Bantari wrote:Anyways. There are many more issues involved here than just fossil fuel, which is just one of the indicators. For example - some land is not appropriate to grow protein-producing plants, but you can grow plants that can feed protein-producing animals. Without animals, such land would be used inefficiently, if at all.
Bantari wrote:None of the studies I have seen mentioned (or if they did, they just glossed over and dismissed them) any of the problems that exist and some of which I mentioned in my previous post. Nitrogen ripening, transportation costs, pesticide usage (and production), genetic engineering and other chemical processes we use (and have to use for the industry to be sustainable), and many many more - and the necessary drastic increase in all those bad and expensive things if we as a race do away with meat.
Bantari wrote:And this is why I rather think for myself. And from what I know, I *know* that some problems are far from being solved right now: transportation, necessity of genetic engineering of plants, pesticides, nitrogen-ripening, just to mention a few.
I wanted to weigh in a little bit on this general point. Probably a shift away from meat production would *not* worsen the above problems to that great of a degree.
There is a well-known rule of thumb from basic ecology. Namely, the "10 percent rule", which refers to the phenomenon that as you go up each approximate "level" in a food chain or food web, the amount of biomass supported at that level is typically only on the order of one tenth of that below, owing to the fact that the amount of energy transferred up to that level by organisms consuming other organisms is only about a tenth of that below. This is one of those things that's totally obvious when you actually think about it. Pretty much any animal, humans included, consume far, far more calories than they themselves are composed of, with the vast majority being exhausted as waste heat rather than being available to the next animal up in the food chain.
Some brief searching around suggests that the "10 percent rule" is in fact the right rough order of magnitude for livestock and other animals raised for food - the exact number varies a bit, but animals raised for food generally need to be fed on the order of 10 times as many calories in animal feed as are produced in meat. This rule would suggest that quite a bit of the impact of current meat production is not actually in the "raising animals part", but rather in the "having to grow more plants in order to feed the animals" part. And in the absence of further evidence, given the factor of 10 here, I would be strongly inclined to believe that reducing meat consumption in favor of more grains, beans, and other major plant-based calorie sources would reduce our environmental impact by a fair bit, at least on the margin.
Certainly, it seems unlikely that it would worsen the problems currently involved with growing crops, pesticides, etc, since the above would suggest that reducing meat consumption in favor of, say, consuming more grains would *also* reduce the amount of grains that would have to be grown.
This is even accounting for things like meat being more protein-rich as a calorie source than most plant-based foods, and for the fact some land might be far more suited to growing feed for animals than other production, and similar such things. It takes quite a lot to beat a factor of 10, and it's implausible that this would be case for all or even nearly all of land currently used this way, so one would still expect a significant reduction on the margin.
---
However, there is another point I know of that moderates this and makes it less clear-cut, although it does support some aspects of it:
http://www.mymoneyblog.com/what-does-20 ... esity.htmlWhat charts like the one in that link indicate is that calories in general are already extremely cheap. Primarily what people pay for in food is not calories, but rather something like "quality", and "quality" appears to be expensive regardless of whether it comes from plants or animals. Which loosely suggests that switching away from meat might not reduce environmental impact or might actually increase impact if people simply replaced it calorie-for-calorie with "high quality" costly-to-produce vegetarian foods. (One hopes that despite all the other complicating and unrelated factors involved in food prices, food prices are still at least somewhat correlated with the resource costs of transporting and producing the food!). Granted, for most vegetables measuring things by cost per calorie is particularly unfair, since they're grown and eaten not for the calories, but for other nutrients. Things like meat and grains and beans typically form the "main" calorie sources for people, where vegetables and fruits typically do not.
The particular chart linked doesn't show the cost of things like ground beef, but googling around for typical prices per calorie (hard, because prices vary a lot!) finds things like ground beef often are slightly more expensive than various grains/breads/beans. And while the absolute difference is usually small, it is often a decent relative difference (sometimes a factor of 2 or so), which does support the earlier argument that the environmental cost of growing grains and consuming them directly should be less than the cost of growing animal feed and feeding then to animals in order to consume the animals, at least in calorie terms.
Absent deeper research into the matter, it seems extremely reasonable based on the above to conclude that reducing meat consumption a little from current levels in developed countries in favor of things like plain grains/rice/beans probably would result in a lower overall environmental impact, although arguably not significantly enough to matter relative to other things, and possibly not if the reduction were accompanied by a significant enough increase in consumption of things that were more expensive and difficult to produce. But it seems unlikely that it would result in a significantly *greater* environmental impact.
