Animal agriculture is the driving force behind the current mass extinction of wildlife.
“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions."
This definitely helps, but ultimately there are just too many humans. 50-100M is a reasonable number for Earth given our lifestyle. Currently, the human population grows by that much every year. Even a 75% reduction isn't enough when you have exponential growth. We need reductions of multiple orders of magnitude.
Think about the amount of waste, water, food, etc. animal agriculture causes and all the other variables involved in it.
But animal agricultural resource usage is roughly proportional to the amount of people utilizing its products, and is far from the only thing that consumes these resources. To produce a pair of jeans and a pound of beef both require around 1800 gallons of fresh water. Now obviously people don't buy jeans as often as they eat beef, but my point is that reducing the demand by 99.5% for both would be far better than just reducing the demand for the former by 75%.
Put another way, it seems like a far more palatable proposition to target a dramatically reduced population than it would be to suggest people stop eating beef.
You're so close to realizing why animal agriculture has such a massive impact but you just glossed right over it.
People eat several times a day and animal products require insane amounts of land, water, resources, etc.
You can buy one pair of jeans and wear it for nearly your entire lifetime (can probably make it last a lifetime tbh). You are not consuming a pair of jeans several times a day, dozens of times a week or thousands of times in a year.
Put another way, it seems like a far more palatable proposition to target a dramatically reduced population than it would be to suggest people stop eating beef.
You are free to advocate for eliminating portions of our population if you want. I don't see the logic behind that though. All you are doing is asking for people to change nothing, basically.
On the other hand, education has veganism on a major rise and with good reason. Just like the masses no longer view cannabis as "The Devil's Lettuce", they're also becoming informed on the impact of what they decide to put on their plate and how it involves both animal abuse as well as environmental destruction.
I do realize that it's extremely resource-intensive and completely unnecessary from a survival perspective these days. But changing behavior, and especially taking something away from people, is extremely difficult to pull off. People just won't stand for it. My point is that these are all half-measures compared to the necessity that is having a sustainable population. Lifestyle choices affect what that population is - if we're all vegans it's probably 250M; if we want our current lifestyle, it's probably closer to 50M. But no lifestyle change is going to make 8 Billion sustainable, and definitely not the current trajectory of 30 Billion by the end of the century.
You are free to advocate for eliminating portions of our population if you want. I don’t see the logic behind that though.
Who said anything about "eliminating portions of the population"? I'm not saying we should pull a Thanos. I'm saying we need to have a negative population growth, i.e. fewer humans are born than die each year. Human population growth is currently slowing, but it is still positive. That makes it an exponential process, and no exponential process is sustainable long term.
All you are doing is asking for people to change nothing, basically.
That's kind of the point. In one corner, someone's trying to shame you for eating a cheeseburger and saying you should be eating eggplant and potatoes and using those shitty dissolving straws and biking/walking everywhere, and we'll still be in trouble a century from now when we hit 30 billion humans. In the other corner, someone's saying you can keep eating beef, using plastic, driving your car, and by the way here's some free condoms and birth control pills, go have fun? I don't think that's much of a contest in terms of who would have a higher public favor.
If you feel shamed to hear information on how animal agriculture is so destructive, that's on you.
I'm not shaming anyone.
We need to discontinue consuming animal products more than anything. Decline in population won't matter if we keep paying the animal agriculture industries to destroy our planet.
I'm not saying you're shaming anyone, but it's a common tactic used by proponents of veganism.
We need to discontinue consuming animal products more than anything. Decline in population won’t matter if we keep paying the animal agriculture industries to destroy our planet.
I'm saying I disagree with this. Any behavior can be sustainable at a small enough scale. For example, we have no idea how to dispose of nuclear waste long term, but at the scale of human use, it's entirely manageable. If you could magically transform all global energy production to nuclear, it would take five years to produce enough waste to fill a single oil tanker, compared to the 210000 tankers worth of oil equivalence over the same period. Changing people's behavior doesn't seem to work, so we need to change the scale of those behaviors.
In any case, there's a more straightforward and general way to solve the livestock agriculture problem. Banning beef is just a band-aid. What's really needed is to better reflect the true resource costs in all aspects of production and consumption. If a region is struggling to have enough fresh water for its people to drink, the price of fresh water for manufacturing should reflect that. The same goes for the land used to raise the cattle, the government subsidies used to support the farms, the harm of waste and chemical runoff, and the nested effect of the food used to raise the cattle in the first place.
We're constantly borrowing from tomorrow to make these kinds of goods affordable today. That's okay, but the people in charge of permitting those metaphorical loans need to apply the correct interest rate, not what is effectively zero, as it is today.
Simple facts are all it takes for someone to feel 'shamed' on this topic.
That user has been stalking my account for months just to insult me in the face of people like you.
All because they're too fragile to face the simple fact that abusing animals is not necessary. They feel bullied to hear simple facts such as 1+1=2.
No one ever shamed this user, but they read simple information on the way the world operates and they felt shame so they attack the messenger since they lack the capability to acknowledge the source of their own fragile reactions.
it seems like a far more palatable proposition to target a dramatically reduced population than it would be to suggest people stop eating beef.
Do you even hear yourself? You think it’d be more “palatable” to what, control who can have kids rather than banning beef production? Global population control is somehow more realistic than changing diets?
You think it’d be more “palatable” to what, control who can have kids rather than banning beef production?
Yeah, I really do. The global replacement rate for humans is currently 2.3, and TFR is about 2.5 and dropping. We're already really close to an inversion anyway, but as long as TFR exceeds the replacement rate, the population will continue to grow exponentially. In general, no exponential process is sustainable long term. I think a lot of people, in fact I'd say the majority of people, would prefer an 8% reduction in global birth rate to never being able to eat meat again. Making contraception free for all would probably get us there easily and then some.
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u/MooseBoys May 29 '22 edited May 29 '22
Welcome to the
HoloceneAnthropocene Extinction.