Making Farming More Climate-Friendly Is Hard. Just Ask Europe's Politicians. (nytimes.com) 186
The farmers' protests in Europe are a harbinger of the next big political challenge in global climate action: How to grow food without further damaging Earth's climate and biodiversity. From a report: On Tuesday, after weeks of intense protests in several cities across the continent, came the most explicit sign of that difficulty. The European Union's top official, Ursula von der Leyen, abandoned an ambitious bill to reduce the use of chemical pesticides and softened the European Commission's next raft of recommendations on cutting agricultural pollution. "We want to make sure that in this process, the farmers remain in the driving seat," she said at the European Parliament. "Only if we achieve our climate and environmental goals together will farmers be able to continue to make a living."
The farmers argue they're being hit from all sides: high fuel costs, green regulations, unfair competition from producers in countries with fewer environmental restrictions. Nonetheless, agriculture accounts for 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and it's impossible for the European Union to meet its ambitious climate targets, enshrined in law, without making dramatic changes to its agricultural system, including how farmers use chemical pesticides and fertilizers, as well as its vast livestock industry. It also matters politically. Changing Europe's farming practices is proving to be extremely difficult, particularly as parliamentary elections approach in June. Farmers are a potent political force, and food and farming are potent markers of European identity. Agriculture accounts for just over 1 percent of the European economy and employs 4 percent of its population. But it gets one-third of the E.U. budget, mostly as subsidies.
The farmers argue they're being hit from all sides: high fuel costs, green regulations, unfair competition from producers in countries with fewer environmental restrictions. Nonetheless, agriculture accounts for 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and it's impossible for the European Union to meet its ambitious climate targets, enshrined in law, without making dramatic changes to its agricultural system, including how farmers use chemical pesticides and fertilizers, as well as its vast livestock industry. It also matters politically. Changing Europe's farming practices is proving to be extremely difficult, particularly as parliamentary elections approach in June. Farmers are a potent political force, and food and farming are potent markers of European identity. Agriculture accounts for just over 1 percent of the European economy and employs 4 percent of its population. But it gets one-third of the E.U. budget, mostly as subsidies.
Everyone needs to eat (Score:5, Interesting)
So if you kill your local farmers you'll have to import food from the cheap questionable sources that could have a worse environmental impact.
People also make the decision with their wallets.
Re:Everyone needs to eat (Score:4, Insightful)
So if you kill your local farmers you'll have to import food from the cheap questionable sources that could have a worse environmental impact.
People also make the decision with their wallets.
Where the hell does the EU Parliament think that their food is going to come from if you run the farmer's out of business?
If the EU thinks that the farmer protests are nasty, wait until the grocery store shelves are empty. Hunger has a way of focusing you, most rikki-tik. Maybe what Brussels needs is a Peasants with Pitchforks moment.
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Expect the bullshit to continue until the elites hear the singing of guillotines. And if history is any guide, they still won't knock it off until the last head is chopped.
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they still won't knock it off until the last head is chopped.
Even then, I expect that the European Commission will continue to convene and issue directives for a few years following that.
Re: Everyone needs to eat (Score:4, Informative)
Nice rant, but goes totally sideways to the actual situation regarding farmers in Europe, Germany in particular.
Google for some giggles, I don't care enough to go into details right now. But bottom line is: it's a scam of larger corporations (because those.were who profiled most from subsidies), paired with what is essentially a failure of large farmer's organizations to properly deal with price-undercutting competition from outside Europe.
Inside view in a nutshell, they try to compete with the world suppliers by racing to the botttom, degrading product quality to the detriment of consumers and environment, instead of lobbying for raising the import bar, forcing outside competition to produce to the same (more expensive) standards or fuck off. And the reason they're doing this is easy: pure greed. Going down with prices, i stead of up with quality, opens them a larger market (world market).
Meanwhile, EU is destroying 50% of its own crops - after having paid out the farmer for that crops - simply because with such disconnect from supply-and-demand as high subsidies bring, there's a massive oversupply.
So... nope. Not buying whatever sob story is being sold about "and who will.out bread on the table?"...
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Note that this story is about the EU recognizing that the proposed changes are not going to work, and deciding to alter them more to farmer's liking.
So in answer to your question, the EU expects food to come from the farmers it is listening to and working with to find a sustainable path forward.
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Who said "kill"?
Ultimately, _everything_ hurts the environment. It depends upon definitions and what the desired outcome is. The problem with humans is that we do far more damage than other species to the surrounding environment: to plants, animals, atmosphere, and even geography. Rather than a slow amount of change over centuries or millenia, we are creating rapid change. But if all life does damage, then so why is it important? It's important because humans are changing the environment in ways that harm
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My first thought is beavers but I can't think of another example. There are likely more though. That's what animals (like us!) do. We alter our surrounding environment for our benefit.
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Ants, termites and other social insects.
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Thing is we are very efficient at it and that efficiency is going to be our downfall.
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Ants and termites :-) There are species of moths that will kill off trees.
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Humans aren't the only species that modifies its environment for its own benefit. Can you name another one? (I think there's only one, but I'd be pleased to be proven wrong on that.)
Coral. Beavers.
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Re:Everyone needs to eat (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's reasonable and appropriate to level the playing field by putting a tariff on any product that hasn't already been taxed by the originating country for the environmental damage created by its production.
Sure, make it too expensive for poorer people to buy. They can just eat cake, right?
Re:Everyone needs to eat (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Everyone needs to eat (Score:4, Interesting)
Well by this logic what we are doing currently is subsidizing poorer people by artificially lowering prices by letting companies shift their negative externalities instead of incorporating them into the price.
If carbon is taxed into costs and food becomes too expensive we may as well just subsidize poor people directly instead of subsidizing the offending business instead.
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If carbon is taxed into costs and food becomes too expensive we may as well just subsidize poor people directly instead of subsidizing the offending business instead.
Messing with peoples food will definitely engender voter backlash. One can see the anger now at current food prices due to inflation. Now make that a policy on purpose and you won't be well received.
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Agreed but at the same time a check in the mail goes a long way to being popular as well, but you are right, "price go up" is an instinctual negative reaction.
I don't think we will see that happen so we are where we are but the point stands, a subsidy is a subsidy, the people are paying the price regardless it's just moved somewhere else.
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The US does, but the electoral college makes that not exactly democracy either.
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"Federal Republic" [Re:Everyone needs to eat] (Score:3)
Only by the very narrowest of definitions of democracy. Technically the US is a federal republic .
Once again, this time louder: "Democracy" and "Republic" are not different types of government. Pretty much all forms of republic are democracies.
The US can be a federal republic and a democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Everyone needs to eat (Score:4, Interesting)
I would take the revenue and redistribute it equally to everyone. [wikipedia.org] People who buy the least and lowest priced food (poor people) would come out ahead.
Re: Everyone needs to eat (Score:5, Informative)
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How does the North Sea oil affect Sweden and Denmark? Could throw in Finland too as while not officially Nordic, they're similar.
Alberta has extracted more worth out of its oil then Norway and blown a trillion dollars while being in deficit much of the time and fighting with their fellow Canadians about their right to give the oil away and pollute as much as they like. More pure capitalism hasn't seemed to have helped all the people living in tents there in temperatures as cold as the Nordic countries exper
Re: Everyone needs to eat (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that how Sweden and Denmark had success? Wonder why Alberta, with more oil and less people has done so much worse.
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So communism?
No a socialist welfare state. Communism is a system where production is owned and controlled by the state.
Of course no system is pure something or other. In the old Communist states everyone was given a job by the government and you were at least expected to show up for it, pure welfare as we understand it was rare. The United States does have welfare abit less then what we call the Socialist European Countries. European Socialist countries on their part own major parts of a number of companies (AirBus co
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> Sure, make it too expensive for poorer people to buy. They can just eat cake, right?
Nordhaus one a Nobel Memorial Prize for figuring this out. You need three pieces: tax, tariff & rebate. You put a tax on your own carbon, you put a tariff on untaxed imported induced carbon and you give out a per capita rebate with all the rest.
Canada has 2 pieces of the puzzle, but is missing the tariff part. In Canada there's a carbon tax of 14 cents a litre on gasoline, and then everybody gets a few hund
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The way the long tails work, for 80% of Canadians the rebate is higher than the tax.
It may compensate you for the tax you pay directly. It most certainly does not compensate you for the hidden costs of the tax that is passed on in everything you buy. - the tax on the farmers and manufacturers, the tax on the shippers, and the tax on the wholesalers and retailers. None of those people get any rebates, and they pass those costs along to you. Government hopes that keeps it out of sight and out of mind, but many consumers seem to have figured it out.
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Yep. There is an argument whether it is 0.2% or 0.4% that the carbon tax has raised prices while the bull shitters claim it has raised prices worldwide and is the sole reason that the world has inflation.
People are going to be disappointed when they get the new government and things get worse, along with changes in the election laws to make sure the people no longer have a choice.
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'tis true. OTOH, there are ways the governments help.
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Sure, make it too expensive for poorer people to buy. They can just eat cake, right?
If poor people can't afford basic food then address that by supporting the poor people, not by letting everyone including the rich fuck the world over through ignored externalities of their actions.
Incidentally since you care about the poor people so much it's worth noting that the poor are disproportionately affected by climate change https://www.weforum.org/agenda... [weforum.org]
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If poor people can't afford basic food then address that by supporting the poor people
You gonna support the middle class too? Because they won't be happy at you making food less affordable any more than the poor people do.
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That's the problem in a nutshell. If the people don't have cheap food the government risks a revolution. If you want to pile on regulations the food will not be cheap unless you use fossil fueled large scale agriculture with economies of scale. If you don't want that (which means you do want organic local agriculture) then you need either serfs/slaves that you are willing to keep at bare subsistence, or you can provide subsidies to the farmers to make up the difference between the cost of production at dece
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For context Dad threw in the towel on the family 45 cow 200 acre dairy farm back in the 1960's. Even then the return on his labor was way below what other employment would pay.
That's not because of government. That's because a 45-cow farm can't compete against highly-mechanized agribusiness. Same reason shoes are made in factories, instead of by shoemakers. Economy of scale.
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No shit Sherlock (Score:2)
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Crops are themselves largely carbon neutral (they absorb carbon when growing, but that is all released again when they are consumed and metabolized for energy by humans and other animals), but how we get those crops is not.
- Diesel fuel to sow the seeds, spread the fertilizers/pesticides, harvest the final crop, and to transport it where it needs to go to be used.
- Energy cost of creating and
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IF what you're saying is true, these same people would not be pushing for 'sustainable plant based diets' (which are far more dependent on those industrial inputs than animal based products, and less nutritious). But they are.
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Meat production is far MORE dependent upon those inputs than the crops. After all, what do livestock eat? In the US, most of them eat those very same crops. In essence, the environmental impact of animals will ALWAYS be worse than grain, because of the inefficiency of producing meat from grain. The benefit to those diets isn't that the grains are perfectly sustainable, but that you are cutting out the middle man (the animals we like to eat) who - like all m
Its time to show the technocrats the door (Score:4, Interesting)
The administrative state on both sides of the Atlantic has grown way beyond what the organizing documents, certainly of the US, but very much UK and France as well ever authorized.
The techno-autocracy is a violation of the social contract. Its time burn it down! Use you votes to put the populists in power, especially those who have personal axe to grind and dont stop until the current group of bureaucrats and regulators are running scared.
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There's a whole expose' you can watch on the areas around Brussels being marked as 'low nitrogen' which precludes farming, which is what is there now, and *totally coincidentally* there are plans on file at the city office for a new WEF/OWG Capitol District in the exact same spot.
These are wealthy bastards trying to steal working class land and telling you they're saving the planet.
No matter how much you despise these parasitoids it's not enough.
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You don't seem to understand how the EU works.
What happened here is that the "technocrats", the EU's civil service, were asked to create new rules by the elected officials. They didn't do this on their own, they were tasked with it by representatives.
They gathered expert advice, and had an open consultation, then drafted their proposed rules. After feedback from the elected bodies, they understood that they were not what the elected representatives wanted, and so will revise them.
The populists are idiots wh
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Populists are a menace to civilization. For every problem, they have a proposed 'solution' that is simple, sounds attractive and does not actually solve the problem.
Invite the populists in, and you end up with an authoritarian, undemocratic state that goes to hell in a handbasket.
Disingenuous doublespeak (Score:5, Informative)
The framing of this is disingenuous doublespeak.
What the governments are doing are pinching people out of their livelihood while enacting policies which will (and are, globally) causing food scarcity. It's hard to see it as anything but intentional.
The solution to shitty government laws is not to figure out how to get people to comply and avoid the politicians from getting strung up on lamp posts for ruining peoples' lives. The solution is to change the horrible laws and get rid of the politicians who put these horrible laws on the books.
Keep this up and we'll see famine in the West similar to the food crisis which was manufactured by helpful government efforts a couple years in Sri Lanka.
https://fee.org/articles/sri-lanka-s-food-crisis-is-man-made-and-demonstrates-the-danger-of-faux-environmentalism/
Free trade (Score:2)
You cannot farm without chemical pesticides and fertilizers, if your competitors use them.
There is an impossibility trinity: environment preservation, free trade, and decent farmers income. You have to sacrifice one of the three.
Making anything will be extremely hard if (Score:2)
Maybe itâ(TM)s time to exclude farming from c (Score:2)
You can't have it all. (Score:2)
Spending tax money is easy. Ask EU politicians (Score:2)
Maybe first start addressing the waste of moving the all EU meetings between Brussels and Strassburg EVERY SINGLE MONTH.
Technically.. (Score:2)
This ain't about farmers (Score:3)
The other point is that agri-chemical industry farming methods degrade soil & land & make ecosystems less robust & resilient to extreme weather. Newer, less chemically intensive methods are exactly what we need, bearing in mind the extreme weather events that the EU is regularly facing right now.
Rather than squeezing poor farmers & agricultural workers (many farms in the EU are no longer run by what you & I think of as "farmers") between agri-chemical corporations & legislated environmental targets, why not help them?
& farming subsidies? I'll give you one guess as to who gets most of the benefit of those.
Do pesticides affect the climate? (Score:2)
Or was this a case of green activists trying to sneak through a non-climate restriction, and muddying the waters with lots of noise about the environment and emissions targets.
propaganda dialed to 11 (Score:2)
Re: Farmers FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
That is true but not because of this.
The people of Europe want to have a future.
Getting pollution under control is a key step towards that.
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Re: Farmers FTW (Score:2)
The obvious solution is to place tariffs on imported goods which account for the difference.
That they are not doing this proves they do not want to solve this problem. Why this might be is left as an exercise blah blah blah.
That we in the US are not doing it, likewise.
If a nation doesn't want to allow inspectors/assessors then you simply levy the maximum tariff. Not complicated.
What is complicated about it is that the wealthy are profiting from the importation, so they resist simple, rational, and effective
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https://www.consilium.europa.e... [europa.eu]
They aren't just going to obliviously let market forces change that situation going forward, either. The EU spends big on subsidizing domestic agriculture.
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China is currently doing more then all the other countries together. More nukes, solar, wind, battery production then the rest of the planet together and starting to kick their coal habit. One of the few positives of a dictatorship is they can force their society to swivel quick.
Agriculture vs. Nature (Score:2)
Getting pollution under control is a key step towards that.
Yes, but some of the "pollution" from agriculture is highly questionable. Take, for example, the methane produced by cattle. In North America, before Europeans arrived there there were an estimated 30-60 million bison roaming the continent. The current estimate today is around 32 million cattle and about 0.4 million bison. While this is bad news for bison, in terms of greenhouse gases it probably means that the impact of cattle farming has been a net decrease in greenhouse gas emissions - assuming bison pr
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assuming bison produce about as much methane as cattle
lrn 2 internet pls [google.com]
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Does raise the question of whether a Bison produces as much methane as a grain fed steer.
Quickly looking, it seems that a Bison produced about 30 kilograms a year compared to a 100 kilograms a year from a cow. You probably could have better understanding then me who mostly glanced, to this study, https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/... [cdnsciencepub.com], also https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
Agriculture has other larger emissions of greenhouse gas such as NOx which perhaps should be a larger worry, though moving from cattle to oth
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Getting pollution under control is a key step towards that.
Simple solution: reduce industrial farming and stop shipping food into the cities. Want to eat? Move the urban populations out into the countryside and have them practice lower intensity agriculture [wikipedia.org].
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Getting pollution under control is a key step towards that.
Simple solution: reduce industrial farming and stop shipping food into the cities. Want to eat? Move the urban populations out into the countryside and have them practice lower intensity agriculture [wikipedia.org].
Poe's law strikes again: you can't distinguish satire from ignorance if the person posting doesn't explicity say so.
This is satire, everybody.
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The people of Europe want to have a future.
Getting pollution under control is a key step towards that.
You mischaracterize the problem. Having a functional economy and maintaining reasonable quality of life is a much higher priority than any green initiatives. Prosperous people reduce the pollution. The data on this is unambiguous.
Re:Farmers FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've always thought the argument in favor of wide scale gun ownership as a defence against ones own democratic governance as ridiculous. With our out of control homicide and gun violence rates due to the wide availability of guns all it's saying is that we should endure the deaths of so many innocents now because at some point in the future we might need to resist government because...? Wait, what's worse than tens of thousands of innocents dying each year?
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Wait, what's worse than tens of thousands of innocents dying each year?
More innocents dying because of tyranny dictatorship?
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If governments want to abolish you, your family, and your way of life, abolish your government. The protests have shown that the EU oligarchs are out of touch with reality and don't represent the people of Europe.
Protests almost universally represent the voice of a minority. Democracy represents the voice of the majority. People know who they are voting for and unlike the USA or UK there is a *lot* of choice in Europe. There are plenty of people in Europe who think farmers and high intensity industrial farming is out of control and would like to see it reigned in before it destroys the world around them.
Just one example of this is clear in the Netherlands, the world's most intense industrial farmer and largest expor
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There are plenty of people in Europe who think farmers and high intensity industrial farming is out of control and would like to see it reigned in before it destroys the world around them
Lots of people have opinions. Most of them don't understand the actual consequences of those opinions. The EU government is largely driven by a lot of big idea bureaucrats that enjoy pulling big target numbers out of their rears with zero concept of the things they are regulating. They just think they are smarter than everyone and that anything they propose must be done. How it gets accomplished, they don't care. What the consequences are, they don't care. None of that concerns them because they have
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Just one example of this is clear in the Netherlands, the world's most intense industrial farmer and largest exporter of food per capita. Incidentally also a country with an actual political party that represents only farmers, and a party which incidentally got *checks notes* fuck all votes in the most recent election.
You mean this farmers party? Farmers' protest party win shock Dutch vote victory [bbc.com]
And didn't Geert wilders just win the recent Dutch election? He may or may not be able to form a coalition, but that is a huge step to the right in any case. He seems pretty much aligned with the farmers as well, and certainly won't be pushing climate costs on them (or anyone). There has certainly been no repudiation of farmers in recent Dutch election history as you imply.
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Yes that one. The party which promised a lot of things and cleaned up in local elections. But when it turned out they were ONLY focused on farmers that same party initially expected to win big in the following national election got a tiny 4% of the votes, which leads to an interesting political field of the local government being wildly different from the national one. That is the exact repudiation that I am talking about. The farmers party got completely rejected in the national election.
As for Wilders, no
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Canada announced the approval of a new product there that can massively reduce the methane produced by cattle (where most of the animal food supply chain emissions arise). Report I read this morning put the amount as high as 45% reduced [beefmagazine.com]. TO the best of my knowledge, the company is already pursuing regulatory approval in the US and EU.
Now that there are effective tools, I anticipate that the governments are going to take more of a free-hand with regulating methane emissions dire
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Seaweed has been tried and does reduce methane emissions slightly (not 45%) and does nothing for the land use degradation and land water and fertilizer used for animal feed.
It's not a solution.
The solution is to reduce demand for meat.
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As I understand it, bromoform binds to the active site and stick there. Preventing new CH4 from being produced. 3-NOP, otoh, binds to a different spot on the enzyme in question, reducing its efficiency dramatically
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> Reducing demand for meat requires changing the mind of virtually every meat eater in the world.
Not really. It just requires it be priced at a level commensurate with the environmental damage it does. People won't like that so it won't happen, but it is a proven method of reducing demand for a product.
Re: Stop Livestock Farming (Score:3)
that said, I agree. The cost should account for the environmental impacts. I approve of cap and trade for carbon, including for meat production. However, if we get that, it
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The solution is to reduce demand for meat.
You will have to find another solution. Voters are not going to go for that one.
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Forcing everyone to veganism at gunpoint (and killing off all livestock critters AND preventing other similar animals such as Bison from taking their place)
Why do all the ideological posts eventually claim "the other guys wants to do this at gunpoint!"
No, nobody is proposing "forcing everyone to veganism at gunpoint." Nor killing all livestock.
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Re:Stop Livestock Farming (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution is simple. Reduce meat consumption to something close to what it was 100 years ago when meat was only for Sunday dinner.
A hundred years ago, meat consumption was probably about double what it is now [mikecallicrate.com].
The folks you got your information from incorrectly based their estimates on cross-state imports. But although produce tends to be massively imported and exported between states, a lot of meat was historically grown and butchered locally [theatlantic.com].
Even slaves in the Civil War era were typically given half again more meat than the average American eats today [timelinesmagazine.com] (about half a pound of meat per day).
There is no other way to reduce livestock pollution.
Adding seaweed to the diet of cows can reduce methane by up to 90% [theguardian.com].
But you're right that moving agriculture back to the way it was done a century ago might help. Smaller farms that use natural fertilizer (from animals) aren't dumping ammonium nitrate on everything like industrial-sized farms do. Of course, doing that on industrial-sized farms would require new machine designs that can do the job closer to the way humans would at a small scale, but it might be worth trying.
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A hundred years ago, meat consumption was probably about double what it is now [mikecallicrate.com].
Partial credit, that guy did not adjust for population growth so while yes we eat less meat per capita, total meat production (the thing we are concerned about in regards to emissions) has never stopped rising
https://ourworldindata.org/mea... [ourworldindata.org]
The seaweed thing would be great if it works but I first heard about it like a decade ago and I haven't read about anyone doing it at scale.
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A hundred years ago, meat consumption was probably about double what it is now [mikecallicrate.com].
Partial credit, that guy did not adjust for population growth so while yes we eat less meat per capita, total meat production (the thing we are concerned about in regards to emissions) has never stopped rising
Ah, but the same is true for total vegetable production as well. And lowering total food production can't be a realistic goal unless you wipe out 75% of the population, which most people would say is a bad idea.
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A hundred years ago, meat consumption was probably about double what it is now [mikecallicrate.com].
No. Meat consumption *per capita* was higher. But it wasn't eight times higher, which is what it would need to be in order to simply break even with population growth in order for you point to make any sense at all.
Adding seaweed to the diet of cows can reduce methane by up to 90% [theguardian.com].
And yet in actual trials the results of the methane cuts have been drastically lower. Here, from the same newspaper: https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
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The machines you want already existed. They were pulled by horses. A lot of horse drawn stuff was modified for the early tractors. Big tractors were more cost effective than small tractors so the equipment scaled up quickly.
And if you are thinking EV, the tractor does not need 1000 HP. It does need to be able to run all day. Dad pulled a four bottom plow with a John Deere 3010 gas tractor. (At the time no force in the universe could start a diesel in a Wisconsin winter.) The tractor also can't be excessive
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The amount of meat in diets might have been the same or higher but there are huge differences in what was used and how it was raised. The meat used was largely pigs and goats (great generalist foragers which are even beneficial to pastures). chickens sheep and cows were only slaughtered after egg/milk producing ran low. Old farm animals like horses and donkeys were also slaughtered. A good chunk of it was also what we would now call "bush meat". Another big difference was that human grade grains were not us
Re:Stop Livestock Farming (Score:5, Insightful)
>stop livestock farming
no.
>stop eating meat
no.
>pretty please
No, get fucked.
Why are progs essentially temporarily embarrassed dictators? The audacity in attempting to have mommy dictate (via taxes of course!) pretty personal facets of daily life (what you can eat, drive, where you can live, etc) is actually pretty impressive.
That said, Livestock apparently accounts for ~6% of global emissions. Surely there's other less important things that could be reduced first? like international shipping (how much useless consumer-grade bullshit plastic gets trucked around all over the world?) or data centers? Oh no, not the amazon/MS/google/FB spyware centers!
Or Perhaps we could stop subsidizing population growth in Africa -- which is a big chunk of the population growth over the last 100 years, and pretty much 100% of it going forward.. Might that free up some emissions for the rest of the world?
Or is it more about progs and prog-adjacent types finding meat eating just kind of icky, and looking for an acceptable cudgel to nudge the unwashed masses into a more socially conscious diet?
On an aside, do you happen to be a vegetarian or vegan?
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That said, Livestock apparently accounts for ~6% of global emissions.
Are you including the emissions produced by vegans hyperventilating in that figure?
Re: Stop Livestock Farming (Score:2)
You mean hyperarselating? Because of all the fibre.
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I see a lot of finger pointing in your comment and not much personal responsibility.
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Could you be more specific? my brain is getting fried trying to understand the point you're trying to make here?
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Re: Stop Livestock Farming (Score:2)
Eat what you want but let others eat what they want, too. Keep your own beliefs to yourself and don't be a food terrorist.
Re:I wonder what happens (Score:4, Insightful)
Fact is, climate change is real, we have known about it for decades, and all the hand-waiving in the world about alternative explanations for the observed phenomenon have failed to hold up to scrutiny... repeatedly. We need to do something about it, and anyone trying to debate that is not being a serious person.
That said, there is absolutely room to negotiate over who is to bear the brunt of the cost of decarbonizing our economy and food production system. Or, bout the trade off between making meat production more efficient (which I favor) and pushing people to be more vegetarian (which I opposed) or some combination of the two (which I'd settle for). However, any rhetoric around "is it real" or "is it our fault" is an instant disqualification from the discussion as far as I'm concerned.
And for the record, I'm in the animal production industry. Much of the future policy around carbon and food is going to directly impact me and my customers, and I am not really looking forward to it. But I'm also a father of 4, and I'd like my kids to NOT see themselves as the last generation of a failed civilization. I'd like for my prospective grandchildren to enjoy a world that isn't accelerating towards terminal heat death.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd say that finding any evidence against the human-centered climate change consensus is likely to be a career-ending act.
To the contrary. Any atmospheric scientist who came up with a theory that showed why the greenhouse effect wasn't causing global warming, and have the correctness of that theory confirmed by measurements, would instantly become the most famous climate scientist in history. There are plenty of universities that would love to have that climate scientist on their faculty.