etc used in ammonia production as waste?

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auganov
Could some countries realistically just phase out (outlaw) most classes of
meat production and consumption? IMO that's much more interesting than any
taxation/disincentivization scheme.

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krisdol
No, for the same reason they couldn't phase out alcohol and drugs

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prawn
I think public education could be enough here. Obviously, a campaign to reduce
beef consumption would be far more successful than one to reduce or eliminate
meat consumption. I eat meat and like it. I'd struggle to cut out all of it,
but I could easily see myself making beef a thing to have at restaurants or
special occasions only. More than happy to stick with chicken, pork and lamb
(which I think is far more popular in Australia than the US?).

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yellowapple
I feel like this problem would solve itself if livestock producers were
encouraged (read: mandated) to move from factory farming to more traditional
ranching. Lower density of livestock, more humane conditions, at least some
carbon offset from pastures, etc. Prices might go up, which will likely hurt
low-income carnivores, but that'll be the case with the proposed taxation
approach, too.

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paulddraper
This isn't about meat, but rather farming methods.

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Johnny_Brahms
Well, not really. meat is horrible in many ways, and the very few systems that
aren't bad for the environment won't scale.

If all pasture was magically turned into carbon sinks (in my home country
about 5% of natural pastures could be called carbon sinks. in some countries
it is almost as high as 30%) we would still have to cut our meat consumption
considerably - and that would be for sustaining the meat consumption of today
and not meet the growing consumption in Asia.

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pvaldes
Hum, Some people still think that they are made of gold?

