Please, stop this fake news of meat growing in burned-down rainforest farms. Most of the cattle in brazil is raised on biomes that were never rainforests to start, no matter what the lie the NYT told you. Free-ranged cattle are also usually raised in regions that are very marginal in arable land. And in fact, bovines filled an ecological niche in the "Pantanal" region that was once occupied by native herbivores, extinguished centuries ago by human occupation. Eliminating them now would just mean more fires in the dry season.

Well, it's not just Brazil. A lot of meat in Europe is grown on burned or cut-down forest, it just happens to be the case it was done centuries ago.

Yes, the entire talk of destruction of rain forests comes across as a little hypocritical when it's coming from countries with like 6% forest cover.

I was up in scottish highlands recently and many hills are bold like someone just shaved them. Looks weired.

The only solution O see is to habe a global forestly fund, so developing countries can get paid but dont have to destroy forests.

The bizarre thing is that Scottish (and Irish) people largely see barren moonscape as "natural". I never encountered such hatred for trees before I moved to Ireland. I drove through the Sperrins on Sunday and while the rolling hills are pretty they would be a lot prettier with native broadleaf forest...

> The only solution O see is to habe a global forestly fund, so developing countries can get paid but dont have to destroy forests.

That just incentivizes scammers and fraud, just like many of the "CO2 offset certificates" based on paying people not destroying forests they wouldn't have destroyed anyway [1].

[1] https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2023-01/co2-certificates-frau...

I am aware of CO2 market being a scam, this is very diffetent to what I propposed.

CO2 market depends on assertations of intent, and on efficacy, both of which are easy to forge and hard to prove.

Forestry found is much simpler. Everyone put money into a pot, say. we hVe 100 billion dollars.

The. yoy get data from satellite, and calculate square miles of forest.

Then you divide the pot by square miles of forest.

Then countries det paid based on how many square miles are in their borders.

There is not potential for fraud - the calculation is sinple and idiotproof. You might debate if some marginal land is forest or not, but for 90% of it you can clearly see what it is from space.

You can also have debate about how muhch should be put into the pot, and by whom.

The problem: illegal farming and logging will always be more profitable than whatever the West can manage to pay countries like Brazil - not to mention it isn't sure how much the West can reasonably hand out in payments given the multiple crises straining our budgets, or how much isolationist politicians like Trump want to pay out / if they are even interested in climate and nature protection.

And on top of that come the corruption issues. Large amounts of foreign money flowing into poor(er) countries has historically always invited either said money being grifted away or redirected to other political budgets that have nothing to do with the purpose the money was originally earmarked for.

Do you have a source for this?

Many sources, spanning many years, and both private (such as newspapers or NGOs) as well as governmental (e.g. the UN), have found that an overwhelming percentage of razed rainforest in Brazil was used for cattle farming [1][2], with a large part of the remainder going to large-scale soy farms, and a tiny bit for small-scale subsistence farming.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra...

[2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/09/14/devastating-burning-seas...

Without looking at details, I agree we produce too much. Of everything, not just meat.

Edit: Regarding meat from Latin Amerca, where exactly do you think all the raw materials forbthe vegan, processed stuff in our super markets come from? Like imported meat, from burned down rain forest areas, ranging from Latin America to Asia.

Is switching from meat to more grains better for birds? I strongly doubt that. Converting fields to planting fields is going to kill a lot more small mammals, birds, insects and so on?

It is better, because switching from meat to grains results in less area needed for planting grains, since we don't need to feed the animals anymore. Most grains that we farm today are fed to animals.

Interesting. But rough time to be a cow.

Most farm animals are kept in absurdly large stables. In Germany, the record is at 600.000 chickens (avg. 40.000) on a single farm [1], for pigs and cows it's 10.000-18.000 per farm [2].

This raises a number of problems:

- the poo and urine from the farm animals is way, way too much to distribute on the fields around these mega-farms, meaning it has to be transported across Europe. The worst offenders here are the Dutch, which have so much manure that it's impossible to spread out all of it in the country, and plans to close down farms have led to protests and riots [3].

- These farms themselves, as well as the slaughterhouses, are a blight on their neighborhoods - from personal experience, it's bad enough to live next to half a dozen cows, but large farms? These can be smelled many kilometres away.

- all these farm animals have to be fed insane amounts of food - depending on which study you believe and which animal you look at, 1kg of animal meat requires anything from 3 to 20kg of plant-based food (most often, grain).

The last point is where the meat is at: say, you cut down the demand for meat in half. For Germany, that would mean going from 7.6 million tons a year to 3.8 million tons - by the leverage effect anything between 12 to 38 million tons of grain production can be avoided, or to put it bluntly: out of the 43 million tons of grain produced in Germany in 2022 [5], you can avoid around 25%. Obviously the numbers are a bit off due to imported food and livestock, but the estimate is that, yes, in fact about half the grain produced in the country is food for livestock [6].

Even assuming that humans will eat a bit more grain to compensate for the calories they would have gotten by meat, it's still safe to assume that you could reduce total grain growth by at least 10% - enough to provide strips of greenery surrounding fields and to make them otherwise more friendly for animals. The reduction of manure production would lead to higher water quality in rivers and more aquatic life, and the space occupied by large stables can also be returned to nature for local environments.

[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/gefluegelmaester-in-d...

[2] https://www.boell.de/de/2016/01/13/mecklenburg-vorpommern-wo...

[3] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/Nitrat-im-Grund...

[4] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung-fischerei/versorgun...

[5] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Landw...

[6] https://www.bmel-statistik.de/ernaehrung-fischerei/versorgun...