Going off on a tangent, but the scale of production is very hard to grasp. I'm probably not the first person to observe this, but I once did some napkin math about steel production, and what I realized kind of blew me away. About 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020. Like with billions of dollars, I have no intuition for such numbers. Context is needed.
Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So production has increased about thirty-fold in one century. That wasn't so shocking to me, at first. But 1910 was not the beginning of the industrial era; things had been under way for more than a century then. Railroads. Ocean liners. Factories. Knives and rivets for fabric owned by hundreds of millions of people. Dozens of skyscrapers in New York by then; the Brooklyn Bridge hung on thousands of tonnes of cable. All made out of steel.
Then it struck me. A few million tonnes a year in 1850. 70 million tonnes in 1910. All of it adds up to less than 1900 million tonnes. Every single tonne of steel manufactured by humans from prehistory until about a century ago -- the entire output of the industrial revolution -- amounts to less than one year at current production.
I made a website to help visualize American meat consumption in terms of animals slaughtered per second. It’s pretty insane and I think does something to help communicate just how large such industrial operations truly are.
Chick culling is certainly gruesome, but not so shocking to me. It terms of animal suffering, I have seen much worse, still not enough to stop me from eating meat though.
I've seen videos of these chick grinders, from fully live chick to ground meat, it takes something like 1/10 of a second, I am not even sure their brain have time to register what happens before there is no brain anymore. Culling also happens very early, maybe after a day or so after hatching, so early it could almost be called abortion. Considered what happens after that, if I were to reincarnate, I would rather be one of these culled chicks than one that survives...
I think that focus on culled chicks is more because it looks ugly than real concerns about animal welfare.
The moral objection in this case is less around predation but the fact that humans rear the animals we kill and as such have far more control over their environment and lives. As such the cruelty of their lives and the way they meet their end is absolutely within our control as a choice. Whereas the vast majority if not all other animals aren’t in this position. You can also put this alongside the enormous amount of food waste that occurs in human society.
I think what really hits me about it, is that the male chicks aren't even product. They are just the exhaust out of the meat engine.
It's casual destruction of life because it's a byproduct. It is as good evidence as any that there are no karmic forces and reality does not care.
I agree though. I would rather be the chick than a farmed chicken. In terms of deaths in the animal kingdom, it's probably pretty hard to beat fast and certain without prolonged striving or suffering.
The great lie of capitalism is pushing a theory of personal responsibility rather than legislating these problems away.
There are so many elements of my life that cause harm to other beings that addressing the harm could be a full time job.
Killing rodents, mosquitos, and ants is something most people will do without a second thought. I've sprayed a wasp nest with wasp killer and one writhed on the ground for 5 minutes and I felt awful about it, but there is practically a whole aisle of it at the local hardware store.
How many insects do you think have been harmed by industrial pesticides used in growing grains? What type of animal harm do you think pet ownership brings? How many wild birds do you think are killed in how many different ways? How many animals do you think are hit with cars? What do you think the effect the shipping industry has on sea life? What about trash? What about the smog? What about the chemicals dumped into the environment that are used to produce the hardware we are communicating with?
How much animal testing has been done by scientists on all types of animals to have what we have today?
My desire to pay as little as possible for coffee means the barista can't afford a home and likely will have their body harmed by the stress of not having enough money to operate in today's society. We send manufacturing off to poor countries were pollutants more directly harm their citizens than ours.
The wikipedia article states that poultry sex can be determined before hatching and that European countries have legislated that culling must stop, so it sounds like we are able to make progress. "Beyond" shows there is at least research going into lab grown/cruelty free meats.
Do I have a moral obligation to go live next to a pond feeding on what I can forage while living in a dwelling I built with my own hands or is it satisfying enough that I vote progressive and hope to make progress over time by regulating the more atrocious of our actions.
FWIW, I have tried vegetarianism and I did not enjoy it at all. I found it greatly limited my food choices. It felt ascetic and I felt miserable. So while it is easy for you, I did not find it easy.
We're all guilty aren't we, even speaking as a vegetarian, but for me it's about how much cruelty I can avoid, not all or nothing. I don't kill insects but I eat eggs. I try to use public transport but I do have a car. Don't let perfection be the enemy here.
Wow. That you attack someone who merely said they're a vegetarian in these terms, and your comment isn't flagged and dead, is extremely embarrassing for HN.
I mean, I have low expectations (on HN) for anything involving vegetarians and vegans, but you've gone lower.
Can you see why a person would find trivializing diet restriction a little militant?
I'm not sure the rest could be considered an "attack."
If being vegetarian feels righteous, that's great, and I am happy for anyone who feels good about restricting their diet for ethical reasons. The rest of my post is stating that I don't think (ethical) vegetarians are better people, and the corollary, that I am not a bad person because I choose to spend my ethical attention on things other than avoiding chicken. There is clearly no shortage of ethical endeavors.
I am not even an ideological enemy. The post I was originally responding to was somebody who successfully made a website showcasing an emotional appeal to the amount of animal consumption in the US. I added the information of an emotional intensifier (male chicks getting macerated en masse) as something that would intensify the web page and something that causes me (someone who doesn't have a lot of qualms about meat consumption and its consequences) discomfort and cognitive dissonance.
When it's you vs me, that guarantees there will be conflict. When it's us vs the problem, there is a chance.
> You can "handle that" by no longer eating meat. It's that easy.
What do you think would have happened if the person had instead said "What prevents you from giving up eating chicken?"
Alternatively, what do you think would have happened if this person had instead said: "I saw something like that and was motivated enough to give giving up meat a go, I found it much easier than expected and haven't regretted my decision for two years." Same content, wildly different level of righteousness, conviction, and condescension.
>>The great lie of capitalism is pushing a theory of personal responsibility rather than legislating these problems away
>>There are so many elements of my life that cause harm to other beings that addressing the harm could be a full time job.
The principles of a free society with private-property/contract rights do NOT exclude the right of the collective to prohibit actions that generate negative externalities, including pollution of the commons and depletion of scarce natural resources.
Like most anti-capitalist arguments, yours is based on ridiculous caricatures of what you're railing against.
You can just accept that meat is a human food. Animals die for it.
The natural world involves animals eating other animals.
If you have to kill male calves because you're on a dairy farm then you kill the male calves. It's really not that shocking.
Meat is human food. But industrialization of meat is much more morally grey. Working with a local farmer to buy pasture raised pigs free from gestation crates is totally different from the hog mills with tiny cages and concrete floors.
> The natural world involves animals eating other animals.
A "natural world" argument will always be weak. The natural world also involves rape, infanticide, and a general lack of morality. A "feature" of humans is that we can reason about, assign morality to, and ultimately move beyond some things that occur in the natural world.
The natural world also involves species consuming their entire food supply and then going extinct. Or polluting their ecosystem until they are unable to survive.
I would hope we are intelligent enough to avoid that. Meat eating is contributing to both.
Not the first. Sounds like we're not consuming our entire food supply, but rather generating more as we need it.
And there's a lot of other things besides cow farts contributing to global warming, which can have a much bigger effect for much less effort than making the world vegetarian.
Clearing huge swaths of Brazilian rainforest, “the lungs of the planet”, to make way for cattle seems like a pretty significant contributing factor though, would you agree? Less demand for meat, less demand for eliminating large pieces of a rather important natural carbon sink.
In addition to this, and for those who live in places where this isn't feasible, I recommend some serious thought into the amount of meat consumption. I tried the vegetarianism thing, and basically felt awful the entire time. I don't know why, but I found I just needed some read meat every now and again. However, I learned I only needed a small fraction of what I had before. I end up consuming a moderate portion once a week opposed to one a day and an able to supplement the rest.
nitpick: People confuse simple and easy. Losing weight is simple (don't put food in your mouth), but anyone who's obese can tell you it is not very easy to eat less.
Likewise eating vegetarian is simple but to many, not easy.
I think you make it sound easier than it is. I also decided over dinner one evening. Then I realized meat was in almost every meal I loved. I tried them without meat and hated it. Habit I guess.
Then I realized I'd rather be a bad person than a miserable person; that it was wrong, but I'd do it anyway. This is what you're up against -- the sad but brutal reality of apathy and willful disregard.
I went vegan for about a year not too long ago. Just thought I’d try it. I ended up really liking it, mainly because it got me a bit more comfortable cooking and trying recipes and ingredients I would never have considered. I’m not vegan anymore, primarily because of a living situation (roomies.) I like meat, but I’m still thrilled to whip up a good quick vegan or vegetarian dish now and then.
However, if you take a meat centered dish and just remove the meat, or throw in a meat-like substitute (beyond burgers more than something like tofu or seitan), then yeah, it’s not going to be great. Vegetarian and vegan recipes are often really good precisely because they don’t attempt replace meat with anything. Instead I think they rely more on spice and flavor combinations.
You’re not going to find a replacement for a killer dry-aged ny strip steak that’s grilled to perfection. But you might find a fantastic curry, kimchi stew, roasted pepper, or black bean burger recipe that help to broaden your tastes and get comfortable eating less meat.
Bad person according to whom, though? What makes eating meat wrong? That some people decide it is? There's no consensus or laws that make it so, unlike the case with eating humans. You decided you didn't want to be miserable, but I guess you feel guilty because you decided it was wrong? I've decided it's not wrong, and I don't see that anyone can make me think otherwise.
It’s always been bad to us living today, but it hasn’t always been bad to people in the past. I’m not a moral realist because I don’t see what sort of objective facts are moral. The universe doesn’t care. It’s humans who are moral, and what’s considered good or bad varies quite a lot. No, I wouldn’t want to be enslaved, and the golden rule seems like a good principle to live by, but nothing in nature makes it true. It’s a value judgement we moderns make.
My grandmother had a plum bush about 12 feet high that would produce thousands of plums every year. We would eat a few hundred, but about 90% would be “wasted”. Of course, they rotted back into the soil and provided nourishment for other living things.
Luckily, the bush is dead now, and all that food is no longer being wasted.
How much fertilizer, pesticide, labor and water from underground was applied to this bush? Were the fruits diverted to landfill after or composted? How much fossil fuel was used to transport the plums from her back yard to a sort facility, to a grocery store, to someone’s house and then back to the landfill? Landfills btw emit significant quantities of methane that are not present in aerobic composting.
This is a silly response that misses the forest for the trees if you will.
It beggars belief that the difference between industrial agriculture and ornamental plants is lost on you. Especially since my focus was on animals not plants - with a particular focus on water use.
Your average grandmother by the way (in the 70s), wasted 50% as much food as the average American wastes today so it might be worth a follow-up conversation with gammy about why that was.
Nope, but we can reduce waste by raising prices for instance by ending farm subsidies. We can mandate the removal of (or at minimum the regulation of) expiration dates on food. Also, educating people about food. People assume that milk goes bad the second the clock rolls over on the unregulated 'best-by' date, so there's incentive to goose the numbers to raise sales. Further, slightly sour milk can be used as a substitute for buttermilk in baking, for instance, but people have to learn that. [1]
Any competing plans you'd like to share that allows us to avoid losing unfathomable quantities of limited fresh water and raising a ton of animals so they can be hucked onto a landfill?
I fail to see the connection between raising prices and better affordability/access of food for the poor. Certainly you could make food as valuable as, say gold, and most would be loath to waste a single gram of it.
If they're throwing out 40% of the food they buy, then raising prices slightly and not throwing out 40% of the food should be accessibility-neutral no? Instead of buying 2 milks and throwing 1 milk out, you buy 1 milk for 2X the price and throw out 0 milk. At the end of the day you still drank 1 milk for the same effective price.
They already have significantly more than they need. Americans already pay less as a percentage of their paychecks for food than any other nation on earth.
What they're running out of though, is fresh water. Having two extra Colorado rivers' worth would be pretty nice in the southwest! [1] And that's just from beef. Don't get me started on the gallon of water it takes to grow a single almond in the California desert while asking people to skip showers [2]. [edit] While the Utah governor literally prays for rain. [3]
It seems the year 2022 is a sort of "experiment" in terms of testing this theory. Food prices have inflated ~10% this year, nice round number although lower than your suggested "2x the price." Do you think this resulted in less waste?
> At the end of the day you still drank 1 milk for the same effective price.
Why don't then people just buy 1 milk today at today price instead of buying 2 and throwing one away? They'd still have drunk 1 milk, but for half effective price. Why aren't people already doing that?
People often make fun of economists with their very specific mathematical models of perfectly round customers, production functions, etc. They often have a point. It is important to not forget, however, that the popular understanding of economics is even worse, and your comment is a great example of that.
Because they hope to drink the other jug of milk tomorrow, and sometimes it works, sometimes, sometimes some of the milk gets sour.
The problem is that spending an hour to drive to a grocery store and an hour driving back also costs something, in fuel and labor / time, so it totally makes sense to buy milk with some excess just in case more would be needed.
As said upstream, eliminate most zoning restrictions, make living more densely more accessible. (I line in NYC and the fact that I can walk most anywhere I need is great.)
If you wanted an answer to your question you could google “sources of food waste USA” however if you’d like to make a proper counterpoint instead of a glib remark I’m all ears :)
> They'd still have drunk 1 milk, but for half effective price. Why aren't people already doing that?
I think I've already mentioned expiration dates and education around them, no? [1] My secondary argument is that people value things that are cheap less, and are more likely to waste them.
The biggest single category is dairy, which isn't the cheapest. But of course it doesn't exaggerate the waste, its 40% by weight of marketable good - but if you figure in the weight of the grain and other feed used to raise animals the number gets worse not better. If anything it understates the waste.
Hey, don't let me tell you how to run your website, but it took me a while to realize that I should scroll. You could add a little "scroll down ↓" indicator that fades in after a bit.
Could we use this to justify factory farming humans, in that the agony and terror they experience is eclipsed by the good of them being bred into being rather than not existing at all?
We would certainly have more humans being born in that case than now, is it a negative thing that we are not doing this?
I was going to say - I know where the parent comes down on abortion laws. Given that they obviously think an unwanted child being born into an impoverished family unable to support them is still a net positive.
Actually the opposite. Personally I think abortions are a valid tool and not all lives are worth living. I'm very much on the fence regarding mine and I'm leaning towards the opinion that it wasn't and it isn't.
I think bringing children into this world is a sin and parents atone for it to some degree by providing for children the best way they can.
We kind of do already when we romanticize life. Every human dies eventually, at equilibrium, humans die at about the rate they're born. How long the average human lives does not change that, it only changes the delay in population changes. The same is true of chickens or cows, they live shorter lives but they're born at the same rate they die. When they die has no effect on this, but whether they live is entirely dictated by their utility to human beings. So you wouldn't actually get more humans from this, just more turnover. On the same note, you wouldn't get less cows not doing it, just longer turnover, all else being the same. In actuality though, without the meat they'd be useless to us, so you would wind up with a culling and then less of them, this is not the case for humans.
I think people would be perfectly capable of justifying farming humans if it made economic sense. Slavery is not far from it and we were perfectly comfortable with it for millennia.
We have religions that contain or contained at some point rules on how to be moral and have slaves. Some of those religions are not only still active today but are still huge.
Well humans aren't generally born into farrowing crates in factory farms and jammed together a few inches apart until killed. We did a whole Matrix thing about how that kind of life might be sub-optimal. I'm pro meat btw, just opposed to factory farming and waste.
There aren't as many hungry kids as there used to be. There aren't as many hungry adults, either, for that matter. Global hunger is declining.
I am rather more worried about hungry kids than dead cows.
I also don't care if people can subsist solely on vegetables; subsistence is not our aim -- we can live in appalling conditions, but we got out of those circumstances deliberately. It took a great deal of time and hard work in miserable environments to do so.
That's why there's so much meat now, we were tired of being hungry and we built a better world.
We have build such a peaceful, prosperous world now that large numbers of people are worried about the emotional state of our meat. They're not worried about hunger or violence or poverty because, for enormous numbers of people, those issues are gone. So now we worry about chicken burritos.
I'm obviously overthinking it, but I love that the visual style manages to somehow marry minimalist typography with a 90s geocities vibe.
I was trying to see if there's a way of "visualising" some of these numbers using audio, but at 285Hz (for chickens), we're at C#4/D4. For the other animals you can distinguish between the specific beats, but this is just uniform noise. (cue the quote about one death being a tragedy, 1000s a statistic lost in the noise)
From your perspective, you just made a smart comment that adds wider context on this issue.
From mine, it's something of a cosmic horror that people can think like this and be proud of themselves.
We are wreaking havoc on the Earth and all life on it; strip mining it to the bone for the shallowest purposes. And some people have this strange glee about it...
It's Lovecraftian to me. Like cultists worshipping death and darkness - literally.
Dramatic? Sure. But you're literally cheer-leading the death of billions and billions of lives as a strong economic indicator.
The fact is, we can't afford industrial farming (and many other 'indicators'). The bill is coming due for our lifestyle. Faster and closer every day.
What to you is "determination to enjoy life", reads to me as blissful ignorance - but only blissful for the ignorant.
We may like them better, given that we are them. We may like our families more than strangers as well. That does not mean that a machine that used unfathomable cruelty to concentrate the rest of humanity into a slurry for the pleasure of our family members would not be a horror.
Humans are more important by far. This idea that a cow’s life is as precious as a human’s life is the worst type of misanthropic thought.
There is a hierarchy and although we shouldn’t torture living things, giving them “1 bad day” is totally ethical when used to endure and pleasure. I admit we don’t live up to that standard necessarily, but we should strive for it.
Ideally everyone that wants to is eating happy animals at their pleasure.
I mean, I think they may agree that we are the most powerful species on Earth (debatable, if you account for the impacts of bacteria, viruses, trees, etc.), but that's distinct from agreeing that our lives are the most valuable.
I think most humans would begrudgingly agree that white men, americans, europeans, etc. are the most powerful group on Earth. I don't think they'd agree that their lives are the most valuable.
I know. I looked to see which way the rest of the world could see us as being some synonym of important, powerful is the likely one.
The way that "important" was likely meant in this context was "valuable", which I then addressed in my comment.
Again, even the power is debatable. Single celled organisms and plants have a far greater impact on the world than we do.
Valuable is not really up for debate. A nonhuman animal would not say that the life of a human is more valuable than their own any more than a disempowered person would say that the life of a powerful person is more valuable than their own.
>Humans are roughly interchangeable with each other, so in a wide view they can be roughly equally important.
What? Some are surgeons are working for MSF saving lives with their bare hands on a daily basis, others are sex traffickers. Some are Einstein others are flat earthers. Their positive and negative impact on the world around them, their capabilities vary greatly.
Depending on how loosely you define interchangeable, you can include nonhuman animals as being interchangeable with humans.
> But we're capable of so many things nothing else is.
Can we hibernate? Can we lay eggs? Can we grow to the size of a blue whale? Can we survive naked in the vacuum of space? Do we possess biological immortality? Have we persisted for hundreds of millions of years through multiple extinction events? Etc etc. The natural world is filled with species who hold countless capabilities beyond our own.
Do you think there might be a bias at work when we decide that the traits unique to humans are those that are more "important"?
> Valuable is not really up for debate. A nonhuman animal would not say that the life of a human is more valuable than their own any more than a disempowered person would say that the life of a powerful person is more valuable than their own.
There are plenty of people I would say are more important/valuable than me. And I can imagine species that would be more important/valuable than humans; they just don't seem to exist here and now. But the boundaries within humanity are a lot narrower and I wouldn't be confident enough to label any humans as less important/valuable than me the way I would talk about a random non-endangered rodent.
> Do you think there might be a bias at work when we decide that the traits unique to humans are those that are more "important"?
Well I think "hibernate" and "eggs" are dumb metrics. But we can replicate most feats with some prep time, even if you use a big list of unique abilities that humans need technology for.
Even taking bias into account, I think the bias would have to be ridiculously large to overcome the strength of the answer.
> There are plenty of people I would say are more important/valuable than me.
So by this thinking humans are not interchangeable?
> And I can imagine species that would be more important/valuable than humans; they just don't seem to exist here and now.
Really? You think the single celled organisms and plants responsible for producing oxygen, those responsible for decay, even those present within the digestive tracks of all animals, are not more important/valuable than humans?
>But the boundaries within humanity are a lot narrower and I wouldn't be confident enough to label any humans as less important/valuable than me the way I would talk about a random non-endangered rodent.
Sorry I'm confused, your first quote says there are plenty of people you'd say are more impotant/valuable than you. How do you square that statement with this one? What is the range of variation within human capability that is allowed for equal consideration, but which excludes nonhuman animals? What are the boundaries of that variation defined by if not, honestly, by ex post facto rationalization?
> Well I think "hibernate" and "eggs" are dumb metrics.
Why are they any more objectively dumb than any other capability?
> But we can replicate most feats with some prep time, even if you use a big list of unique abilities that humans need technology for.
Huh? At this point in time humans are incapable of any of the things I listed. You'll need to show proof that we are capable of these things even with all of our technological ability. As of right now it's just kind of handwaving "with the power of technology, at some indeterminate point in the future, anything is possible!" when facts don't bear that out, as we have yet to have any immortal humans, and may never have them.
> Even taking bias into account, I think the bias would have to be ridiculously large to overcome the strength of the answer.
Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by the strength of the answer. I do think it's self evident that the bias is ridiculously large though.
> You think the single celled organisms and plants responsible for producing oxygen, those responsible for decay, even those present within the digestive tracks of all animals, are not more important/valuable than humans?
Weren't we talking about most important animal?
But when it comes to most important, things a million different species can do are much less important.
Let alone the fact that we can produce oxygen and decay organic matter.
As for everything else, I don't feel like you're even trying to understand my argument. But if you're that confused it's only going to be a waste of time for me to go on.
You’re right. I slipped into talking about species on the whole, my bad.
That said, I think it’s really important to clarify what we mean by important. Do we mean powerful, impactful? Or do we mean the lives of the individuals of that species are more valuable?
Back to powerful/impactful, if we’re talking about purely animals, then I’d look to pollinators. Would you argue that humans are more important to the functioning of the world than pollinators?
> But when it comes to most important, things a million different species can do are much less important.
Again, what do we mean by important? Power?
> Let alone the fact that we can produce oxygen and decay organic matter.
If we were to rely purely on humanity’s ability to produce oxygen and decay organic matter, the majority of life on Earth, humans included, would quickly die and then pile up, undecaying. There’s no comparison between our ability and the ability of the species that are specialized for this. It’s like comparing Einstein’s and a crow’s ability to flesh out physics. Sure, the crow might be able to solve some physics-based puzzles, but it’s on a very basic level.
> As for everything else, I don't feel like you're even trying to understand my argument. But if you're that confused it's only going to be a waste of time for me to go on.
I admittedly made some assumptions about your argument, and have been arguing against those assumptions. This is because I’m genuinely unclear on your argument. If you can clarify a couple things:
1) What exactly do we mean by important?
2) What are the boundaries of ability by which we can define humans as interchangeable, but humans and nonhuman animals as not, that are not rationalized after the fact?
If we establish these things I think we can make some progress instead of talking past each other.
> If we were to rely purely on humanity’s ability to produce oxygen and decay organic matter
But again this is about a single species. If you remove one random type of algae or plant it's not going to make a huge difference.
> 1) What exactly do we mean by important?
The impact they have, the breadth of skills, the monuments and constructs and art, the potential for what they can do in the future. Including spreading life through the solar system eventually, or things like that. I might be missing some parts, it's late.
> 2) What are the boundaries of ability by which we can define humans as interchangeable, but humans and nonhuman animals as not, that are not rationalized after the fact?
I don't want to double down on this too hard. I just think most humans are in a pretty narrow band and this band is pretty far away from any other species.
> But again this is about a single species. If you remove one random type of algae or plant it's not going to make a huge difference.
Prochlorococcus single-handedly produces 20% of all oxygen on Earth.[1]
> The impact they have, the breadth of skills, the monuments and constructs and art, the potential for what they can do in the future. Including spreading life through the solar system eventually, or things like that. I might be missing some parts, it's late.
No, I mean what do you mean by important, fundamentally. Is this a judgement of the objective value of the lives of the individuals of that species? Is it just an assessment of their power? Is it putting arbitrary characteristics that species happens to posses on a pedestal while simultaneously and just as arbitrarily devaluing the unique characteristics of all other species?
Are we starting from the bias that humans are more "important" (again, still unclear what that actually means) than all others, then working backwards and highlighting all the human characteristics as being evidence of that importance after the fact?
If a species with giant claws ruled the world, do you think they might wax poetic about the great importance of giant claws, and how this is the one true metric by which the value of a life can be measured?
Are giant claws, ability to produce art, or any other specific characteristic or capability in any way relevant to the question of whether or not a life has value?
> I don't want to double down on this too hard. I just think most humans are in a pretty narrow band and this band is pretty far away from any other species.
Well we're going to have to define the boundaries of this band, otherwise it doesn't seem to be based on anything concrete and seems more like circular reasoning that the boundaries of this band are those that exist within humans and therefore those humans are important because they exist within the boundaries of that band.
I mean just because something feels good doesn't mean it's right.
We can get all of our nutrients from plants, most of us in the developed world don't need animals, we by and large just eat them for pleasure because we like the taste, as you noted by leading with the fact that they are delicious.
Further, if your concerns are humanitarian in nature, in terms of feeding the most humans, ensuring the greatest amount of happiness for them, then we are on the same side.
It turns out you can feed more humans with plants than you can with animals, given that the latter are largely inefficient middle men for our calories that are fundamentally sourced from plants. We feed a cow roughly 10 calories of corn and soy to get 1 calorie of meat out of it. Were we to eat those crops directly we'd be able to feed ~10x the number of people on the same agricultural output, or reduce our agricultural output by ~90% and feed the same number of people.
That latter point leads to the environmental impact of animal farming. Over 90% of the destruction of the Amazon to date has happened for two industries - beef, and soy. Over 80% of the world's soy is... turned into feed for those same animals.
We are destroying the Amazon, evicting and slaughtering the indigenous people that live within it, exacerbating climate change which is already resulting in more and more extreme droughts and famines, killing millions around the world, and as this gets worse will kill untold millions more.
Animal agriculture is one of the most environmentally destructive industries on the planet, in terms of climate emissions, resource use, and land destruction.
By feeding animals to humans we are turning around and killing those same humans. Well, not the same ones actually. The poorest ones who can't even afford the meat we're gluttonously shoving into our faces.
This is all tied to the fundamental fact that the animal is a middle man for our calories, and in a time where our environment's carrying capacity is greatly exceeded by our civilization, we need to reduce these gross inefficiencies in order to save our own lives, even if that's all we care about.
So even if your primary goal is to feed people and save humanity, the rational conclusion is still to stop eating animals.
> I mean just because something feels good doesn't mean it's right.
I’m just not into your religion, sorry. I love it for you though. I’m happy that you’re happy not consuming animals, and that it makes you feel good. I will continue to smoke beef briskets over live fire for hours at a time.
Between doing something just because your people have traditionally done it, in the face of all the mounting scientific evidence that that thing is destructive, and choosing to embrace that science and shirk those traditions, which course of action seems more religious?
The other millions of species don't have an ethical perspective. But okay, lets grant their perspective of wanting to survive and reproduce, behave in the way they evolved to. Fine, but how do you balance the perspectives of those millions? We still need to plow and harvest large fields even if we all go vegan. We still have to deal with pests in our homes.
Should we kill a bunch of cows to make way for native species? Was it okay when the feral goats in the Galapagos were machine gunned down from the air so they would stop eating all the vegetation the native tortoises relied on? Should we kill off all the feral cats, or just let them continue killing birds and small mammals? Is it okay to spray for mosquitos and ticks, or do we let them carry disease and infect us and other animals?
There's a million different tradeoffs, thousands of which we have to decide no matter what.
> We still need to plow and harvest large fields even if we all go vegan
We would need just 25% of those fields. The rest can be returned to the nature. [0]
> Should we kill a bunch of cows to make way for native species
But we're killing them already, at astonishing quantities. It's enough to not make new ones, the problem will solve itself.
> okay when the feral goats in the Galapagos were machine gunned down
Maybe don't introduce farm animals where they don't belong?
> kill off all the feral cats, or just let them continue killing birds and small mammals
Give the birds & mammals a chance to live and procreate, by giving them enough habitat to live in. In time nature will solve the feral cats problems - when bigger predators appear.
> Is it okay to spray for mosquitos and ticks
No, because you're spraying poisons and killing other species as well, and reducing the human health. That's not practical. But you know, biodiversity is the solution [1].
When you kill predators (owls, foxes, coyottes ...), mice proliferate. More mice, more ticks. Let the mice eating predators return and ticks numbers goes down.
Mosquitos? Don't spray poisons and let number of amphibians/fish go up. The problem solved.
> Could anything evil happen as a result of embracing this outlook?
Yes. If we demote the value of human beings to meet the value of other species, we open the door to the legitimacy of killing human beings. If we promote the value of other species, we have swathes of carnivores to arrest and put on trial.
I also do not value animal lives as much as human lives. But there is an important assumption built into the argument that it is ok to eat this many animals: that it is possible to raise and slaughter this number of animals without deleterious effects on humans. I believe that assumption is incorrect, and that the environmental and health consequences of the current level of meat consumption will cause immense suffering to both animals and humans.
This line of argumentation is brought forward too seldomly. It’s not solid, but as a human centrist, the only future that’s made me pause is the potential loss to human research and enjoyment if our ecosystems collapse. Animal advocates would do well to argue from opposing moral frameworks.
I agree. Humans have struggled to feed themselves since the beginning. We finally, only recently, figured out how to make people not starve to death and now we have people saying we are morally wrong for living how humans always wanted to.
I think sone people need the guilt of being alive religion gave them. But they rejected traditional methods and invented a new religion of self hatred. Humans as sinners that need to seek redemption or some other silly idea.
Of course people are going to be proud, the horrors of capitalism aside, we’ve completely eliminated hunger in the US (not implying we’re the only place). Not one single person is starving because we are unable to feed them. And we’re able to feed everyone with the absolute top tier of food desired by humans. It used to be an event only for special occasions to slaughter your lifestock. The only people who got a steady diet of meat were the wealthy.
Cruelty aside that is something to take so much pride in. I think it’s easy to forget the bigger picture of progress here. Are we destroying the planet, oh yeah. Have we created a machine of unfathomable cruelty, also yes. But are we well fed with exactly the food we want to be eating given the choice, hell yeah and that’s an insane accomplishment. That’s something that was not possible 150 years ago.
"We're destroying the planet with unfathomable cruelty, but at least we get to eat what we want!"
This is not the accomplishment you think it is. This is absolute depravity on a societal scale and the fact that we're all so okay with it is horrifying.
Okay we have to take a step back here, things are allowed to good and bad. I am in no way whatsoever trying to downplay the bad parts of our meat industry. I feel like there's a tendency in online discussions that if you ever point out any positive aspect of something that someone doesn't like overall, then it's taken as a full endorsement of that thing. Clearly I did not admonish the industry enough to make that clear.
We're not going to get anywhere unless we can agree broadly that humans like eating meat. For all of human history it's been the most prized food and sits at the center of a lot of our rituals -- ham for Christmas, lamb for Easter, turkey for Thanksgiving, pork for New Years. I'm not assigning any value judgement to this. And so reaching a point where this thing that previously had to be savored because it was expensive and/or only available after the harvest now being a commodity is an accomplishment. You might not like the manifested will of humanity but we nonetheless did it and that's impressive in and of itself.
Where do you live? The greater cruelty is that we can feed everyone, but choose to throw it away instead if they can't pay. My mother worked at inner city schools in Ohio, let me tell you if the schools didn't have a free lunch and breakfast program (something a lot of politicians hate) a lot of kids wouldn't be eating at all. Saying hunger is solved in America is absurd. Maybe it is in a technical sense but it's far more profitable to keep it around, so we do.
Rate limit edit: The fact you have to give out food for free is the opposite point. They had food lines during the great depression too. Ideally the government wouldn't have to hand any children food for free lest they not eat at all.
We're agreeing. This is exactly my point. Hunger is not solved in the US because of capitalism, not because we're unable to produce enough food to feed everyone which is a horror unto itself.
Or we give out "free lunches" to people because as a society we don't value them starving? It's not an indicator of some huge oversupply and I certainly hope we wouldn't let them starve if food became slightly more scarce and expensive.
Poverty and food anxiety is an enormous issue in this country and it baffles me that you can't see it.
I guess we can agree to disagree. Livestock is something only the wealthy could eat daily and today we have discovered methods that allow anyone to enjoy this. This is great progress.
You’re free to choose your lifestyle of course and I’m grateful to live in a place and time where that’s possible. But I don’t subscribe to your beliefs. I have access to the same information you do. I possibly have a more critical appraisal of it and I don’t believe the hype.
People have acted like you since the dawn of time. They might be right one day but they’ve been wrong every time so far. Line the guys who claim the market is crashing every month.
A cow was worth about 10 months of skilled labor in ancient Rome [0].
If you keep the fat trim that's maybe ~600-700 pounds of usable meat.
That's about 0.01666 of a month's salary for a pound of meat. So if you were willing to spend 10% of your salary on meat, you could have a quarter pounder everyday. Not cheap, but if you really liked meat and you had a semi-skilled job you could afford to eat it everyday.
Thats an interesting way of looking at it, but seems kind of misleading to use a cow. Pigs can live anywhere and eat pretty much anything and are a much more common meat. Beef has always been a luxury meat in most places.
Wow not what I would have expected, though a lot of my intuition about Rome is probably wrong. I respect your effort in looking up ancient pork prices. I may have to change to Beefnubbins.
Cows can eat what people can't. This may have been the source of the semitic proscription on pork: that they compete with people for the same calories.
Of course now we feed cows mostly corn.
If everyone gave up eating meat from animals fed farm output, the looming climate catastrophe would just fade away.
You know, stopping climate change. The thing that's gonna keep your grandchildren from eating meat at all if people don't stop consuming so much of it.
No, hopefully we can see these numbers stabilize at some long-term sustainable level, whatever that is.
They aren't at that level at the moment, with large parts of modern agriculture more similar to a kind of mining - resources are extracted, with insufficient replenishment.
The thing with mines is that they are eventually exhausted, and stop producing.
Strange this is getting downvotes. Protein consumption was traditionally one of the fundamental measures of social health, wealth, and quality of life, and it is on track to massively expand as population grows and huge parts of Asia and Africa (and others) continue to catch up in wealth.
Apparently now we're in upside-down world were the richest and most highly consuming people on the planet believe that the production that supports their lifestyles is now immoral, and the idea that poorer people might increase their wealth and consumption a bit is so horrible to contemplate.
That's not a "hint", meat is a desirable food, a very good source of protein, can be a good income for poor farmers and can be raised in places that aren't suitable for cropping.
But even if you set aside meat, modern lifestyles necessitate the killing of other life.
Take your protein-rich plant food, for example. Do you know how modern cereal and vegetable farming is carried out? The idea is basically to create a holocaust of chemical poisons that exterminates all animal, plant, and fungal life except the crop, over millions of acres, and that is after the land has been cleared and the native plants and animals killed and wiped away. Housing, water, energy, mining, all that costs lives as well.
You can't absolve yourself just by not eating meat.
If the option is eating cows that eat some grass and feed from a couple of acres of desolation vs. eating beans and grains from a quarter acre of desolation, then the option is obvious. You can still eat the tenth of the cows that can survive on the grass alone.
Reducing the desolation and increasing the yield by building an ecosystem rather than monocrop is better, but that is a harder transition.
I have to say it takes some chutzpah for a person to just out and say their level of consumption is the correct amount and someone else's is not.
Sure you can eat the beans and grains instead. You can also stop driving, stop heating and cooling your house, stop buying computers and phones and cars, stop air travel, live in a small apartment you share with several other people.
I don't have a problem with the idea of reducing environmental footprint or moving consumption patterns to more efficient products. Great ideas. What I have a problem with is making choices for or passing moral judgement on other people.
Your lifestyle results in the death of life and animals, and you do not do everything physically possible to minimize that, therefore you simply do not have that moral high ground. If killing animals is "wrong", then we are all wrong. "Oh but I try to minimize" is not an defense because you are minimizing according to what is convenient or valuable to you. You'll accept some killing of animals because you fly to Europe once a year or have a smartphone or heat your house and that's okay, but somebody who chooses to eat more meat than you would prefer?
If you're consuming 19x as many resources than someone else, and the sustainable level is 10% of the current level, then demanding they reduce their 5% share to a 1% share is not just arrogant, unfair, and greedy. It also doesn't do anything to solve the problem.
Your implicit thesis is that you should not be held to account to do the extremely easy things if anyone else is asserting their right to exist at all is transparent reprehensible.
> You can also stop driving, stop heating and cooling your house, stop buying computers and phones and cars, stop air travel, live in a small apartment you share with several other people.
If I already do all those things (with the exception of a second hand phone I use with a 10yo monitor when I need a desktop). Then do I get to tell you to maybe drive a slightly smaller SUV or stop opposing renewable energy?
> If you're consuming 19x as many resources than someone else, and the sustainable level is 10% of the current level, then demanding they reduce their 5% share to a 1% share is not just arrogant, unfair, and greedy. It also doesn't do anything to solve the problem.
If.
> Your implicit thesis is that you should not be held to account to do the extremely easy things if anyone else is asserting their right to exist at all is transparent reprehensible.
No it isn't.
Not eating meat, by itself, does not give you any moral high ground about killing animals or consuming resources or impacting the environment.
I'm saying we should stop factory farming cattle that are fed with heavily subsidized, fossil fuel grown crops, stop clearing land for more cattle, return about half of the land currently used for feed and ethanol to conservation, and hold the meat industry to some basic environmental and animal welfare standards.
You're welcome to continue eating what meat is available in such a world and should thank anyone you meet who eats less so that your combined share of a sustainable world can meet your personal demands.
> I'm saying we should stop factory farming cattle that are fed with heavily subsidized, fossil fuel grown crops, stop clearing land for more cattle, and hold the meat industry to some basic environmental and animal welfare standards.
Oh, I didn't see where you were saying that.
Almost all global food production has large fossil fuel based inputs, land clearing is the unfortunate reality of growing population and consumption but at least the market allocates it somewhat efficiently, and its quite fungible, so it makes no more sense to say no more land to be used for cows than it does to say no more land to be used for almonds or tomatoes or quinoa. And in the western world at least animal farming and the meat industry is held to some basic environmental and animal welfare standards.
> You're welcome to continue eating what meat is available in such a world and should thank anyone you meet who eats less so that your combined share of a sustainable world can meet your personal demands.
I don't know or care about your fantasy world, but I am quite welcome to eat meat that is available in the world I find myself living in. Just like you are quite welcome to buy a new iphone every year or go on frivolous vacations to ski or sight-see whenever you choose to.
> Almost all global food production has large fossil fuel based inputs, land clearing is the unfortunate reality of growing population and consumption
Well no it's not. Said population (which we should be stabilizing) can be sustained on a fraction of the land used today by eliminating the inefficient uses such as ethanol, cattle and almonds.
> but at least the market allocates it somewhat efficiently,
Nice slight of hand. Markets optimise for the goals of the people with capital. Efficiency is only meaningful once an objective is selected, and wellbeing of the majority is a different objective to increase in wealth of the already wealthy.
> And in the western world at least animal farming and the meat industry is held to some basic environmental and animal welfare standards.
This is patently untrue. The penalties for even recording or photographing factory farm operations are much bigger and more consistently enforced than the penalties for violating what scant animal welfare laws there are.
> I don't know or care about your fantasy world, but I am quite welcome to eat meat that is available in the world I find myself living in. Just like you are quite welcome to buy a new iphone ever year or go on frivolous vacations to ski or sight-see.
So we're back to you having no accountability for your personal actions and no change to the system that enables and subsidizes them being permissable. This is just a reframing of you getting to do whatever you want if you are powerful enough to do it.
So I guess I am asserting the moral high ground after all. Because I'm not lying and gasghting and demanding you subsidize my lifestyle while I and the systems I support destroy the lives of everyone around you.
Yep, fossil fuel based fertilizers and other chemicals aren't going away.
> Said population (which we should be stabilizing) can be sustained on a fraction of the land used today by eliminating the inefficient uses such as ethanol, cattle and almonds.
How about computer games and instagram and google searches and air travel and cars including EVs, electricity, more than 50 square feet of housing per person, etc etc.? We're back to judgements excusing our own preferences and consumption and denouncing others.
> Nice slight of hand. Markets optimise for the goals of the people with capital. Efficiency is only meaningful once an objective is selected, and wellbeing of the majority is a different objective to increase in wealth of the already wealthy.
It's not a slight of hand, you brought it up. I don't think markets are perfect or even all that great, but they sure are better than you (or I).
> This is patently untrue.
Your wild conspiratorial fringe theories and claims are just false. For example The US Animal Welfare Act (AWA) was signed into law on August 24, 1966. Name any country and you'll be able to find laws and regulations for basic environmental and animal welfare standards.
> So we're back to you having no accountability for your personal actions and no change to the system that enables and subsidizes them being permissable. This is just a reframing of you getting to do whatever you want if you are powerful enough to do it.
No, we're at everybody else not being accountable to you.
> So I guess I am asserting the moral high ground after all.
Yes it always seemed so.
> Because I'm not lying and gasghting and demanding you subsidize my lifestyle while I and the systems I support destroy the lives of everyone around you.
Yes, it is exactly because you claim that you are not doing that and that I am.
> Yep, fossil fuel based fertilizers and other chemicals aren't going away.
Yes that sentence was definitely about the fossil fuel bit and not the land use of cattle vs other protein sources.
Try a piece of intellectual honesty. How much human edible protein can be produced on an acre of land being used for corn and soy cow feed? Now how much on the same land with the same fertiliser input with a combination of plants and free range chickens? How much even if you sacrifice some yield to use organic methods?
> Your wild conspiratorial fringe theories and claims are just false. For example The US Animal Welfare Act (AWA) was signed into law on August 24, 1966. Name any country and you'll be able to find laws and regulations for basic environmental and animal welfare standards.
And almost all of those countries have laws specifically criminalising whistleblowing or documenting violations or turns the burden of proof for libel onto the defendant. Here's one that criminalises having footage.
> Yes that sentence was definitely about the fossil fuel bit and not the land use of cattle vs other protein sources.
You directed it generally. Now you're upset that I replied to what you wrote.
> Try a piece of intellectual honesty. How much human edible protein can be produced on an acre of land being used for corn and soy cow feed? Now how much on the same land with the same fertiliser input with a combination of plants and free range chickens? How much even if you sacrifice some yield to use organic methods?
I don't know the numbers. Chicken is a very cheap source of protein, much cheaper than a huge range of plant based protein actually. Are we moving the bar for sinning to "thou shalt not consume any plant protein more expensive than chicken"? How about bugs? You have to kill them to eat them, right? Or does the holy book have some kind of complicated sin taxonomy here?
> And almost all of those countries have laws specifically criminalising whistleblowing or documenting violations or turns the burden of proof for libel onto the defendant. Here's one that criminalises having footage.
That does not support your false claim that these countries do not have basic animal right or environmental regulation though.
> You directed it generally. Now you're upset that I replied to what you wrote.
More dishonesty.
> I don't know the numbers. Chicken is a very cheap source of protein, much cheaper than a huge range of plant based protein actually. Are we moving the bar for sinning to "thou shalt not consume any plant protein more expensive than chicken"? How about bugs? You have to kill them to eat them, right? Or does the holy book have some kind of complicated sin taxonomy here?
Yes. That's the entire point. Grain fed factory cattle farming is cruel and unsustainable. Option two is much less cruel and can be done for the same cost with solar derived hydrogen and takes a fraction of the land. There are organic methods that would see the same yield as option two with a slightly larger fraction of the land and would do less damage to the soil.
> That does not support your false claim that these countries do not have basic animal right or environmental regulation though.
A law that is never enforced and which whistleblowing of is criminalised is not holding anyone to any standard. I never claimed there was no law. I correctly claimed that farms were not held to account.
Do you admit you choose to inflict pain and suffering and death on animals for your own comfort, as you condemn others for doing the same?
> A law that is never enforced
Source on the wild conspiratorial claim that environmental and animal rights laws are never enforced? Don't make me google a counter example that proves you wrong for the nth time.
> "Do you know how modern cereal and vegetable farming is carried out?"
I do know. The food I eat is not, in fact, produced that way.
I do not need or want absolution. But I know my carbon footprint is a tiny fraction of yours. You are, in other words, personally responsible for overwhelmingly more suffering in the world than I know, by direct experience, is necessary for your level of comfort.
> I do know. The food I eat is not, in fact, produced that way.
Maybe. Maybe not grown in a way that's sustainably capable of feeding the world's population or even accessible to many.
> I do not need or want absolution. But I know my carbon footprint is a tiny fraction of yours.
You think it is, I'm sure. And you believe yourself to have the moral high ground.
> You are, in other words, personally responsible for overwhelmingly more suffering in the world than I know, by direct experience, is necessary for your level of comfort.
And so are you. Unlike your assumptions about my carbon footprint, I actually do know that with certainty because you are posting this message here which consumes energy. What's more your level of comfort itself is almost certainly far beyond most people on earth, and far beyond what you need to barely keep yourself alive, therefore you have made choices for your own comfort at the expense of many other life forms.
Yes! Happy to see more people celebrating human achievement amidst all the usual doom and gloom that people like to leverage to push their political beliefs. The GP should be commended.
Seriously, it's a bit tiring that [vegetarians] people that want to control what I eat get a pass for posting the same tired stuff every time it came up. If any other fanatic jumped in with their own agenda at every conceivable juncture, you'd expect it to be shut down. (I suppose cyclists may get a similar pass)
Maybe because your meat consumption and demand for increasing land and water use to satiate your meat consumption is ruining the planet for the rest of us?
If I could trap all the "unrepentant meat eaters" in a dome and let you ruin your own environment without broiling the rest of us, I wouldn't have a problem with your choices.
"Every single tonne of steel manufactured by humans from prehistory until about a century ago -- the entire output of the industrial revolution -- amounts to less than one year at current production."
Walk around and pick up a random rock. On average it’s 5% iron which combined with just a little carbon makes steel, so no we aren’t running out.
This is also why the Iron Age was such a big deal. The bronze age required both copper and tin which where rare and didn’t generally show up near each other while you could operate a shitty iron mine just about anywhere.
Not that we would necessarily run out, but would a 5% ore be financially viable, and how many places would be able to operate it (geology for underground mines, location/eco concerns for strip mines)? We also have to question they typical coke and smelting process.
Economic viability is largely a question of competition between alternatives. As long as 60% iron ore is available there is little reason to focus on 30% iron ore and so on. Today 60% iron ore is only worth about 100$/ton.
Hypothetically, if we where down to 5% being the best option, then chances are your backyard would be just as viable as anywhere else. Plants will happily grow grow with up to about 55% iron in their soil. So in some place you could literally just use surface dirt as your “ore.”
Because anyone who chucks a (copper-based) rock into a standard wood fire will notice the copper that melts out of the rock. Tin's melting point is only 500F for example (one of the components of Bronze), while Iron's melting point is ~3000F.
It has to be the _correct_ rock, but chucking random things into a fire is an activity that all humans like to do. Its only a matter of time before some human chucks the right rock into a wood fire to discover Tin and begins the Bronze Age.
Iron however, is far more difficult to process. One theory is that early Iron-age was helped by meteors, as pure-iron rocks from the sky would be objects of worship to any human. After experimentation with the space-metal, they'd discover the incredible properties of iron.
With the "Seed of knowledge" planted in the human's brains from space rocks, humans would build hotter fires that can better process the space-rock / space-iron (maybe not reaching 3000F, the melting point, but maybe 2500F for hot enough to make it malleable / hammerable).
Once this discovery is made, its only a matter of time before people chuck _other_ rocks into the 2500F fire and start hammering to look for the common iron that's all around us. So the process is instead to heat the iron as hot as possible with your current technology (again: maybe 2500F) Then, you smack the hot rock with a hammer until you squeeze all the impurities out (while shoving it back into the fire to keep it at 2500F+ as much as possible through this process).
Once the impurities are gone, you're left with pure iron, equivalent to the space rock.
---------
This iron-age process (even for the simplest of ores) is far more difficult to "discover" than "chuck the correct rock into a fire".
You really can start mass producing iron when you can melt the darn thing, which requires a blast furnace. But "Iron Age" smiths were largely with simpler forges / fires and with the "hammer method" IIRC.
Bronze is much easier to create than iron which requires higher smelting temperatures. The only reason we were able to was likely through advances smelting bronze.
AFAIK Africans, that is, the Bantu and related West African peoples, went directly from Neolithic to Iron Age, skipping Bronze.
For Mediterranean, it's mainly because the whole region, Iraq, and Northwest India/Pakistan were already integrated together as a trading unit, with factors coming hp from Sumer and Assyria to trade with Dilmun, Indus Valley, and Anatolia. Then the Phoenicians traded tin from Iberia and all the way from Britain as well.
Funnily enough, Egypt only adopted bronze (and chariot) at least for their armies after the whole Hyksos invasion stuffs. That might be the basis for Exodus.
Yes, it does. About 40% of steel produced globally is recycled and the number for some other metals like aluminum are even higher. IIRC almost 80% of steel production in the US is from recycled stock.
Processing ore is very energy intensive. Problem is the world needs a lot of steel
Luxembourgh has a huge steel industry, relative to the size of its GDP. As I understand, they switched to electric arc furnaces. Yes, it seems possible, but difficult. Also, I don't know if there are limitations on these furnaces. Example: Can you only recycle scrap metal or produce certain types of (lower grade) steel? Unsure.
Those furnaces are for removing the oxygen from the iron oxide, so they're not needed for scrap metal. The CO2 emissions from smelting iron is due in large part to that reduction process, not just the heating.
Wow! Probably similar numbers for concrete. It's exponential growth.
The thing about exponential growth is it can't continue for too long. As observers of Moore's Law will understand, eventually you run out of resources or into other physical limits.
However, I'm quite confident that we can keep innovating and growth will continue in one form or another. I don't think Elon Musk is correct that human population will collapse. All it takes is one subgroup to keep reproducing above the replacement rate, and after enough generations they will come to dominate and overall growth will continue. It's pretty much the law of life - expand to consume all available resources, be that food, space, energy, oxygen, whatever. You see it in bacteria, in fish, in mammals large and small, and of course in humans.
There will be lot's of challenges there, and lots of need for innovation so we can handle growth without destroying our remaining wild spaces and ecosystems on which we depend. Humans haven't figured out how to grow sustainably yet.
"According to his blog, between 2011 and 2013, China consumed 6.6 gigatons of concrete – that’s more than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century. Look at what the U.S. built between 1901 and 2000: all those skyscrapers, the Interstate, the Hoover Dam, the list goes on and on but all that concrete only amounted to 4.5 gigatons."
A pet tinfoil hat theory of mine is that most organisms ought to have some built in fail safe mechanism that causes populations to regulate themselves before a catastrophic overpopulation collapse. Because if it didn't have it it would be more likely to die out, so there should be a strong evolutionary pressure towards getting it.
So maybe the population growth stagnation we're seeing is due to us seeing the writing on the wall and pacing ourselves, more or less voluntary/consciously.
Also, for it to make sense in a game theory sense everyone that shares the niche needs to switch it on more or less simultaneously and it has to be embedded in the genome in a way that makes it very hard to remove by random mutation.
Well, there is a mechanism that largely prevents this, but it isn't genetic.
Say you're a rabbit, and you have a bunch of rabbit babies, and they eat all the grass and leave less grass growing. Their babies will die young and the population will stabilize around necessary resource availability.
What happens is increasing infant mortality and starvation. The interesting thing is, you never actually get to a global state of overpopulation, you get osculating population numbers between generations that are very stable.
The stabilization of human population now is the same phenomenon, but also has to do with technological advancement. As standard of living rises for a population, they become accustomed to abundance. This abundance is different from times past, in the past the more children you had the more labor you had so the more abundance you had. This created more pressure to reproduce than to reduce the number of mouths you need to feed. Since resource availability is becoming decoupled from availability of human labor the opposite incentive now dominates, and people naturally reduce reproduction to maintain personal comfort. This has the emergent, not deliberate effect of doing the same for the larger population.
> All it takes is one subgroup to keep reproducing above the replacement rate, and after enough generations they will come to dominate and overall growth will continue.
Consequently, religion is going to thrive. Everyone else stops reproducing once they reach a certain standard of living.
Perhaps that's the point. Religion is universal across human cultures, it must serve some, as yet unknown, evolutionary purpose to be so universally widespread. I doubt that historical purpose was higher birth rates, but it certainly is now. Since it seems to grant such a huge advantage to evolutionary fitness, it will thrive, even dominate.
Is your number all New Metal (not to be confused with the equally important to the world's economy Nu Metal production) or is part of the 1.9 billion recycled/reclaimed? It appears this number includes 450-500 million tons of reclaimed steel?
In my opinion there hasn’t been enough nu metal production since early 00s, I think we should manufacture more black bowling shirts with flames on them to incentivise uptake.
So modern civilization currently requires the average human to consume roughly 3-4 times his body weight in steel per year. And given that steel production has roughly doubled in the last 20 years, this will probably still go up a fair deal.
Iron actually is a consumable in some processes. For example, it burns pretty well. So it gets used in thermic lances. I'm not sure if anyone bothers trying to collect the resulting iron oxides and recycle those.
We also use 100 million barrels of oil every day. Each barrel carries equivalent energy to ten years of human labour.
Let's forget for a moment about other energy sources, and also pretend we use all that oil just for energy. That would mean that every day, the 8 billion humans on Earth are using the same energy that it would take 365 billion humans to provide by hand.
> Every single tonne of steel manufactured by humans from prehistory until about a century ago -- the entire output of the industrial revolution -- amounts to less than one year at current production.
That is the nature of exponential growth. The nth term in a geometric sequence is always related to the sum of all previous terms.
Yup, I was Justin the town that has the worlds largest shipping port by tonnage, all of it iron ore. I bet you’ll never guess - you’ve never heard of it.
I like those comparisons of how much meter cube of XYZ next to a skyscraper. The one where all humans can be compressed in a relatively small 100s meter^3 cube was eye openning.
The sad thing is that 100 years ago humans and livestock accounted for around 5% of the biomass (all zoomass, not land mammals only), 95% being the wildlife. Now the numbers are reversed.
We've stolen the land from the wildlife and dedicated it to a few species we consider edible (agriland is more than forests now, and 75% of it for animal agriculture).
Is anybody surprised that we're living in the anthropocene, defined by massive die off of wild species?
We have to (as a species) return the land to wildlife and let it repopulate the earth, otherwise we'll lose them. We don't even know what gems we're losing. I'm not talking about some bugs, but about dna - those are millions of years of (computer) code generated by nature, code so precious we don't even have an idea how to simulate it, let alone understand it (at this point in our evolution).
If we lose it, goodbye new medicines, new regenerative dna techniques, new technologies, and who knows what. We simply cannot know what we're stealing from future humans (this point was made for the selfish humans we are, better arguments could be made).
The article indicates that the bulk of the extinction of large mammals happened during the Quaternary Extinction[1], between 52kya and 9kya, so 100 years ago the damage was already done. It also makes the argument that the extinction events in each region coincided with the arrival of humans to that region, which would imply that these extinctions were not due to climatic changes.
I don't mean to imply that we're doing enough right now to keep our planet healthy. I agree with your sentiment and just wanted to provide a little context and clarification.
If we return land to wildlife, that entails shrinking the human population by a hgue margin.
The supposed benefit is what, new medicine and regenrative dna? But why would we need that? Shrinking human population and human longevity are incompatible goals.
It entails improving the efficiency of food production.
Switching to LED lighting put more light in my house while lowering electricity consumption. Similarly switching to more efficient daily sources of protein (plants, shrimp, etc) can give more people more food, while yielding some of the land back to wildlife.
To say nothing of inefficiencies due to weird local policies, like growing almonds and alfalfa in arid parts of California, etc.
We have the capability to enjoy life like no other generation before us. The difference is previous generations did not have the resources to destroy like we do now. With that being the case we must be sensible in how we enjoy ourselves, by being mindful of our existence and impacts.
Yes, except unlike wildlife, we have evolved be smart enough to limit our consumption in order to sustain future life. Unlike the algae that grows until it literally chokes itself to death, we can limit ourselves so future generations can also thrive.
Up farther in this thread you're celebrating increasing meat consumption as an economic victory, so I suggest you tilt your balance more towards "conservation" and away from "immediate pleasures".
Unlike algae we can invent things. We can engineer. Are aren’t a hopeless, deterministic algorithm like algae. Future generations don’t need us to thrive. Plus, what’s your obsession with future generations?
Thank you for your suggestion. While I’m choosing prime ribeye steaks to grill this weekend I will consider it.
"Future generations don’t need us to thrive. Plus, what’s your obsession with future generations?"
Have you considered asking those "future generations", i.e. YOUR KIDS, whether they'd like to live on a planet with a self-sustaining ecosystem or suffer through a climate catastrophe?
You can't possibly think that we don't owe it to future generations to try to leave them a better planet. Would you support setting off a nuclear war now too, because the fallout will be a future someone else's problem?
So what? What value are these species? What are they for? I'm sure we'll be able to advance medicine in other ways. I'm much more concerned about the longevity of our civilization than the other organics we happen to have coevolved with. If we have to pave over the whole planet then so be it. Organic life is common and therefore expendable. If we all die off, new life will almost certainly evolve, but a new civilization? That's much less certain.
I think your point is somewhat fair, and I agree that advancing medicine is not a great sole reason to keep around our fellow organics. There are a few ways to respond to this, including such notions as having intrinsic respect for nature, and appreciation for what natural selection has wrought. But for one and most simply with regard to your anthropocentric viewpoint, the ecosystems that these species constitute are actually critical to keeping civilization going in a practical economic sense.
The theoretical human civilization that can withstand a global ecosystem collapse and exist on a paved over earth is perhaps possible with the right technology but also it is 1. very dreary and 2. much more expensive and difficult to maintain than just putting in some effort to prevent ecosystem collapse now.
Fisheries management is a good microcosm for the cost of ecosystem collapse. If we manage a fish population correctly, we can continue to harvest fish from it and get resources out of it indefinitely. If we do not manage it well and let the population go extinct, we lose that pool of resources permanently and need to replace it with another equivalent source of food which may be very expensive in comparison. Perhaps the local human civilization which relied on the fish will be unable to adjust and will also fall.
Thank you for your good faith reply. I agree with everything you wrote, but don't see how saving importantly regarded mammals such as polar bears, elephants, whales and dolphins (etc.) fits into the picture. If these animals and others no longer have vast tracts of wilderness to roam on an anthropocentric earth, what's the downside?
Extirpation of keystone species causes the rest of the food chain to become disrupted, resulting in proliferation of some species and extinction of others. The consequences for humans are zoonotic diseases and loss of natural food sources.
This is basically bioforming, and I'm sure it's more complicated than "removing keystone species == always bad". For instance, sperm whales compete significantly with humans for tuna fish, making up about 50% of the fish eaten. As our demand for tuna grows, wouldn't exterminating sperm whales help us meet that demand?
Ad tuna ... it's worse than you think. I have to quote to a very good article:
"The Mitsubishi conglomerate controls a forty per cent share of the world market in bluefin tuna; they are freezing and hoarding huge stocks of the fish every year. While they claim this is to smooth supply on a year-to-year basis, conservationists believe they are acting in the expectation that in the event of the fish’s extinction in the wild, prices will skyrocket. Frozen in great stacks at –60oC by the same company who made my childhood cassette player, the bodies would be sold for astronomical prices.
It has a name, this uniquely vile game: it is called extinction speculation. It’s practised by those who collect Norwegian shark fin, rare bear bladders and rhino horn; men and women with hearts that sing along only to the song of money. There are collectors known to be building up huge piles of tiger pelts and vats of tiger bone wine. (The wine is made by soaking portions of a tiger’s skeleton in rice wine; it takes eight years to ferment, and can then be stored indefinitely.) If tigers go extinct in the wild, which is wholly possible by 2050, the value of these assets will soar."[0]
The tuna is not on brink of collapse because it competes with sperm whales for food. They were here together, perfectly fine, for ... i don't know ... millions of years? It's near die off because we eat them and work tirelessly towards their extinction.
Also ... if you want to know more what happens to the ecosystem when some key species die off (it collapses), I highly recommend the movie Seaspiracy [1]
Also, wouldn't extermination of primates prevent crossover of viruses? A world without other primates would have been a world without HIV. A world without other mammals would be (or would have been) a world without COVID, MERS, SARS, Ebola, Marburg, Rabies, hantavirus, bubonic plague...
Hmm. I'm taking the fanatical blue aliens' position from the second Doc Future e-book.
An absolutely crazy point of view. What is to stop this point of view to extending to people who are no longer “useful” to you? Do you just annihilate them?
Slaves used to be sub-human. Women were property. Eventually, if we as a civilization survive long enough, our current treatment of animals will be universally felt to be immoral.
Basically humans are a part of the ecosystem whether we realize it or not, so destroying the natural world to make room for power plants and landfills threatens our survival by threatening our water, oxygen, and food with pollution like microplastics, PFAS, overfishing, etc.
In all seriousness, Isaac Asimov defended this approach (at least he explored in his books in a non-negative light): let's just live in Caves of Steel.
In short, I think from a humility standpoint that's probably not the best solution. I think there's value in preserving animal life, and also they really help balance Earth's environment which we don't understand well enough nor have adequate industries to replace yet, I believe. If we're going to live in Caves of Steel anyway, why not reserve say 50% of land for wild reserves? Do you want to have paradise and however many billion people you can fit in a planetary steel maze, or do you want just one single planetary steel maze with twice as many individuals? I think the answer is the former, pretty clearly.
Also, in the long term we do have other planets we can build planetary scale steel mazes unimpeded, like Mercury -- I'm sure we'll be able to within a few centuries if we don't destroy our ourselves and our environmental sustainability (I'll be rooting for humanity meanwhile).
Value is more than one thing, arguably. You kind of have to go back to first philosophical principles to unpick this. Which I guess is my point - if one's goal is the expansion and longevity of human civilization (which I think is reasonable) then it's not clear at all where the rest of organic life (which we compete with) fits into this picture. If the best reason to preserve it is "it's pretty to look at" and "maybe we'll get some medical advances" then let's just admit that. I'm only suggesting that this is something about which reasonable people can (and have) disagree.
> the rest of organic life (which we compete with)
Here is the issue: it is more than mere competition. We co-exist in a delicate balance with the rest of life, or at least we used to. Now we threaten to destroy them, and the planet on which we depend, exactly because of this implicit belief that we compete with them instead of relying on them.
I agree, and we should probably understand it before we change it. It was already engineered by natural selection long before we gained the capability to alter it. Now we are in the process of destroying it by accident as a byproduct of thoughtless growth. If we want to survive we should understand it and then carefully cultivate it for maximum performance.
I agree that we shouldn't destroy value, especially by accident. My original point was that having this conversation in engineering terms is the only sensible way to have it.
Lets take in mind that there is a problem to compare two groups when one group is much easier to measure than the other. The error interval in the mammal biomass should be much higher. The actual real values are probably not so extreme.
... I see, is just megafauna. The most competitive groups (rodents and bats) are deliberately excluded. The title is incorrect then.
Is this true? This source (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115) gives a very similar percentage (95.8% of all wild mammals) and doesn't mention anything about excluding rodents or bats from the categorization of wild mammals. Is it in a footnote somewhere that I'm missing?
Certainly the article might not be credible, but can you cite the relevant text from the article, so that the rest of us can quickly verify your claim? I'm not seeing where in the article this is stated.
I think it is an unclear and bizarre term. “The energy contained in one group” - what energy? Is a lean cheetah “less-energy” than an elephant? Why? Or do you literally mean energy like calories (which, IIRC means “how much heat if burned”).
What a bizarre metric, nobody thinks like this, I don’t even think “ecologists” understand why they should think in terms of mass. I, too, can have a metric: number of decibels of sound you can produce; maybe humans make up a SHOCKING 3% on that- doesn’t mean it’s a sensible metric.
> “The energy contained in one group” - what energy?
The chemical energy contained in the links of the molecules
> Is a lean cheetah “less-energy” than an elephant?
Yes, of course. One cheetah, has less biomass than one elephant. But -the- rats, have more biomass than -the- elephants. Is the beauty of the ecology.
> What a bizarre metric, nobody thinks like this, I don’t even think “ecologists” understand why they should think in terms of mass.
Well, this sounds a little arrogant. The professionals that use it, obviously, know their job. They aren't stupid.
Would be like claiming that programmers don't understand why they use an if loop. Biomass is a measure as widespread in ecology as Megabytes is in computers.
And there is not need to use quotes around the word ecologists, in the same way as you wouldn't wrote: the "engineers" or the "programmers".
> I, too, can have a metric: number of decibels of sound you can produce; maybe humans make up a SHOCKING 3% on that- doesn’t mean it’s a sensible metric.
Well, the difference is that nobody uses your metric.
> The professionals that use it, obviously, know their job. They aren't stupid.
I will not defer to authority. I want an explanation for why the percentage of aggregate “chemical energy contained in the links of molecules” is considered a meaningful metric for anything other than “how much percentage heat would I produce if i threw them into a fire”, let alone mammal population health or diversity.
> Well, the difference is that nobody uses your metric.
Correct, because it is not meaningful, and neither is biomass.
I'm not sure why you're so hostile toward this idea...
I know basically nothing about ecology, but it seems relatively straightforward to think of reasons to study biomass. Think about food chains. Food is energy is biomass (as you mention). At a basic level: if you know that a certain ratio of biomass is needed (or expected) between two stages in a chain, then you can keep tabs on one of those stages, and when you see biomass decreasing, it's a signal that the food chain might be soon disrupted. In a food chain, the number of animals seems mostly irrelevant (except in cases of near-extinction), but the total energy is highly relevant.
"To understand how the richness of the mammal kingdom has changed we need a metric that captures a range of different animals and is comparable over time. We could look at their abundance – the number of individuals we have – but this is not ideal. We would be counting every species equally, from a mouse to an elephant and this metric would therefore an ecosystem taken over by the smallest mammals look much richer than one in which bigger mammals roam: if the world’s mouse populations multiplied and multiplied – maybe even to the detriment of other animals – then this abundance metric might suggest that these ecosystems were thriving.
Instead, ecologists often use the metric biomass. This means that each animal is measured in tonnes of carbon, the fundamental building block of life.1 Biomass gives us a measure of the total biological productivity of an ecosystem. It also gives more weight to larger animals at higher levels of the ecological ‘pyramid’"
PERCENTAGE biomass in NO WAY reflects “the richness of the mammal kingdom”. It is a synthetic metric that scientists can futz around with enough to produce some shocking metric and get funding/press.
ABSOLUTE “biomass” is meaningful, simply because mammals have relatively tight weight ranges and you can estimate the individual counts from the biomass- but let’s be real: it is most likely that they start with estimates of number of individuals and multiply that by the average weight to get biomass. So- ditch the biomass and show absolute numbers of individuals over time. That is meaningful.
> Also, “biomass” is a strange term. Is that literally an estimate of mass?
It is indeed. The idea being that individuals vary greatly (it doesn't make sense to compare individual counts of humans with individual counts of ants for example), and that mass at least roughly accounts for the size of individuals.
But, especially in mammals, it is the individual animal that is the fundamental unit. A cheetah and an elephant are unique individuated specimens; it doesn’t make sense to compare their mass. In ants/bees it’s maybe something like “number of colonies/hives” that is the meaningful unit. Why would anyone compare across species by mass- that is a reductive number, you can’t infer anything meaningful out of it. Also, certainly not by percentage - have to look at absolute numbers of meaningful units over time.
You can call me a heretic for questioning His Majesty The Ecologist, but the emperor wears no clothes and percentage of aggregate biomass is the most meaningless metric I've ever heard to study mammals.
Biomass is probably exactly the right measure, when we are talking ecology. A lot of mice to weigh up to one cow, it is true, but then, you could feed a lot of mice on the grain with which you feed your cow.
I understand that each animal group has a different weight range and that, if you reduce animal groups to “total weight” metric, you can compare cows with mice on that metric.
I do not agree that this is some kind of meaningful unit, especially in percentage terms, for anything that ecologists might be interested in, like population health, or whatever else.
The fact that ecologists think in terms of biomass while putting on a lab coat and getting a PhD does not make this metric make more sense.
What do we talk about when we talk about human populations? Like say, you want to formulate an opinion on Germanic peoples' population in history. Do you EVER talk about percentage aggregate biomass of Germanic peoples?
No, meaningful numbers are # of individuals, lifespan, sex/age composition, fertility, height, weight, etc. Percentage of aggregate biomass is not among them, for good reason.
Look, I have no problem if scientists are measuring things in an exploratory way. Let's add up the mass, subtract, play around - this fun exploration is good. But if you are doing fun exploration, don't tell me this is to "measure the richness of the mammal kingdom" and throw around a shocking "96%" as if to pretend it is meaningful. It is not.
EDIT/PS: Thought of another example - say you are studying dogs and human interaction in history. You would never think of showing historical aggregate [dog biomass / dog+human biomass] as some kind of meaningful metric. You would show dog count, dogs per human, dog speciation, etc. Not dog biomass percentage.
Oh come on. We do in fact talk about the biomass of human populations, relative to what an ecosystem can sustain.
Broadly speaking, different ecosystems can support different total biomasses, as a function of total energy input into the system (mainly from the sun), and a variety of limiting factors (like availability of water). So a desert--which can be a perfectly healthy ecosystem--sustains, both in theory and practice--far less biomass than, say, a tropical rain forest.
Let's take an example, pulled more or less randomly from Google Scholar, an article titled "Hunting pressure modulates the composition and size structure of terrestrial and arboreal vertebrates in Amazonian forests". Here is the abstract:
>Overhunting is a leading contemporary driver of tropical forest wildlife loss. The absence or extremely low densities of large-bodied vertebrates disrupts plant-animal mutualisms and consequently degrades key ecosystem services. Understanding patterns of defaunation is therefore crucial given that most tropical forests worldwide are now “half-empty”. Here we investigate changes in vertebrate community composition and size structure along a gradient of marked anthropogenic hunting pressure in the Médio Juruá region of western Brazilian Amazonia. Using a novel camera trapping grid design deployed both in the understorey and the forest canopy, we estimated the aggregate biomass of several functional groups of terrestrial and arboreal species at 28 sites along the hunting gradient. Generalized linear models (GLMs) identified hunting pressure as the most important driver of aggregate biomass for game, terrestrial, and arboreal species, as well as nocturnal rodents, frugivores, and granivores. Local hunting pressure affected vertebrate community structure as shown by both GLM and ordination analyses. The size structure of vertebrate fauna changed in heavily hunted areas due to population declines in large-bodied species and apparent compensatory increases in nocturnal rodents. Our study shows markedly altered vertebrate community structure even in remote but heavily settled areas of continuous primary forest. Depletion of frugivore and granivore populations, and concomitant density-compensation by seed predators, likely affect forest regeneration in persistently overhunted tropical forests. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how cascading effects induced by historical defaunation operate, informing wildlife management policy in tropical peri-urban, rural and wilderness areas.
Let's think about this for a bit. You are making observations about lots of different animals. Some animals are common. Some are not. Some animals are small. Some are not. But you aren't interested in, say, just the effect of hunting on some particular species of woodland mouse, but across groups of species (e.g. frugivores, granivores, etc.), and as a whole. So, how are you going to do it. You found a 10,000,000 really healthy ants, and 5000 mice, 100 snakes, 10 weasels and 1 cougar. You can't just add them up. Sure, you could measure the decline in number of individuals from each of those in percentage terms, and then, maybe, what, average that? But aren't you really making a mistake doing that? What if that 1 cougar died, roughly the weight of all those ants put together. Aren't we missing something here? Yes, we are. And that thing is the total mass.
A fact like, humans and our livestock, account for (some huge proportion) of the total biomass in a particular ecosystem, that's actually pretty damn relevant, and meaningful. Less meaningful perhaps than comparing to the theoretical capacity it could achieve, if such numbers could actually be derived, but it still says a lot about the state of ecosystems today.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. Your explanation makes sense, but it makes me modify my objection two-fold:
1) humans+livestock should not factor into these biomass calculations.
Humans+Livestock are not meaningfully competing against other animals, in desert, in bush, or in the rainforest, because we modify the environment and make it far more calorie-rich: we farm. Even the densest rainforest wouldn't come close in # of mammal-consumable calories per acre to what humans can produce in farms. And the energy to farm is enabled mostly from fossil fuels, ore mining, etc - another thing that only humans do - we are not using solar energy to make or operate tractors, so not really meaningfully taking sunshine resources from other animals.
In other words, you can't lump human+livestock biomass, as if it's a passive consumer of ecological biomass resources, because we increase those resources.
Then, the only meaningful thing to compare is wild natural area displacement (like in miles squared) through settlements and farms. To the extent that other mammal populations shrink or go extinct, it will be simply due to smaller square miles we squeeze them into.
2) for the remaining animals, biomass is still not a good number.
> Sure, you could measure the decline in number of individuals from each of those in percentage terms, and then, maybe, what, average that?
Those intra-species population changes would be far more meaningful, yes. Averaging - no.
I still do not accept this idea that if you kill a cougar, then the ecology will support cougars-weight more ants in that area. That is a major unsubstantiated hidden assumption. Only animals that consume the same resources at the same rates are fungible like that. When a cougar dies, no more ant-compatible food sources pop up. Need to show species level individual count. Biomass implies fungibility.
In terrestrial ecosystems, the sun's energy is captured by primary producers (plants). That energy is used for plant metabolism, reproduction, and growth (building tissues, storing energy, etc.). Net primary productivity (NPP) of an ecosystem is the the difference between what energy primary producers capture from the sun and onvert into sugars during photosynthesis, and the energy loss to maintenance and metabolism. It is principally measured as the accumulated biomass. Importantly, NPP is an upper bound, since the primary, if not only way, for all other organisms to obtain their energy is to consume plants (herbivores), or consume those who consume plants (carnivores).
NPP is different between terrestrial ecosystems. Deserts have the lowest. Tropical rainforests the highest (excluding marshes, etc.). Temperate forests are quite high, and much higher than grasslands or farmlands.
e.g. 9000 kilocalories/square meter/year for rain forests, 6000 for temperate forests, about 2000 for farmland.
Now what most modern farming does do, is bring in energy from elsehwere. For example, cattle might be fed corn brought it from elsewhere. Not to mention the energy inputs from fossil fuels (fertilizers, tractors, etc.)
(2) You are right that comparisons in terms of biomass imply fungibility and it is not always appropriate. But it is also true that individual species often simply fill niches that arise as a property of the system (the system of energy inputs and limiting factors). How else would you compare, say, a forest in Washington with a forest in northern Europe? different species, and all that. But the niches are largely the same.
> Now what most modern farming does do, is bring in energy from elsehwere. For example, cattle might be fed corn brought it from elsewhere. Not to mention the energy inputs from fossil fuels (fertilizers, tractors, etc.)
Yes! Minus the corn, which is another farmland, fossil fuels, Haber Bosch fertilizers are things that only humans do.
Are you saying that with all the technologies of modern farming, it still produces less than 0.25x mammal-consumable calories per square mile (9000 for rainforest vs 2000 for farmland)?
That is unbelievable on its face, frankly, but also of couse farmland is not generally replacing lucious rainforests, but other bushland or something. So, humans and their farmland has to be enormously increasing the mammal-consumable calories per plot of farmland compared to wildland, otherwise farming wouldn’t make sense.
The point is, there is only 1 animal (human) that drastically increases calories per square meter wherever it goes, so we (and livestock we choose to feed with farming) can not be lumped into any biomass calculations.
2) I would compare the species within themselves, and the “niches” between forests. Ultimately, I think biomass confuses more than it elucidates. Talk about ant colonies of Antium Washingtonicum to Antium Europium, don’t plop them into the same metric as Cougarium Washingtonium, in my opinion this is will lead to maybe nice-looking graphs with “findings” that are nonsensical.
This statistic always takes the top of my head right off: "The dominance of humans today is clear: us and our livestock account for 96% of global mammal biomass. Wild land mammals make up just 2%."
If you, like me, wondered about poultry ...
"Here we focus on mammal populations, so neither wild birds or poultry are included. But for birds the story is similar: our poultry biomass is more than twice that of wild birds. "
But has their resource consumption per capita leveled off?
Population numbers aren't the scary thing about our CURRENT population.
What's scary is that China and India, which is almost 3 billion people, want US-levels of resource consumption, and they are full steam ahead in doing so.
Oh, so the curve will tail off around 11 or 15 billion? Who cares. Each billion is 3x the population of the US, and they all want our standard of living, or BETTER.
US per capita consumption/energy also higher. Just from energy perspective, US trending towards 150M more population by 2100 is equivalent to 1.8B Indians and 900M Chinese. PRC population is set to decline, and probably India's as well. Canada is like 50% more than US baseline, Norway 300%, Iceland 500% but not much immigration there.
Every individual migrating from developing world to developing world is increasing energy use of that person substantially even considering that (a typically skilled) migrant is likely a higher tier consumer in their origin country. Or that moving to a high consumption economy has greater compounding effects in terms of knockon consumption, i.e. 40% of RMB spent in PRC goes towards consumption vs 70% (?) for US. I joke that the most enviromental way to be a consumer is to buy developing countries with poor consumption or huge savigns rate because they're simply less likely to recycle that profit into more excessive consumption.
India is right below replacement levels and China is well below. I find it interesting that Americans are currently consuming that many resources-- it would seem to me it's unsustainable if everyone can't do it.
> Or perhaps he was just evil and had a hatred of humanity that he was
justifying with whatever reason pleased him.
For me. Agent Smith isn't coded as evil. He represents the cold
rationality of the scientific algorithm - "I've been studying your
species...". He's simply curious. It would never occur to Smith to
"justify" anything, even to simulate pleasure. Smith represents what
Kant called the limits of pure reason - the ability to measure,
compute and model everything, but understand nothing.
In the cities yes. I live outside the city. Some of the biodiversity near me is deadly and city dwellers haven't a clue.
Regardless, fish outweigh mammals by at least an order of magnitude. then calculate arthropods, mollusks, bacteria and plants and you will see this is an overstating of a complex ecosystem.
"Ten thousand years ago, 99% of biomass (i.e. zoomass) was wild animals. Today, humans and the animals that we raise as food make up 98% of the zoomass."
""Research by Professor Vaclav Smil from the University of Manitoba in Canada shows that as a percentage of mammalian zoomass, human beings and our domesticated mammalian animals (for food, beasts of burden and as pets) have gone from <0.1% 10,000 years ago, to 10–12% at the start of the industrial revolution to between 96–98% today."
Has total biomass (not just wild biomass) declined? I would expect it has, because most modern farming tries very hard to make sure the only thing growing is the thing that makes the farmer profit. A lot of farms are ecological wastelands; or rather, they sustain less biomass than they could.
I suppose it has. Farm land has 2% of a forest biomass (iirc). Agriculture (meat/dairy/sea-food) is worse than most want to acknowledge.
Land and marine ecosystems are decimated (70-90% die off, incl. soil & plankton). We've killed off almost everything.
The change has to come, there is nothing more important imho, or we'll be heading directly into blade-runner like future. Personally I would prefer star trek.
From a 2017 breakdown of the world's biomass, it appears that the "humans and livestock...of mammal biomass" were very carefully picked, to give the most extreme possible percentage -
We find that the kingdoms of life concentrate at different locations on the planet; plants (≈450 Gt C, the dominant kingdom) are primarily terrestrial, whereas animals (≈2 Gt C) are mainly marine, and bacteria (≈70 Gt C) and archaea (≈7 Gt C) are predominantly located in deep subsurface environments.
You have any prepper ideas about surviving an apocalypse and living off the land, forget about meat. It'll be crickets or some such. All the wild meat in the world will be gone in like 4 days due to massive over-hunting.
I'd guess that depends greatly upon where you live. Some places are sparsely populated, and I suspect it's these rural people who would have the best chance of surviving in an apocalypse. The earth is a big place. There's a non-trivial chance that some people wouldn't be affected at all.
There are a lot of people...right now, but in an apocalypse scenario, a huge number of those people will die off before getting a chance to hunt. Some to starvation, some to other humans, and many many to whatever event is causing all this in the first place.
There are a lot of people. But not everywhere. What you say will true for the US. But in more sparsely populated and less accessible parts of the world it may not be.
If you ever look in old barns that have been there before the Great Depression (few but there are some) you will see rat traps with holes drilled in them. They were used to hang on trees to trap squirrels. Apparently this worked well the first year...not so good for the decade after that.
I highly recommend Mike Hannah's book "Extinctions
Living and Dying in the Margin of Error" which puts modern extinction rates into deep time historical context.
becoming a sustainable food item is actually a great survival strategy at the level of the species, something to consider should earth ever be invaded by hungry aliens
The article has 'no data' for Rhinos in China, but this is false. Rhinos previously existed in what is now southwest China, in Yunnan, and probably in Sichuan. They were hunted to extinction. We know this with certainty at least from Tang Dynasty texts like the Man Shu, but also from earlier texts. The Man Shu specifically states the hunting technique used was pit trapping. It also states that the bodies were used to produce shields and armour, not only for meat.
One day, whilst eating a burger in a pub and thinking about the food chain, I ran a thought experiment in my head. I imagined being hungry and someone offering me a choice between a ham sandwich or a vegan sandwich. I could only select the ham sandwich if I was willing to shoot a pig in the head. I wouldn’t have to butcher the pig or anything else, just be responsible for its death. I decided that I would choose the vegan sandwich. This lead me to believe that by continuing to eat meat I was shirking responsibility and passing the pain of killing an animal on to someone else so I decided to go vegan. The environmental benefits were secondary and I was under no illusions as regards to health; I believed (and still do) that it is worse for you than both vegetarian and meat containing diets.
It was around 2016-2017 and I lived in a small town in northern England. Veganism was only just starting to make it into the mainstream; there weren’t any vegan options at any of the fast food places and there was about one freezer worth of vegan alternatives if you went to a large supermarket. I found transitioning over to a meat free diet surprisingly easy. The hardest thing about it wasn’t cravings for foods you couldn’t eat like you might expect. The hardest thing was the social aspect of it.
I slowly found myself being pushed out of social circles. People knew you were vegan so there was no going for a burger or a KFC or any other bonding activities over food. People would cook Linda McCartney sausages if you brought them round to a BBQ but you could tell they didn’t appreciate the extra fuss.
I tried really hard not to be the loud, shouty, fussy vegan but as soon as anyone found out the questions would start. People were curious about why I was vegan and I would tell them. The vast majority of people admitted to feeling bad about eating animals. They didn’t want to think about where their food was coming from and I was a living symbol in front of them that they could stop doing that if they really wanted to. Eating was celebration after hard work and, just with my presence, I was ruining that for them.
At the time I was heavily into fitness and I noticed that achieving my protein intake was really difficult. It would require having 3 to 4 protein shakes a day or doing lots of cooking and prep. All the natural vegan protein sources outside of protein shakes weren’t lean; they also contained lots of carbs or fats. This made hitting macros hard. Food became a chore and I didn’t feel particularly healthy. If anything I felt my health declining.
I went for a walk one day and ran the thought experiment again. I decided that yes, this time I would take responsibility and kill the pig. And that was that. At the end of my walk I went into a Subway, ordered a meatball sub and went home to eat it. I expected to have gastrointestinal distress having not eaten meat for so long but there was nothing. My body went right back to processing it as if I’d never stopped.
The one thing that this whole experience taught me is that food is tied deeply into culture and bonding. I very strongly believe that plant based sources are not going to be the solution to this problem. There is just too much social resistance to overcome.
From my experience, the only way of solving this problem is petri dish meat. Not plant based, but actual meat tissue, grown in factories. Why? People will still get the joy of eating meat and maintain their traditions without the guilt. It also has the potential to actually be better and cheaper than regular meat. If scientists can perfect the processes, they can make it taste like prime beef every time but with a fraction of the economic and environmental costs. It can be sold as an upgrade not a downgrade which is what people see veganism as.
>It would require having 3 to 4 protein shakes a day or doing lots of cooking and prep. All the natural vegan protein sources outside of protein shakes weren’t lean; they also contained lots of carbs or fats. This made hitting macros hard.
A large number of Indian people are vegetarian (plants + poultry eggs + cow/goat milk), and I've never heard of them having such problems. Why? I certainly didn't have any dietary or nutritional problems when I grew up as a vegetarian there.
It's because the grandparent comment has misconceptions about nutrition, including that animal products are necessary for a healthful diet and how much protein is required for a healthful diet.
The first misconception is contradicted by extensive analysis by health organizations such as [Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics][1]. Healthful vegan diets are no less healthful than healthful non-vegan diets.
The second misconception is about how much protein is needed in a healthful diet. Many people wildly overestimate how much protein a person needs, especially when strength training. It is not difficult to get sufficient protein within a given calorie budget while on a vegan diet, even without using protein supplements. For instance, tofu and seitan have protein to calorie ratios similar to meat, with seitan often having a higher protein to calorie ratio than most meats.
Go and have a look at the amino acid profiles of seitan and tofu and also their bioavailability in comparison to meat and vegetarian protein sources. And you can talk all you want about people overestimating protein macro but 1 to 2 grams per lb of bodyweight has consistently shown to be optimal. You’ll be hard pressed to find any high performing athlete who isn’t aiming for that outside of endurance sports.
At the end of the day in my experience, a vegan diet is both a lot more hard work and less healthy than a non vegan one. Saying that a vegan diet isn’t any less healthy than a meat eating or vegetarian one is an absolute joke, especially considering there are no vegan foods containing vitamin B12 outside of yeast flakes and artificial supplements.
Amino acids - it's suboptimal to eat only one source of protein. I suppose more so on for a vegan. Just as well no one does that. Of they do you're no longer attributing "poor amino acid profiles" to veganism as you are to the person responsible for terrible diet.
B12 - Animal products come from animals filled to the brim with B12 supplements, of which a huge majority of global B12 supplements go towards livestock. Also along with over lovely concoctions of antibiotics and drugs.
There's nothing wrong with cutting out the middle-man! Not least when so many flesh eaters are also deficient in B12 themselves. In need of taking the same B-complex as vegans.
Vegetarian is easier than vegan but still more difficult if you want to be lean E.g sub 15% or at the more extreme end 10% body fat. You can separate yolks and white to get lean protein from eggs. And with milk you can get skimmed milk to avoid the fat (but milk is still absolutely loaded with carbohydrates so some people argue that it is actually more beneficial to drink full fat or semi milk to buffer the carb dump somewhat.
The other thing to consider is amino acid profile. Milk and eggs have a full amino acid profile but vegan sources are normally incomplete. This means to get all the protein your body needs you have to consume multiple protein sources. And bioavailability: just because you consume 1g of protein doesn’t mean your body can necessarily use that entire gram. Vegan proteins tend to have the lowest bioavailability, often in the 0.7 to 0.8 range meaning you have to consume more of them for the same result. Which is problematic as it means you’re now consuming more carbs and fats knocking your macros further out of whack.
It is doable, it is just very hard work. Here is a vegan bodybuilder with 13.7% body fat percentage after 4 years.
The other thing complicating matters nowadays is steroids, SARMS and TRT. If people are on them it makes life significantly easier: there were studies done that showed people on steroids doing absolutely nothing (no workouts whatsoever) still built more muscle than people who were natural (no steroids) doing hours of hard bodybuilding gym workouts. They are absolutely rampant, far more than people realise. For what it’s worth looking at this guy, I don’t think he’s doing roids. His physique is achievable without them. But I might be wrong.
Also, heart disease is absolutely rampant in India. So not the best country to be using as an example.
Most people don't care about being body builders, so I am not sure why you are getting into this topic. Every reputable nutritional organization says vegetarian / vegan diet is ok and on top of that the longest living populations are mostly eating plant-based diet, suggesting they are not only nutritionally appropriate, but also desirable in order to maintain body function over time.
> Every reputable nutritional organization says vegetarian / vegan diet is ok
Ok yes, optimal no. You cant say a diet (vegan) that requires artificial produced supplementation (vitamin b12) in order for you to survive is the optimal diet for humans. It just doesn’t make any sense. If our ancestors ate vegan diets before we had mastered science we literally would not be alive having this conversation because they would have all perished of anaemia.
> on top of that the longest living populations are mostly eating plant-based diet.
The longest living populations are eating diets that are heavy on plants yes, but not vegetarian or vegan. If anything, the blue zones have a higher proportion of fish intake than elsewhere.
And I went off on the bodybuilder tangent because the original commenter specifically asked about a line in my story which was to do with me hitting my macros and trying to find lean protein sources in order to do that. At the time, I was doing bodybuilding and CrossFit so it was relevant to the question asked.
I don’t grant your claim that a diet isn’t optimal just because it includes a b12 pill. In fact that it’s so trivial to supplement makes me wonder why you take for granted that there’s some magical bonus from incidentally getting it from a non-supplement.
It’s like saying getting vitamin D fortified milk is superior to taking the fortification yourself.
I bet this cashes out into the appeal to fallacy. Frankly I see no reason why the optimal human diet can’t be some undiscovered 100% artificial diet that we can synthesize from scratch. To say otherwise, including your b12 belief, leads to some pretty hilarious reductios.
> You cant say a diet (vegan) that requires artificial produced supplementation (vitamin b12) in order for you to survive is the optimal diet for humans.
You know animals don't produce B12 as well, right? They come from bacteria in the soil.
> The longest living populations are eating diets that are heavy on plants yes, but not vegetarian or vegan.
Take a look at the Seven-day Adventist study (the population with the highest longevity ever recorded). Between this group, the ones excluding all animal products from the diet actually live longer than the rest.
> You know animals don't produce B12 as well, right? They come from bacteria in the soil.
Good luck with your soil recipes.
> Take a look at the Seven-day Adventist study (the population with the highest longevity ever recorded). Between this group, the ones excluding all animal products from the diet actually live longer than the rest.
Not true. Pesco-vegetarians had a lower death rate.
Grazing animals get their B12 from dirt, because they don't wash their greens.
If you purchase B12 fortified vegan foods, you don't have to eat supplements.
When you wash your salads and don't eat fortified foods, then you should eat B12 supplements ... there are vegan B12 supplements from algae on the market.
> The longest living populations are eating diets that are heavy on plants yes, but not vegetarian or vegan.
The people longest living at the adventist church are pesco-vegetarians which are not vegetarians as far as I’m concerned. Also as far as I’m aware, there is no significant difference between the Adventist church goers in terms of life expectancy and the other blue zones, which are also consuming small to moderate amounts of meat, dairy, fish and alcohol.
If you're body building or doing serious exercise, it can be hard to get the protein your body needs to recover and build muscle on a strictly vegan diet. I've tried it and it's difficult.
It is absolutely amazing to me that I can go vegan for an entire year and heavyset_go can also try being vegan and you and the rest of the vegan brigade want to now lecture us with vegan subreddits and recipe blogs. I am absolutely aware of what the vegan protein sources are as I am sure, given their username, heavyset_go is. It is this kind of militant mentality which is why so many people roll their eyes whenever the term vegan gets mentioned.
Neither of us are disputing that it is possible to be a vegan bodybuilder. But it is significantly more difficult and extra work compared to being either a meat eater or a vegetarian and to try and claim otherwise does not chime with our experiences or those of others I have encountered. The protein sources are inferior in density, amino acid profile and bioavailability, prep time is longer, more cooking is involved, meals can easily get monotonous and your social life is strained. It is hard work on top of already gruelling work in the gym. I will not be going back.
I can also say without a shadow of a doubt that several of the bodybuilders on that PETA page are using steroids which completely changes the game. Studies have shown that a steroid user doing no training puts on more muscle than a natural bodybuilder training as hard as they can.
> It is this kind of militant mentality which is why so many people roll their eyes
But, you know, you're the one who selected a lifestyle where you value your muscles above life of innocent beings, above the future of the nature and cause immense suffering with every meal you take.
You're killing innocent beings. Not just the ones you consume, you're also the reason why wildlife is dissapearing.
> The protein sources are inferior in density, amino acid profile and bioavailability, prep time is longer, more cooking is involved, meals can easily get monotonous and your social life is strained.
When somebody points out that you don't have to do that, you counter argue that it's inconvenient to prepare vegan meal? As if your convenience was somehow relevant.
> It is hard work on top of already gruelling work in the gym.
> But, you know, you're the one who selected a lifestyle where you value your muscles above life of innocent beings,
No I valued a lifestyle where I felt healthier and could perform at a higher level outside of the gym. But performing at that level requires me to train hard in the gym otherwise I am prone to bouts of depression.
> You're killing innocent beings.
So are you going to act like the food chain doesn’t exist anymore and all animals are innocent beings who don’t eat other animals. That’s some Disney Princess shit.
> Not just the ones you consume, you're also the reason why wildlife is disappearing.
Ok but you can’t label all of this at the door of omnivores.
Presumably you are typing this on a device which mined the earth for rare minerals so I hope you are willing to give that device up. And if you have any kind of vehicle other than a bicycle I hope you’re willing to give that up too. When you get sick, I hope you are willing to eschew medicine as it has almost certainly been tested on animals (most likely mice) at some point before making it to market.
Every time new construction is undertaken habitats are destroyed. So I hope you are ok sleeping in a tent and not a house or do you just want the rest of the growing population to sleep rough whilst you are excluded from having to make this particular sacrifice? You’re also guilty of killing animals unless you’re living in a hut wearing home spun robes. It’s just more abstract for you so you can delude yourself into thinking you’re one of the holy ones.
> When somebody points out that you don't have to do that, you counter argue that it's inconvenient to prepare vegan meal? As if your convenience was somehow relevant
First you’ve cherry picked the sentence and disregarded the rest. And yes, my convenience (and everyone else’s) is relevant. Humans are wired to conserve energy. I am not going to waste my energy unnecessarily if there are more convenient options available. Presumably you do the same or are you still taking your clothes down to the river to scrub them rather than using the washing machine?
It sounds you're just suppresing your depression. Maybe you should direct your efforts to solving the problems causing you depression. It will catch you sooner or later, you know.
> like the food chain doesn’t exist anymore
We're at the top of the food chain, destroying everything below us. And we're no longer part of the nature, we're above it. If you feel you're like a lion, why don't you lick your balls and eat your young?
> Presumably you are typing this on a device ...
Nobody argues we should go back to the stone age. It's not possible and not practical. Eating plant-based is, and it solves a lot of current problems (co2, methane, biodiversity loss, droughts, needless suffering, ...).
> It sounds you're just suppresing your depression. Maybe you should direct your efforts to solving the problems causing you depression. It will catch you sooner or later, you know.
Your arrogance is truly astounding. Not only do you know what’s best for my diet and lifestyle apparently you know what’s best for my mental health as well. I’m going to go eat a burger today just because of your attitude. Good luck with your crusade.
You literally don’t give one fuck about getting people to reduce their meat intake. All you care about is that you get to maintain the pedestal of holiness you sit upon in your own head. Your entire comment history is just you arguing with people about why everyone should be vegan. You’re a sad individual.
It's a pedestal of sadness and desperation, not holiness. You're wrong again.
You know, it's a viewpoint that's been desperately ignored in HN comment threads in recent years, that's why I decided to start commenting on it after almost 10 years of lurking.
I may make some people very angry, to the point of personal attacks. That's fine.
If you plant a seed, it may grow. We'll see. Better than doing nothing and watching the world burn.
> Since I bet you don't want to only eat beans, you'll probably want to take a pea protein supplement to replace the whey supplement. These cost about the same, but vary depending on location. Also, a vegan diet will be higher in carbs and lower in fat, unless you supplement with a lot of protein powder and eat a lot of nuts.
Your own source admits that it is difficult to get enough protein in a vegan diet without supplementation. I'm on a medication that increases my insulin response, and I can't eat 400+ grams of carbohydrates a day just to get ~100 grams of protein without both getting fat and putting myself at risk of pre-diabetes.
Many of these are just carbohydrates. One of the recipes is literally just overnight oats, others are full of bread, grains and other carbohydrates with little to no protein at all.
>There is just too much social resistance to overcome.
We're really only on the second wave of veganism right now. I can't say exactly when the first wave "ended", but I'd say the second wave started to roll in after 2010. But in this second wave, there is a lot of culture being developed that I believe will sustain a third wave. Whereas the first wave had a bunch of early adopters who had very odd food habits (i.e. eating barely palatable food or eating 50 bananas a day), this second wave is developing new food culture. There are large communities like the Vegan Soul Food Group. Groups like this share recipes and tips for making vegan food and, frankly, it's damn good. Not everything is the best nutritionally, but that's not why everyone is adopting veganism in the first place. There are also high profile chefs (and burgeoning chefs too) who are coming on the scene. Gaz Oakley, Yeung Man, Andrew Bernard, Vegan Bunny Chef. There are all sorts of accounts on tiktok with culturally-specific vegan foods - Mexican, Indian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Ghanaian. Not to mention all of the "accidentally vegan" foods that already existed before.
These people are leading the way to a vibrant vegan food culture. They're developing new traditions and practices right before our very eyes. And a lot of people are joining in as a result. The younger generation is much less obsessed with this sort of "tradition perfectionism" where every element has to be there to make it a tradition. They were much more willing to change and adapt traditions to fit their own personal and moral beliefs.
The third wave, I think, is going to come as a result of what you're talking about. We have some great things like nut-based cheese, but also on the horizon (beyond meat ;) are things like vegan casein and whey, which will make it even easier to be vegan. At that point, the third wave will be as if people were never vegan in the first place.
I honestly think this is going to have the opposite effect of what you think it will. People outside of metropolitan areas are sick to death of “new traditions and practices” and “high profile” names. They see it as another bourgeoisie vs proletariat battleground.
They do not want “new food culture” they want the existing culture but more environmentally friendly. You aren’t going to pry the burgers out of their hands no matter how good your beyond burger is. But if you make a petri dish burger that tastes better than a dead cow you might stand a chance of them getting behind it.
You can say the younger generation doesn’t care about old traditions but people have been saying this throughout time. Young people have a habit of growing old and more conservative when they gain more life experience and realise that the traditions they rallied against in the youth were actually developed for a good reason.
You need only few % of the population protesting in the streets (less than 5% imho) to topple an authoritarian regime.
I suppose with sufficient vegan base the political will to remove (huge) subsidies for meat/dairy industry will materialize.
It simply doesn't make sense that meat burger/milk is cheaper than plant-based burger/milk now.
You need 100x more land to produce same amount of calories (beef vs. peas). Removing subsidies will drive prices of meat/dairy up, and plant based food prices will go down (as seen now with increasing competition and growing vegan movement).
With higher prices of meat/dairy many more people will switch.
As things are now, we need to remove subsidies for all unsustainable stuff, meat/dairy/oil/plastics/agri poisons ... we can't pretend forever that (negative) externalities don't exist.
> You need only few % of the population protesting in the streets (less than 5% imho) to topple an authoritarian regime.
I know who my money would be on if vegans decide they want to try and overthrow the country.
> we can't pretend forever that (negative) externalities don't exist.
I agree but like I said, I think petri dish meat is the answer which would most likely be even less resource intensive than plant based alternatives when perfected. You only use the exact resources you need for each Petri dish and you can literally build a meat factory for every city. Next to zero transport emissions.
There is a good reason why those farming subsidies exist. It does not end well when people are hungry en masse.
Ok well good luck fighting in the civil war that’s about to break out in whatever country you try to enforce your strict no animal products policy. My money is on the people who don’t mind killing things to win.
Obviously all the death will significantly reduce the population so that’s one way of temporarily solving the problem. Although the loss of brain power might set back finding the actual solutions that we’ve already mentioned so swings and roundabouts.
People act like it will be easy to remove the huge subsidies from these bad industries, but imo the fact that these subsidies are so huge and so ridiculous from anyone from the outset to see is proof that they are not going anywhere. These lobbies are seriously entrenched and probably as powerful as they come.
Plus there is more that a cow is used for than just ground beef. 99% of the cow is used for things. You'd have to bring a capable alternative to market for each and every part of the cow that currently sees a use if you want to end pasturalism, and right now even coming up with an alternative to the most common use people think of when it comes to a cow is hard enough.
Thinking about something getting shot in the head isn't too helpful, because you could realistically run a similar moral exercise on just about every thing you encounter in modern life, and find that somewhere, something along the line from raw material to finished product is getting either literally or proverbially shot in the head.
Yes, the killing is being done everywhere throughout modern life just at different levels of distance removed from the killing. I believe the thought experiment to be relevant in this case as there is a more direct chain between the death of the animal and my consumption of the end product. It provided me with insight as well as the year long experiment.
I think it’s a brilliant thought experiment as (providing you’re not completely desensitised) it makes you sit and think whether you truly want something or if there are alternatives out there you’d be happy with it. And it forces you to take personal responsibility for the consequences of the things you do want.
There couldn't be less of a direct chain of death between you and the animal. If you don't order that steak its still in the inventory of the restaurant. If you don't buy it at the store its still at the store. If demand actually drops like a stone, I wouldn't be surprised if cows were still killed hand over fist and their bodies turned into mere fertilizer, because a well developed industry is not just going to willingly cease to exist overnight. Once the industry exists and is politically entrenched consumer action can do little to remove it. Take corn for example. We produce so much corn that a huge portion of the crop is converted to ethanol for lack of a better use, and farmers still grow this corn knowing its not going to do much good or feeding that many people, because the industry is entrenched and protected by strong subsidies and costs are high to convert to some unknown industry. We produce so much milk that rather than scale back production when we overproduce for demand, we just dump it into the drain.
If you want to enact the change you expect to enact by going vegetarian, then move to a district with a slaughterhouse and show up to local government meetings every day to raise hell until such land use is made illegal in this jurisdiction. If you rely on consumer demand alone, industry will just find either nonconsumer demand or will use its ability to strongly influence government to keep it in existence in perpetuity.
1. This is something I would consider unlike the ridiculous points above some of the absolute militant vegans are trying to make. If I was going to do something again it would be more like this rather than strict veganism.
2. Huel is great. I drank it a lot at the time and still drink it today. It’s pricey though.
Why not just measure total mammal biomass? Humans are part of ecosystem, just like any other species and we have allowed many animals to flourish on unprecedented scale. Just look at all the new feline and canine diversity, or novel genomes like glofish.
Obviously, we want to preserve pre-existing biodiversity as much as we can, at the very for our own sake and for future generations to have all the tangible and intangible benefits of these species. But I wouldn't say that human-symbiotic species are inferior or that relative biomass has to have a particular ratio.
Regardless of what humanity beliefs or justifies, while unlikely, sincerely hope for our shake that we never run into more advanced life form, including true artificial intelligence — since in my opinion, our actions will likely require explanation and struggle to find such an explanation given how intelligent we claim we are.
1). There isn't one for big mammals any more. The majority of the ecosystem is locked up in plants and bacteria. For example fungi outweigh all _animals_ by roughly 6 times. Bacteria by 30 times and plants by 200 times.
2). We're the major drivers in the processes that used to limit biomass on the planet. The nitrogen cycle is dominated by humans [0] where depending on how you measure it we've done something between doubling it and increasing it by an order of magnitude. The same is true for all the other limiting cycles. By comparison the carbon cycle has been barely touched.
3). Mammals are rather big and we don't like big things trying to eat us/step on us. Mammal global mass has been decreasing since the last ice age when we figured out how to hunt mammoths to extinction and 8,000BC when we domesticated goats.
how much has the total animal biomass and all biomass changed since modern humans evolved, and since agriculture and the industrial revolutions occurred I wonder? I know thats asking for like 8 graphs but I find it interesting
I can't be the only one who is extremely tired of these semi-frequent utterly nihilistic "I'm sad to be part of the human species, we're killing the planet" posts and comments, especially when the posts themselves are possibly misleading (whales aren't included? come on). I don't know about you but I'm quite happy to be alive and reasonably healthy, and I hope to have many children, I hope mankind doesn't go extinct anytime soon, and I'm not going to eat any bugs or fake meat or any of that.
nihilistic platitudes like "how is there still an ecosystem?" are completely baffling to me—I don't understand what would make someone think that way. what could have caused this level of innate shame felt on behalf of one's species?
the only thing I can think of is that people overestimate the power of mankind and underestimate the power of nature possibly due to living in dense urban environments surrounded by nothing but artificial creations of man all day every day, and this skews their perspective.
It isn't a skewed perspective. Our civilization passed the carrying capacity of the planet half a century ago. Resources are being consumed at a far greater rate, despite advances in technology.
You don't need to be depressed or nihilistic about it. You can still live a great life and so can your children. The reality is that we need to start reducing consumption over the long term to prepare for the inevitable. Being aware is the first step.
The wrong path is to close our eyes and assume Elon Musk is going to transport us to another world, or that some unrealistic hollywood technology will magically terraform the planet and bring back the glaciers and mammoths.
> I don't know about you but I'm quite happy to be alive and reasonably healthy
I think the important thing to contemplate is that this might be at the expense of other people, living or yet to be born. Not that we've done anything wrong – just that the circumstances that make this possible for us might preclude it for others.
> nihilistic platitudes like "how is there still an ecosystem?" are completely baffling to me
For some people, I think, it's jarring to realize that much of the world, including life for other people and creatures, is very different from anything they've experienced, and that the future could look very different from the present – despite it having not changed much so far in their lives. And the feeling of that realization might be the reason for platitudes like that.
> I think the important thing to contemplate is that [being happy to be alive and reasonably healthy] might be at the expense of other people, living or yet to be born. Not that we've done anything wrong – just that the circumstances that make this possible for us might preclude it for others
this is called the natural order of things. nature is competition. this is all self-evident. all of our ancestors innately understood this. what exactly has made us forget it? again, the only thing I can think of is sheer societal decadence, being so far removed from nature that we only have an abstract concept of it.
The natural order of things is only important inasmuch as it is a stable, desirable order. Lots of things we don't like happen in nature: starvation, disease, rape, murder, torture, isolation, immense pain. If these things happen to us we don't blithely say, "Ah, the natural order of things. It's all good!"
People want to preserve the natural order because they like the things they find in it. These things make them happy. Also, they like security. The natural order has persisted, with occasional mass extinctions and other disasters, for quite some time, so splitting off from the natural order into something that holds no promise of stability and security doesn't seem like a good choice.
But to the extent possible people who value nature and stability of existing ecosystems are still picking and choosing for themselves from what nature offers. No disease, please. Delayed senescence, please. No freezing to death or drowning. Less tooth decay.
And I suspect you don't adopt a throw-up-my-hands-and-let-shit-happen philosophy in your own life. You look both ways before you cross the street. You don't eat every mushroom you see. You stop walking when you come to a cliff edge.
So basically "[being happy to be alive and reasonably healthy] might be at the expense of other people, living or yet to be born. Not that we've done anything wrong – just that the circumstances that make this possible for us might preclude it for others" is just applying this same foresight and judgment more broadly. The qualitative difference is that it is not selfish. It is the difference between "I shouldn't step on this landmine" and "I shouldn't place a landmine where someone else will step". Why do this? Again, the same old reason: other people's happiness makes you happy; other people's sadness makes you sad.
When we want the natural order, it's only by accident.
It's more a factor of dislocated moral feelings. If you decide humans aren't special, then you can go one of two ways with the moral feelings you had towards humanity: you can broaden them to a larger category that you still think is special, such as mammals, animals, all living things, etc, or you can narrow them down to some arbitrary set that you happen to be fond of, like your family, your friends, or yourself. Both are problematic to those who still think humans are special.
To anyone who's tired of reading those frequently espoused, virtually now mainstream, apparently self-hatred fueled viewpoints, or to those who are interested in positive outlooks on humanity, I can recommend this book:
Global steel production just before WW I was about 70 million tonnes. So production has increased about thirty-fold in one century. That wasn't so shocking to me, at first. But 1910 was not the beginning of the industrial era; things had been under way for more than a century then. Railroads. Ocean liners. Factories. Knives and rivets for fabric owned by hundreds of millions of people. Dozens of skyscrapers in New York by then; the Brooklyn Bridge hung on thousands of tonnes of cable. All made out of steel.
Then it struck me. A few million tonnes a year in 1850. 70 million tonnes in 1910. All of it adds up to less than 1900 million tonnes. Every single tonne of steel manufactured by humans from prehistory until about a century ago -- the entire output of the industrial revolution -- amounts to less than one year at current production.