[mytailorisrich]

Beef in itself is not bad for the environment. It's the scale of demand that is bad. And that demand is fueled by the combined effects of global population growth and global increase in standards of living.

We tend to stop at the symptoms instead of going after the root cause.

[Qem]

> Beef in itself is not bad for the environment. It's the scale of demand that is bad.

Wasting crops feeding cattle is inherently worse than the alternative, feeding directly on the crops and avoiding the wasting of calories when going up one trophic level.

[virtue3]

"A large amount of beef is grown in areas that are not suitable for crop farming in the United States. In fact, 85% of the land used to graze cattle in the U.S. is marginal land, which means it's not suitable for growing crops. Marginal land is either untouched or used for grazing livestock, mostly cattle"

Grain finishing is another matter. But it's not a 1 grain : 1/10th beef type situation.

Now chopping and burning down the amazon to create grazing land for cattle? yeah that's going to probably kill us all.

[whywhywhywhy]

They're gonna chop and burn it down either way, it'll either be for cattle or if you make eating meat illegal they'll chop and burn it for something else like palm oil.

Like it's obvious the people who own and control that land don't care about it anywhere near as much as you do so if you want them to stop chopping it down essentially you're gonna need to start paying them not to. Just seems naive to think stopping specifically poor people from eating meat is the solution to this.

[whimsicalism]

If you take away one of the profitable reasons to chop down the Amazon, it’ll reduce people doing it at the margin - that is simply facts.

> Poor people from eating meat

Yeah and a carbon tax will stop poor people from using as much gas, etc. - if we want to solve climate change we cannot just insulate all poor people from externality pricing.

[mytailorisrich]

At global scale we can't solve the environmental crisis in general (climate is only one aspect) and solve poverty at the same time with 10 billion people.

Solving the environmental crisis means reducing our consumption of resources. Solving global poverty means a significant increase in consumption of resources.

So the only way forward is to let the global population decrease ASAP so that we can both live well and preserve the planet.

[whimsicalism]

Resource intensity is decreasing. We can solve both at the same time, but we can’t solve both with maximum possible speed at the same time, true.

[whywhywhywhy]

There’s limitless profitable reasons to chop it down.

Don’t understand why people want to play whack a mole to get to the end goal all while making everyone’s lives worse, esp on the lower income levels who can’t afford organic meat.

When if you want the trees saved then pay them to keep them and hold them to it. Like that’s the actual goal no? And easier than completely retooling society as a backwards way to cause that change.

I mean this is about the trees right?

[whimsicalism]

> When if you want the trees saved then pay them to keep them and hold them to it. Like that’s the actual goal no? And easier than completely retooling society as a backwards way to cause that change.

REDD+ programs (which is what you are describing) are massive failures at preventing deforestation or carbon decreases.

> There’s limitless profitable reasons to chop it down.

No, there are costs and profits and if you decrease the profits and increase the costs it changes peoples behavior at the margin. The Amazon rainforest isn't the one thing that is exempt from basic economics.

[nolverostae]

Yes, but now give out the statistics on how much of the calories fed to cows in total in the US or worldwide is actually grazing and how much is from crops that need extra area apart from where the animals graze. Even cattle that grazes is often supplemented with grain, and the grain is of course much more calorie-dense.

The world wide land area for farming would reduce from 4 to 1 billion hectares if we didn't use livestock to feed humans. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

So the answer to "what would we do with all that land we can't put crops on" is "whatever we want". For example, we could just leave it be nature, since we don't need it for farming.

[lukas099]

“Not suitable for crop farming” =/= “ecologically unimportant”

[jeffbee]

Seriously, the is a big problem in the US. Cattle are grazed on BLM land and they trample all the stream banks to such an extent that riparian ecosystems are totally destroyed. And in exchange the grazing fee is only $1/head/month! If you stand at the point where a stream crosses from a fenced conservation area into a grazing area, the difference across the boundary is stark.

[Amezarak]

How did did the riparian ecosystems thrive when there were tens of millions of bison? There is the same order of magnitude of cows in the US today (90 million) as bison hundreds of years ago (30-60 million.) Bison are also generally much heavier, meaning they eat more and trod the ground more deeply.

[jeffbee]

The historical range of the American bison was largely not overlapping with BLM grazing lands. The bison, a sensible animal, wasn't found in California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.

[verisimi]

> Now chopping and burning down the amazon to create grazing land for cattle? yeah that's going to probably kill us all.

How?

I mean, I'm not a fan of destroying forests, etc, but around here, there is no unmanaged land so presumably all the forests were already burnt etc for farmers... But we're all around, right? I don't get how burning the Amazon for food people want will actually kill us.

[jterrys]

Because the rainforest is important in regulating global temperature and oxygen production, much more so than the (probable) temperate climate forests you are from.

You are living in a post destruction area, with new forests planted to supplement the destruction that was there before. Most of these forests aren't more than 70 years old, that's about when we finally made an effort to fix how badly we totally fucked up and why people needed clean air to not die from lung cancer (among other things). The loss of biodiversity, air quality, etc. already occurred. You are a survivor. What's more, your survival was in part supported by the air quality of other virgin forests further away from you that weren't yet cut down. But now that they are being cut down, there's less left to support you.

In short, you're asking yourself why you shouldn't shoot yourself in the foot again, because you managed to survive the first shot and it looks to you like it healed just fine (it didn't).

[verisimi]

I didn't shoot myself in the foot.

Someone around here did clear the forests for farmland... and people are doing ok.

Its not that everyone died, as the comment I responded to said.

[chinupbuttercup]

To substantiate your point, I was thinking about deforestation for farming in Indiana (where I live) and Ohio last week and learned that Indiana was 90% forest until taxes got in the way. It's crazy that something as silly as taxes can cause most of your forests to become farmland.

https://woodlandsteward.squarespace.com/storage/past-issues/...

We are still alive. I wish we had the forests, but we have survived and the environment has adjusted.

[adrianN]

The Amazon is pretty important for the global climate

[bongodongobob]

Cows don't eat people crops.

[colordrops]

The amount of energy and water used to grow those crops is spent regardless, and could have either not been spent, or spent on people crops.

[mytailorisrich]

That's an uneeded "optimisation". There is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle. Again, the issue is that the environment has a limited, finite capacity, which we exceed when we are 10 billion with good standards of living.

To reduce quality of life (because it's not limited to meat, it's comprehensive restrictions) simply to accomodate ever more humans on the planet is madness and unsustainable, anyway.

PS: Let's also remember, for example, that 50-60 million bisons roamed North America before European settlement, whereas there are about 28 million beef cows in the US today (according to Google).

[emptysongglass]

> There is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle.

You're not doing a whole lot to explain why there is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle. I can think of a whole host of reasons why it is wrong in matters of ethics and mercy. Who is there to advocate for the cow? We know cows feel a gamut of emotions just as we do. They are not insensate. Most humans, when given a knife or a captive bolt gun and told to go kill that cow on yonder would not. So we externalize the death-making to slaughterhouse workers who coincidentally also suffer:

> ...SHWs had significantly higher levels of depression compared with office workers, but not butchers. The difference in depression rates differed from study to study, ranging from 10% to 50% [1]

There's really no good, ethical argument to be made for the killing of animals for food or pleasure. Did we need to do it once to survive as a species? Yes. Are we largely living in a post-scarcity world where those practices should now be challenged? Yes.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10009492/

[mrighele]

> You're not doing a whole lot to explain why there is nothing wrong with eating meat and breeding cattle.

Why should explain why something is NOT bad ? It's up to you to convince him (or others) that it is bad, and the reasoning "according to MY ethics it is bad" is not a good argument.

There is a good argument to be made that in the West we should eat less meat, but that doesn't mean removing it completely: it is harder to make a balanced vegan diet, so for most people that would mean a less healthy outcome that just eating a moderate amount of meat.

[emptysongglass]

> Why should explain why something is NOT bad?

Because they're the one who made the claim without evidence or argument.

> It's up to you to convince him (or others) that it is bad

Yes, that's what I did.

> the reasoning "according to MY ethics it is bad" is not a good argument.

That wasn't my argument.

[Marsymars]

> There is a good argument to be made that in the West we should eat less meat, but that doesn't mean removing it completely: it is harder to make a balanced vegan diet, so for most people that would mean a less healthy outcome that just eating a moderate amount of meat.

You're making something of a jump there - not eating meat equates to a vegetarian diet, not a vegan diet. One can argue about the merits of a vegan diet over a vegetarian one, but a vegetarian, non-vegan diet is already a big step up over a meat-heavy one, and a vegetarian diet including eggs and dairy doesn't really have any challenges in being balanced/healthy compared to a moderate-meat diet.

[mytailorisrich]

There is nothing wrong or unethical with eating meat. It is a natural behaviour, which we are evolved for, and in fact a necessary animal behaviour within the environment at large.

If you do not wish to eat meat for personal reasons you are free to do so of course but I object to the current trend of minority groups trying to impose their views to the whole of society and to paint those who disagree as 'wrong'.

[asoneth]

> I object to the current trend of minority groups trying to impose their views to the whole of society and to paint those who disagree as 'wrong'.

I'm curious what you mean by "impose their views" with respect to meat-eating. Has a vegan ever tried to stop you from eating meat for example through physical force, threatening your livelihood, making meat illegal in their state, etc?

Don't get me wrong, I also dislike when strangers impose their moral, ethical, racial, political, or religious views on me.

But of all the groups that concern me, vegans are low on my list as their weapons mostly seem to be uncomfortably strong arguments on the internet and the occasional preachy Netflix documentary.

[lukas099]

We are omnivores and we have plentiful sources of plant nutrition. Eating meat is mot necessary for either health or happiness, and any appeal to it being “natural”, even if true (primitive human diets varied enormously) is irrelevant.

One could argue that meat eating is necessary for taking part on some people’s culture, which is true, but also shifting. And spreading the idea of vegetarianism is helpful in making that shift happen.

[carom]

Vegetarians also have higher levels of depression. [1]

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01650...

[colordrops]

It's obviously that they became vegetarian due to this personality trait rather than the other way around. Your study doesn't indicate otherwise. Vegetarians and vegans become so precisely because they are depressed about the state of affairs in animal welfare, human health, and the environment.

[repelsteeltje]

Another way to cast the meat vs crops debate is "true pricing": the growing demand for meat is not simply a result of growing population or growing standards of living, but caused by ignoring "externalities".

I.e.: if the true impact of turning crops into meat were reflected in the price of a hamburger, demand elasticity would eventually result in much less production. Or: growing meat consumption is mostly a result of implicit subsidies to maintain status quo, ignore climate change,etc.

[mtnGoat]

And to think those 50-60 million animals were slaughtered and laid to waste just to starve the natives out of the Great Plains.

[jdietrich]

If you think there are too many people, remember that you are people.

[mytailorisrich]

Why is it always impossible to have an adult discussion on this issue? (An interesting question for academics, I think)

Obviously we are all people. The question is do we keep chasing an ever increasing population or do we accept that it cannot keep growing and should in fact probably decrease?

Most developed countries have birth rates below replacement rate so this is already happening. We need to accept it and adapt.

[mrguyorama]

>The question is do we keep chasing an ever increasing population

We aren't.

Every bit of evidence is that Human population is on the path to stabilizing. Developing countries plateau, and all that "India and china are going to outreproduce us!" rhetoric was stupidity; people extrapolating an S curve as if it were an infinite exponential curve.

All you have to do is give women an education and legal access to birth control and it turns out most humans do not want 50 kids. Women happily manage population control, with no moral problems.

[mytailorisrich]

Oh we are. While global birth rates are indeed down this is seen as a catastrophe. Governments have policies to increase birth rates and in Europe we're also madly opening the doors to massive immigration to keep the population growing.

I have yet to see a government declare that they will let population decrease and initiate programs to adapt. Perhaps Japan comes close but we'll see.

[LinXitoW]

WE should keep the history of the world in mind. How things shake out when people say "there's too many people". Who gets killed first? Who gets involuntarily sterilized?

WE should consider that in the equation of "overpopulation", the other variable, "resource consumption", is far easier and more ethical to reduce.

The issue, of course, is that option 1 hurts others that aren't us, while option 2 will require changes from US, like not eating meat, reducing personal cars, reducing consumption and infinite growth in general.

[colordrops]

That's like saying "oil is not bad for the environment, it's the scale of the demand that is bad".

[DasIch]

Beef is extremely inefficient compared to plant-based food. We could sustain a far larger population with no loss in standards of living without it.

[wk_end]

Most people would argue that not eating beef would lower their standard of living.

[defiamazing]

Agreed. Check out /r/keto and /r/zerocarb for some great research about the natural human diet. Humans have eaten beef (exclusively even) for billions of years.

[jdietrich]

Humans have only existed for about 300,000 years. Cows are about 10,000 years old.

[chickenchase-rd]

Brazilians of years, not billions