Theoretical alternatives to the status quo are:
* Higher taxes and fines for those using detrimental and high-risk farming practices, thus driving up the price of meat, fish and poultry to deter over-consumption, people don't need to eat animals 7 days a week. Food is simply "too cheap".
* Public education and further studies into mostly plant based diets so people aren't afraid to face the stigma and uncertainty about not having animals every night of the week. It's ok to cut back.
* Eating food grown or caught as close to your residence as possible.
* Mandatory food labelling of products, detailed information about the origin and production methods used to produce said product.
* Monetary incentives to have less children.
IMHO this isn't necessary in developed economies as the replacement rate is already below 2. [0]
Instead of paying people in developed countries to have fewer children, as the population of these countries would already be in decline were it not for immigration, we should spend the sane money on women's education and contraceptives in developing countries. [1]
Personally, my biggest concern is that the largest population growth is occurring in regions with the lowest levels of food security. Any disruption to the food supply in these areas will lead to large loss of life and/or geopolitical strife.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
[1] http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2011/highlights1...
[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428120658.h...
Personally, no. Latin America is statistically more dangerous than North America yet their population growth is not significantly larger.
The largest factor toward population growth has been shown many times to be the education level of women. More choices for women means fewer children. This is disccused in my source links above.
How would we deal with that?
The demographic death spiral can be real. And if anything, there will be worse environmental impact simply because you have to use more invasive means to support an aging population. More factory farms since there are fewer, older workers, more resource intensive automation and robotics to take over things people did.
Edit: not to turn them into atheists, but to reduce birth rate.
Also to thwart any racists- no, this is not limited to poor country's or certain skin colors. Once the economy drops below a certain threshold, everyone goes full survival zombie with the Loop-Deformation. Proof: The Nazis turned europe into a white version of africa during WW2.
Soldiers of the leash. War feeding the war. Refugees pouring back and forth.
Source is mostly anecdata:
My late grandfather was a Nazi truck-driver in France, Italy, eastern Europe (Hungary, Greece) and the stories he and his war companions told - are really very similar to those you get to hear from African refugees. My grandfather and his officer made a nice little extra by smuggling people and got sentenced into a "Straf-battalion" for taking advantage of the general lawlessness of the situation.
I know, i know- the popular Nazi image in TV presents a wicked law & order extremist, but where the war went - it really was quite different. There was a mixture of total lawlessness (as in "We dont care/expend resources on subhumans") and extreme military overreactions.
And before you claim that was just fascism at work, as if politics where just a program loaded into humans, no,the unraveling usually set on before the occupation got started.
In a ironic way, the Nazis and their homecoming war proofed that all humanity, disregarding of race, pushed beyond a certain breaking point - is equally wretched and desperate.
A zombie like animal, forgetting about tomorrow, trying to see the end of today at all costs. Not a beautiful sight, but one that offers a lot to understand and learn.
The good news is, once the stress is reduced - and the war has not gone on to long, preventing the education of the next generation- there is a way to recover.
This is so true in most civilized world. But same is its opposite, paradoxically.
Dunno how the whole system of gov subsidies and externalized costs and all work around the world, but meat is severely underpriced and vegetables are severely over-fucking-priced. Like geez, anywhere around western Europe if you go around buying ingredients for a decent salad you're like "wtf, a beef steak would lead to a cheaper meal!"
And after this, occasionally see that the cheapest vegetables of one type or another are produced like a freaking continent away! Don't tell me that transport energy that is mostly from burning fossil fuels doesn't have insane environmental costs that somehow got magically externalized out of the product price.
Maybe this also has something to do with underpriced oil or dubious trade treaties making half-a-planet-away exports too cheap, or "indirectly subsidizing" transoceanic shipping costs (hint: China, hint 2: all that burnt shipping diesel is similar to the pollution of the world's cars).
To top it all, in most developed countries increasing food prices would 99% likely result in increasing minimum wages because people will fight for them, and politicians will eventually give them... Really, if there's any way in which global economy needs to be "fixed" is by making products prices include the real damn costs, including environment ones!
Vegetables are not good calories sources; they are good nutrient sources. Grains are good calorie sources: your rice, your potatoes [not a grain], and especially your corn. Grains will yield 10-20 times the calorie per acre of vegetables. Grains are so insanely productive that, on a calories per acre basis, it is more land efficient to get your calories from corn-fed livestock than from vegetables.
Calories per acre are a big reason why vegetables cost more than meat. It is also why we grow different foods in different places. It is why basically all of our [the United States] potatoes come from Idaho: the volcanic soils there grow potatoes so well that it makes more sense to grow highly efficient potatoes in Idaho and corn in Kansas and ship them back and forth, because you'd get half as much corn in Idaho and half as many potatoes in Kansas.
Re: food prices -> minimum wage, is your plan seriously to (somehow) raise food prices, so that the people who cannot afford to eat will riot / strike / protest for higher wages, so they don't starve to death?
Why don't tell you that? Have you ever looked at the energy needed to transport full cargo containers? It's not a lot. You could fully internalize the cost by using renewable fuels and it would still be cheap.
> all that burnt shipping diesel is similar to the pollution of the world's cars
That's looking at a couple very specific pollutants, and could be fixed with a relatively tiny cost if there was enough political will.
What if I Don't Care.
There's this weird assumption that information/education will lead people to share your viewpoint. It won't. I am fully aware of the impact that cattle farming has on the environment. I still eat beef whenever I want with literally zero concern.
I know that I can live without meat. I know that it's entirely possible to eat food that has a lower impact on the environment. It doesn't mean that I'm going to do either of those things. That doesn't make me uninformed or ill-educated. It just means my "utility function" is different to yours.
Is there? I don't think anyone thinks labelling is going to magically make people who don't care make different choices, they just think it will allow people who do care to actually make choices at all.
Most people include "social recognition" into their utility function. Spreading the idea that "eating too much beef is 'bad'" might actually alter the behavior of those who want to be "'good' citizens".
(please note I'm not advocating for the method here ; although I certainly see how it could work, I have no idea how much it actually does)
Some countries are already below the necessary births to renovate the generations, you want to reduce it even further?
Why not having suicide booths, it's faster to lead humans to extinction.
Actually, many people (myself included) advocate for the right, and plan for themselves, euthanasia as the best, most humane alternative to the current nightmare/torture regime that makes up end of life, hospice, and terminal disease care. This seems like just a logical idea at first, but nothing puts it quite in perspective like experiencing these things in your own family.
The fact that euthanasia is one small way to speed up the reduction of human population down to less environmentally destructive levels is a small benefit.
Eating food grown or caught as close to your residence as possible.
Is this some kind of a joke? How will society support itself with fewer kids?
By increasing productivity, as it has been doing over the past few centuries, and not increasing waste of resources proportionally, unlike what it has been doing over the past few centuries.
Gross.
So basically its the very concept of paying poor people not to procreate, so that the current existing people have a 'nicer time' (which is actually also economically incorrect).
Its super gross.
First of all is more efficient. We produce human food via cold blooded animals so we need to provide less animal food to obtain 1Kg of high quality human food. Mammals and birds instead will use a considerable amount of this energy just to keep itselves several degrees warmer than the environmental temperature day and night.
Is better also because reduces waste. Fishes are aquatic and have swimming bladders. Its bodyweight is carried by the water, so you are not investing in growing several Kg of heavy unedible skeletons that will end in the trash. There is more food in 100Kg of entire fishes than in a pig of 100Kg, and you'll need to allocate less volume of garbage dump.
At difference of agriculture or industry, if you have a farm fish you need to care for keeping the quality of the water in reasonable levels for life beings. This water is still available to other animals and plants.
More efficient use of energy and water and less waste is the definition of environmentally friendly. The ugly truth is that the number of humans is ever increasing but resources are limited. Cows, sheeps, pigs and poultry use also antibiotics and spreaded parasites and diseases in the past and of course the arrival of massive quantities of them 200 years ago was also a neverending 'environmental nightmare' for lots of species of trees, flowers or insects (and a bless to other, just like salmon farms). The difference is that you can have more people with aquaculture in the end.
The problem comes when the fish farming industry doesn't stick to the rules and the government, who are meant to be overseeing the industry, decide to look the other way.
That exact situation has been going on in Tasmania for many years now and that type of neglect can only end badly.
More details: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-08/how-salmon-farming-got...
The alternative is to stop eating carcinogenic, heart disease-causing foods made out of animals and animal secretions:
Please, provide evidence that all ANIMAL products are carcinogenic and causes heart diseases.
The logical conclusion is not stop eating any animal product, is eating less meat.
If we look at lakes, there are plenty that is over populated because of eutrophication, but the type of fish that thrives in that environment also eats fish eggs of the fish we want to eat. Predators can actually go extinct by a combination of prey either the eggs and humans eating the adults.
Much of this could be solved if we just wanted to eat more divers selection of fish.
What's are the alternatives here? The ocean is overfished, mammals and birds require large amounts of water and either large areas of land or bring welfare concerns.
I can't clearly see that fish farming is any better than farming of any other animals. Did I understand you right?