Maybe we should subsidize the fake meat industry instead.
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Most of the US is empty and fertile unlike other parts of the world, land use is not really the biggest issue with meat farming
Empty... to humans but not to native species that living there. Grazing still affects those ecosystems there. From the article
As the cattle graze, they tend to disrupt ecosystems and do a lot of damage to the land. They eat or destroy plants consumed by native species, like turtles, which can lead to biodiversity loss. Their manure pollutes rivers and streams, and as they move about, they erode soil.
[...] analyzed decades of BLM data and found that about half of the acreage it oversees that has been assessed fails to meet the agency’s own land health standards (in Nevada, it’s an alarming 83 percent). PEER points to livestock grazing as the primary source of land degradation.
There's an opportunity cost in using all that land. If we let land go back to its natural state we can sequester quite large amounts of carbon
A 2020 study published in the journal Nature Sustainability highlights the immense environmental potential of changing how we farm and eat. Researchers found that if all high-income countries shifted to a plant-based diet from 2015 to 2050, they’d free up enough land to sequester 32 gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of removing nine years of all those countries’ fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere. Globally, if we shifted to plant-based diets over that same time period, the land saved could sequester the equivalent of 16 years of global fossil fuel emissions.
What's the environmental cost of growing all that soy, corn and oats for an US wide vegetarian diet?
A lot less than farming meat which requires all the cost of growing that and ensuring the animals are fed and watered until slaughtering.
From the article
But not all agriculture is equally land-intensive. Meat-heavy diets require far more land than low-meat and vegetarian diets.
But not only that it also requires crop land for plant-based diets. From a different source
If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%.
[...]
If we would shift towards a more plant-based diet we don’t only need less agricultural land overall, we also need less cropland.
Sounds like you didn't even read the first paragraph of the article
Although the article talks about biodiversity, people may have other concerns and i thought i would note them
I agree, the meat industry should be nationalized along with agriculture and the energy sector.
More like taxed out of existence
Idk man, have you ever seen how poorly run government businesses like the DMV are?
Well when you try to run a service that is by definition unprofitable, "like a business," the only way to hit the financial metrics is to cut salary and headcount. This obviously leads to shitty service. That said in states like New York and Illinois the DMV is actually pretty well run, though the number of locations and hours of operation leaves something to be desired.
A 2020 study published in the journal Nature Sustainability highlights the immense environmental potential of changing how we farm and eat. Researchers found that if all high-income countries shifted to a plant-based diet from 2015 to 2050, they’d free up enough land to sequester 32 gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of removing nine years of all those countries’ fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere. Globally, if we shifted to plant-based diets over that same time period, the land saved could sequester the equivalent of 16 years of global fossil fuel emissions.
basically everyone eats meat. If it's making meat it's broadly serving the people.
Deforestation is not serving the people
High GHG emissions is not serving the people
High cruelty to non-human animals is not serving the people
Etc.
basically everyone is experiencing record heat waves every summer now
Yeah, and neither deforestation nor meat make a dent in that. If you want to end global warming, end the use of fossil fuels.
The statistics they parrot about nothing emissions are largely bullshit and even if everyone stopped eating meat tomorrow we'd still have all the same problems we do now.
You can't offset global warming with forests, what humans are doing is an order of magnitude larger than what nature is equipped to handle.
Nor is this even relevant at all, because even fossil fuels serve the average person. There's a reason we keep using them.
The statistics they parrot
That tells me everything i need to know, you cant be convinced with science.
People who don't understand that all methane emitted by cows must come from carbon gathered by plants and as a result contributes near net zero to the long-term global warming trend are the people who don't understand science.
CO2 is a much less potent green house gas than methane. Ruminants converting converting CO2 to methane causes quite a great deal of warming because methane and CO2 are not created equal. As long as we have large amounts of cattle, we'll keep creating higher methane concentrations
It's about a 20x potential over the course of 100 years. The problem is, the sheer size of emissions from fossil fuels dwarfs any contribution cow methane gives to the atmosphere.
Like, methane in the atmosphere is really high right now, but it's not because of cows, it's because of fracking in Canada and the United States, which commits an order of magnitude or methane than cows ever could.
It would be like standing in a room with a raging inferno and pointing to a matchstick and say look, there's our problem.
Cow-warming has a bunch of problems that mean it's never going to contribute to being a significant factor in global warming.
It's self-correcting. Eventually methane is going to reach a certain point of equilibrium where the amount that's coming back into CO2 is equal to the amount being emitted and now you're going to be at a steady state again.
It's relatively small scale. Cows farting is not really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things when we have factories producing millions of tons of carbon emissions.
It's easily fixed. There's lots of medications and other things you can do to cows to make them stop emitting methane, if it ever becomes one of our most significant problems it will be easily and quickly solved much like CFCs were.
Carbon emissions from fossil fuels have a bunch of traits that make it particularly nasty.
It's additive. Everything we admitted in 1960 is going to be around and heating the planet for 100 years yet
It was growing exponentially. Humanity has been emitting an absolutely mind-boggling amount of carbon. We've gone from what? 300 parts per million to 400? And the amount of carbon we're emitting every year now is higher than it's ever been, and every single year worth of emissions just adds on to the problem pile that's going to keep on getting worse for the next 100 years.
It's not easily undone. That carbon is never going to turn back into oil unless humanity goes out of our way to do it, and it's incredibly difficult to do. You would need the sum energy usage of humanity from the 1930s to today recreated and wasted on pulling the carbon back out of the atmosphere and sticking it in the ground.
Emissions from cows undo themselves in 20 years, entirely offset themselves through plant growth, and are easily massively reduced any change in our lifestyle in just a couple of years if we really wanted to as a society, with next to zero change in our lifestyle.
They aren't comparable problems and all you're doing by pointing at cows and acting like they're causing global warming is distracting from the real problem.
It's hardly small. It's enough to make us miss Climate targets even if fossil fuels were eliminated today. We have to tackle both
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
Further for the bit about feed addatives, those don't do as much as you'd think because the touted emissions reductions are only looking at feedlot emissions and not overall emissions
There, algae feed additives can be churned into the cows’ grain and soy feed. But on feedlots, cattle already belch less methane—only 11 percent of their lifetime output.
All told, if we accept the most promising claims of the algae boosters, we’re talking about an 80 percent reduction of methane among only 11 percent of all burps—roughly an 8.8 percent reduction total
It’s enough to make us miss Climate targets even if fossil fuels were eliminated today. We have to tackle both
Yeah, if every single trend occurring today continues linearly into the future and we don't account for the fact that all of the methane emissions have to be offset by carbon sinks from plant growth, we'll have a problem.
Fortunately none of that will happen. Your study is literally assuming that we will stop using all carbon within 20 years, but yet continue to use it for nitrogen fixation.
If you go look at their graphs, you notice a trend. The lines comparing fossil fuels and food emissions don't diverge until the absurd linear assumptions they make go nuts 50 years into the future.
At the end of the day, if you remove the fossil fuel usage, the cycle must self-balance, else eventually you run out of some resource.
Further for the bit about feed addatives, those don’t do as much as you’d think
That is one option, you can reduce methane emissions through things like medication.
You can gather the cows into one big airtight building, collect the methane emissions, and burn it before it gets into the atmosphere instead of just venting it raw into the atmosphere.
And you can do the same thing for manure.
Right now we aren't doing anything because these really aren't the problems we need to solve right now. The vast vast majority of emissions today are coming from:
Transportation.
Manufacturing.
Electricity use.
Agriculture is ten percent. Land carbon sinks in the United States? They offset 12 percent.
That is completely misunderstanding the study. The study still finds that food emissions alone - with zero emissions from non-food sources after 2020 - would make us miss climate targets.. They do other analysis later than only makes the picture worse if other emissions aren't immediately stopped
As such, even if all non–food system GHG emissions were immediately stopped and were net zero from 2020 to 2100, emissions from the food system alone would likely exceed the 1.5°C emissions limit between 2051 and 2063
For biogas, it still has plenty of methane emissions and doesn't solve a number of other environmental issues like waterway pollution
What "medication" are you referring to with cattle? That's pretty vague but most likely you are referring to some kind of feed addatives which have the problems I mentioned earlier
zero emissions from non-food sources after 2020 - would make us miss climate targets..
Did you actually read past the abstract?
Literally everything I said in my comment above still applies and you responded to literally none of it.
The line I quoted in the second response was not from the abstract
The earth doesnt produce carbon at all, so why do you think things have getting warmer? It matters what form that carbon takes. Carbon in the form of a plant is a solid, and even works to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon in the form of methane has a much stronger greenhouse gas effect than regular carbon dioxide. Which is where those bullshit statistics you hate come from, it's carbon that was solid and is now a greenhouse gas. Same shit as fossil fuels, its not new carbon being made, its just solid carbon being turned into gas.
The earth doesnt produce carbon at all, so why do you think things have getting warmer? It matters what form that carbon takes. Carbon in the form of a plant is a solid, and even works to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon in the form of methane has
Jesus Christ you're ignorant.
The carbon in plants comes out of the atmosphere.
Cows eat those plants and processes in their stomach turn it into methane.
Methane in the atmosphere turns back to carbon within 20 years.
Plants then reabsorb that carbon when they grow to feed the cows.
It's literally a constrained cycle. You can't increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere through cows and plants. You have to actually find carbon that is in a stable solid form and then put it into the atmosphere when it otherwise wouldn't be.
In other words, you have to mine coal or pump oil.
Plants and cows have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Where do you think oil and coal came from?
You don't think the earth produces carbon at all, so please, tell me. Did humans 2 billion years ago create all the carbon on earth?
Mostly the oceans, over the course of millions of years.
The earth doesnt produce carbon at all What?
There are hundreds of fully natural processes that emit carbon that have nothing to do with Humans. Volcanos, Plant Respiration, other mammal respiration, forest fires, lime stone erosion, natural decomposition of organic matter, meteorites burning up in the atomosphere, lightning strikes, etc etc. Where do you think the carbon in the earth came from? God? Well before humans existed there were ice ages and periods of higher carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as well as higher oxygen. That statement by itself shows you don't' really have a good grasp of what climate change is, nor what is causing it.
None of those things create new carbon, its just changing form of existing carbon.
@bioemerl @usernamesAreTricky @blazera lol. The problem is humans keep artificially up a cow population to satisfy their apetite for meat. One cow's emissions is fine, 20 billion cows' emissions is not, regardless of the plants capturing CO². Nature is artificially out of balance.
No, nature is out of balance because we are pulling carbon deep out of the Earth and emitting it into the atmosphere.
No number of cows is going to cause an imbalance in the carbon cycle, because it doesn't matter how many cows you have, they must be fed by carbon pulled out of the atmosphere.
@bioemerl @usernamesAreTricky @blazera wrong. The more cows releasing gas, the more saturated becomes the atmosphere. One thing is the carbon they eat and a very different story is capturing it back, or do you think the carbon problem from the oil industry is happening just because we drill the oil out?
I'm having a hard time even understanding your sentences at this point.
All carbon from cows comes from plants, and all carbon in plants comes from the atmosphere.
The problem with fossil fuels is because we are drilling and pumping the carbon out of the deep Earth and then emitting it into the atmosphere as a byproduct undoing hundreds of thousands of years of sequestration in just a few short decades.
@bioemerl @usernamesAreTricky @blazera a couple of cars won't make a difference, billions of cars do. Just like cows. No wonder why you are having a hard time understanding
Cows don't run on fossil fuel that have been in the ground for millions of years. Cars do.
@bioemerl @usernamesAreTricky @blazera picture this. You have a glass of water and a spoon of salt. The water has a concentration of ions, when you pour the salt in it you move the balance to a higher concentration of salt. Basically you have an atmosphere with X concentration of CO² and lets say a population of a billion cows and a billion trees. What happens if you double the amount of cows and half the amount of trees? Do you think the CO² concentration remains unchanged?
lets say a population of a billion cows and a billion trees. What happens if you double the amount of cows and half the amount of trees?
Relatively little. Trees aren't actually a huge carbon sink.
@bioemerl @usernamesAreTricky @blazera they are during active growth. Also my example was only to illustrate how the balance tilts, and even if you keep on denial, cows methane emissions can be measured, and are a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
Someone hasn't heard of Buddhism or India
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“The problems are huge, sprawling, and major,” said Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist and executive director of the Western Watersheds Project (WWP), the group that sued numerous federal agencies for failing to preserve the habitat of the Mojave desert tortoise and 77 other species.
WWP alleges that for decades, the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and other agencies have violated an agreement they signed in 2001 that forbids cattle grazing in a part of Nevada’s Gold Butte National Monument in order to protect the desert tortoise, whose population has plunged since the 1980s.
The permitting program is costing the federal government tens of millions of dollars annually to administer, all while giving cattle ranchers a deep discount on public lands.
Even worse, the federal government spends millions annually on its “Wildlife Services” division, which kills wild animals it deems a threat to grazing livestock.
The programs that subsidize the beef industry represent some of the most striking examples of America’s tradition of “agricultural exceptionalism” — giving farmers and ranchers special treatment, like sweeping exemptions from critical environmental, labor, and animal welfare laws.
Agribusiness also benefits from getting large swathes of the West to itself, illustrating a simple fact of land use in America: Contrary to the famous Woody Guthrie song, much of it isn’t for you and me — it’s for the meat industry.
The original article contains 1,123 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The autotldr isn't great here, focusing on one example and missing quotes about the broader picture like these:
All told, a staggering 41 percent of land in the continental US is used for meat, dairy, and egg production. Globally, it’s more than one-third of habitable land. Much of it was once forest that’s since been cut down to graze livestock and grow the corn and soy that feeds them.
not all agriculture is equally land-intensive. Meat-heavy diets require far more land than low-meat and vegetarian diets.
A 2020 study published in the journal Nature Sustainability highlights the immense environmental potential of changing how we farm and eat. Researchers found that if all high-income countries shifted to a plant-based diet from 2015 to 2050, they’d free up enough land to sequester 32 gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of removing nine years of all those countries’ fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere.
What a stupid and annoying title, trying to imply that I am on some team that is not the "meat industry" team. I eat meat and I have nothing against ranching.
What?
Because America is so short of land...
High land use harm native species and has great environmental consequences as described in the article
There's more to consider than just how much land is available to humans
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