With the meat packaging plant closures and the "shortage" of beef, the cattle herds are probably growing in numbers, which could cause the spike of methane.
What do you mean? I never heard any official recommendations.
Also, a quick Google search says there were 30-60 million bison roaming the plains. Today, there are 95 million cows, and another 70 some million pigs.
I don't claim that farmed meat does not contribute anything, but it's not the only, or even main problem of the climate change. Start a garden, and see for yourself how much resources it takes to grow enough plant food to feed your family,and compare that to a number calories you can get from one cow.
Currently, the animals in our food system are not. I do garden extensively, and I know how difficult it is to produce food for a whole year. I also know that feeding carbon intensive corn to cows to eat is a thermodynamically loosing game calorie-wise. If you want to pay for regeneratively raised, grass fed beef from farms with integrated waste management, good for you. If you think your 99c hamburger at a fast food restaurant isn’t part of a climate and ethical catastrophe, I think you’re being willfully ignorant.
Personally I’m a vegetarian, but the main thing I care about is that people eat less meat, which was more sustainably and ethically raised.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C16&q=cow...
>I don't claim that farmed meat does not contribute anything, but it's not the only, or even main problem of the climate change. Climate change does not have a "main problem", it's multiple minor causes that each need to be addressed (and agriculture is a big one).
>Start a garden, and see for yourself how much resources it takes to grow enough plant food to feed your family,and compare that to a number calories you can get from one cow. Are you implying the cow doesn't need to be fed? Cows need a lot more water and land per gram of protein or per calorie than fish, poultry or legumes. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014Natur.515..518T/abstra... https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...
I'm glad that I can eat a meat-and-dairy-based diet and am not forced to fill my calories with garbage plant-based substitutes.
If you want to work on reducing enteric fermentation emissions with technology, I'm all for it.
If you want me to cut my consumption of meat to save a few percent of methane that will do next to nothing for climate change, then get off my lawn.
No.
> You know that animals eat food, and the food they eat is grown in crops, and the crops use fertilizer ... right?
Yes.
> Even if emissions associated with growing crops are higher than expected, if the number of people that they feed is higher than the number that can be fed through meat, then reducing meat consumption is a win.
I disagree, because plant-based food is inferior, therefore it is a loss. From a pure nutrition perspective, meat and dairy isn't as inefficient as you might think.
You could probably cut down on some emissions by feeding people Soylent or some other food that had better been served to livestock instead, perhaps you can even brainwash people into doing that voluntarily. That doesn't mean it is a better outcome.
> If 30 percent of methane comes from industrial meat farming and 20 percent comes from industrial rice farming but our industrial meat feeds 1 billion people and our industrial rice feeds 2 billion people, I don't understand how that's an irrelevant concern.
It's not just about feeding people, but feeding them well. White rice is probably responsible for the huge rates of Diabetes in Asia. Brown rice is poorly digestible. Altogether, it is not very nutritious either.
> It's very convenient to form opinions in such a way so that no personal changes in consumption are ever required.
Don't get me wrong, my opinion is borne out of self-interest, it's not about moral grandstanding.
Even if a meat-based diet was better for no other reason than being more delicious, it wouldn't change my position fundamentally.
You're very welcome to change your consumption, just don't force it on me.
Must they be garbage substitutes? Must your vegetabilic food look and taste like a meat facsimile? I hear this perspective often from meat-eaters when they contrast their diet to a vegetarian diet, and I cannot understand it.
From a nutritional perspective however, animals can do things for us that we can't even do in the lab, let alone at industrial scale.
It might be possible to create some sort of fortified plant-based diet that has all the nutrients in a form that the body can actually absorb, but even then, that doesn't mean this is the route free people will go.
Even if you could change western food culture to make people to stop eating animal-based-food in favor of that plant-based Frankenfood, you will not change the food culture of rest of the world, which is shaking its head at white saviorism.
We eat more meat than ever. We subsidize meat production at every level so that all taxpayers pay for cheap meat, even vegetarians and vegans.
We can reduce subsidies, or even reverse them to accurately account for the externalities of pollution and global heating.
While population growth rate is lowering, humans are still increasing in population. We can make contraception and education more available globally.
The United States' science education has declined for generations so people don't understand nature and how we affect it. We can improve science education.