[inthewind]

Hilarious to read people writing that they'd be better off with steak as a protein source, it might be better for you - but not the planet. We'd be better of as a species by eating the grains directly and bypassing the animals. Silly food subsidies (at least in the UK), subsidise meat and dairy over grain and veg. For example it's cheaper to buy sausages than it is to buy aubergines. Pretty senseless!

[VLM]

Couldn't disagree more strongly for economic reasons.

Lets say I pay $4 for a pound of bratwurst. He cannot do more than $4 of environmental damage and still stay in business. Even if brats magically fell from the sky for free, he simply can't do worse than stack up $4 worth of lead and old car tires and set them on fire or whatever other environmental degradation you can imagine.

The good organic farmers market meat costs more than $4/lb but less than $10 so the argument still holds. In fact I'm about to take delivery of a quarter-cow from a local organic farmer, got my high efficiency freezer all defrosted and emptied and ready to fill with delicious organic local grass fed beef.

On the other hand, the guy who I just handed a $10 to for a pound of quinoa can stack of $10 worth of old car tires and set them on fire and dump $10 of antifreeze into the river or WTF. He can afford to "ruin the environment" to the tune of $9.99 and still stay in business, unlike the brat guy above who would go almost instantly out of business if he spent $9 trashing the environment for every $4 incoming.

This is before I even get started on the supply side, where for the sake of argument lets say I have to kill one baby seals per $1 take home pay. That means to earn the $10 for quinoa regardless of how "pure" his quinoa growing operation is, ten baby seals died, whereas to earn the $4 for brats, regardless of how "pure" his pig sty is, a mere four baby seals had to die. I would argue that most people in the real world work at pretty ugly companies, ecologically speaking, so most of the enviro damage comes from earning the money rather than how its spent. Another example is I burn about a gallon of gas per day that I drive to work, so even if I do the ultimate green thing and finance planting a rainforest or something, I've still ecologically destroyed a gallon of gas before I even crack open my wallet.

There are some interesting petroleum arguments also, in that a pound of "meat" from the organic farmer five miles away at the farmers market burned a heck of a lot less diesel / bunker fuel than a pound of quinoa from another hemisphere. Although a small timer grew and sold a little native quinoa at the market which I bought, reality is that the vast majority of it is imported from another hemisphere at substantial cost.

I can buy locally grown organic beef, pork, and chicken. Most people can't buy locally grown quinoa. Some people can, and American's are literally starving them out of the local quinoa market, which is too bad.

Don't get me wrong, I am a hard core environmentalist at heart for example I think people who dump industrial waste into rivers I hike by should be capital punished by being forced to drink what they dumped till they croak, its only fair since the poor bastards living downstream are already literally drinking it... But feel good irrational non-analyzed environmentalism does more bad for the earth than good, and it turns out the reality is that everyone's better off if I eat a quarter pound steak rather than a quarter pound of quinoa, under existing conditions.

[biot]

Here's a trivial example disproving your entire argument:

$4 for a piece of wood from a forest where the company harvesting the wood does not replant any trees. They ravage the forest, leaving the land barren and unusable, before moving on to the next forest.

$6 for the same sized piece of wood from a forest where the company harvesting the wood replants trees, thereby increasing costs. They sustainably manage the same area of forest and the land remains fertile.

According to your logic, the $6 wood is 50% more environmentally damaging? Clearly we should all buy the $4 clearcut, ravaged forest wood because that manufacturer has less money to damage the environment with?

[socillion]

Your "bratwurst vs quinoa" argument makes the assumption that negative externalities per dollar is constant, therefore negative externalities can be measured by dollars spent.

You later disprove this assumption yourself when describing how local goods can have fewer negative externalities than those imported from across the globe.

[VLM]

Transport cost isn't an externality because neither were will-call or transported by myself (other than the last mile to my house). The transport cost was baked into the retail price in both examples. I suspect it was substantially higher for the quinoa; its still baked into the retail cost of both.

In comparison, an externality would be using my wifes prius to pick up a quarter cow from the butcher shop instead of a SUV. The price of the cow is constant but total environmental damage depends how its shipped. There are enough organic farms in my area that its assumed you'll pick up locally so there's a fixed price and you handle your own shipping aka drive out to the farm and back. My wife is arranging a quarter cow and I'm told its about 50 miles round trip, which is only about a half hour away. I can see how this business model wouldn't work for people living in Las Vegas or another desert.

That money goes somewhere. If I give someone 2.5 times as much money, they Could theoretically do 2.5 times as much "bad stuff". There seems to be a lot of hostility toward that obvious logical idea, no idea why. Think about it... local oil change place down by the river... if 200 people each give them $20 they can dump two barrels of used motor oil in the river. Now if only 100 people give them $20, how do you propose they'll dump the same two barrels of used motor oil in the river, if they only have one barrel anyway?

If I hire a repairman to repair my rain gutters, he can only afford to keep his old truck running. If I pay 3 times as much so he installs new gutters, he now has enough dough for a downpayment on a new truck, so he buys a new truck. It seems blindingly obvious which transaction results in more environmental damage... more money meant new gutters instead of fixing them, and a new truck. Less money means neither.

You can fool the finances for awhile, but not forever. $10 of something greenwashed is inherently going to cause more total damage than something the opposite of greenwashed but only $4, especially if they're basically the same thing sold by the same type of people.

[socillion]

A negative externality is the cost borne by parties unrelated to the transaction. In this debate, that party is the environment. I'm confused by your usage of the term.

According to your argument, buying organic food is worse for the environment than buying non-organic food because it costs more. Likewise, buying hydroelectric power would be worse for the environment (have more negative externalities) than buying coal power if it cost more. Do you dispute the logic of this extension of your argument?

[mynewwork]

Is this a satire on something? I can't tell if this is a big joke or if you actually believe this "cannot do more than $X of environmental damage" absurdity.

[VLM]

You'd have to expand on whats absurd about it. If food is a hot button for you, lets take it to a new area. How bout cars?

I recently bought a cheap little commuter car for about $15K. I could have bought a much fancier car for $30K but why waste the money to show off my wealth to people on the interstate whom I don't care about? Besides I'm pretty well off but I can find plenty of fun things to spend $15K on and a fancier car doesn't quite make the top 100 or so.

Can you make a reasonable argument, that given the same manufacturer and roughly the same workers that the $30K car wouldn't by definition cause about twice the environmental damage as its constructed as the $15K car? I think thats an epic engineering fail.

Now lets say I bought a 4WD all terrain $40K pork-mobile commuter instead of a green (paint) $100K quinoa-SUV... I'm sure the planet would be trashed about 2.5 times worse by the SUV than my glorified golf cart. Now then lets step back into the world of farmers and their products...

[mynewwork]

>Can you make a reasonable argument, that given the same manufacturer and roughly the same workers that the $30K car wouldn't by definition cause about twice the environmental damage as its constructed as the $15K car?

That doesn't make sense at all. There is not a 1 to 1 relationship, or even a linear relationship, between price and environmental damage.

All your arguments seem like you're trying to equate low-cost in dollars with low environmental damage. This is not the case, in food or in cars. In fact in many cases the exact opposite is true.

[dubfan]

Your reasoning relies entirely on the ability to quantify environmental damage, but it's not clear how you would quantify this. To me it appears completely arbitrary how you decide "this damage is 2.5x worse than the other damage"

[VLM]

So your argument is you can't compare levels of environmental damage. OK then by that argument there is no way to compare the environmental damage of $4 worth of bratwurst vs $10 worth of quinoa. So I may as well eat what tastes better and is healthier and eat the brat.

[mikeash]

If environmental damage actually cost money in that way, a lot of problems would be solved.

The problem is that there are a ton of externalities. Farmers aren't paying the cost for the ecosystems they destroy or the waterways they pollute or the monocultures they develop or the greenhouse gases they emit. They can trivially do more than $4 in environmental damage for your $4 purchase.

[VLM]

So... you're seriously trying to argue with me that giving people in the same line of business, with identical morality, outlook, and financial motivation $10 will magically result in less environmental damage than giving them $4, merely because they sell their $10 product with a little more greenwashing PR?

Think about it this way... human nature MIGHT be more dramatically different between vegetarian and meat eater than it is between two farmers, one who sells asparagus and one who sells beef. Even more confusingly there are small time farmers who sell both plants and meats yet have about the same political outlook as they slop the hogs or spray the fields. Your ascribing a large difference in customers, which probably does exist, to somehow apply to a relative monoculture of suppliers, where I don't think a major difference exists. I'm not buying it.

As a PR tool, yes for vegetarians its popular to publicize animal abuse and rivers of blood from slaughterhouses and such. That valuable PR tool WRT vegetarianism doesn't necessarily mean anything WRT environmentalism. The farmer spraying god knows what on his fields which you eat from is hardly the paragon of virtue just because you don't see any animal blood.

Furthermore you're assuming I work at a greener company than most farmers. Possibly true to as many as half the people. Obviously, $10 of income causes 2.5 times more environmental damage than $4 of income.

Finally the cold hard truth is for most people, food enviro damage doesn't matter compared to their giant SUV or obese mcmansion. Or obesity in general. I'm a mid size dude, in the tiniest highest conventional MPG car I could get, living in a small old house... I can eat ten steaks a day and not cause as much enviro damage via my lifestyle as one fat SUV driver who only eats (enormous quantities of) kale. Most people are like that, and their house, thermostat, car, and job swamp any food purchase effects by a large enough factor to ignore. Food works as a "guilt sells" PR tactic, its very Puritan, and its traditional to make americans guilty about their diet to control them. But I'm not buying it. I don't think the numbers fit reality.

[mikeash]

I am seriously arguing with you that $4 of one product can result in more environmental damage than $10 of a completely different product. Not that it does, but merely that it can, depending on exactly how they are produced and what the products are. Your simplistic "$4 cost means <=$4 in environmental damage" is just plain wrong.

[a8da6b0c91d]

Grain farming is less sustainable than pastured animal raising. You're welcome to a discussion about supportable human populations, but the idea that grain and legume farming is more ecologically sustainable is flat out wrong.

[inthewind]

Good point. But we should be thinking about supporting the masses.

If I have a hillside that isn't being used for anything else, than fair enough, I could throw a couple of sheep/goats on it and later reap the rewards.

I'm not sure how many of these romantic pastures continue to exist though. I live in a green fertile valley, where sheep farming is rife. The sheep get additional feed on top of their grazing. I'd prefer acres of trees or some other arable crop instead. Sadly most of us won't ever get access to the land to do so.

Less than 1% of the population owns 70% of the land, running Britain a close second to Brazil for the title of the country with the most unequal land distribution on Earth. - http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/17/high-ho...

[IgorPartola]

I can see that, though then you run into all manner of ethical questions of eating animals as well. What we eat is a pretty complex social, environmental, and moral problem.

Also, is it possible that grain farming is worse for the planet in some circumstances and better in others? I am sure that a small rice paddy is much better for the environment than a barn full of chickens in cages too small for them to stand up.

[a8da6b0c91d]

> ethical questions of eating animals as well

Grain and legume farming kills massive numbers of amphibians, birds, and rodents, with huge knock on ecological consequences. When you slaughter a pastured cow or sheep it's one life. During their lives the hooved animals serve a vital role in grassland ecology. The 1930s American dustbowl desertification happened in substantial part because of the preceding elimination of bison and steer.

> a barn full of chickens in cages

If chickens are caged in barns they're eating mostly grain. Historically normal chickens ran around outside and ate mostly bugs, in season.

[VLM]

Don't forget fish kills from fertilizer runoff. Depending on what part of the country you live in. Locally runoff fish kills means vegetarians are in the running with fish eaters in terms of total dead fish per year.

[Nelkins]

That's interesting, I've actually never heard this before. Do you have a source?

[VLM]

Cost of industrial non-organic grain production, herbicides, insecticides and the whole lot vs hey cow, here's some natural prairie, now go eat it, which doesn't cost as much environmentally.

[inthewind]

This cows on natural prairies idea is pretty much bullshit. Unless you are talking about some maasai tribes that bleed out their cattle for protein shakes. Cattle farming is huge agricultural business. And for most people their meat is farmed (with additional inputs).

Europeans decimated the Americas for their corn fed fatty marbled cattle. The rainforests are being cleared for soy, as with most arable crops a high percentage are grown as animal feeds. So there isn't any escape. Eating a cow has collateral damage too.

Take a fraction of those arable crops, don't bother meat farming and move over to better farming methods that are more in tune with nature. It's a balancing act.

If you haven't any ethical qualms about meat eating then you can still farm those fringe places pastorally - reindeer, goats, kangaroos etc.

[a8da6b0c91d]

I have a freezer full of pastured beef & game venison and that's pretty much all I eat in terms of protein. I have piles of grass fed butter in my fridge. What's bullshit about that?

[inthewind]

I think though you're an exception. What a luxury. It sounds like you've weighed up the environmental pros and cons for your locale, which is more than most do.

I still think there's better use for that land than raising cattle on it. I can't help but think that good meat is reserved for the luxury of a few, that includes well raised organic meats. It's only the wealthy people that I know that can afford such.