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down with slavery posted:As it is, the price of essentials should not and does not need to go up. We don't need more expensive clean water, food, or any of the things we should be using carbon for. What needs to be more expensive are luxury items, carbon-heavy forms of transportation, and running a business that pumps thousands of tons of CO2 into the air. Except that we are not talking about essentials. Eating far more meat than is necessary (gently caress, even than what is healthy), which many people in developed countries (even the relatively poor there) do, is very much a luxury. And it does have a major impact on eCO2 emissions, both directly and though deforestation/biomass decay. computer parts posted:A lot of the crops grown are literally not edible for humans but are for animals. Most of it is just grains that humans can eat, though. The world's human-edible crop harvest yields about twice as much as we need per capita (so you're right about the second part). Well over a third of this is fed to animals, and around 70% of that (in calorie terms) is lost in the process. Grazing animals are of course much better, especially as they can use marginal land that wouldn't suit crop farming anyway. Trouble is they can't be farmed anything like as intensively. But like I said, you're right that's it's about distribution and prices. But if we reduce demand from the meat industry for human edible crops, the prices should fall. Obviously this will be bad for some farms/farmers, but I think it has to be a net good.
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Mar 6, 2014 15:22
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The New Black posted:
They don't have to, and even if they do they don't have to for the places that need cheap food the most (the developing world).
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Mar 6, 2014 15:26
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Ahh yes "meat isn't essential" are you loving kidding me. We, as a society, can afford the luxury of having meat be available to everyone at a low price. Eating meat is something that can be done without any fear of climate change. The problem is what we burn (and how much), not what we eat. ANY increase in prices will necessitate the pricing out of certain sectors of the economy, whether it be domestically or internationally. We should be striving to make food prices lower, not higher. Overpopulation is bullshit, if you want to stop population growth, educate the women and provide birth control. It's not hard.
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Mar 6, 2014 15:29
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We can afford to have meat, just not beef. Cows are extremely land-inefficient. It's not an accident that goats are raised in poorer countries with less land. We've tried to solve this problem by feeding cows corn instead of grass, which just means that they have to have the rotting matter they can't digest removed manually.
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Mar 6, 2014 15:41
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peter banana posted:We can afford to have meat, just not beef. Cows are extremely land-inefficient. It's not an accident that goats are raised in poorer countries with less land. We've tried to solve this problem by feeding cows corn instead of grass, which just means that they have to have the rotting matter they can't digest removed manually. I understand that cows produce lots of green house gasses. I think there are better ways to discourage consumption of meat aside from raising prices, such as ensuring that fresh fruits/vegetables are available at low prices and improving our nutritional education, both for children and adults. Point being that there are ways to reduce consumption (or shift it to "better" meats) in the first world that don't involve pricing people out of the market.
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Mar 6, 2014 15:44
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Huh? That link has nothing to do with "rotting matter". It's pretty gross, yeah, but not for the reason you said.
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Mar 6, 2014 16:47
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down with slavery posted:Spoken like a true privileged first worlder. The irony of all of this after you saying how we can and should have cheap factory farmed meat for the entire planet is just too much for me.
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Mar 6, 2014 21:26
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Yiggy posted:The irony of all of this after you saying how we can and should have cheap factory farmed meat for the entire planet is just too much for me. I never said anything about factory farming but sure, go ahead and put words in my mouth. Also, there's nothing ironic about me telling you that we ought to provide cheap meat for everyone while you say we ought not to when your justification is some bullshit appeal to nature. Meat is a healthy part of a diet and many people in this world cannot afford it, including some in the developed world. Why should the price of meat go up (which negatively impacts the poor) when we have so many options that do not do so? Quite frankly, the externalities associated with humans eating meat are worth it. Could methods be improved? Sure. Are rising prices in of themselves a good thing? Of course not.
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Mar 6, 2014 21:45
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Yiggy posted:The irony of all of this after you saying how we can and should have cheap factory farmed meat for the entire planet is just too much for me. Not emptyquoting  Note that even after reducing meat consumption, we shouldn't just let untold millions of cows (down from 1.3 billion cows  ) graze every unforested piece of grassland into poo poo. Any number of cattle large enough to be interesting for agribusinesses tends to be large enough to gently caress up all but the hardiest open habitats (see: Africa, any cow pasture you drive past except for some traditional alpine stuff).
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Mar 6, 2014 21:51
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:Not emptyquoting Well gently caress, if we're giving up beef we're sure as hell eating them all first.
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Mar 6, 2014 22:11
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bpower posted:Well gently caress, if we're giving up beef we're sure as hell eating them all first. No argument here, though I'll pass. A little more seriously though I don't think at all that there should be no meat ever. In my view what is important is adapting our surroundings to the most sustainable agriculture which will feed people in those areas. Some ecosystems like arid, rocky steppes and certain grasslands aren't going to support vegetable crops or lentils/pulses and trucking them in isn't necessarilly a great solution either when there is good grazing land. For people in those areas ruminant agriculture is of necessity the most sustainable agriculture they have access to. I just don't think thats something that scales to the entire planet. And if that were the basis of our livestock agriculture as opposed to how we do it now, it certainly wouldn't be cheap for anyone but people living in those areas.
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Mar 6, 2014 22:23
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Somebody fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Mar 7, 2014 |
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Mar 7, 2014 04:04
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petrol blue posted:In the UK, I've been noticing food prices really going up recently (and the news seems to agree). It's getting to the point where I can't afford non-processed meat, and even fresh veg is pricey. To address the original query, yes. The California drought is unprecedented. http://www.jsonline.com/business/drought-sends-beef-prices-soaring-with-no-relief-in-sight-b99215383z1-248256871.html
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Mar 7, 2014 11:31
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Welp, ok, I take back what I said about "suspecting" that the California drought would show up in prices soon. That said, it's hard to imagine a doubling of retail price in England is primarily or even largely explicable by a drought in the US SW, as much beef as that region produces. For anyone wondering about global production like I was, the USDA figure from 2011 for 2007-2011 weighted average of % global production: e: it seems there are other distortions happening in the British beef markets, actually: http://www.fwi.co.uk/articles/24/01/2014/142951/farmers-blame-polish-imports-for-beef-price-drop.htm It's possible that Tesco sources particular cuts mainly from the US and they were more affected by the US drought than by the Polish cattle mentioned above. Paper Mac fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Mar 7, 2014 |
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Mar 7, 2014 17:29
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Any day now, the invisible hand will sort this out, just you wait.
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Mar 7, 2014 18:02
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Ronald Nixon posted:To address the original query, yes. The California drought is unprecedented. Nah it's not. This has been a debate over the past week between Twitter and Senate testimonies. Here's a capstone piece from one of the foremost experts on California drought: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/a-climate-analyst-clarifies-the-science-behind-californias-extreme-drought/ quote:The bottom line is that this type of drought has been observed before. And, to state the obvious, this drought has occurred principally due to a lack of rains, not principally due to warmer temperatures. Umentioned in that email/write-up is that the IPCC predicts California will get wetter, not drier. All of this doesn't ameliorate California's long-term water challenges --- growing population and limited access to fresh water. Which dovetails into the desalination discussion a few pages back: California will be building lots of desalination plants.
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Mar 7, 2014 19:06
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Arkane posted:Nah it's not. This has been a debate over the past week between Twitter and Senate testimonies. Here's a capstone piece from one of the foremost experts on California drought: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/a-climate-analyst-clarifies-the-science-behind-californias-extreme-drought/ Ahh but you see, this time the lack of storms and the low delivery of rain to California are caused by Climate Change not by what caused them last time.....because climate change. Much like the flooding in the south west of England
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Mar 7, 2014 23:29
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Illuminti posted:Ahh but you see, this time the lack of storms and the low delivery of rain to California are caused by Climate Change not by what caused them last time.....because climate change. Much like the flooding in the south west of England Uh, yeah? Michael Mann posted:There is credible peer-reviewed scientific work by leading climate scientists, published more than a decade ago, that hypothesized that precisely this sort of blocking pattern would become more frequent with disappearing Arctic sea ice. Moreover, Arctic sea ice has declined precipitously in the intervening decade. John Holdren posted:So, yes, climate change has undoubtedly worsened the drought, which was Holdren’s point in the first place. sitchensis fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Mar 8, 2014 |
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Mar 8, 2014 23:56
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I know very little about climate change, so could someone give me the simple explanation as to what specific activities are contributing the most to it? How much is industrializing countries burning more CO2? How much is cars/oil burning vs power generation vs food production? The very vague idea I had was that most of it was being caused by the third world industrializing, but I have nothing to back this up.
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Mar 9, 2014 09:51
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icantfindaname posted:I know very little about climate change, so could someone give me the simple explanation as to what specific activities are contributing the most to it? How much is industrializing countries burning more CO2? How much is cars/oil burning vs power generation vs food production? The very vague idea I had was that most of it was being caused by the third world industrializing, but I have nothing to back this up. http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html Note that agriculture, home of the "unsustainable" meat industry is less than 20% of our GHG emissions worldwide.
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Mar 9, 2014 09:54
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down with slavery posted:http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html Note that energy, home of the "unsustainable" fossil fuels is less than 27% of our GHG emissions.
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Mar 9, 2014 10:29
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Ag is 14% compared to almost double that for energy.
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Mar 9, 2014 10:37
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FAUXTON posted:Ag is 14% compared to almost double that for energy. Of course it's less than energy generation, but agriculture still produces a significant amount of emissions, and actually preventing even more catastrophic climate change means addressing all of the things emitting GHGs, not just energy generation.
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Mar 9, 2014 13:05
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down with slavery posted:http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html Ditto for every category except energy supply, and even that is only 26%! No problem here, close the thread, climate change is solved!
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Mar 9, 2014 15:19
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icantfindaname posted:I know very little about climate change, so could someone give me the simple explanation as to what specific activities are contributing the most to it? How much is industrializing countries burning more CO2? How much is cars/oil burning vs power generation vs food production? The very vague idea I had was that most of it was being caused by the third world industrializing, but I have nothing to back this up. The answers you are looking for are in this PDF...you don't even need to read it, you can just go through and look at the tables/graphs http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/news_docs/pbl-2013-trends-in-global-co2-emissions-2013-report-1148.pdf Energy generation is what is driving emissions increases. Yes, the developing world emits more than the industrialized world and the gap is expected to grow by a large amount (China already emits more than the US + EU combined, and adds about a United Kingdom's worth of emissions every year). Africa will also grow rapidly over the next generation. Cars are estimated to represent 16% of the emissions picture.
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Mar 9, 2014 16:32
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Uranium Phoenix posted:Of course it's less than energy generation, but agriculture still produces a significant amount of emissions, and actually preventing even more catastrophic climate change means addressing all of the things emitting GHGs, not just energy generation. It actually doesn't. You can go look at how much we need to reduce emissions to stop climate change and do the math yourself. There's just no reason we have to give up affordable meat for all as a society. Uranium Phoenix posted:Note that energy, home of the "unsustainable" fossil fuels is less than 27% of our GHG emissions. The reason fossil fuels are unsustainable has very little to do with emissions and more to do with the fact that they are finite. Tochiazuma posted:Ditto for every category except energy supply, and even that is only 26%! No problem here, close the thread, climate change is solved! ? Agriculture is #4 on the list. Transportation, energy generation and industry are all better places to cut emissions than to start talking about potentially reducing yields in a time where there's already a large amount of food insecure people in the world.
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Mar 9, 2014 17:24
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Restructure the entire energy grid and transit system, retrofit every home and business for efficiency, completely overhaul the industrial processes of the world, but god forbid we eat fewer cheeseburgers!
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Mar 9, 2014 18:20
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down with slavery posted:http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html I'm generally sympathetic to your original point, which as I understood it, was that increases in the retail price of food primarily harm the poor and don't do much to curb emissions. That said, you're veering into really odd territory here in an effort to score points. Industrial agriculture as practiced in the developed world is definitionally unsustainable:  This is not some abstract problem. This is among the largest threats to food security on the planet. To the extent that anyone suffers as a result of our failure to reform this brittle and energy-intensive system it will be the poor, and you do a disservice to those trying to encourage sustainable agriculture in places where it will genuinely increase the resilience and security of poor communities when you treat concerns about agricultural sustainability as merely a bourgeois way to impinge on the livelihood and wellbeing of the poor.
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Mar 9, 2014 18:39
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That graph is kind of disingenuous because food doesn't power most of those categories.
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Mar 9, 2014 18:55
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computer parts posted:food doesn't power most of those categories. That's the point, yes. If our primary energy input into ag was labour rather than fossil fuels, this wouldn't be a problem.
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Mar 9, 2014 18:58
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Paper Mac posted:That's the point, yes. If our primary energy input into ag was labour rather than fossil fuels, this wouldn't be a problem. I see what you're saying but your point is just as applicable without the input from food. How much food you get doesn't matter if the input relies on a quickly draining resource. In other words, a better graph would be the amount of energy required to transport x amount of food versus the amount of reserves of that energy we have.
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Mar 9, 2014 19:04
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How is that graph indicative of a lack of sustainability and/or something that will hurt the poor? We are the world's largest exporter & donor of food. Not only does the US donate more food than the rest of the world combined, but our percentage of agricultural output that is being exported is increasing (in other words, it is becoming more sustainable). And as all this is happening, the number of "global poor" continues to drop precipitously. Your post makes no sense as far as I can tell.
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Mar 9, 2014 19:04
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computer parts posted:I see what you're saying but your point is just as applicable without the input from food. How much food you get doesn't matter if the input relies on a quickly draining resource. The intent was to disabuse the notion that modern industrial agriculture isn't obviously structurally unsustainable with data. If the point is obvious to you, I'm glad, but it's still useful to have the lifecycle analysis. computer parts posted:In other words, a better graph would be the amount of energy required to transport x amount of food versus the amount of reserves of that energy we have. All that would tell you is how long you could keep shipping food if that was all you expended energy on. The point of a lifecycle analysis is to define all of the energy inputs into a process (some were missed here, but it's the best analysis that I've seen so far) and to measure the outputs, to give a holistic picture of energy concerns for that product/sector/whatever. In this case it's trivial to glance at the data and realise that the vast majority of those inputs involve directly or are undergirded by logistical networks involving the use of fossil fuels.
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Mar 9, 2014 19:12
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Arkane posted:How is that graph indicative of a lack of sustainability and/or something that will hurt the poor? We are the world's largest exporter & donor of food. Not only does the US donate more food than the rest of the world combined, but our percentage of agricultural output that is being exported is increasing (in other words, it is becoming more sustainable). And as all this is happening, the number of "global poor" continues to drop precipitously. US agriculture is highly dependant on massive inputs of fossil fuels to produce the food energy it does. Fossil fuels are a limited resource. US agriculture is therefore long-term unsustainable and vulnerable short-term to disruptions associated with use of fossil fuels. Disruptions in food markets which arise from the energy structure of the agricultural sector will result in price increases which primarily affect the poor.
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Mar 9, 2014 19:14
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As to the "limited resources" in the long term, we are not going to run out of energy. We have such an abundance of natural gas that we export it. We are also examining whether to start exporting crude oil again due to some excess supply. We have large supplies of uranium. By the time access to fuels becomes a challenge, we will have long since moved on to other energy sources (i.e. tapping into that radiating star we orbit or re-creating our own mini-stars with fusion plants here on Earth). If you want to argue that agriculture processes are going to lead to increased GHG emissions, alright go ahead, but we have seen no evidence that our food production is "unsustainable" or will have adverse effects on the global poor. Price fluctuations are just that, as is inflation. The greater challenge for the global poor is access to energy, which in turn can lead to their own agricultural revolution. Malthusian arguments have not only been historically ill-founded, but they lead to all sorts of undesirable arguments along the lines of population control. Ask John Holdren about that.
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Mar 9, 2014 19:37
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"Fossil fuels are limited and supplies subject to great volatility and disruption" isn't a malthusian argument. Unless you happen to believe in rapid abiogenesis of FFs, fossil fuel driven agriculture is not sustainable, period. That said, you don't appear to understand what "sustainable" means, given that you seem to be under the impression that exporting more of a industry's product makes the industrial processes used more sustainable, so you probably want to get yourself straight on that before pursuing arguments about it?
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Mar 9, 2014 20:26
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Unsustainable means that our agricultural output cannot be maintained. That there is some barrier on the horizon. So if we're producing 100 tons of agriculture, we cannot maintain that 100 tons of agriculture in the long run. We're in agreement on what sustainable means, ya? So how do you reconcile this with the fact that our agricultural output is increasing every single year, and in the US our output is GROWING FASTER than the population (the export statistic)? The imaginary barrier you have erected is some far future date where we have run out of energy (or at least energy is prohibitively expensive). This is not a thing that is going to happen, because we already have the technology to tap into virtually limitless amounts of energy (the efficiencies of which are going to keep improving until they overtake fossil fuels, probably in the next generation or two). You're in a hurry to make an argument about some perceived malady that is going to harm the global poor, when in fact agricultural output is improving rapidly and helping the global poor. How did this argument even start? Some guy in the UK talking about meat prices? Repeating what I said, access to energy is the biggest hindrance to the global poor. They need lots and lots of energy if they're going to transition from economies of sustenance farming and widespread poverty to industrialized nations with improved infrastructure, health access, and education access. The United States of America is starting to build that energy infrastructure, which is a great thing, but unfortunately the methods we've chosen are inefficient and limiting (focusing on solar projects which do not yet approach the efficiency levels of fossil fuel burning power plants and in turn serves to stunt the growth prospects). But that's another debate.
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Mar 9, 2014 21:02
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Part of the difficulty in the conversation is reductionist thinking which is not only unfit to address complex global issues, often cannot even see them. This includes reductionist thinking about energy, food, water, soil, built environment, or transportation as if they were stand alone systems. They are not and it is no longer meaningful to think about them as occurring within geographically separate niches. Industrialized agriculture is not sustainable for a variety of reasons having to do with this. One of the easiest to see is the soil. The industrialized system kills the soil, usually within a decade. At that point yields drop. This is then usually compensated for by a higher investment in fossil fuel based additives, but is a case of diminishing returns. There are many other negative social and environmental consequences of the current system, which can be seen developing real time in China as major moves over the past decade or so have been made to shift to manufacturing agriculture and mono-cropping. One of the strange things about this is that the traditional system was one of the highest yield systems on the planet. Additionally, Arkane does not really believe in climate effect or the implications of that which are already being felt. The thing in particular that Arkane (libertarian, reductionist) always deletes is the systematic production of inequity. It is not a separate system, but cooked right in. The belief when making that deletion is that the current system will effectively address this problem through application of market forces. There is literally no evidence for this. In fact it is clear that it does the exact opposite and purposed to do the exact opposite. The consolidation and maximization of profit functions as a morality. Arkane is a moralist in this way and his arguments should be understood as a faith based morality, for which there is no real evidence, without deleting much of what is happening on the planet. With food the social and institutional dynamics are manifestly unsustainable. Much of the hunger on the planet has to do with this. When reading Arkane it is important to keep in mind that he always has an artificially grounded growth model that does not consider things such as carrying capacity. He reasons from that basis. It's delusional, but does not seem so from within the model, since contraindication is deleted. It also good to remember that he believes in a global profit based conspiracy of scientists. As an example in order to address food insecurity or nuclear Goldman Sachs would have to change its basic business model, which in the current system would occur as a moral violation. They have disconnected the natural economy of the food system from an artificially produced financial economy based on speculation and the glories of the free market. The last food crisis, which lead to riots and the beginnings of the Arab Spring can be traced to that. They also own, buy and sell, almost all of the worlds supply of yellow cake uranium. Goldman Sachs is just one visible example.
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Mar 9, 2014 22:30
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down with slavery posted:Ahh yes "meat isn't essential" are you loving kidding me. We, as a society, can afford the luxury of having meat be available to everyone at a low price. Eating meat is something that can be done without any fear of climate change. The problem is what we burn (and how much), not what we eat. ANY increase in prices will necessitate the pricing out of certain sectors of the economy, whether it be domestically or internationally. We should be striving to make food prices lower, not higher. This argument seems very emotionally charged, and I think you make some good points. However you are saying things that that are objectively untrue. It is objectively true that meat is not essential in a human diet. It does not follow from this that we shouldn't eat meat, but It is a fact. It is objectively true that agriculture and the meat industry emit CO2. It does not follow from this that we should bring an end to agriculture. I think we're all trying to solve the same problems here, but I we'd all benefit from being very explicit about what problems we are trying to address, so as to avoid divisive cultural issues. 1. We need to improve global health, in particular nutrition. There are more than 900 million food insecure people, and though I don't have numbers many of those are protein deficient. source You have repeatedly emphasized the importance of providing affordable meat. I agree we should be able to eat meat if we want, but let's not forget that the real important thing is a full belly and good health, however one gets those. 2. We need to prevent climate change by reducing carbon emissions. I'm sure nobody here who matters will disagree. If we can do something that has a positive impact on one problem, without impairing our efforts to solve the other, we should do it. If we can improve our nutrition without increasing carbon emissions, we should do so. Similarly, if we can cut emissions without harming our health, of course we should do so. In the United States, the average person consumes more protein than recommended for good health. Source Red meat makes up a large proportion of American protein consumption, and is know to negatively impact cardiovascular health in addition to numerous other ill effects. source High protein diets can be perfectly healthful in some circumstances, I personally know many people who have lost tons of weight with them. yet generally, I think we have enough evidence to conclude that decreasing average American protein consumption would have either a neutral or positive effect on American health. Consuming meat is also more carbon intensive than eating plant derived foods. You have acknowledged this so I won't bother supporting this claim. Therefore reducing meat consumption, especially the consumption of red meat, should reduce carbon emissions. Since the United States can reduce average animal protein intake without harming the health of its citizens, and doing so would reduce carbon emissions, the United States should attempt to do so. This does not necessarily mean policy should be designed to make meat more expensive. Although on average most Americans would benefit from reduced meat consumption, there are still millions of Americans, especially children, who are food insecure, and we should be careful to avoid policies that worsen their circumstance. Yet something should be done. The government could just ask everyone to eat less beef, but lets be honest, its delicious and I don't base my shopping list off the recommendations of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. You say we should do more to insure access to affordable vegetables. Well you might be interested in the fact the U.S. government provides perverse subsidies that incentivize meat consumption over healthful vegetables and nuts. source Would you object to transferring those meat subsidies to more healthful vegetable foods? It would obviously lead to an increase in meat prices, yes, but there would be a concurrent decrease in the price of alternatives. We have also talked about the effect of changing meat prices in Britain and America on meat prices in the third world. Does anyone know how U.S. policies effect access to animal protein in developing markets? Because I don't, and would be curious if anyone does. I suspect the developed world in generally is a net importer of meat, but that's just a guess and the United States at least exports about as much beef as it imports source
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Mar 9, 2014 23:03
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As mentioned above, the problem is industrial agriculture, not just meat specifically. Growing plants the way we do now is still far over the acceptable carbon boundaries even if it's technically less so than meat. Stopping production of meat while keeping everything else will make things less bad, yes. It will also still gently caress you over.
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Mar 9, 2014 23:12
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