Scrutable

The basic problem here is that people like simple solutions, and they don't like complications.

I had an argument on Facebook the other day about whether the entire world going vegetarian was a feasible solution to climate change. Their argument was that cows fart so we shouldn't eat any meat at all. I'll give it 10/10 for simplicity, but it's missing a massive part of the picture which includes the fact that in order to feed the world we need to grow calories on every bit of land we can, as efficiently as we can. No doubt this would mean less steak for everyone, but what are you going to grow on land that can't support arable crops? Which arable crops, for example, will Iceland be growing? Or the Welsh hills? (And that's not the only thing that wrong with their argument, but it's the bit we argued about.)

This mirrors the debate about meatless burgers, which people are glomming on to sometimes because they believe that they are fighting climate change. The driver of beef sales is steak, not burgers, so as long as we're eating the same amount of steak we'll be producing the same amount of burgers. Burgers are, essentially, a byproduct of steak, they're about efficient use of the carcass. But so many people just don't get that, not even if you point it out.

Oh, and then there's palm oil, the big baddie du jour. Palm oil deforestation is driven by our need for vegetable oils, (which is in part driven by vegetarianism, ironically). Unfortunately, the alternatives to palm oil require more hectares to grow the same amount of oil, so they are less efficient crops and would result in more deforestation. Demanding manufacturers drop palm oil is environmentally counterproductive. We certainly need to protect the rainforest, but banning palm oil won't achieve that. Banning cutting down the rainforest and working with local communities to provide other sources of income that depend on a healthy rainforest might, though.

In all three cases, I thought that the arguments were pretty self-evident. But people really, really don't like to be told that their nice simple answer to everything is, in fact, a crock of manure.

Unless your simple solution is an end to bottomless consumerism.

And the way we’re heading, this is peak consumerism right now.

plodder wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 2:54 pm Unless your simple solution is an end to bottomless consumerism.

In what way would you say that that was a "simple" solution?

Apart from doing a Thanos, of course.

I’m defining ‘solution’ as the ending place, rather than the journey.

eta however given the complexity of any journey along any path towards any end place, it’s unlikely to be more or less complex than any other journey.

plodder wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 2:58 pm I’m defining ‘solution’ as the ending place, rather than the journey.

In which case my simple solution is to allow consumerism, but to eliminate the environmental cost of it.

nefibach wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 2:41 pm The basic problem here is that people like simple solutions, and they don't like complications.

I had an argument on Facebook the other day about whether the entire world going vegetarian was a feasible solution to climate change. Their argument was that cows fart so we shouldn't eat any meat at all. I'll give it 10/10 for simplicity, but it's missing a massive part of the picture which includes the fact that in order to feed the world we need to grow calories on every bit of land we can, as efficiently as we can. No doubt this would mean less steak for everyone, but what are you going to grow on land that can't support arable crops? Which arable crops, for example, will Iceland be growing? Or the Welsh hills? (And that's not the only thing that wrong with their argument, but it's the bit we argued about.)

This mirrors the debate about meatless burgers, which people are glomming on to sometimes because they believe that they are fighting climate change. The driver of beef sales is steak, not burgers, so as long as we're eating the same amount of steak we'll be producing the same amount of burgers. Burgers are, essentially, a byproduct of steak, they're about efficient use of the carcass. But so many people just don't get that, not even if you point it out.

Oh, and then there's palm oil, the big baddie du jour. Palm oil deforestation is driven by our need for vegetable oils, (which is in part driven by vegetarianism, ironically). Unfortunately, the alternatives to palm oil require more hectares to grow the same amount of oil, so they are less efficient crops and would result in more deforestation. Demanding manufacturers drop palm oil is environmentally counterproductive. We certainly need to protect the rainforest, but banning palm oil won't achieve that. Banning cutting down the rainforest and working with local communities to provide other sources of income that depend on a healthy rainforest might, though.

In all three cases, I thought that the arguments were pretty self-evident. But people really, really don't like to be told that their nice simple answer to everything is, in fact, a crock of manure.

Just to chuck in a very simplistic (ha) response to that - I think part of the issue lies with the psychology of capitalism. Consumers cannot, physically, make complex decisions about what bits of land should be used for what. Not out of stupidity, it's just not directly within our power. However we are told that the markets 'work'. So on the one hand - can't actually do anything. On the other - the only way to send a message/effect change is to change buying habits (I don't necessarily entirely agree with this, but it is the current capitalist message). And there will be no message made if everyone just carried on eating burgers.

nefibach wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 2:41 pmincludes the fact that in order to feed the world we need to grow calories on every bit of land we can, as efficiently as we can.

That doesn't make sense to me. Given the huge inefficiencies of turning vegetable matter into meat, we should reserve crops growing on arable land for people food, and not animal food. Something like 30%* of the arable land in the US is used to grow crops to feed to animals. Which is insane.

Following this logic, meat animals would this be restricted to marginal lands which can't have crops grown on them. That is profoundly destructive environmentally and would generate comparatively few calories, far fewer calories than freed up by not feeding crops to pigs and cows.

*I'm going to dig up real numbers when I get a spare 15 minutes.

discovolante wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 3:44 pm

nefibach wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 2:41 pm The basic problem here is that people like simple solutions, and they don't like complications.

I had an argument on Facebook the other day about whether the entire world going vegetarian was a feasible solution to climate change. Their argument was that cows fart so we shouldn't eat any meat at all. I'll give it 10/10 for simplicity, but it's missing a massive part of the picture which includes the fact that in order to feed the world we need to grow calories on every bit of land we can, as efficiently as we can. No doubt this would mean less steak for everyone, but what are you going to grow on land that can't support arable crops? Which arable crops, for example, will Iceland be growing? Or the Welsh hills? (And that's not the only thing that wrong with their argument, but it's the bit we argued about.)

This mirrors the debate about meatless burgers, which people are glomming on to sometimes because they believe that they are fighting climate change. The driver of beef sales is steak, not burgers, so as long as we're eating the same amount of steak we'll be producing the same amount of burgers. Burgers are, essentially, a byproduct of steak, they're about efficient use of the carcass. But so many people just don't get that, not even if you point it out.

Oh, and then there's palm oil, the big baddie du jour. Palm oil deforestation is driven by our need for vegetable oils, (which is in part driven by vegetarianism, ironically). Unfortunately, the alternatives to palm oil require more hectares to grow the same amount of oil, so they are less efficient crops and would result in more deforestation. Demanding manufacturers drop palm oil is environmentally counterproductive. We certainly need to protect the rainforest, but banning palm oil won't achieve that. Banning cutting down the rainforest and working with local communities to provide other sources of income that depend on a healthy rainforest might, though.

In all three cases, I thought that the arguments were pretty self-evident. But people really, really don't like to be told that their nice simple answer to everything is, in fact, a crock of manure.

Just to chuck in a very simplistic (ha) response to that - I think part of the issue lies with the psychology of capitalism. Consumers cannot, physically, make complex decisions about what bits of land should be used for what. Not out of stupidity, it's just not directly within our power. However we are told that the markets 'work'. So on the one hand - can't actually do anything. On the other - the only way to send a message/effect change is to change buying habits (I don't necessarily entirely agree with this, but it is the current capitalist message). And there will be no message made if everyone just carried on eating burgers.

This is also why "ending mass consumerism" is a difficult solution - markets change what's produced in response to consumers buying the new thing. So it's relatively easy for the market to follow consumers deciding to buy more eco-friendly products by producing more eco-friendly products and fewer non-eco-friendly products (and here many of the eco-friendly products will be brought by consumers who aren't trying to be more eco-friendly) , but consumers stopping buying stuff at all doesn't send any direct message. The producers response to that can just as well be to produce stuff more cheaply (i.e. often less eco-friendly) for the non-eco-conscious consumers buying things as for it to reduce production overall.

bjn wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 4:05 pm

nefibach wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 2:41 pmincludes the fact that in order to feed the world we need to grow calories on every bit of land we can, as efficiently as we can.

That doesn't make sense to me. Given the huge inefficiencies of turning vegetable matter into meat, we should reserve crops growing on arable land for people food, and not animal food. Something like 30%* of the arable land in the US is used to grow crops to feed to animals. Which is insane.

Following this logic, meat animals would this be restricted to marginal lands which can't have crops grown on them. That is profoundly destructive environmentally and would generate comparatively few calories, far fewer calories than freed up by not feeding crops to pigs and cows.

*I'm going to dig up real numbers when I get a spare 15 minutes.

Told you it was complicated.

But nothing you've said contradicts what I've said, thanks to the multitudes covered by 'can' and 'efficiently', neither of which say anything about what that actually means in practice.

We are going to have to recognise this complexity in our conversations and actually realise that it's not possible to sum something so complicated up in a single paragraph. There is, therefore, no logic there for you to dispute, and doing the whole "Hey up, you're wrong" thing on such a vague statement is a symptom of the problem, I'm afraid.

Conversations need to be additive, not combative.

discovolante wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 3:44 pm

nefibach wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 2:41 pm The basic problem here is that people like simple solutions, and they don't like complications.

I had an argument on Facebook the other day about whether the entire world going vegetarian was a feasible solution to climate change. Their argument was that cows fart so we shouldn't eat any meat at all. I'll give it 10/10 for simplicity, but it's missing a massive part of the picture which includes the fact that in order to feed the world we need to grow calories on every bit of land we can, as efficiently as we can. No doubt this would mean less steak for everyone, but what are you going to grow on land that can't support arable crops? Which arable crops, for example, will Iceland be growing? Or the Welsh hills? (And that's not the only thing that wrong with their argument, but it's the bit we argued about.)

This mirrors the debate about meatless burgers, which people are glomming on to sometimes because they believe that they are fighting climate change. The driver of beef sales is steak, not burgers, so as long as we're eating the same amount of steak we'll be producing the same amount of burgers. Burgers are, essentially, a byproduct of steak, they're about efficient use of the carcass. But so many people just don't get that, not even if you point it out.

Oh, and then there's palm oil, the big baddie du jour. Palm oil deforestation is driven by our need for vegetable oils, (which is in part driven by vegetarianism, ironically). Unfortunately, the alternatives to palm oil require more hectares to grow the same amount of oil, so they are less efficient crops and would result in more deforestation. Demanding manufacturers drop palm oil is environmentally counterproductive. We certainly need to protect the rainforest, but banning palm oil won't achieve that. Banning cutting down the rainforest and working with local communities to provide other sources of income that depend on a healthy rainforest might, though.

In all three cases, I thought that the arguments were pretty self-evident. But people really, really don't like to be told that their nice simple answer to everything is, in fact, a crock of manure.

Just to chuck in a very simplistic (ha) response to that - I think part of the issue lies with the psychology of capitalism. Consumers cannot, physically, make complex decisions about what bits of land should be used for what. Not out of stupidity, it's just not directly within our power. However we are told that the markets 'work'. So on the one hand - can't actually do anything. On the other - the only way to send a message/effect change is to change buying habits (I don't necessarily entirely agree with this, but it is the current capitalist message). And there will be no message made if everyone just carried on eating burgers.

Problem is, stopping eating burgers isn't what sends the message, because burgers aren't what drives that part of the market. Steak is. All that will happen if middle class western people stop eating burgers is that producers will find another market for them. We need to reduce our consumption of steak and then hope that other markets don't step in to take up the slack. That's the best we can really do.

dyqik wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 4:08 pm

discovolante wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 3:44 pm

nefibach wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 2:41 pm The basic problem here is that people like simple solutions, and they don't like complications.

I had an argument on Facebook the other day about whether the entire world going vegetarian was a feasible solution to climate change. Their argument was that cows fart so we shouldn't eat any meat at all. I'll give it 10/10 for simplicity, but it's missing a massive part of the picture which includes the fact that in order to feed the world we need to grow calories on every bit of land we can, as efficiently as we can. No doubt this would mean less steak for everyone, but what are you going to grow on land that can't support arable crops? Which arable crops, for example, will Iceland be growing? Or the Welsh hills? (And that's not the only thing that wrong with their argument, but it's the bit we argued about.)

This mirrors the debate about meatless burgers, which people are glomming on to sometimes because they believe that they are fighting climate change. The driver of beef sales is steak, not burgers, so as long as we're eating the same amount of steak we'll be producing the same amount of burgers. Burgers are, essentially, a byproduct of steak, they're about efficient use of the carcass. But so many people just don't get that, not even if you point it out.

Oh, and then there's palm oil, the big baddie du jour. Palm oil deforestation is driven by our need for vegetable oils, (which is in part driven by vegetarianism, ironically). Unfortunately, the alternatives to palm oil require more hectares to grow the same amount of oil, so they are less efficient crops and would result in more deforestation. Demanding manufacturers drop palm oil is environmentally counterproductive. We certainly need to protect the rainforest, but banning palm oil won't achieve that. Banning cutting down the rainforest and working with local communities to provide other sources of income that depend on a healthy rainforest might, though.

In all three cases, I thought that the arguments were pretty self-evident. But people really, really don't like to be told that their nice simple answer to everything is, in fact, a crock of manure.

Just to chuck in a very simplistic (ha) response to that - I think part of the issue lies with the psychology of capitalism. Consumers cannot, physically, make complex decisions about what bits of land should be used for what. Not out of stupidity, it's just not directly within our power. However we are told that the markets 'work'. So on the one hand - can't actually do anything. On the other - the only way to send a message/effect change is to change buying habits (I don't necessarily entirely agree with this, but it is the current capitalist message). And there will be no message made if everyone just carried on eating burgers.

This is also why "ending mass consumerism" is a difficult solution - markets change what's produced in response to consumers buying the new thing. So it's relatively easy for the market to follow consumers deciding to buy more eco-friendly products by producing more eco-friendly products and fewer non-eco-friendly products (and here many of the eco-friendly products will be brought by consumers who aren't trying to be more eco-friendly) , but consumers stopping buying stuff at all doesn't send any direct message. The producers response to that can just as well be to produce stuff more cheaply (i.e. often less eco-friendly) for the non-eco-conscious consumers buying things as for it to reduce production overall.

A significant problem is that companies will not want to lose their buyers and will engage in marketing to convince consumers that either (a) there is no problem in the first place (eg: cigarettes and cancer, coal and global warming) or (b) their goods are already wonderful and superduper when infact that aren't (eg: filter tipped cigarettes, any petrol engine labeled eco-something, BP is 'beyond petroleum). This throws a huge amount of mud to cloud the waters. Which are already cloudy, because it is very hard to see the environmental footprint of any particular good or service. How much CO2 is involved in making a loaf of Kingsmill 50/50 versus a Hovis equivalent vs a loaf of artisan bread in some trendy local bakery? No idea.

This is also why consumer led action can have very limited impact, beyond the broadest of gestures (eg: eat less red meat, fly less).

nefibach wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 4:20 pmProblem is, stopping eating burgers isn't what sends the message, because burgers aren't what drives that part of the market. Steak is. All that will happen if middle class western people stop eating burgers is that producers will find another market for them. We need to reduce our consumption of steak and then hope that other markets don't step in to take up the slack. That's the best we can really do.

If people eat fewer burgers, that will push up the price of steak and people will eat less steak. An indirect effect, but still an effect.

nefibach wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 4:17 pm

bjn wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 4:05 pm

nefibach wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 2:41 pmincludes the fact that in order to feed the world we need to grow calories on every bit of land we can, as efficiently as we can.

That doesn't make sense to me. Given the huge inefficiencies of turning vegetable matter into meat, we should reserve crops growing on arable land for people food, and not animal food. Something like 30%* of the arable land in the US is used to grow crops to feed to animals. Which is insane.

Following this logic, meat animals would this be restricted to marginal lands which can't have crops grown on them. That is profoundly destructive environmentally and would generate comparatively few calories, far fewer calories than freed up by not feeding crops to pigs and cows.

*I'm going to dig up real numbers when I get a spare 15 minutes.

Told you it was complicated.

But nothing you've said contradicts what I've said, thanks to the multitudes covered by 'can' and 'efficiently', neither of which say anything about what that actually means in practice.

We are going to have to recognise this complexity in our conversations and actually realise that it's not possible to sum something so complicated up in a single paragraph. There is, therefore, no logic there for you to dispute, and doing the whole "Hey up, you're wrong" thing on such a vague statement is a symptom of the problem, I'm afraid.

Conversations need to be additive, not combative.

“we need to grow calories on every bit of land we can, as efficiently as we can” reads to me as, “all available land that can be used to grow food has to be use and we should optimise for calories per acre”. Which is what I was responding to. Forgive me if I’ve interpreted that wrong. My point is that if we optimise for calories per acre, we grow waaaaay fewer animals for food and actually free up land from food production and so don’t need to use “every bit of land we can”.

nefibach wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 2:41 pm I had an argument on Facebook the other day about whether the entire world going vegetarian was a feasible solution to climate change. Their argument was that cows fart so we shouldn't eat any meat at all. I'll give it 10/10 for simplicity, but it's missing a massive part of the picture which includes the fact that in order to feed the world we need to grow calories on every bit of land we can, as efficiently as we can. No doubt this would mean less steak for everyone, but what are you going to grow on land that can't support arable crops? Which arable crops, for example, will Iceland be growing? Or the Welsh hills? (And that's not the only thing that wrong with their argument, but it's the bit we argued about.)

Why would we need to grow anything on the land that can’t support arable crops? Why not re-wild it? If going vegetarian meant using less land for food production the other land could be not used by man at all.

What needs to be done is to make meat eating as socially unacceptable as tobacco smoking. It took a couple of generations for it to happen so its hardly a quick fix.

nefibach wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 2:41 pm The basic problem here is that people like simple solutions, and they don't like complications.

I had an argument on Facebook the other day about whether the entire world going vegetarian was a feasible solution to climate change. Their argument was that cows fart so we shouldn't eat any meat at all. I'll give it 10/10 for simplicity, but it's missing a massive part of the picture which includes the fact that in order to feed the world we need to grow calories on every bit of land we can, as efficiently as we can. No doubt this would mean less steak for everyone, but what are you going to grow on land that can't support arable crops? Which arable crops, for example, will Iceland be growing? Or the Welsh hills? (And that's not the only thing that wrong with their argument, but it's the bit we argued about.)

This mirrors the debate about meatless burgers, which people are glomming on to sometimes because they believe that they are fighting climate change. The driver of beef sales is steak, not burgers, so as long as we're eating the same amount of steak we'll be producing the same amount of burgers. Burgers are, essentially, a byproduct of steak, they're about efficient use of the carcass. But so many people just don't get that, not even if you point it out.

Oh, and then there's palm oil, the big baddie du jour. Palm oil deforestation is driven by our need for vegetable oils, (which is in part driven by vegetarianism, ironically). Unfortunately, the alternatives to palm oil require more hectares to grow the same amount of oil, so they are less efficient crops and would result in more deforestation. Demanding manufacturers drop palm oil is environmentally counterproductive. We certainly need to protect the rainforest, but banning palm oil won't achieve that. Banning cutting down the rainforest and working with local communities to provide other sources of income that depend on a healthy rainforest might, though.

In all three cases, I thought that the arguments were pretty self-evident. But people really, really don't like to be told that their nice simple answer to everything is, in fact, a crock of manure.

I don't know if it is as simple as 'people like simple solutions' - ordinary people aren't really empowered to make optimal solutions with the urgency that is required.

This is riffing off what disco, bjn, Grumble and others have already said, to be honest.

We are relying - in order to address the twin crises of carbon and biodiversity - on systems that operate at a wholly inadequate scale. People using different straws or saving up their crisp packets to recycle them isn't going to change anything usefully. What is needed is regulation of the production, sale, use and (perhaps especially) disposal of plastics, especially in the developing world and at sea. There's not a lot most people can do about that.

In terms of land use and food production, there are many things that land can be used for. Food production is one, but so is water storage, carbon sequestration, or even conserving biodiversity. Making those choices optimally requires large-scale, top-down planning of land. Almost certainly, IMHO, that would require some people to design a system to do this that took multiple factors into account.

Instead, we are trying to rely on the market. Consumer choice is one vehicle for market forces. Another would be pricing in externalities, for example a functioning international carbon market. These would allow assessments of the relative value of land as regenerating forest vs low-density grazing (with no supplementary feeding?) within a defined scope.

Britain, for example, is a small, crowded, dark, cold, damp, island. It's probably not very proportionately useful in the globalised food supply system, were it optimally designed. Allow wetland regeneration in coastal areas and floodplains, and forest regeneration on marginal land, would probably be a better use of the area, as the carbon cycle is global, and those areas would also have recreational and flood-protection benefits for the island's population. (These considerations should obviously be weighed against things like the perceived importance of food security given contemporaneous and expected future geopolitical influences)

I don't think we'd need to use every available scrap of land. We already produce enough food for everybody in the world on the land currently used, even though current production methods are quite inefficient. There are distributional issues to fix, which probably includes producing a (regional) surplus, which probably would include expanding (as well as drastically reconfiguring) current agricultural production.

In any case, agriculture requires some surrounding non-agricultural land to do stuff like store water, produce pollinators, recycle organic matter, mine minerals, house workers and so on.

I think meatless burgers are part of a transition towards more plant-based diets in the West. They herald an acceptance that plant-based diets can be convenient without requiring much departure from your current, culturally normal, preferred and enjoyed diet. Vegan food isn't just for losing wait or detoxing - you can have a takeaway from burger king or a barbecue with your mates with a minimum of fuss.

The sale of non-steak obviously subsidises the consumption of steak, so if the burger market were to be seriously damaged by a Big McQuorn steak prices would increase and consumption would take a hit. Plus, westernisation is one of the drivers of growing global meat consumption. If that cultural rollout included less emphasis on high meat consumption, the global trajectory of overall food production would be influenced.

These are really big global-scale problems, where everything is connected to everything else. The powers that be - empowered by the status quo - offer people a message that they too can be empowered by "voting with their wallets", while simultaneously offering platitudinous assurances that the global elite were doing their best to solve the issues at a larger scale. They have so far entirely failed to even convincingly attempt the latter.

So it goes.

Herainestold wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2020 12:49 am What needs to be done is to make meat eating as socially unacceptable as tobacco smoking. It took a couple of generations for it to happen so its hardly a quick fix.

Given that what we absolutely need is a quick fix, I don't think anything that "is hardly a quick fix" can be truly described as "what needs to be done".

People don't change their social attitudes very much, which is why these things take multiple generations. Society progresses one funeral at a time. So we need something that isn't too reliant on social messages. Taxing the sh.t out of meat, for example, would make people eat less of it. Banning unsustainable production techniques would have a rapid effect, with a bonus of pricing a bit more of the sh.t out of meat.

A carbon tax would be more comprehensive, and would be inter alia an effective meat tax. Those hipster meatless burgers would suddenly be the affordable option, and hipsters would be eulogising about the subtle ammoniac tang of ground-chuck-with-bull-penis-and-gristle.

bjn wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 10:56 pm “we need to grow calories on every bit of land we can, as efficiently as we can” reads to me as, “all available land that can be used to grow food has to be use and we should optimise for calories per acre”. Which is what I was responding to. Forgive me if I’ve interpreted that wrong. My point is that if we optimise for calories per acre, we grow waaaaay fewer animals for food and actually free up land from food production and so don’t need to use “every bit of land we can”.

This was an incredibly brief summary to make a broader point, and a request for clarity would be have been preferable to an assumption that your interpretation was what I meant.

My explanations below will not be comprehensive either, because this is a very difficult and complex topic, and I'm not an expert.

"Every bit of land we can"

I'll admit that "can" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, but ultimately we have both a lot of demands on land, and a lot of land that we can't or shouldn't do anything on at all. Rainforest, for example, is land we shouldn't be farming and that we should, in fact, be expanding, because of climate change. Desert is hard to farm on, and whilst we have the engineering chops to create massive irrigation projects we really shouldn't (at this stage at least). So we have to think about what land can feasibly do, and whether that is the best use of that land.

There is a lot of prime agricultural land in Illinois, for example, that was divvied up for housing in the mid-00s, but never built on. That land is mostly now just sitting there, in some cases with roads, pavements and utilities in place, but no housing. The housing boom that they were expecting never came, but the local councils who were hoping to cash in on it now can't afford to strip out the development and return that land back to farmland. They should. That is land we can farm, and should farm, but we're not farming it because of various political and economic reasons (most of the cities that did this are still hoping someone will come along and build on that land, so that they can make back their investment).

So I am assuming that "can" involves some level of evidence-based discrimination as to what is sensible and what is not.

"Efficiently" means using the land we are going to farm for the right kind of farming. The Welsh hills will not grow soy or wheat or palm oil. They will grow sheep. Kent orchards can grow various types of livestock as well as apples, if you go for a mixed crop approach. We're already growing deer that we don't eat, and we should eat them.

So, if we optimise for environmental responsibility and productive land usage, yes, we will likely grow less livestock in terms of things like less beef (although that also depends on what kind of beef and how it's raised), but we'd consume more deer, maybe more bison, more rabbit. We might well grow more arable. But given the population growth curve we're on, and the fact that a lot of the world is still undernourished, in an ideal environmentally sound and sustainable food production utopia, it's still gonna be tight. We are not going to be able to rewild loads of land, because we are going to need to grow a lot more food in coming decades.

But none of that is relevant to the original point I was making, which is that as a planet, we can't just all go vegetarian. It's not feasible.

Bird on a Fire wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2020 1:01 am I don't know if it is as simple as 'people like simple solutions' - ordinary people aren't really empowered to make optimal solutions with the urgency that is required.

I think you just made my point.

What people like and what people can feasibly achieve on their own are not the same thing.

People like to campaign on straws, instead of looking at the full problem of plastics pollution.
People to think that the market solves all problems, instead of looking at how we plan holistically.
People like to think they have choice, instead of thinking about how reduced choice might be better for the planet.
Blah blah blah.

I don't think we'd need to use every available scrap of land.

See below.

We already produce enough food for everybody in the world on the land currently used

No we don't. Not even close. There's a lot of starvation and malnourishment in the world.

I think meatless burgers are part of a transition towards more plant-based diets in the West.

Maybe they are an indicator of an attitudinal change, but by themselves they aren't going to do squat.

Honestly, I'm reminded of why I stopped posting here.

nefibach wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2020 1:20 am

Bird on a Fire wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2020 1:01 am I don't know if it is as simple as 'people like simple solutions' - ordinary people aren't really empowered to make optimal solutions with the urgency that is required.

I think you just made my point.

What people like and what people can feasibly achieve on their own are not the same thing.

That was also my point. I think we're just using 'like' differently, so it's probably not that important.

What I was trying to get at is that I don't think people are choosing to focus on microconsumerist bollocks rather than the joined-up holistic strategising that is needed. Ordinary people aren't going to write their own policy briefs, voting is infrequent and inadequate, and there is basically nobody in the current political sphere doing very much useful on a large scale. The only tool ordinary people are given to address what they (correctly) perceive as pressing issues is consumerism. I don't actually think it's reasonable to expect ordinary people to devote the significant hours of study necessary to form balanced purchasing decisions for everything they need and want - that should be done by informed leadership. So really I was just disagreeing that these things are coming up because people actively prefer making purchasing decisions to effective action, which in any given field probably requires at least one degree. I think they are trying to use what the system is offering them, but that the system has failed them.

We already produce enough food for everybody in the world on the land currently used

No we don't. Not even close. There's a lot of starvation and malnourishment in the world.

Yes we do, according to people who study the issue. We Already Grow Enough Food for 10 Billion People … and Still Can't End Hunger:

Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2009a, 2009b) the world produces more than 1 1 / 2 times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s already enough to feed 10 billion people, the world’s 2050 projected population peak. But the people making less than $2 a day—most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land—cannot afford to buy this food.

Worth noting that about 40% of food produced is wasted, and we could feed the world while reducing the area in production. Starvation and malnourishment result from poverty, from distributional challenges, and systemic inefficiencies. Meat production is, according to these references (and many others) a net loss to the human food production system, not something that should be increased.

I think meatless burgers are part of a transition towards more plant-based diets in the West.

Maybe they are an indicator of an attitudinal change, but by themselves they aren't going to do squat. [/quote]
I think we agree on that.

Honestly, I'm reminded of why I stopped posting here.

Sorry to hear that.

Bird on a Fire wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2020 2:13 am

What I was trying to get at is that I don't think people are choosing to focus on microconsumerist bollocks rather than the joined-up holistic strategising that is needed. Ordinary people aren't going to write their own policy briefs, voting is infrequent and inadequate, and there is basically nobody in the current political sphere doing very much useful on a large scale. The only tool ordinary people are given to address what they (correctly) perceive as pressing issues is consumerism. I don't actually think it's reasonable to expect ordinary people to devote the significant hours of study necessary to form balanced purchasing decisions for everything they need and want - that should be done by informed leadership. So really I was just disagreeing that these things are coming up because people actively prefer making purchasing decisions to effective action, which in any given field probably requires at least one degree. I think they are trying to use what the system is offering them, but that the system has failed them.

Bottom up solutions are not going to work. We need top down solutions that can cover a lot of people. I look at what the Chinese government is doing
to stop the Corona virus pandemic, and we need that kind of approach for agriculture and climate. Within living memory the average Chinese peasant might eat meat once or twice a year. The whole world needs to return to that kind of diet, and the populace would be happier for it.

There is in fact a lot of complexity involved in the idea that the world would go vegetarian. As a simple extrapolation, I would note that doing so would lead to an increase in the area required for crop production.

While the world technically is growing enough food to feed itself, if we didn’t feed all that grain to animals, the reality is not so (even including food waste in the discussion). The reason being that a lot of the food grown is the wrong sort of food. The world has become very good at growing calories, but much less good at growing plant protein.

Changing the world’s diet to plant only would mean a shift of protein sources from meat to plants. The Green Revolution resulted in more than doubling the yield of cereals/ha, but had almost no effect on the yield of pulse crops. In the same fields cereals will typically out yield pulse crops by a factor of 2 to 3. For example, average soybean yields in the USA are 3.3 T/ha, average corn yields are 10.5 T/ha. It turns out that increasing harvest index has been simple for cereals (grasses) but is really hard for other types of crops. No doubt more work could be funded to try and achieve this, but there is no guarantee that the same yield gains will occur.

Also there is the issue of protein content. Comparing chicken to chickpeas, you need to consume roughly 3 times in weight as much chickpeas to get the same protein content as chicken. Using the Australian Government Recommended dietary intakes as a place to argue from, if you shifted 1 person from meat to pulses for protein, you would have to grow 0.26 extra T/year of chickpeas to accommodate that. Moving just 1 million people from meat to chickpeas would require an extra 260,000 T of chickpeas/year or an extra 79,000 ha of chickpea production. That is assuming the chickpeas could be grown on the best arable land. If they were produced on new marginal land, more area would be needed.

Much of the argument that is often made about growing crops to feed animals and how wasteful that is, is based on North American production systems where a large amount of grain is fed to animals. In most other areas of the world, this is not the case. Animals are pasture grazed, fed on crop residue and only occasionally supplemented with grain (many times not at all). Removing animal production would free up grain for human consumption in North America, although by less than people claim (see my comments above), but would have negligible impact in other parts of the world and increase the area required to grow protein crops. In many places, animal production occurs on land that is not suitable for crop production, so this land would have to come from somewhere else.

While I am all for eating less meat, and particularly less red meat (actually I had my first steak (rare of course) in over 12 months on a recent holiday), meat free diets are not going to save the world from greenhouse gas emissions.

I was hoping to find a more recent set of data, but this is what an easy search came up with. This figure divides greenhouse gas emissions up by both gas and source. The main sources from animal agriculture alone (leaving aside the transport and crop production values, which ironically would both increase if eating animals was done away today) are CH4 from agriculture, where animals contribute about 2/3rds (the rest is from rice) and N2O from agriculture, where animals contribute about half. Compare those with the other sources and it becomes pretty obvious where the biggest gains could be had. That doesn’t mean the gains from reduced animal production should not be had, it is just they are much smaller than the average person thinks and won’t be nearly enough on their own.
It is from here https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... 0500400345

If anyone is interested in references to back up my comments, I am happy to provide some reading.

Chris Preston wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2020 3:28 am...
Also there is the issue of protein content. Comparing chicken to chickpeas, you need to consume roughly 3 times in weight as much chickpeas to get the same protein content as chicken. Using the Australian Government Recommended dietary intakes as a place to argue from, if you shifted 1 person from meat to pulses for protein, you would have to grow 0.26 extra T/year of chickpeas to accommodate that. Moving just 1 million people from meat to chickpeas would require an extra 260,000 T of chickpeas/year or an extra 79,000 ha of chickpea production. That is assuming the chickpeas could be grown on the best arable land. If they were produced on new marginal land, more area would be needed.
...

Regular readers will know that I'm all in favour of eating a decent amount of protein and I even think people in general aren't eating enough protein (or rather, that the should get a larger proportion of their daily calorie intake from protein and then maybe they wouldn't feel like they needed so many daily calories).

I have also noted that in terms of protein sources, chicken is a much better one than chickpeas in terms of how much protein is in it versus how much not-protein is in it.

So I agree with you so far.

My question is, where are chickens getting their protein from, and why can't humans just eat whatever that is instead of feeding it to chickens and then eating the chickens? This is actually a genuine question.

I removed the bit about beef because I understand that's a whole different equation, not least because humans can't eat grass.

In commercial chicken rations, much of the protein comes from meat meal and fish meal - basically ground up offcuts like liver and fish heads - and some from clover or lucerne leaf.

Free range chickens have access to a wide range of insects and of course the occasional egg.

Doing a top down analysis.

A quick google reveals that the total worldwide meat production was around 320 million tonnes. The total worldwide soybean production is around 350 millions tonnes. Of that soybean production about 85% of the protein is fed to animals as soybean meal.

Mature soybean has a roughly the same protein content (15%) vs beef (16%)

Other crops are also being fed to animals, eg: 70%-80% of maize's* one billions tonnes are being fed to animals. Maize is around 9-10% protein.

So to a first order approximation**, there is more than enough protein in existing maize and soybean crops being fed to animals to replace the protein from all global meat production, regardless of how those animals are raised. This could free up rangeland for other purposes.

*A big chunk is also turned into alcohol to put in cars, which is very very stupid.

**Yes, I'm not taking into account animals grown for dairy/eggs, yes, some essential amino acids would require other crops, and yes not everyone can eat soy protein plus a hundred other details.