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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
and you have to get all the facts straight.
Only one letter noted that the (typical) conversion ratio for feed to beef is 16 to 1, not 6 to 1 as indicated in the article. 10 to 1 is about the best achieved for feed to beef; grass-fed with poor husbandry can be 20 to 1 or worse, depending on how long the cattle are left alive -- they keep eating their entire lives.
No "beef" with advocates of less reproduction or reduced population growth, but those who talk about getting rid of humanity should start with themselves or they are being hypocritical. Or start advocating genocide. Personally, I have no intention of ending my life or anyone else's to save the world for other species.
Several have noted important overlooked variables such as landfills, bulldozing forests for pasture OR farming. Even grazing is an issue; ungrazed grass absorbs more carbon. If everyone buys only local agricultural products, you do save on transportation.
Anyone who has owned a horse can tell you how much more they cost to operate than a car, particularly on a per mile basis, and remember, they are a 16 to 1 feed grain animal. De-mechanizing farming (returning to animal or human power instead of tractors) would probably produce more carbon, but I have never seen a detailed analysis.
Even walking is a problem. I walk a lot for both health and environmental reasons. It believe it beats driving my car, but given the extra calories I burn and therefore the carbon output used to produce the extra food I eat, it may well produce more ultimate carbon than using existing public transport, which produces very little incremental carbon per passenger until capacity is exceeded. This is another topic needing study.
All grass eaters produce methane. If we got rid of all humans and domestic animals entirely, antelope, deer, bison, etc. populations would expand to the limits of disease and starvation, producing huge amounts of methane and N2O. Of course, if you eliminate humans from the equation, who will care? The polar bears?
There are few free lunches in the carbon output realm. Most are already well known, i.e., direct energy savings or efficiency (turn off lights, A/C, more efficient vehicles and appliances), use carpooling and public transport, stay home, stop killing trees.
Most others involve complex trade offs. As you raise income and education levels, population growth declines, per capita energy consumption increases, but cleaner energy sources also become available, i.e., use of gas or solar / wind / nuclear electricity, instead of chopping trees and burning firewood or coal.
The one thing we rich folks cannot do is tell the world's poor to stop having babies. They will not listen, suspecting selfish ulterior motives. Morally speaking, I would much rather try to adapt to global warming than advocate genocide or totalitarianism.
Emitted from PETAs hu-man crematorium are bound to add to global warming too. Maybe if we just eat PETA we can cut out the middle man.
Global warming is a technical problem not a moral one. It's a solvable problem, and the point is to reduce greenhouse gases. It's completely irrelevant how they are reduced, be it by alternative energy, more efficient or reduced consumption. This does not require us to reduce our consumption to zero, or to try and come close to it. Pretending it would is only helping to convince people that there is nothing they can do, or to cause them to resort to delusions ("it's a worldwide conspiracy of thousands of top scientists").
So if you think being vegetarian is morally superior - fine, you are welcome to your beliefs. However PETA's nonsense propaganda actually hurts our efforts to combat climate change, and that's not moral behaviour.
"I think that the thing that most ardent advocates of vegetarianism/veganism for the environment's sake completely (and foolishly) ignore is that food is an intrinsic part of culture."
Driving a Hummer and having five babies is also an "intrinsic part of culture." Tell me how that makes it a good thing?
"The life of an industrially raised chicken is not a happy one. The growing birds are warehoused in spaces so small they can't flap their wings, turn around or preen. Breeding for maximum meat production has resulted in animals whose bodies have difficulty supporting their own weight, meaning chickens live much of their lives in pain."
This is more or less true of the conditions in hen egg-laying houses (battery cages), but it is not true of broiler (meat) or turkey facilities. They are crowded, but not at all inhumane. I have been in many in recent years.
What you need to understand is how cattle and other ruminants can efficiently convert grass that grows on land that is unsuitable for crops due to steep grade, rocks, low moisture, etc. into high biologic-quality protein and energy for human consumption. You also need to understand how much more yield per acre there is in feed corn (ears, stalks and leaves) compared to sweet corn. In addition, ruminants utilize many waste products from other products, e.g., distillers grain, corn gluten, vegetable canning waste, citrus pulp, cottonseeds, soybean hulls, etc.
Consider these factors from one who knows when thinking about these issues.
Chickens might not produce many greenhouse gasses, but they cause more damage than this article suggests. Intensive chicken and egg farming operations pollute ground water for example. There are simply too many people for them to all eat chicken except from factory farms. So chicken is not the answer.
Also, meat production's effect on global warming isn't just about the methane produced. As the article points out, land is being cleared world wide for meat production, and the loss of those forests contributes to global warming. In the US we've already lost many of our forests, but we could rebuild them and reduce global warming if we weren't using them for grazing ground, feed lots, and fields to grow all the grain and soy we feed to livestock. We could make do with less total farming land on a plant based diet, even though humans would be eating more grains, legumes, and vegetables, because right now we feed most of our grain and soybeans to farmed animals. Also, most meat is trucked long distances. Living animals are also transported. Their feed is transported by trucks as well. So they are a major contributor to vehicle emissions. Likewise, heating and cooling intensive farming operations, providing electricity to them, all of those things add up.
Livestock runoff is killing the oceans and we don't even understand fully yet how dependent we are on a working ocean ecosystem for our climate, our air, our very survival.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
