The grass family contains over 9,000 species distributed throughout the world. Of that, 35 have been cultivated as cereals. Of these, the following are important today: Barley, Corn, Goat grass, Millet, Oats, Rice, Sorghum, and Wheat.
Of the important grains and/or cereals listed above, only corn (maize) is a New World native. Corn is an important member of the grass family.
Corn (Zea mays) was domesticated from a wild plant called teosinte (Zea mexicana) about 7000 years ago. This species was considered sacred and was central to Mayan creation myths. Famous Mayan images show an earth god sprouting from the corn stalk.
Corn is the most efficient of the modern cereal grains in converting water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates. Maize formed the basis for the Mayan, Aztec, and Inca civilizations in the New World.
Corn, beans, and squash were planted together by early native Americans in companion planting to benefit all three species.
There is no wild plant or evidence of one that resembles corn with giant husked ears; besides the ears, teosinte and corn look very similar.
Columbus took corn to Europe on the first voyage but it did not gain wide attention.
Official US agricultural policy and habitual farming practice have made growing maize together with beans and/or squash, tomatoes, and peppers nearly impossible to do competitively. That could be fixed with policy changes that would be fought by the biggest agribusinesses.
Corn is among the most efficient natural converters of sunlight into chemical energy useful to the plant (with some left over for the farmer), but photovoltaics beat it by up to 10x. Capturing CO2 and producing glucose, starch, ethanol, and kerosene by an organic chemical process could be much more productive, by any measure, than via corn, which must anyway also grow stalk and leaves. The power could come from solar panels sharing fields with vegetable crops (e.g. tomatoes and peppers) that benefit from the shade they would provide by multiplying yield, and with wind turbines which take up very little ground footprint.
Combining solar, wind, farming, and chemical processes yields much better results than keeping them separate.
Global PV cell production is about 1 million square meters per annum.
Global farmland is about 45 million square kilometers, approx 1e10 more.
Lets say the solar panels cover 10% of the field. That 10% produces 10x as much, so you've approximately doubled your fields overall productivity. We're currently a factor of 1e9 short of producing enough to do so (and it's not like PV cells are not currently produced at scale).
1e9 is an unfathomably large delta. We'd be converting most of the planet into PV factories & mines to supply them.
> Global PV cell production is about 1 million square meters per annum.
I think you are of by a few magnitudes as this is only 1 square kilometer? The largest solar park in India is 56 square kilometers in area (or 10 million solar panels which are at least(?) 2 square meters in size).
Your numbers are screwy and the metric you're calculating is the wrong one.
Installed solar grew by around 130GW in 2020 according to this https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv which implies somewhere on the order of a billion square meters so you're out by a factor of at least 1000
and there about 20TW of electricity production to replace. So we need 120x 2020's output to replace electricity.
Other uses of fuels are about an order of magnitude more
So the delta is about 100-1000 given a decade of production. Less if we start to reign in the gratuitous waste of the west.
The output of your calculation is a testament to how grossly inefficient corn ethanol is. Not an endorsement of it.
The actual delta is indeed huge, but there were some mistakes in your calculation that result in an answer that is off by some orders of magnitude.
Assuming your initial numbers are correct, the approx 1e10 should be 1e7 (rounding down from 4.5e7), as 1 million sqm equals 1 sqkm (this is different from 1 kilo square meter; see cube square law etc.)
You also do not take into account that solar panels have an expected lifetime of over 20 years - your current calculation seems to want a panel produced every year for every field.
Taking these into account brings the production defecit factor down to ~ 1e5, which is still unfathomably huge but at least marginally more achievable than the 1e9 answer you got.
The initial number of 1 square kilometer of PV panels produced per year doesn't pass the sniff test. An average home installation is already 10 square meters, and a lot more than 100,000 installations are added in a year.
The global production of solar panels was 180 GW in 2020. Assuming around 200 W per square meter, you get 1 billion square meters of solar panels. So their initial number is off by a factor of 1000.
But even using the figure from a sibling reply, 1e5: so what? There is no need to put solar panels on every square km of farmland, or even on the 1/10th of it needed to fix the same calories; nor any value in trying or discussing trying.
If civilization does not collapse immediately, or even somewhat later, we will have centuries to build out solar. Future panels will last longer than today's, and be more efficient, and cheaper and lighter. Production, transport, and deployment will be increasingly automated. Today's production rate is not any kind of limit, and panels built today will not anyway evaporate next year. Build-out is cumulative.
Meanwhile, the nutritionally most valuable crops will not be displaced. Only cereal grains fed to animals are legitimate targets.
Furthermore, as I noted originally, panels placed in crop land will not displace crops, but coexist with them.
TIL: "Buckwheat is related to sorrel, knotweed, and rhubarb, and is known as a pseudocereal because its seeds' culinary use is the same as cereals, owing to their composition of complex carbohydrates." - wiki
Still though, the question is not so much about classification but about importance as a food\resource.
A staggering amount of California's water is used for alfalfa, which gets shipped to China to feed cows. In essence, we are allowing certain farmers to sell CA's water to China.
That won't put the water back. Revenge is just the final form of prioritizing the comfort (or discomfort) of a handful of bad actors over the well-being of the other 99.9999% of the world.
There's no answer except functioning government and the general eradication of solipsistic liberal/libertarian fantasies, and that's never going to happen.
> That won't put the water back. Revenge is just the final form of prioritizing the comfort (or discomfort) of a handful of bad actors over the well-being of the other 99.9999% of the world.
Punishing the perpetrators won’t put the water back in the same way punishing a murderer won’t bring the victim back. We don’t punish to make right. We punish to deter.
it might be that you get punished despite trying to live properly as you claim in 2).
Punishment doesn't work in this context, since it's not a repeated game. Murder is punished because everyone has the chance to do murder - it's a "repeated" game. Destroying the environment isn't.
Destroying various environmental resources is completely a repeated game (for example, look at superfund sites).
If in the future it's decided that I made my money unethically and it needs to be redistributed, I guess I'm fine with that so long as the same standard is applied to everyone's money. I think it'll be close to a great reset, but whatever. I'm not thrilled by the idea, but it might have to happen.
Punishment is not a sustainable measure, it only fosters more bad motives, and rules used to justify the punishment inform malicious actors on how to not get caught (a.k.a. how to follow the letter but not the spirit).
To address the root cause, work out why bad motives exist (what compels people to violate the spirit in the first place) and eliminate those.
I agree that punishment != punishment, and there seem to be many cases where evidence of intentional harm appears to be substantial enough that the majority would support if something was done about it legally, yet unfortunately nothing is done. That aside, I still doubt it would be a fundamental deterrent (it’ll deter some from doing this particular thing, but they’ll find another workaround).
If the powerful bear consequences when something bad happens regardless of fault, then power will be wielded to prevent those outcomes rather than enact them. Anyone who does not wish to take that risk can dispose of their power.
There’s a hint of the idea that “power should be exceedingly inconvenient, not lucrative, and attract people who ‘irrationally’ want to make the world better as opposed to abusing it”, which I don’t disagree with.
However, there’s another big concept, and that is “do not fire an employee who just learned a big and expensive, to you, lesson”. Punishing people simply because they failed, especially in a complex environment with slow onboarding process, is unproductive.
Furthermore, it can sow fear, resentment and distrust. Take China, where a local official risks unpredictable punishment, up to losing their job (or worse), if they fail—such as by allowing COVID cases to happen in their locality. Unfortunately, the side-effect of it is that officials are incentivized to lie up, meaning the government may think the country is COVID-free and be unable to make informed decisions.
This is also why I think COVID lab leak event, if confirmed, should not lead to any repercussions for China in particular. Fear of said repercussions seems likely half of the reason the research is being obscured in the first place, as a result preventing the global community from making informed decisions.
So, if you don’t want such shenanigans to take place in your government (I wouldn’t), you have to agree that whichever human being you elected should be able to make mistakes to learn from them, and thus another measure of their performance should be used.
For example, repeat trend of malicious intent supported by concrete evidence could be a good one.
(And to be make things even trickier, they do not deserve the whole credit in case of any success either. The success or failure of a measure to large extent depends on the whole country and the larger context it exists in. There are situations where one can only win, and situations where losing the least is the best outcome.)
Incentives should be aligned, but I don’t think punishment is the instrument for that.
I agree with your perspectives with regard to civil servants, but the people with power I was referring to are the wealthy.
No state actor (other than arguably putin, but I'd characterise his power as individual and not derived from his role as a government agent) is as powerful as eg. rupert murdoch or peter thiel individually, and in aggregate (and in spite of not working together) the 0.01% are vastly more powerful than any state.
If 10% of the fortune 500 were confiscated and redistributed equally every time there's a pandemic or 5% of the amazon is burnt down or there is an unchecked oil spill, then the wealthy would ensure these things do not happen.
Yeah, somehow I mistakenly read your “powerful” to mean elected government.
I suppose the main thing that makes rich powerful is the ability to influence government, which is only because power converts to money. If elected officials could not be influenced by rich malicious actors, those actors would lose much leverage.
The second thing is the ability to use money to secure popular support, which can hardly be eliminated unless people stop putting personal gain above true value… which is realistic in post-scarcity.
If you have power and are wielding it to make things worse in order to gain more power, then yes. Stripping you of all of your power later is morally and strategically right.
Are you suggesting the farmers are criminal? Unless they subverted the democratic institutions to benefit from bedrock water, punishing them IS the crime.
You're right about executives of large firms, but you're wrong about farmers. Focusing on punishment for random small powerless people, most of whom are not still alive, while not assassinating every billionaire is what they want you to do.
Agriculture consumes a lot of water in this drought stricken state. The worst part is that many of these farms pump water from the ground thereby collapsing underground aquifers. This is an irreversible change and has caused the Central Valley to sink by several feet over the last few decades. There is zero political will to solve this. Instead we waste time and energy on pointless green initiatives, desalination and harassing homeowners to stop watering lawns. Keep in mind the labor used to grow these plants is imported as well.
California is a very wealthy state and giving up some of these agricultural businesses to other states and maybe even to our poorer southern neighbors will be an overall good thing with minimal loss in tax revenues. These lands should be used to grow trees instead.
running short of water does not mean you have nothing to drink, it means famine.
madagascar has terrible famine right now, becauae there is no rain. In Syria, all crops that are not irigated have died.
current irrigation water is free. You cant use water from desalination, because it takes many tons of water to grow one kilo of food, and tens of tons of water to grow a kilo of beef. that would drive up prices more than 10x, which menas famine.
you people just don't understand the shitstirm that's coming one the crops fail on two important crop producing nations simultaneously
Multiple nations are having water issues. Not just in myopic California. South Africa, the Mekong delta including Thailand and Vietnam, the PO river, parts of the US southeast are dealing with depleted aquifers and drought conditions, the Nile river supporting Egypt and Jordan, Lake Chad of Africa, etc. The water issue is global, as will be the impact on food prices. I expect significant refugees/migrants and authoritarianism.
Have you ever actually bothered to make a cursory study of the history of food production over the last, say, 100 years in the USA?
Since FDR came into office in 1933 the US federal government has actively been dealing with a serious food problem: tremendous agricultural surpluses.
Virtually every wealthy country, even Japan, has the same problem: too many farmers and too much food.
"We are running out! The sky is falling!" Hey, if that's what you want to yell and scream, that's your prerogative. But, as the adage goes, "Facts are stubborn things."
In terms of crop value, California is the largest agricultural producer in the USA. I'm almost certain if California were to produce zero food whatsoever, the USA could still easily produce massive agricultural surpluses.
Go read Frances Moore Lappé’s infamous "Diet for a Small Planet" which was a very famous bestselling book in 1971. It has been almost 100% debunked as inane wishful thinking.
She claimed meat production had a negative environmental impact, was wasteful, and contributed to global food scarcity. Sure, just like factories can pump rivers full of pollution, if not properly regulated, cattle producers will tend to do the same thing. The answer is good laws and proper enforcement: not requiring people to eat tofu as a main course for dinner.
Frances Moore Lappé was an unhinged "tree hugger." Don't be like her. Use your head: study the history, and look at the technology.
While you are at it, imagine wind turbines spinning in the empty wastelands of the American West, pumping water from Canada to California.
Kansas and Nebraska were part of what was known as the "Great American Desert." But then some engineers figured out how to pump water from what is now the "dying" Ogallala aquifer.
We aren't living in caves, my man, trying to fight off lions and bears with spears.
Doomers. Sheesh. You guys disgust me. Go spread your falsehoods elsewhere.
You are right but running out of water is not the issue I’m talking about. This will not help fix the underwater aquifer collapse problem. Also, I am not aware of anyone using sea water in a large scale for agriculture.
The alfalfa is also used for cows grown in CA for CA residents. That's also a bad thing. Cow farms should be significantly limited in arid climates. There are ecologically better alternatives.
If you're pumping water to grow grass in the desert just for the beef, there are better uses for the water.
However, cows have the unique ability to turn grass into protein, so if all an area can grow is grass, cows are a great way to get calories out of it. Properly allowed to graze freely, cows can be a net improvement on a particular ecology as a carbon sink (manure is an improvement to the soil), but shipping the harvested grass to feedlots is indeed an ecological disaster.
You get more protein per X acres eating corn than feeding that same corn to cows and eating the cows.
If you prefer meat then chicken is worse than eating corn but still much better than cows. We eat beef because it’s delicious and that’s it’s only advantage at scale.
Only about %25 of agricultural land is arable and viable for growing crops, the other %75 can only be grazed by ruminants like cattle. Just on that fact alone, ruminant animals are never going away from the food supply until you could synthesize everything in a lab from some basic raw materials, and have that food actually be healthy to humans. That is long, long long away. Without cows, the prices of vegetables will go up a lot and put even more pressure on the remaining %25 of land.
There is something to be said about growing animal feed on arable land to feed to animals directly although that could be used to make food that humans can digest directly instead. But you still need bio-available protein, and plants do really badly on that. If you actual compare meat to plant matter on what is actually digested and absorbed by humans to get the equivalent nutrition, you'll find that plants actually do not perform that well beyond carbs and some micro-nutrients on an efficiency basis. You still need fat, protein and the other micro-nutrients.
Animals also convert indigestible agricultural waste products from plant growing into something humans can use, meat.
First most cattle in the US get the majority of calories over their lifetime from crops not directly grazing land.
The actual percentage breakdown is for land completely dependent on irrigation and land preparation. It’s not cost effective to use huge tracts of land for crops because we have such excess farmland, but maximum production would involve zero animals whatsoever.
Further, actual productivity on marginal or untended land is by definition very low. Cattle grazing on scrub that gets minimal rainfall is very expensive both in terms of effort and the energy expended by cattle to extract what little food is available while generally leading to desertification.
In terms of converting waste products, such organic material has a wide range of uses including feeding livestock. You could for example burn it for energy so calling it a waste product is very misleading.
The whole point of GP's post is that you can't grow corn everywhere. There is some soil that only supports grass, and the most efficient way to extract nutritional value from this land is through grazing animals.
Irrigation lets you grow corn or other crops just about anywhere. The availability of irrigation is largely a solvable problem. In the US for example the east coast, Alaska etc gets plenty of fresh water which just ends up in the ocean.
Irrigation lets you grow corn or other crops just about anywhere.
No, it does not.
In this context, 'grow' means 'in a usable fashion'.
Rocky, hilly soil isn't tillable, is impossible to harvest en mass, and results in poor outcomes. It's almost like you've never farmed, and are making statements based upon theory, instead of real world usage cases.
Whatever agenda you have, please stop trying to claim that all soil is good for corn.
Even beyond that, there are places corn cannot grow. Period. Ever. For example, in many parts of Canada, the season is too short for corn to mature!
Hay and other such things grow there, and such land is good for cattle too.
Not all crops involve tilling soil, some orchards are in extremely rocky hilly areas. It’s one of the reasons olive trees are so associated with Italy.
Anyway, preparing an area for cultivation is a one time cost. People actually grow crops in areas you consider impossible because someone already put the effort possibly thousands of years ago even if it’s not currently economically viable.
Terraces also work in hilly areas, though building them is expensive. Removing stones from fields is the origin of field stone houses and quite a few stone fences at property lines. The degree of effort required can be huge but at the extreme end people plant orchards in areas that are covered in boulders.
For places where none of that effort is worth it, lumber is still a viable crop as long as it gets enough rain.
You're changing the context of the argument, from "growing stuff people eat" to "growing stuff for grazing, because it makes no sense to grow crops there".
Yes, you can grow crops anywhere, on the moon, in shipping containers, in your basement, and yes on terraces and if you spare no expense to change the land.
But all of that is silly and absurd, and not part of the context of this discussion. Some of it just is notpossible in any sane fashion.
Some of the land you think is just "move a few rocks and it's fine, like people used to do" is not even remotely accurate or true. We're talking about hilly, rocky land, with 1" of topsoil (Canadian Shield), with poor soil. This land is what you throw a goat or cattle at. It's not something you import billions of dollars of topsoil per 100 acres, to make usable.
I was responding to how to maximize use of land. Grazing is low investment for low returns, but rarely the only option.
I am explicitly not saying significant investment is economically viable, we have a vast surplus of farmland.
That said, historically people would improve land because they had a labor surplus and few options for long term investments. We are living in a world where thousands of years of such decisions has made some real changes to various landscapes. Much of Asia is covered in terraces because they preferred really flat areas for rice fields and had a huge labor surplus. That’s a legacy I think worth remembering rather than the focus on who was in charge over the course of history.
As to adding topsoil that’s closer to 10 million per 100 acres. Dirt’s very cheap in bulk though transportation long distances isn’t. Nowhere near viable when farmland is cheap and the Canadian Shield is that cold. But orders of magnitude better than you where suggesting.
Unless you do crazy things, there is more land suitable for grazing only, than not.
And doing crazy things makes zero sense in the context of this conversation, which was about how cattle are all some land is good for.
Your argument seems to boil down to "well, we could literally move mountains of dirt, or perform massive terraforming projects on useless soil!," well of course, and so what.
It doesn't make you correct, because this sort of discussion is senseless in the context we were discussing.
Take the soil example, yes it would be billions per 100 acres, because on that scale (the Canadian shield) you'd either have to desoil massive amounts of usable farmless, or start grinding rock and creating new topsoil from that... so current market prices are meaningless!
And if you were going to do that, why not just proclaim that the sahara is perfect farmland too, but of course you'd have to dig irrigation ditches, setup trillion dollar desalination plants, but hey I'm sure you'd chime in too, when someone says desert sand isn't good cropland too?!?!?
Nobody is grazing cattle in the Sahara. They did graze it next to their which is one of the reasons it’s expanded so far. That said, farmers are actually reclaiming land at the borders from the desert which isn’t possible with herding, in other words much of this land is only viable for farming.
Your 50% benchmark in terms of land is really not a function of each individual acre of land on it’s own.
The southwest as a whole needs vastly more irrigation than is available, but which specific bit of land becomes farmland and which but is used to graze cattle is very arbitrary. The parts that do grow crops generally have more to do with water rights and which bits are federal land than the actual land it’s self.
Conversely a lot of US farmland is more sustainable for grazing, but the giant aquifer is a temporary solution.
Take the soil example, yes it would be billions per 100 acres, because on that scale (the Canadian shield) you'd either have to desoil massive amounts of usable farmless, or start grinding rock and creating new topsoil from that... so current market prices are meaningless!
Individual large river delta’s contain hundreds of cubic miles of soil. It’s not a limitless supply, but there is plenty of soil though not topsoil to cover 3 million square miles of the Canadian Shield.
No, ruminants use bacteria we don't have to get protein out of plants. Humans can not extract that protein, so we use animals to do it then eat them.
Theres about 30 grams protein in 1000 calories of corn. There's about 90 grams in 1000 calories beef. This is because cows are very good at extracting protein.
Also, I can just let cows graze on Texas praire. I can't necessarily do that with corn.
It’s not that they are more efficient at extracting protein it’s they preferentially use carbohydrates for energy. Human vegetarians can have that same ratio of protein to calories in their flesh as cows or non vegetarian humans. Though the actual ratios do depend on body composition for both cattle and humans.
Yes it is. Cows can eat only grass and still get enough protein. Vegetarians can not do that and still get enough protein. They have to eat other plants as well. Those plants do not grow everywhere.
Humans can extract enough protein in terms of grams from grasses like wheat as long as their daily activity level is high enough to burn sufficient carbohydrates. We have more complex dietary needs, but daily protein requirements aren’t actually that high.
ruminants are able to digest cellulose, it's basically what they have extra stomachs for, so they can have different chemistries that are livable for the cellulose digesting bacteria
It’s a meaningless distinction. Ruminants aren’t eating the full plant either, the roots stay in place.
And of course it’s a moot discussion. Directly eating the seeds is vastly more efficient than cattle eating both especially when their primarily eating seeds in the US.
We also prefer beef because that much corn consumption would be incredibly unhealthy.
People like to shit on animal farms and say that more calories could be grown with less resources with plants. That's true, but the calorie count isn't the only factor to consider. Humans need a diverse diet.
It’s not like corn is the only viable crop on this land, humans can also be vegetarians.
That said, with wealth comes the desire to increase meat consumption in just about every culture. We have plenty of food and land to waste a large percentage of them on cattle, the only issue is the externalities of doing so.
I'm not an expert, but my sense of the carbon sink is that the more soil there is the better, and grazing cows eating grass and leaving manure behind is building soil and encouraging plant growth.
The carbon released by the cows "emissions" is part of a carbon cycle, first captured by the grass and then released by bacteria in the cow's gut. The more grass, the more cows, the more carbon is hanging out somewhere other than the atmosphere.
Or you can grow beans, hemp, etc. Some animal protein is good. But in many places the level of animal protein creation and consumption does not harm than good.
I know you mentioned cows, but do some research on factory farmed pigs. They're legal toxic waste sights. We need to rethink our (Western) approach to diet.
>The alfalfa is also used for cows grown in CA for CA residents. That's also a bad thing. Cow farms should be significantly limited in arid climates
Technically, from what I understand, it's enough to limit alfaalfa in arid climates. The location of cow farms does not matter much after that, in terms of water usage.
What's also good is that enforcing alfaalfa regional restrictions is super easy - a satellite photo would be enough to spot a field, and there's not enough margin to have any organized crime to fight back.
Cow farms should be limited regardless of climate. To make food to feed it to food (i.e., animals) because of some dated tradition is not longer appropriate. It's not sustainable.
This isn't a pro-animal talking point. It's a pro-humam and pro-ecology fact.
The farmers spray that water all over their fields as opposed to using targeted irrigation, so most of the water is wasted instead of even being viable to be exported.
Pillaging, exploitation, and destruction of the commons leading to ecological and societal degradation and eventual collapse has been documented as what capitalism does since there was a thing called capitalism
There's still plenty of boosters who will use fallacious arguments defending it that were just as tired hundreds of years ago.
Some people let their aspirations of greed blind them from what's clearly happening
Replacing capitalism with X will not eliminate the underlying socio-psychological factors that push humans to secure themselves at the expense of other humans and the environment. All capitalism does is give participants a high degree of agency that reveals these factors (and that’s also why regulation is needed—the market doesn’t work well when malicious actors exploit information asymmetry).
In long term, we should understand and alleviate the origin of that chronic desire to win while others lose—however, replacing capitalism with X, depending on the degree of autocracy in X, may just obscure them instead, which seems counter to that goal.
Disagree. It richly rewards and strongly encourages behaviors we consider asocial and destructive.
Let's take Natchez, Mississippi. In 1850, half of America's millionaires lived there. It was the wealthiest city in the country because we richly rewarded and encouraged human enslavement.
The brightest minds had very lucrative careers in slave economics and slave labor studies and there was lots of focus on optimizing human enslavement for maximum profit.
It was the silicon valley of the 19th century and you'd have a bright and successful career if you pursued working in the slavery industry. Slave technology, slave accounting, slave management - you don't even need to directly interact, you can just make the tools.
In fact speaking of silicon valley let's talk about the first rush of San Francisco. It wasn't gold, it was whale oil in the 1830s-1850s. San Francisco was the perhaps the largest whaling port in the world as people were highly encouraged through aggressive economic incentives to go and wipe out every species of whale off the planet. And they were well on their way to success when cheaper substitutes, by pure chance, became available.
This is the problem. There's nothing "natural" about these things - they are human created systems that we have constantly redefined and had to because the base driving force is one of negligent exploitation and extraction.
We have other systems, driven by hate and violence for example, such as racism and war. We don't make peace with richly rewarding and encouraging them. We instead seek to minimize these human tendencies. We don't look kindly on war profiteers or race-baiting crowd agitators.
These things existing are as inevitable as any other human behavior, there's an angel and devil inside all of us, what we choose to reward and structure things around is a choice we can make.
We can do better than total war, we can do better than Jim Crow, and we can do better than cooking the planet with capitalism. We have to. There's no choice.
Start with the London School of Economics podcast series, read works by Oxford economist Kate Raworth, the late economic anthropologist scholar David Graeber, the finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, there's plenty of alternative configurations that don't have slavery, child labor, scamming and the sex trade as the default nodus operandi.
That things as complex as macroeconomic systems can't be described in comment threads on internet forums.
As an analogy and an extreme example, pretend there is an evolutionary biologist among a group that believes in creationism.
The creationist has a very simple narrative, only takes a few words. The evolutionary biologist has a much bigger task at hand. They're starting not from an ideology but from a discipline of analysis.
That's the struggle. The neoliberal models are extremely simple to explain, they are taught to elementary school children who all understand the logic of it.
But the anthropologists and economic historians of the world have a different story to tell and they cannot be similarly summarized.
They require careful study and reflection like learning any type of discipline, such as a new programming paradigm or the implications of a new kind of data structure.
And that's my true takeaway here, the answers to your questions are as deep and rich as any other modern school of thought and like any other accurate depiction of reality, say modern physics, chemistry, or biology, there's simply no way to stuff it into 1-2 minutes of casual reading on a social news site.
I guess that's it actually. Instead of starting from an ideology we start from a discipline of analysis. Any summary I can give here will only be totalling ideology, which is what we need to get away from. People presume that any critique of the system have an alternative sweeping simplistic all-encompassing dogmatic ideology.
So this is a bad form for that kind of learning.
---
As an aside that's a major breakthrough in a problem I've been struggling with for over a decade. "this is a bad form for that kind of learning." I'm going to print that out to remember it.
> That things as complex as macroeconomic systems can't be described in comment threads on internet forums.
You’d be amazed how far the medium of written conversation can get you. Pretty involved concepts in the sciences you mention had been explained and discussed here before.
> People presume that any critique of the system have an alternative sweeping simplistic all-encompassing dogmatic ideology.
You have so far not made an attempt to even hint at an alternative, after so many words.
Disregarding the question as to why humans are inclined to behave in ways that benefit themselves at the expense of others and the environment—writing this off as “natural” or blaming it on a devil and an angel on our shoulders—is, in my opinion, key to ensuring the ongoing tragedy of the commons at planet scale.
Yes, in a free society with capitalism people have more opportunities to behave this way. Yes, that’s why regulation is needed (as a stop-gap measure, not root cause treatment).
While you don’t seem to be suggesting an alternative to capitalism for some reason, I’m reasonably sure that in any of them the society would suffer from the same issues, just less visible or more localised to ruling elites (which, by the way, doesn’t mean the scale of exploitation itself would be smaller).
As abolition of slavery showed, ethical standards are evolving—and freedom is necessary for this evolution. Without freedom you are treated as an ignorant child, with decisions made for you. Made by humans who are just as fallible, with imperfect ethics, power-hungry and insecure, happy to use their positions of authority to benefit themselves, whom you’d be deemed not wise enough to elect.
" suggesting an alternative to capitalism for some reason, I’m reasonably sure that in any of them the society would suffer from the same issues"
capitalism is a term so vague its meaningless in a policy discussion
Neoliberalism, on the other hand, is spesifically responsible for many of the problems we are facing now.
the fact that people worship it is also a problem, we have media hosts calling large scale landlord "weath creators"
for some reason people who make ground breaking discoveries are not called wealth creators and do not become billionaires.
you have to consider who the system rewards, and who the system protects.
shumpeterianism, for exanole, is a spesific alternative that rewards those that create new technologies and where government has an active role in shaping a sustainable industrial strategy
It’s not vague if the other side directly argues against capitalism. Then it means they can be arguing for is likely a command economy, which… yeah. Not going to solve anything. Which I am inclined to try to make abundantly clear in such a discussion.
But I also disagree with you. “The system” should not reward anyone. People create value, and people reward those who they think provide value by becoming their customers or by investing into their business.
Problems arise when this basic mechanic is abused: e.g., market participants lie about the value they create, including through concealment of side-effects (let’s drain the aquifers or dump PFAS into the river and pretend we didn’t know), use other measures than actual value when investing (line goes up so who cares if business is unethical or its business model is fundamentally flawed), etc.
Which, again, ultimately comes down to humans trying to secure themselves at the expense of others and the environment.
> It’s not vague if the other side directly argues against capitalism. Then it means they can be arguing for is likely a command economy, which… yeah.
Could be feudalism, could be technocracy, could be replacing all limited companies with coops, could be getting rid of publically traded companies and allowing only partnerships.
> But I also disagree with you. “The system” should not reward anyone. People create value, and people reward those who they think provide value by becoming their customers or by investing into their business.
This is exactly the fantasy-land neoliberalism that got us in the shit to begin with.
It anwers none of the important questions of the day - what can be owned as intellectual property, who does it belong to, how long does it last, why is it that academic reseach is paid for by the tax payer but belong to private journals, why is it that when a company accuses someone of theft that the police investigates it at no cost to the company, but if you accuse the company of breaking the law you have to file a lawsuit at your expence.
Can you claim compensation when a company sells you a product that is 'environmentally friendly' but turns out they lied? What law breaking puts you in jail, and what law breaking just looses you money. What law breaking is prosecuted by the sate, and what lawbreaking is prosecuted in civil court by claimants.
Why is it that stock buybacks were illegal before 1982? Should they be illegal?
All of that is 'the system' and absolutely does determine who are the winners and losers.
What I described is a fundamental mechanic, kind of like “do good stuff and people will do good stuff for you”.
All of your questions basically reduce to “what to do if people abuse this mechanic by disguising bad stuff as good, violating trust, hurting the environment, or such?”
Well, you can either alleviate the symptom or treat the cause.
The only way of treating the cause is working on deep-seated insecurities and psychological trauma that make humans feel motivated to secure themselves at the expense of others and the environment-to abuse this mechanic or facilitate its abuse.
The measures that prevent the abuse by restricting the agency of market participants only alleviate symptoms.
I don’t know what exactly you mean by “system”. If you are saying the current measures are insufficient, I don’t argue, they could (should) be improved. Still, any set of these measures is never the end in itself, as it doesn’t treat the root cause.
If you think restricting agency is the ultimate solution, then we will have to agree to strongly disagree on fundamentals.
Capitalism is a system that gives humans agency it ain't an utopia. All of those things can be documented from the beginning of life on Earth. As a fact, ecological damage is even worse under Soviet Union. Blaming capitalism is a vague argument that says more about the author political ideology than of the many complex underlying causes.
Treating water allocation as if it were property, which it manifestly is not, leads to what would charitably be described as neurotic behavior. We have no need to continue that.
Outlawing alfalfa growth in California from allocated water would not conflict with anybody's "rights". They can grow something else there that uses less water. Or (and this is something being done, in the Sacramento River delta) flood the land and collect carbon credits for sinking swamp vegetation.
Much of the farmland in the Sacramento River delta is well below river and, indeed, sea level, some over 20 feet below, behind dikes (called there "levees") which threaten to collapse in the next big earthquake, pulling in a toxic load of salt water from the bay. (This has happened more than once; the dikes are not in better shape today.) Flooding fields gradually is hoped to lead to a sustainable future for the river. Erstwhile farmers could also float solar panels and collect more revenue. Raise freshwater fish and shrimp, besides.
California agriculture north of Bakersfield does not use up quite so much water as allocation seems to indicate; the water evaporates and is blown to the Sierra Nevada mountains where much of it precipitates, and ends up in rivers again.
I can't tell if the downvotes mean that I'm wrong about this, and the state could theoretically reallocate that water, or that I'm right but people think it should work differently. Are there any experts on how this works in California that could weigh in here?
Every time this comes up, the simple straightforward actually-legal solution of "let's pay the farmers to use less water" gets downvoted to oblivion. I conclude that many Californians on HN simply dislike farmers and don't want them to prosper. The other possibility, that there isn't actually a water shortage in California so there's no need to waste money managing water, seems to contradict everything I've ever learned on this topic from the commercial news media.
In 70 something years we went from 60% forest coverage of earth's land mass to 30%. I can't help but wonder how it would be without any animal agriculture.
It is a really depressing reality that we have carved out. It isn't even clear to me at all what we've gained through this destruction. It also isn't clear if the Green Revolution was a net long-term benefit.
You might be interested in the book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott. I have it sitting on my desk and have watched some talks by the author, but I haven't gotten to the book yet.
"The standing biomass of domesticated poultry, mostly chickens, has been calculated as 5 Mt C, about three times higher than the total biomass of all wild bird species combined"
Someone about ten years ago worked out that the snows of Kilimanjaro are fed by the vegetation upwind from the mountain. Whatever global warming is doing, deforestation is doing faster.
Thanks very much for posting. I'd point out that the numbers from that very useful link are wildly, wildly different from what the parent commenter posted:
1. The graphs appear to be showing that 29% of the Earth's land surface is "barren land", i.e. deserts, glaciers, rocky terrain, etc. In 1900, 48% of the NON barren land was forests, so 34% of the Earth's total land was forested.
2. In 2018 the percentage of forested non-barren land was down to 38%, or 27% of Earth's total land.
34% to 27% of total land area from 1900 to 2018 is a major difference from the parent commenter's assertion of "In 70 something years we went from 60% forest coverage of earth's land mass to 30%".
Sorry I'm writing this on my phone holding a baby, so not the best situation for in depth research. The numbers I quote are from memory based on watching the latest David Attenborough documentary. Not a great reference, I know.
The article that I linked above looks at how much cropland we'd need to feed the entire world population if we gave up on farming animals completely. It turns out that we would end up with about the same amount of cropland, but that's only to match the current production in calories (and nothing else). Assuming the human population continued to grow, we'd have to use even more land to grow crops.
There is of course a lot of pasture that could be turned back to forest, or left to turn back to forest, on its own. But not all pasture is ancient forests. I have no idea how much forest we would regain by ceasing to feed animals on pature.
Most of the world's grain is eaten by humans' food.
We're really really good at efficiently producing grain -- especially field corn (which is not super desirable as human food without significant processing), and we grow lots of animals of all sorts. Naturally, when we can, we feed those animals on field corn -- they don't complain, and it's the cheapest food we can produce for them.
In the US we also subsidize corn pretty heavily, which has biased us towards maximizing efficiency on this crop rather than on some other grain. It's unclear to me whether we would have become more efficient with some other grain (in terms of food calories out per unit of resources/land in) had we produced as durable of an economic incentive to do so -- but regardless, it would still be a grain of some sort that ended up being the caloric efficiency maximum product, and therefore what animal feed would end up being.
It isn't really relevant anymore because the food source is much more diverse than what it used to be, but when some western people started cultivating corn, and feading mostly out of it, they started to suffer from acute lack of tryptophan and vitamin b3, called pellagra, causing millions of death over several centuries.
Mesoamerican civilizations built on top of corn had a specific corn processing step called nixtamalization, which avoided the issue altogether, but unfortunately wasn't imported along with corn during the colonizations of the Americas.
But as long as you can get enough tryptophan and vitamin b3 otherwise, corn is completely fine as a main source of energy.
To have "nixtamalized" maize appears to be what ingredients lists call "processed with lime". Pellagra epidemics have arisen through failure to process with lime.
The Mayans got their cooking water from out of cenotes, skylights of limestone cave systems, which might have made it naturally nixtamalizing. Were their grinding stones of limestone? (The grinding platform, the metate, was not.) Don't know what the Navaho did or do.
No, probably not. Mostly it gets said because sweet corn is tasty when prepared simply as a whole food, and it's what most people think of when they see the word "corn".
I mostly see it as a bad faith argument for why the only possible productive use of x fraction of land is for growing feed and herding cattle and didn't know the 'animal feed corn' and corn as a grain for people are the same crop.
If it's basically the same level of involvement as as bleached flour, then the only real relevant issues are how to source a balanced protein so you don't have to eat half a kilo of carbs when you don't need the energy and how distructive other micronutrient sources are.
Cornmeal is less than 1% simple sugars, as is cornflour. While it's not great compared to high fiber low gi sources like brown rice or sweet potato, it's not sugary at all. You have to split the polysachharides somehow to make it into sugar.
Of course if you spend extra time, money and energy turning your relatively ordinarily healthy grain (which is admittedly a low bar) into sugar you spend more time, money and energy and wind up with sugar. It's no different from wheat in that regard other than you should maybe add a bit more fiber to the meal.
> It's really not about that, corn products are simply bad for health - too much sugar, to little more valuable nutrients
For the majority, sure. In our immediate family I have to disagree, after many months of (undiagnosed) illness, and after several trips to hospital, my son was recently diagnosed with Coeliac[0].
Now corn products are now a key component of his diet.
>Most of the world's grain is eaten by humans' food.
Evidently.
It's like when, talking about how there are too many cars, they make a separation between "cars" and "humans", as if cars weren't driven by humans. It's very basic manipulation.
You can reduce the number of cars without reducing the number of people. Human beings can, in fact, exist without a car. We can also reduce the amount of livestock we keep without reducing the number of people, by consuming less of it.
This seems really obvious. How is it manipulation?
Eh, beef, maybe, but the math basically comes down to: wheat, 4 million calories per acre, corn, 15 million. Take that 15 million calories of corn and feed it to chickens for a 3:1 calorie exchange and you've got 5 million calories of chicken per acre.
It's more complicated than that, but corn yields are so high that they can overpower the otherwise inefficiency of meat production.
Potatoes are as good as corn, and rice nearly so, but just from a land usage perspective chicken is no worse than eating wheat bread.
> First, this is an incorrect comparison: chickens eating corn VS humans eating wheat bread. Humans can very much eat corn as well.
I mean, it compares what it compares. From a land usage and calorie perspective chicken is approximately equivalent to wheat.
> Also, the environmental impact needs to account for water usage, pollution from the plant and animal farming and energy usage.
Yes, I am not accounting for those. The first reason is that I am lazy, and this is a comment on the internet; the second reason is that once you are trying to optimize for land usage, water usage, energy usage, fertilizer usage, human labor, capital costs, run-off pollution, CO2, and everything else, you now need to decide how to weight each factor.
Rice produces almost 3 times as many calories per acre as wheat, but uses more than 3 times as much water (449 gallons / lb vs 132). Which is better?
> Second, you have to consider the conversion rate for each nutrients including calories and proteins and chickens are much less efficient than that.
This is actually where chicken excels.
I should really be comparing chicken to soy, not wheat, because soy is a great source of complete protein.
If you plant 3 acres of soybeans, you'll get 18 million calories worth of soybeans.
If you plant 2 acres of corn and 1 acre of soybeans, you'll get 36 million calories of grains, and if you feed them to chickens, you'll get 12 million calories of chicken.
On a calories-per-acre basis, soy is beating chicken 3:2. But soy only gives you about 0.1 grams of protein per calorie, while chicken gives you more like 0.2 grams of protein per calorie.
So your 3 acres of soybeans give you 1.8 million grams of protein, while your 3 acres of corn+soy->chickens give you 2.4 million grams of protein. So chickens beat soy on protein per acre by 4:3.
> Please provide evidence sources if you want to claim otherwise.
I've stated all the numbers I'm using; if there's one you want to call bullshit on in particular let me know.
Not really; there's also the complication that you don't actually feed your chickens straight corn. Because chickens need protein in their meal, it's more like, 2 acres of corn and 1 acre of soybeans, for 36 million calories from 3 acres to get 12 million calories of chicken for a chicken-per-acre calories of 4 million. You also get your chicken manure as a fertilizer out at the end, but then, if you were already collecting your humanure it's probably not a net gain.
From a pure land usage standpoint, you're still better off if we're getting most of our calories from corn, potatoes and rice directly. Once you start adding in necessary protein, you can either subsist on soy, or feed that soy with corn to chickens and pigs (which have a worse feed ratio compared to chickens, but can supplement on food waste to reclaim calories that would otherwise go to waste) for roughly similar food-per-acre footprints.
Nope. Especially given the extent to which "cow" is a thing that we created because we wanted more/better beef.
Over centuries, we have become increasingly efficient at producing beef, and are extremely efficient at it. It is probably not possible to be much more efficient using whole-plant crops and growing whole-animal beef.
Which is a very good thing indeed, because it makes our food system robust by operating at a large caloric surplus.
When crop failures lead to rising grain prices, ranchers respond by not buying as much grain for their animals. The result is less Prime-grade beef and a whole lot more grain available.
In reality, rich countries are still buying all the grain they can to feed their livestock and carry on as before, just a bit more expensive, while the poorer populations experience the real shortages.
In reality, the United States is the largest exporter of calories in the world, and the overwhelming source of direct food aid, and has been since WWII.
That is a contradiction to my statement in what way? Do you think the United States is the only wealthy country? The fact is that the war in Ukraine is leading to shortages and those are felt by the poorest, not the richest.
Wait a minute. What did the OP say this time that is dishonest?
I'm totally aware that vegans consistently invade this kind of thread on HN to promulgate their vegan propaganda, like little prophets of malnutrition sent into the world by a god of famine, but this time, what was the lie? I can't see it.
As far as I can tell it's true that meat production and consumption is very unevenly distributed: the USA and Argentina produce almost double as much beeef as anybody else:
It also takes some mind reading to think I'm advocating for veganism just because I say meat production consumes more resources and that animal feed production competes with "lower value" plant based food production. The latter is undeniable. It's up to you if that means you want to reduce your meat consumption, and I personally don't.
This is giving the dystopian chills when I consider that the Uber-wealthy proponents of population reduction (Bill Gates) are buying up crop land. Long game?
Gates never advocated population reduction. He has advocated for improvements in human development that inevitably leads to reduced fertility rates (ie slower growth). Gates owns a lot of farmland for one guy, but it's a miniscule percentage of the total farmland in the US.
in the US at least, corn, rice, wheat and soy are subsidized by the government so the normal market forces you are describe don't apply in the same way
> "... a Russian naval blockade has prevented past harvests from reaching their destinations. The loss of this output has caused already high grain prices to surge. The World Food Programme warns that 47m people are at risk of hunger as a result."
I understand that the point of the article is about reallocating and tightening up the belts of consumption, so to speak. However, how about exerting more pressure onto the aggressor which russia openly is?
The world needs to recognize russia's actions as deliberate and premeditated steps to cause the collapses in food supply chains. This is not opportunistic, but rather a calculated policy, just as it is with gas and oil supply.
It's not about the cattle, it's about the "humans" in charge of the kremlin!
How will 'exerting more pressure' help? We may already be past the point where there is a good solution but the best approach so far would be de-escalation, negotiation and cooperation in an attempt to avoid all this.
Every attempt to exert pressure has put the west in a less favourable position. More pressure has built an energy crisis in Europe; rivals in Asia awash with cheap gas and contributed to a global food shortage. This was a series of own-goals.
The US should have taken a few deep breaths over the last few years and dialled back the anti-Russia sentiment rather than burning relations with Russia in an attempt to inconvenience Trump. Unless the plan is to trigger World War III the West's strategies can only be said to be failing. This could have been a 2nd Iraq invasion instead of becoming the mega-crisis that is unfolding.
>...Every attempt to exert pressure has put the west in a less favourable position.
There's a largest war started by russia (8 years ago!) and going on in the middle of Europe with a threat of use of nuclear weapons.
As evident by now, russia is uncapable of maintaining any trustworthy agreements with any other nation, let alone its neighbors. It openly laughs at any civilized rule of law principles and considers this a weakness.
It may not seem that way on a distance, but this war is against the West, against its values, its societies, and its economies. The whole world already feels the blows.
Russia is increasingly acting as a rabid dog. The 'anti-russian sentiment' is a product of its own making, not for the first time in its imperial history.
How does one deal with a rabid dog that brought itself to your yard? Asking the dog to deescalate? Abandoning your yard? Letting the dog into the house?
This dog is driven by a violent agony and the violence will eventually tear it apart. But meanwhile someone needs to fend it off and contain.
Ukraine so far is fending the rabid russia with its own flesh and blood.
The war is on. Can the world exert more pressure? Not dragging feet with delivering the offered weapons. Not diluting the sanctions. Not agreeing to buy the stolen grains or harboring the russian assets. Consolidating and be decisive against the aggressor instead of making this Yankees' business or, worse, let the rabies take over Ukraine...
Parent made a valid point. Why are you on about rabid dog analogies? Please don't urge more aggressive economic measures until you can explain why the existing ones haven't worked at all. [0]
It's grimly amusing that you think the thing that happened in 2014 was that Russia started a war. [1]
1. We already produce way more food than the entire world can eat, even if it were distributed equally
2. When population begins butting up against the limits of food production, demand for cheaper plant based food will rise. Most will be unable to afford meat, making the meat market naturally shrink itself for economic reasons. Likewise if meat becomes too expensive due to resource constraints.
3. At the point where population exceeds food supply, there will be at worst 1 generation of starvation, and then population will stabilize to have enough food
3a. Infinite growth of the population is not sustainable or desirable. Even if meat were banned, this same story will eventually happen again with any vegetable that is less calorie efficient to grow. Do we want 30 billion people eating literally one food, or 25 billion eating a varied, though less land efficient diet? At some point, the world will have to accept that there isn't enough food to have 3 children. At that point, when the 2 child policy is global, what kind of diet should be possible? We can stretch it so that we're all eating literally one crop and there's absolutely nothing more we can do to feed the world, but hopefully we stop breeding a bit earlier than that, to end with one where people can still enjoy meat.
I've started eating barley a couple of times a week, which is used primarily as an animal grain. I've found it makes a great alternative to rice or quinoa.
From Wikipedia:
> Globally 70% of barley production is used as animal fodder,[4] while 30% as a source of fermentable material for beer and certain distilled beverages, and as a component of various foods. It is used in soups and stews, and in barley bread of various cultures. Barley grains are commonly made into malt in a traditional and ancient method of preparation.
I grew up in a land where 95% of the farms grew the same two crops and it was unsettling if you think about it. When mosaic virus started to become a problem here there were a number of stories published about how few grains represent most of our calories and two epidemics happening in the same year or couple of years could put us into a very, very bad situation.
I decided probably 20 years ago that the simplest thing I could do was to eat multigrain bread, based on the observation that it's not just acres of alternative grain that matter in a situation like this, it's experience with grains that matter. A farmer who has grown 5 acres of millet for a decade can easily ramp that to 50, 100, and his neighbors can impose upon him for advice to do the same (probably the next year or the year after since farmers gonna farm).
But if you don't know anyone who grows millet or sorghum or chia or whatever, it's going to take you years to sort that out, and if you're older you might just decide to try to avoid having to change at all.
Black bean, bacon (turkey bacon, for me), and barley stew is my go-to Instantpot meal. I like to imagine I'm eating at a tavern in a vaguely D&D/Middle-Earth-esque setting. Sometimes I add turnips too.
Biodiversity loss also counts as destroying the planet. Don't let climate change distract you from other sources of planet destruction. There's this concept called planetary boundaries.
Not saying climate change isn't important, just that these systemic issues are interlinked and should be addressed together. We won't last long without healthy ecosystems.
No objection there from me. I'm just saying that as far as I understand it, one important reason why climate change is bad is that it directly affects ecosystems.
That we also destroy ecosystems directly must also be stressed as you say. And the two are indeed interlinked, for example habitat destruction causes both biodiversity loss and decreased ability to bind carbon. This "land use change" is a major source of emissions from agriculture and industrial farming is the main reason for it, for example rainforests razed to make space to grow soya to feed to cows. So yeah. I think we agree more than we disagree on that.
> what do you think of the documentary cowspiracy?
I haven't watched it but from what I've read about it, it seems like ideologically driven propaganda rather than a documentary.
> in any case if most of the grain production isnt going for feeding humans, it is quite ridiculous.
Why? The title of the article is misleading. If you look at the second graph, it's obvious that the amount of grain that is eaten directly by humans (1337 tonnes) is greater than the amount that goes to any another single use (the next highest is animal feed at 987).
In fact if you sum all the other uses up from that graph they come to 1570 tonnes, where 245 of that is "processing & losses", and another 73 is "seeds". Those are categories that overlap with grains used to feed humans directly (and other uses also) so it's not clear they should be counted separately . In short, only 1252 tonnes are definitely used to do other things than to directly feed us (namely, they become feed and fuel). So despite what the article says, most of the grain we produce seems to go to feed humans directly.
And as the article points out, it's not "grain" in general that's not fed to humans, but corn ("maize"). Most wheat and rice does go to feed humans directly and only a tiny amount of wheat or rice goes to other uses.
Seems we need to reduce world population by 1/2 or more. Aren’t we at least contracting in developed countries? Anyway to ask India/China to stop growing so fast?
As soon as that happens, the reproduction rate falls below the replacement rate.
The problem is that global society is actually not ready for a population that shrinks instead of grows. Many of our institutions are effectively pyramid schemes that rely on more people entering the bottom and paying for them than pull out money and exit from the top.
(Side note: I believe China is actually falling. There have been significant programs attempting to get women to have more children. Between education and "one child" (which is no longer in force) China has some demographic issues ahead.)
Women also need reproductive rights -- something that just took a hit in the US -- and the ability to support themselves. I'm not remembering/finding the rest of that list of 4 or 5 items.
Since men are physically more powerful, you also need a society with laws and people that will protect women and women’s rights. Women’s rights to mate with who they want, when they want, how they want, and earn income and be financially independent to be able to make those decisions independently.
I wrote that women’s education is necessary, but not sufficient. All the women in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan can have PhDs, but it is not going to do them much good if the men collectively decide to oppress them.
Au contraire, the men can collectively decide to oppress them, but it is not going to do them much good if all the women in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan have PhDs.
What is it, I ask you, that makes a population difficult to oppress?
That seems like a strange conclusion to draw from this article. It even says "But in fact, more than enough grain is already grown to meet humanity’s needs."
Seems more like the number of people isn't the biggest problem, but the lifestyle of a part of those people is. To me it look like the problem will be solved if North America and Europe drastically reduce their meat consumption.
So someone gives an argument which involves less than 1/4 of the world population merely having to change their consumption patterns by eating less meat, but still you see a better solution in 'cutting our population' by more than that? Wouldn't it be better to first focus on the lowest hanging fruit in which we tackle the problem by focussing on those people using a disproportionate amount of resources, instead of indiscriminately reducing the whole population? Not to mention the fact that there are not really any ways to quickly 'cut our pupulation' to this level short of killing people.
Most places outside Africa are contracting or rapidly turning toward it, with only a few places avoiding that fate. As the other poster pointed out, this is certainly true (and disastrous) for China, who accelerated their own population crash through communism's attacks on traditional religion and policies against children.
Yeah but my ancestors natural human history circle of life top-of-the-food chain indigenous people crop deaths protein deficiency b12 free-range cage-free humanely-killed cow overpopulation lions and gazelles moral relativity plants feel pain canine teeth bacon is delicious though
You guys are so eloquent and persuasive, it's incomprehensible why everyone has not joined your ranks already.
Btw, congratulations for sneaking real problems like B12 and other nutrient deficiencies suffered by vegans in with all the straw men:
> Most vegans show adequate B12 levels to make clinical deficiency unlikely but nonetheless show restricted activity of B12 related enzymes, leading to elevated homocysteine levels. Strong evidence has been gathered over the past decade that even slightly elevated homocysteine levels increase risk of heart disease and stroke and pregnancy complications.
None of those are straw men; I've heard every single one, including one of my favorites "cow overpopulation" from you "cheese goddess" specifically.
The same way plenty of farm animals are supplemented with b12 for later human consumption, it's mindlessly easy to get the adequate amount of b12 in a vegan diet. Tons of vegan food come fortified, and if not, a 1000mg supplement once a week couldn't be simpler.
Both the American Dietetic Association[0] and British Dietetic Association[1] confirm that a well-planned vegan diet is healthy for all stages of life.
_My_ bingo card says: someone whose entire life and identity has been in animal agriculture takes personal umbrage to the notion that their lifestyle is immoral and destroying the planet.
Who is that "somoeone whose entire life and identity has been in animal agriculture"? I work in IT. I chose my username because I make cheese as a hobby.
btw, when did I say anything about "cow overpopulation"? I don't even know what that is?
Oh, wait. Of course. It's a straw man. Nevermind.
> Both the American Dietetic Association[0] and British Dietetic Association[1] confirm that a well-planned vegan diet is healthy for all stages of life.
The key words being "well-planned". As the Vegan Society says, most vegans have low homocysteine levels which is a clear indication that their diets are not "well planned" and put them in danger of heart disease, stroke and pregnancy complications, at least.
That is "most" vegans, in the words of the Vegan Society.
Then of course there's the vegans who feed their kids vegan diets without any planning at all and end up damaging their kids' health, or killing them:
> In 2002, a vegan couple from New Zealand was accused of child abuse after ‘failing to provide the necessities of life’ for their six-month-old child. Their son died of medical complications due to vitamin B12 deficiency after the parents left the hospital against medical advice to treat their son with herbal remedies (23). In addition, seven infants exclusively breastfed by vegan mothers developed nutritional vitamin B12 deficiency. Most of these children presented with hypotonia, lengths and weights below the third percentile, and psychomotor retardation that improved with the appropriate nutritional supplementation (24).
> As recently as 2005, despite the significant available literature on the potential risks of alternate diets, strict vegan parents were taken to court and charged with neglect after one of their children died of malnutrition (25). Their other four children were all found to be below the lowest appropriate percentile for height and weight for their age. These parents avoided taking their children to see physicians and the children were not immunized.
So, well-planned diets, my foot. Most vegans have no idea what to do to stay healthy while eating their preferred diet. And do you know why? Because irresponsible internet vegans like you try very hard to hide the fact that a vegan diet is a health risk. The Vegan Society at least is honest about that:
> The risk to these groups alone is reason enough to call on all vegans to give a consistent message as to the importance of B12 and to set a positive example. Every case of B12 deficiency in a vegan infant or an ill informed adult is a tragedy and brings veganism into disrepute.
My guess is that this is because those folks care deeply about their principles and don't just use them as a bludgeon to win internet arguments, like you guys.
People suffering from poor health because of a shitty diet is not a uniquely vegan phenomenon. Heart disease kills more people in the US than anything else and a poor diet plays a massive role in that. Talk about a straw. man.
So we agree that a vegan diet is just another shitty diet that carries a risk of heart disease (also stroke and pregnancy complications), just like other shitty diets. And just because other diets are also shitty and unhealthy, doesn't change the fact that the vegan diet is a shitty, unhealthy diet and that people should be warned of the health risks inherent in it.
You've been vegan for 19 years but does that mean you haven't had any meat or animal products in those 19 years?
Because from what I understand, most vegans do eat at least some meat and animal products once in a while. "Breaking vegan" they call it. And it's OK to do it as long as you're vegan, otherwise it's not right and you're a murderer.
Because only being vegan is an ethical stance. Where being vegan of course means posting vegan memes on twitter and stuff like that.
> Some grain by-products, such as maize husks, are unsuitable for human food. And feeding grain to animals does generate food for people indirectly, in the form of milk, meat and eggs. However, this process is highly wasteful. For every 100 calories of grain fed to a cow, just three emerge as beef. Along with other feed crops and pasture, rearing animals also uses land that could produce human food.
But we don't only need calories. In fact we already produce and eat many more calories than we need (but we distribute them unevenly so that a third of the world eats too many and 2/3s not enough). The reason we feed all this grain to animals is so that they turn it into nutrient-dense meat, dairy and eggs. Those are rich in micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) that we can't get as well from grains (or not at all like B12 vitamin).
So maybe farming looks "inefficient" if you consider only calories, but when you consider nutrients in general, meat (including seafood), dairy and eggs are actually the most efficient source of those we need to stay healthy and thrive.
But even if we only count calories, the amount of cropland that we would free for rewilding if we stopped farming meat completely and produced no meat from ruminants, no pork or poultry, no dairy, and no eggs, is miniscule:
In short, we'd go from 1.17 billion ha of cropland for farming animals and growing crops, to using 1 billion ha of cropland.
That's a tiny change and it would most likely quickly need to grow as the global population increases. And it's such a tiny change because most of the land used to farm animals, or grow grains for animal feed, is not cropland, but pasture, which is for the most part not suitable for growing crops.
Do you have sources for claiming animals are the most efficient source of those micronutrients? Where do those animals get those micronutrients from? Why do they still need to be injected with supplements like vitamin B12? Why do you discount use of pasture for rewilding?
B12 is basically never made by eukaryotes. We humans use bioreactors or traditional fermentation cats to have bacteria do the job. Ruminants like cows get B12 by fermentation in the gut. Animal with smaller guts like chicken need it in food like us, generally via fermented food. There is no significant difference in bioavailability that I know of for B12, but there’s an argument to be had that meat is more palatable than pills or weird fermented acquired-taste foods.
Iron is probably the only nutrient I can immediately think of where there’s a significant (~2x) bioavailability difference between plants and animals. Not big enough to make the animal source "more efficient" from a resource use perspective considering the feed conversion still.
> We humans use bioreactors or traditional fermentation cats to have bacteria do the job.
OK, same line of reasoning as above, I guess. Answer me this question please: how did we get the B12 we needed to stay helahty before we knew about B12, or any other vitamin, or were capable of creating in bioreactors?
> Why do they still need to be injected with supplements like vitamin B12?
I've had this conversation many times before: maybe animals need to be supplemented with B12 where you live, but not where I live and I'm pretty sure not in most of the world, either. If we couldn't get enough B12 from meat and animal products we'd have been in real trouble a very long time ago. Like a couple hundred thousand years ago, at least.
But I should not use the word "efficiency" in this kind of context because it's really so vague what "efficiency" means that it can be used to mean anything at all and justify any kind of conclusion at all, even completely contradictory conclusions. For example: are chickens "efficient"? Sure, because you can pack a hundred of them in a square meter! Aren't chickens really "inefficient"? Obviously, since you need one chicken to lay one egg a day!
Mea maxima culpa. Animals are not "efficient" producers of B12. Instead, eating the meat of animals is how we naturally acquire our B12. Regardless of who actually makes it. How does that sound? Better I hope.
I generally see this argument pushed by vegans whose central issue is really animal rights, which is a valid concern, but the claim that a 100% vegan world, all other things being unchanged, would be one free from fossil-fueled global warming is simply not true.
Generally speaking the claim is that significant amounts of agricultural energy go into growing grain for animals, and that domestic animal populations result in methane emissions, so eliminating the animal populations means less methane and you'd also need less agricultural production as everyone would eat vegan diets, if I've spelled it out adequately.
However, this doesn't change the need for electricity generation and transportation fuel to move food and materials around the world, or from farms to cities, or for industrial production and heating and cooling, so that's where the electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines and storage systems are needed so we can phase out the fossil fuels from the energy mix. Yes, that's going to be cheaper and more sustainable than trying to expand uranium fission.
Furthermore, in the pre-industrial era in North America for millenia there were large populations of bison, estimated variously at perhaps 50% of the domestic cattle population (which is where the biogenic methane is coming from). For example:
(2012) "Historic, pre-European settlement, and present-day contribution of wild ruminants to enteric methane emissions in the United States"
Overall, enteric CH4 emissions from bison, elk, and deer in the presettlement period were about 86% (assuming bison population size of 50 million) of the current CH4 emissions from farmed ruminants in the United States.
There are plenty of decent arguments for eating less meat, but I don't think 'fixing the climate' is really a very strong one.
You assume that the number of ruminants is invariate. You assume that only North American ruminants participate. You assume that excess from farming to feed livestock, foreign and domestic, does not count. That is crappy science.
Because everyone on the planet going vegan tomorrow will not fix the root cause of climate change which is burning fossil fuels. Three quarters of Greenhouse Gas emissions are caused by burning fossil fuels in sectors other than agriculture (in general, not just farming):
So even if we stopped eating any food at all tomorrow, we'd still not be stopping climate change, which is caused ... say it with me ... by burning fossil fuels.
Burning fossil fuels. <-.
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This!
That thing right there is the cause of climate change and that's the thing what we have to address, and address immediately.
The problem with this kind of post is not, as you might surmise, that people disagree with the notion that reducing meat consumption is helpful from an emissions perspective.
It is that the binary presentation implies an either-or when in fact both are helpful.
Plus it just shits on people and nobody likes that.
There is carbon-negative beef, and there are plants that require enormous amounts of artificial soil additives. Probably the biggest factor is whether the meat comes from a ranch in your general area and if the bell-pepper in your salad was flown in from holland.
I'm responding to "people disagree with the notion that reducing meat consumption is helpful from an emissions perspective". People may disagree but it's like disagreeing that 100 > 1 -- who cares what they think?
You should probably sit still and not move around too much in order to minimize the number of calories you need to stay alive. If that's the metric we're optimizing for, anyway.
This is the sort of childish reply I see when folks talk about emissions from meat consumption/production. What's next, are you going to tell me that every steak I don't eat you'll eat two more? That's a classic.
There is no more time left for this kind of pragmatism. It doesn’t matter it people disagree, the truth is supporting meat consumption is supporting industries that are actively killing us and the planet.
I assume you are being serious, but the truth is that supporting ICE vehicle sales and the fossil fuel industry as a result is supporting industries that are actively killing us and the planet also.
I sure hope you bike (or drive a conflict-free electric car, I guess?) and are powered by your own solar panels if you feel this way.
why do you have to have your own solar panels? doesn't make any sense to me
I agree however on biking (or public transport). I will always try to live max 15-20km away from work, such that I always can use a bike or a velomobile.
Please don't try to make ad hominem arguments, thanks.
I understood. However this is rather counter productive as it requires more environmentally costly storage as well as solar capacity.
Additionally, it totally neglects all other sources of renewable energy.
It is next to impossible to use only renewable electricity from the grid. I agree with you, the statement was meant to illustrate the original poster’s rather unhelpful maximalist stance.
I guess I should have said "currently" -- very few grids are 100% renewable; some offer the option to individual customers (hi EBCE!) but usually what this means is that the operators purchase enough power from renewable sources to cover that customer's daily use, but crucially it's not always at the time of use. For example, the user might be supplied with power from a fossil fuel power plant at night, but then extra solar power is purchased during sunnier periods to compensate.
We need to both (a) reduce emissions from transport, and (b) reduce emissions from agriculture.
The parent poster was implying (presumably, because my original post was saying “we should do both” in response to a post that said “(a) is irrelevant, only (b) matters”) that anyone not doing (b) was killing the planet, and I’m pointing out here that if that’s true, anyone not doing (a) is also killing the planet.
We need both! It’s not optional! Half these conversations are “ok sure but X is really all that matters!” — and that is completely false.
We need to reduce or eliminate emissions from all sources, full stop.
It would also help the planet greatly if we stopped sending aid to Africa and other poor nations. Without our help, their populations would decline quite a bit, reducing their meat consumption and emissions by a huge amount. I know this is an unpopular sentiment but we have to be pragmatic.
It's not about per capita, it's about total. We can not only reduce their resource usage, but also produce less food ourselves, all for free. It's win-win.
Asking genuinely: what point are you making with that EPA data? That switching our method of transportation is more impactful than switching our diet because transportation is a bigger chunk of the emissions pie?
I see, thanks for the elaboration. You may be correct, but there is more nuance based on my reading of the report: in particular, the "agriculture" category is somewhat misleading. I read a bit of the report, so I might as well post my findings here :)
"Agriculture" appears to measure the emissions generated directly from agricultural processes themselves, as well as "secondary" combustion inputs. This includes "enteric fermentation in domestic livestock, livestock manure management, rice cultivation, agricultural soil management, liming, urea fertilization, and field burning of agricultural residues". However, based on my reading -- please correct me if I'm wrong -- large parts of the agricultural process are included in each of the transportation, electricity, and industry categories. Thus the effects of agriculture would be seen downstream and upstream in these other categories. For example, any agricultural use of electricity is included in "electricity", not "agriculture".
An aside on meat specifically: since meat production involves more inputs, such as feed, livestock, and additional processing, you would have to account for these when comparing to a non-meat diet. For example, every cow involves the transportation of the cow, the (industrial) production of fertilizers needed to grow its feed, the production of the materials to package the feed, the transportation of the feed to a facility for packaging, the transportation of the packaged feed to a farm, the transportation of the cow to a slaughtering facility, the refrigeration of the cuts of meat, etc. The emissions generated during these steps would belong to the transportation, industry, and electricity categories, not even counting the extra emissions included in the agriculture category. While all food production would have steps such as these, clearly there are more steps in meat production because there are more inputs.
Now, back to the original point of transportation versus agriculture: the report says that 25% of the transportation category is "freight" -- I believe the shipping I described above would be included in this. However, to your point, around 60% of transportation is due to passenger vehicles and light-duty trucks, which is quite significant and likely mostly personal use (rather than agricultural), and that's where changing transportation methods can make a difference. I'm too tired to find what percent of industry and electricity are related to the agricultural process, but you would need to calculate this and compare it to personal transportation use in order to get a fair comparison.
In my personal opinion, I think we should both reduce meat consumption and personal vehicle use. No need to pick favorites.
Yes, but be careful what you mean by "we". The truth is that most meat is consumed in certain parts of the world, particularly Western, industrialised countries. The USA, Australia and Argentina consume the most meat:
In my reading, there is a great inequality in distribution of both consumption and production and if both could be equalized downwards, that would mean a significant reduction overall.
I looked at the document, and it doesn’t seem to include the embedded CO2 from Urea production (fertiliser) which would be a large emission omission. Perhaps it shows up in the detailed breakdown somewhere.
I downvoted you because doing one thing does not preclude doing the other. Using an electric car and solar panels is very good for the environment. You can also eat less/no meat in addition.
No. Who said that, other than vegans? It's a lie. Everybody else, the IPCC, the FAO, environmental organisations, they all say we need to shift diets, in particular western diets, towards a plant-based diet:
> Such recommendations include for example: having a mostly plant-based diet, focus on seasonal and local foods, reduction of food waste, consumption of fish from sustainable stocks only and reduction of red and processed meat, highly-processed foods and sugar-sweetened beverages.
But a plant-based diet is not vegan (although a vegan diet is plant-based), it's a diet where the majority of calories come from plants:
> A plant-based diet is a diet consisting mostly or entirely of plant-based foods.[1][2][3] Plant-based diets encompass a wide range of dietary patterns that contain low amounts of animal products and high amounts of plant products such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds.[4][5] They do not need to be vegan or vegetarian[6][7] but are defined in terms of low frequency of animal food consumption.[8][9]
For example, the Mediterranean diet is a plant-based diet:
> The principal aspects of this diet include proportionally high consumption of olive oil, legumes, unrefined cereals, fruits,[3] and vegetables, moderate to high consumption of fish, moderate consumption of dairy products (mostly as cheese and yogurt), moderate wine consumption, and low consumption of non-fish meat products.
Or eat grassfed beef, which is grown consuming human-inedible grass that grows for free, instead of being fed human foods that have to be farmed.
White Oak Pastures even claims to have a negative carbon footprint[0], according to a report by a third party which, if I remember correctly, also authored the report behind one of the vegan burger's sustainability claims.
Grass-fed beef is no real solution to the grain shortage. For one the meat is more expensive, for another there is a limit to the land that can be used as meadows but not for other crops.
If that were such a great and practical ressource, they'd be overflowing with cattle or sheep herds like in New Zealand. But it's not. Also the density of grazing isn't that great.
And it anyway affects only the US, a very small fraction of world population or land area. That the US is a very large part of the problem, e.g. importing beef, does not help.
There’re many ways people can reduce their impact on environment. Buying $60k+ luxury cars isn’t one.
Reducing amount of meat can be, but you can give a shit and reduce your impact much more while still eating a lot of meat.
People screaming that unless you reduce meat intake you’re killing earth are as narrowly minded focused on single issue as people screaming that unless you buy an EV, you’re killing earth.
I think there are more people eating meat than people who
# Own and drive an SUV everywhere
# Flying for work every month
Think how much factory farmed meat is consumed. We kill and process ~80B animals per year.
For most folks meat is more affordable than buying an SUV or flying every month.
Getting people to heavily reduce or cut out meat & dairy and move to a more plant based diet will have a greater impact in reducing environmental impact.
This is based on an Oxford Uni study and also recommended by the IPCC. I’ll add sources later.
But it’s not an either or.
We need to do both and more.
It’s a tough challenge and we should have started yesterday.
Interesting times ahead… I wonder what the world will be like in 30 years.
2) “In addition to climate mitigation gains, a transition towards more plant-based consumption and reduced consumption of animal-based foods, particularly from ruminant animals, could reduce pressure on forests and land used for feed, support the preservation of biodiversity and planetary health, and contribute to preventing forms of malnutrition (i.e. undernutrition, micronutrient deficiency, and obesity) in developing countries. Other co-benefits include lowering the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and reducing mortality from diet-related non-communicable diseases.”
3) “Imbalanced diets, such as diets low in fruits and vegetables, and high in red and processed meat, are responsible for the greatest health burden globally and in most regions. At the same time the food system is also responsible for more than a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore a major driver of climate change.”
The solar panels don't do any harm. The issue is the people who think driving a fancy car make much of a difference in terms of their carbon footprint. Stop flying first class. Stop eating beef. And stop throwing water on dirt to support your golf addiction.
Also: don't drive a car to begin with. Use muscle power wherever possible. All weight that's not you and not your stuff and that's transported is a waste of energy.
Moving a 2500kg+ car to transport a 100kg human to buy less than 20kg of groceries? Only humans could come up with that.
But if we eat the animals that eat the grain arnt we kinda eating the grain... like indirectly? If I grind the grain into a kinda dust and then let tiny organisms eat the dust and then cook those organisms am I eating grain?
You are, but you're eating far more grain than you would otherwise be as there are huge energy losses (the animals expend energy being alive after eating the grain) than if you at the grain directly.
With modern urban lifestyles requiring (for many people) a lot less calories than ancient lifestyles of running around some great plains this is actually a feature to some degree for many people
People need to take up protein. If the protein comes with significantly more calories than they burn, they're more likely to gain weight.
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