Just a quick note: The "Cowspiracy" movie unfortunately presents its case by cherry picking scientific evidence and presenting much higher numbers than what is reasonable. Wikipedia has something about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowspiracy#Criticism
I recently saw that movie. Basically what the movie maker did was taking the highest number he could find and repeating it over and over again.
This is unfortunate, because the overall message is still very much true: Meat production causes a lot of greenhouse gas emissions and cutting them is a great opportunity. And NGOs are very reluctant to talk about it.
there's also dead oceans by 2048 which is the most pessimistic estimate.
but some numbers are fine.
the amount of land that is used for livestock is incomparable. water pollution, dead ocean zones, all caused by animal agriculture.
the amount of environmental destruction and pollution is incomparable. more than 90% of destroyed Amazon rainforest was for the sole reason of raising more livestock.
yeah, CO2 equivalent footprint might not be 51% but the oil industry does less environmental damage than animal agriculture. highest CO2 footprint isn't even cars and transport but heating and cooling.
(now whether this number is 51% or something else is another debate)
Also 51% because equivalent calculations are not done over the span of 100 years, but shorter (methane becomes more dominant) and deforestation is also accounted for - (which is both fine).
So it is somewhere in between the results of renovated studies that say it is around 31% (e.g. Tukker et al) and the 51% worldwatch report.
I don't know about this. Eating meat as a staple like Americans currently do is certainly not sustainable. But you can raise meat in such a way that it makes use of resources that you can't otherwise use. For example, pigs can live quite comfortably on waste like vegetable peelings. Cows can live on land that is not arable like meadows. Lamb is a by-product of raising sheep for wool.
We just cannot agree on a quota when those industry are allowed to lobby our gov'ts to bit.
Ie. a 200g steak per day isn't sustainable, but pasta sauces with a few slivers of pancetta are.
You can have sheep spend the summer there. GMO wheat fields, not.
Methane and waste, well, maybe. It's not clear to me that there can be enough sheep there that the waste is a problem. I've never even tried to quantify the methane.
Energy and water aren't issues. The energy to gather the sheep in the autumn is a rounding error, and how would you water such an area anyway?
You can't grow crops on that. No one's watering it. The only energy use is rounding all the sheep back up.
As for methane... well it's not the land that makes that, but the sheep. You're going to have that problem as long as you're rearing ruminants to eat. There's a lot of research being done on that - it's possible we'll be able to engineer low-methane sheep...
Just pushing things further, since I appreciate your insight, in terms of nature (as opposed to feeding humans), wouldn't a more natural ecosystem be preferred? Might it better help protect against extinctions and such?
Chickens are great weeders. Sheep and goats graze down grassy areas (or woody if goats) including areas that are in rotation but currently fallow, so it doesn't need to be mowed down with fossil fuel machines. Pigs are great at rooting up uncultivated areas. And are wonderful waste disposal units. All livestock make great fertilizer. In the case of pigs and chickens at least they make great fertilizer out of stuff we consider garbage.
But yes, meat consumption likely must be curtailed significantly.
Had the author consulted the literature, he'd know that the environmental credentials of grass-fed beef are extremely suspect; some studies suggest that the carbon footprint is actually greater than intensive feedlot beef and the land use is absolutely vast. He'd know that only a handful of animal sources of protein have equivalent CO2 emissions to plant sources - intensively reared poultry, eggs and some inshore seafoods.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257160858_The_price...
Not quibbling with the broader point, but... is this actually a problem? When I see center-pivot irrigation circles laid out on a square grid, wasting 20% of the land, I don't get the impression we're short of the stuff.
It could become highly significant due to the growing global population and increasing meat consumption in the developing world. Global meat consumption has quadrupled in the last 50 years; continued growth at that rate is entirely plausible and entirely unsustainable.
I don't understand this. Why not?
You recommend a documentary with opposing views instead; should we only read and watch things that we agree with?
>Whoever lives in a cosmopolitan city knows this is not true, or not anymore.
Vegetarians compose about 3% of the population. I'd say that's a "margin group". If you live in a coastal city in the US, vegetarians may be over-represented.
>It is that supermarkets choose to put the "high price" on produce all year long, except for a discount crop maybe. This is because produce does not pull customers.
Blatantly false where I live. Produce is substantially cheaper all summer and into the fall than it is in the winter when we have to import vegetables from around the world.
I explain why not. Because bad, unsubstantiated arguments are provided.
> should we only read and watch things that we agree with?
Sure not. But when disagreeing, bring evidence pls.
> Vegetarians compose about 3% of the population. I'd say that's a "margin group". If you live in a coastal city in the US, vegetarians may be over-represented.
Someone who does not eat meat/fish for a day, is that person a vegetarian? I do not know definitions, but I just want to say it is not black-white. Not hippie vegetarians vs the normal omnis.
> Blatantly false where I live. Produce is substantially cheaper all summer
Ok. I was comparing the supermarket with the street markets. In street stalls the prices seem to fluctuate much more according to seasonal availability then in the supermarkets. But heay, just and observation :)
Why?
* Author writes """it’s more accurate to say that vegetarian diets are “less awful,” not “better,” than omnivorous diets""". He gives no hard numbers to back it up. Less awful IS OBVIOUSLY the same as better. According to many sources, that are well presented in the Cowspiracy documentary (among others) it is shown that a vegetarian diet, and specially a vegan diet, is A LOT less awful then an omni diet both environmentally, ethically and considering health impact.
* He argues vegetarians eat more staples. And that they are usually grown as mono crops, thus bad for the environment. He forgets that animals slaughtered for meat have been eating staples all their lives. A large part of the staples are grown for life stock; this makes meat so inefficient in the first place. The author is seems to know that it is also grown for life stock, but then continues that vegetarians are responsible for the monocrop disaster. Clearly misguided he is.
* Showing pictures of hippies to re-enforce the idea that vegetarians/vegans are some treehugging margin group. Whoever lives in a cosmopolitan city knows this is not true, or not anymore.
What I do agree on: eat with the seasons. But simple economics of "eat what is cheap" should help with that. It is that supermarkets choose to put the "high price" on produce all year long, except for a discount crop maybe. This is because produce does not pull customers.
What pulls customers? Cheap meat, and cheap beer. That's why there's always some meat on offer that costs less per kilo then bell peppers in the supermarkets near where I live.
If we want to save the planet from the rather imminent "mass extinction" (lets not call it "global warming" that sound waaay to nice), we should not optimize for consumerism but for sustainability. And meat eating is simply not sustainable.