“Drinking a cup of tea, I stop the war.”
– Paul Reps
Nice media campaign from Morningstar Farms.
What you do does matter.
“Drinking a cup of tea, I stop the war.”
– Paul Reps
Nice media campaign from Morningstar Farms.
What you do does matter.
It’s interesting to note that when polled, 80% of seniors said that they would not reduce the amount of meat they ate in order to tackle the greenhouse gas issue. Hope this campaign helps. Signed ~ Vegetarian for 30 yrs.
speaking of veges… Peter, this might be a good subject for a new post, after looking into it… using wave energy to run pumps to bring up nutrient rich deep waters to the surface and stimulate plankton blooms
Lord love a duck! The geoengineers have come up with another bright idea, and although it’s not as sorry as Solar Roadway, iron fertilization of the oceans, or sulfur injection in the atmosphere, (and is somewhat grounded in real science), I see the hand of the crowdfunding marketers in this, as well as some scientists who are looking at creating “a job for life” for themselves.
So we’re going to utilize those “barren areas” in the oceans for SOMETHING at last? Did it ever occur to anyone that they are “barren” for reasons that are just fine with Mother Nature and that messing with them may make Mother N unhappy? And we are going to encourage SUPER blooms—-things that cause much harm in other parts of the ocean when they occur? And we are going to carpet the oceans with MILLIONS of these pumps and the super blooms are going to cause the sequestration of BILLIONS of tons of CO2? Yes, it WILL take millions of these tiny pumps to begin to have the slightest effect. Such hyperbole!
We are also not taking into account the temperature effects of the water that we are moving to the surface, or the fact that currents will cause the pumps to migrate and cluster, or that they will be a hazard to shipping and impede fishermen, or that typhoons will destroy them, or……
This is just another bright-sided distraction from the truth that we are simply burning way too much fossil fuel and putting too much CO2 into the environment—-too rapidly for the natural ocean processes that worked for billions of years to deal with. Why can’t we look at root causes for a change rather than keep attempting technological pie-in-the-sky “fixes”?
(And I have to laugh at the fact that the pumps are being manufactured in Albuquerque NM rather than in Seattle or Long Beach—-some irony there).
The human response to too much messing with nature is to mess more with nature.
I say eat more crickets!
According to exoprotein.com, makers of protein bars featuring cricket flour, crickets produce 100X less greenhouse gases than cows and require only 1 gallon of water to produce one pound, as opposed to 2000 gallons to produce one pound of beef: https://www.exoprotein.com/why-crickets
There are 40 crickets per bar (5 crickets per bite). Exo hired a professional chef to come up with the recipes, and the two flavors I have tried are DELICIOUS, my favorite being Cocoa Nut. You can’t taste the crickets at all.
Exo bars are pricey, but they’ll send you two sample bars for a couple of dollars, and they enclose a coupon for 20% off your next order, and shipping is free (at least for now). I figure I’ll parlay one promotion into another and another and never have to pay full price. 🙂
I know I sound like a commercial. I don’t work for Exo. I just love these bars! As Exo says on its promotional t-shirt, “Crickets are the new kale.” Yesss!!!
Another thing, Peter–
Thank you for the Paul Reps quote. I just put Zen Flesh Zen Bones in my Amazon cart to include in my next order.
I am now convinced that every single thing I hear about the meat industry and its effect on AGW and water use is complete and udder (see what I did there?) bullcrap ( yup, did it again).
Take any article or commercial or soundbite about meat, follow back its sources (if even possible – most of these statements about meat are memes or factoids at this point) and you will eventually find where they pulled this ‘data’ about meat from a highly discredited U.N. report called “Meat’s Long Shadow…”.
This report counted rainwater that fell onto grasslands as “beef water use”. Its figures on how many calories of food or fossil fuel needed to produce one pound of cow meat flesh, or how much methane is attributable to cows are off by factors of ten or twenty in some cases, as proved by more careful subsequent studies.
Nevertheless – we are barraged by complete nonsense statements constantly – watch for them! Collect them!! – nutty nutty stuff like “95% of all agricultural land is devoted to livestock production.”
All of which leads to seemingly automated knee-jerk reflex comments – hey! like 1happywoman’s – urging us to eat more insects!
If you crunch the numbers, there is no need to crunch carapaces.
“All of which leads to seemingly automated knee-jerk reflex comments – hey! like 1happywoman’s – urging us to eat more insects!”
I took her comment as satire, really. A person can get plenty of protein and nutrients from plant matter only – no bugs needed. It’s also still possible to vastly decrease meat consumption without ill effects. The Western diet has morphed into heavy meat consumption over the years, but this is far from the diet we evolved on or even need.
“I am now convinced that every single thing I hear about the meat industry and its effect on AGW and water use is complete and udder (see what I did there?) bullcrap ( yup, did it again).”
Of course you are. You have decided what you WANT to believe, and you close yourself off to evidence contradicting that belief. It’s the exact same process that happens with climate change denial.
Of course, any position can be taken too far, and organizations like PETA have ample motivation to stretch the facts. However, here is a partial list of other sources:
http://science.time.com/2013/12/16/the-triple-whopper-environmental-impact-of-global-meat-production/
http://foodtank.com/news/2013/12/why-meat-eats-resources
http://water.usgs.gov/edu/activity-watercontent.html
https://woods.stanford.edu/environmental-venture-projects/consequences-increased-global-meat-consumption-global-environment
http://www.worldwatch.org/peak-meat-production-strains-land-and-water-resources-1
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/jan/10/how-much-water-food-production-waste
http://waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Hoekstra-2012-Water-Meat-Dairy.pdf
Please note that the above articles have many different sources, not just one UN report. Did you notice how you bashed the UN because you don’t like what they said? Have you ever that same tactic used elsewhere? Speaking of which, here’s Wiki’s synopsis of it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock's_Long_Shadow
“Did you notice how you bashed the UN because you don’t like what they said? Have you ever that same tactic used elsewhere? “
Yes, Jimbills – I hate the U.N. and criticize them as a tactic. Never saw that defect in my personality before – it took a clear-seeing objective analyst like you to open my eyes. Thanks!
Or perhaps you only perceive such a thing because it is what you WANT to believe. Excuse me now, I am going to dig up a bunch of studies to cut and paste for you, you know…. just like climate deniers do. Oh… and you.
Now, I’m not going to vet all the cut and pasting you plopped onto the table as if to mimic the sound of heavy evidence. Did you?
Because Hoekstra referenced the U.N. FAO groups studies three times. What are we to make of that? That they support the god-awful standards of the FAO report, or that they reject them?
That was a very partial list meant to show that there are far more studies and references about meat production’s very heavy water and environmental costs than just that one UN study from 2006. I can link another 20 or so if you’d like. They all come to similar conclusions as ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’. but not the exact same figures – which can depend on differences of methodology and samples – but which don’t yield greatly different results.
What did you do with the links I did provide (and yes, I did look them all over, some of which I read in full in the past)? You scanned them for the one report that referenced ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’. You consider that report to be tainted, so you can now consider the Hoekstra report to be tainted, and you ignore the rest, telling yourself it’s not worth your time to look them over.
I have seen this pattern so many times in climate denial. Haven’t you?
About ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’, which you consider to be thoroughly discredited, I wonder if you read that from some blogger with his/her own agenda at some point, and took that to be the definitive statement about it, without reading the report yourself or at least reading several pro/con analyses of it and coming up with your own conclusions? I’ve seen that characteristic in climate deniers multiple times as well.
The 2006 UN report has ALSO been criticized in its methodology for not including several factors that would increase the results of meat production’s impact. But, this happens all the time in science. It’s one report, and no one source is the full and complete truth. Look at all the evidence and decide for yourself, instead of just deciding what you want to believe and filtering out all the other information that contradicts that belief.
“What did you do with the links I did provide (and yes, I did look them all over, some of which I read in full in the past)? You scanned them for the one report that referenced ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’. “
No – I ignored them, jimbills, I ignored them. Because I clicked on the one nearest to the comment box – and SURE ENOUGH – there was that report again being quoted.
I don’t have the time to vet the sources of every other of the trillion studies you cut and pasted. Because that process never ends – you have to check the references of the references!
My point is:
Everywhere I look, I see nonsense factoids about the meat industry bandied about – all traceable – eventually – to that idiotic report. And nobody is saying :
“PLease get your facts straight”.
BTW, Jim – that’s a *report*, not the * U.N. * .
Besides the fact that who actually gives a shit that it takes more resources to eat cows than to eat vegetables? We eat meat. We will always eat meat.
And when we get to the point that we are arguing passionately about meat kcals vs wheat kcals – it means once again we have taken our eye off the ball.
For those of us who have already forgotten what the “Ball” is, it is: how can we get the trillions of dollars worth of carbon-free electricity infrastructure that we need to survive as a civilization built and deployed already?
Hey – a shiny cow!
“….who actually gives a shit that it takes more resources to eat cows than to eat vegetables? We eat meat. We will always eat meat”.
It is not nice to post quotes without attribution, GB. I believe this was first said by either Fred Flintstone or a “caveman” politician from TX or OK. Just sayin’.
And “We eat meat. We will always eat meat” falls under the logic fails called non sequiturs and bald assertions. We will eat meat only as long as there is meat to eat, and AGW is likely to turn many of us into vegans all too soon. (And that’s ignoring CA, where the drought will have people reduced to eating dirt and rocks if it continues).
a) You brought up the shiny cows here, not me.
b) You just confirmed my meaning without even realizing it. You ignored them, and then you follow THAT up with:
“Everywhere I look, I see nonsense factoids about the meat industry bandied about – all traceable – eventually – to that idiotic report. ”
And you provide zero evidence to back up those assertions. Again, it’s straight out of the denial playbook. There have been several independent studies that have nothing to do with that report, which you refuse to acknowledge, and the 2006 U.N. report was not ‘idiotic’. It was an attempt to cohesively study the issue while containing some minor elements of questionable methodology that would either increase or decrease their results. The multiple following studies and reports have largely confirmed the basic conclusions of that report.
You follow that up with semantics. Nice.
c) One of your inabilities is to see the larger picture of how all our environmental/economic/political problems interact. This comes largely from your refusal to acknowledge those other issues are actually important problems.
“Besides the fact that who actually gives a shit that it takes more resources to eat cows than to eat vegetables? We eat meat. We will always eat meat.”
Most people eat meat, yes, but the Western diet in the past 50 years has greatly increased the amount of meat in its diet. A MAJOR reason for this is U.S. government subsidies, which have greatly lowered price for meat:
http://www.pcrm.org/search/?cid=2586
Almost 2/3 of our agricultural subsidies end up in meat and dairy. So, the taxpayers pay for that INSTEAD of solar, and the added health problems from heavy meat and dairy consumption also add to the nation’s debt in our Medicare/Medicaid bills, which also decreases our ability to pay for solar utilities.
Add to that the important Stanford report (link above, which you ignored), in which world meat production is projected to double in less than 10 years due to other nations adopting the Western diet, and we have a MAJOR problem here.
It’s not a separate issue at all, but an interrelated one.
It is factory farming that is contributing to climate change – not the cattle, in and of themselves.
Cattle have existed for millions of years. When they eat grass, that they have evolved to eat, they do not change the balance of carbon in the air. At all.
In fact, large roaming herds of herbivores living in natural grasslands end up being large carbon sinks.
https://youtu.be/wgmssrVInP0
Gingerbaker,
C’mon–I was just having a little fun!
I *do* love Exo bars. But is eating insects a solution to AGW? Of course not!
The solution is for the world’s leaders to treat AGW as the hair-on-fire emergency that it is.
At the same time, and notwithstanding that “it won’t make any difference,” I take whatever personal actions I reasonably can, including not eating animal protein–except, now, crickets. 🙂
Gingerbaker,
Why do you keep dredging up that 2006 report, citing it as the source for “any article or commercial or soundbite about meat”?
Any credible reporting over the past two years would’ve used the figures in the FAO’s 2013 report:
http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3437e/i3437e.pdf
Here’s a summary: http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/resources/en/publications/tackling_climate_change/index.htm
Maybe the FAO’s newer analysis is flawed; I don’t know. But it doesn’t help your argument that you continue to refer to the 2006 report as if it were the FAO’s current and authoritative statement on the issue. The 2006 report is ancient history.
“the two flavors I have tried are DELICIOUS, my favorite being Cocoa Nut. You can’t taste the crickets at all.”
And Soylent Green doesn’t taste like people. Yuk!
Perhaps we should feed the cricket flour to beef cows? Hopefully, they would still taste like beef.
OK, 1happywoman, I have a question for you:
Let’s suppose cricket farming takes off, and products with cricket flour in them become popular. (I didn’t even snicker there). And then a bright fresh mind at a research facility says “Cricket flour is good, but we have developed a process to produce equally nutritious flour more economically and with less degradation to the environment using cockroaches. Cockroaches are greener than crickets – use Cucaracha flour!” How would you feel about eating products deliberately made with cockroaches in them?
Joel Salatin has some interesting thoughts on carbon sequestration using cattle. This site is run by some folks who work at his Polyface Farms, and this article addresses some issues raised here. The comments are also worth reading.
http://polyfacehenhouse.com/2012/03/mob-stocking-herbivorous-solar-conversion-lignified-carbon-sequestration-fertilization/
Galen
More bright-sidedness and wishful thinking about how much sequestration could be achieved. We have been too busy building cities., roads, shopping centers, and multiplexes on the limited amount of arable and habitable land on the planet. Feed lots came into existence because they allowed us to maintain meat production for a population that has grown exponentially. We simply cannot go back to “the old ways and devote enough land to “grazing”.
(I think I remember reading that land makes up ~30% of the Earth’s surface, and so much of it is too hot-cold-wet-dry-steep that only ~1/3 of that (or 10%) is habitable.
Jimbills,
Please don’t wind GB up any more than necessary when he is embarked on one of his udderly over the top rants. Now he’s off into Soylent Green and having us eat cockroaches?
He does have a small point in that there is a fair amount of disagreement on “how much water it takes to grow a pound of…”, but anyone with a basic knowledge of food webs-food chains-food pyramids knows that it takes a lot at the “bottom” to produce what’s at the “top”.
The basic principle that eating plants instead of meat is more “efficient” is valid—-the further down you interrupt the chain and consume the “food” at that level, the more bang for the buck you get. (And to make a fine point about “crunching numbers and carapaces”, it is more correct to talk about “crunching exoskeletons”).
I look forward to helping to finance Ginger Baker’s “bug farms” and “Vermont Bug Flour” when he starts crowd sourcing them. A far better idea than Solar Roadway. I also look forward to watching him get attacked by the FF (Factory Farm) interests who want to maintain BAU and sell beef. They can turn the tables and claim that runoff from his bug manure is polluting Lake Champlain, he is overusing antibiotics to keep his bugs healthy, and he his using GMO bugs. I think the real nail in the coffin will be the noise factor—-can you imagine the chirping coming from a football-field sized barn full of crickets?—-it will be worse than wind turbine noise!
FYI, recent Nate Hagens:
Hagens gets it. I thought the last talk of his that you linked some months back was terrific, and this one is “more of the same but more”. He does the kind of thinking that I keep returning to—-linking biology, climate change, economics, politics, and human psychology/behavior into one big and complicated web—-and he is good at it.
Hey, GB who is growing crickets in Vermont. (Eat Mor Crickuts!)
Here’s a little reading to get your heart rate up before lunch. Couldn’t get the link to the SumOfUs petition or the public comment page for the USDA to take, but a little googling will get you there if you want to comment or sign.
“For the first time, the USDA has asked Americans to think about the environmental impact of the food we eat. Unsurprisingly, the cattle industry doesn’t like it one bit.
“A diet heavy in red meat is unsustainable — and raising cows produces five times more greenhouse gasses than other animals raised for meat. This doesn’t mean that we should never have a steak again. But eating red meat every single day, like the cattle lobby wants us to, just isn’t a responsible choice. That, together with health considerations, is why the USDA is asking us to reduce our beef consumption.
“Industry insiders are lobbying hard to change the USDA’s advice. But we can put a stop to corporate influence by submitting comments to the USDA and showing that there’s widespread support for its new dietary guidelines.
“Let the science speak for itself! Submit a comment to the USDA demanding that it keep its recommendation for us to consume less meat.
“Cows use 28 times more land and 11 times more water than other animals to produce the same amount of meat. Livestock production crowds out biodiversity, pollutes our water and hastens species extinction — and runoff from cattle lots can contaminate crops and destroy aquatic ecosystems. The cattle industry is also the country’s biggest user of antibiotics. And how many e. coli outbreaks do we need to show us the problems with centralized stockyards?
“The cattle lobby is powerful, and it’s planning an all-out offensive to stop the USDA adopting these recommendations.
“We’ve got to act fast: the USDA is accepting comments on its Dietary Guidelines until May 8. If hundreds of thousands of us submit comments supporting the USDA’s stance, we can stop the cattle lobby from blocking action on climate change.
“And USDA recommendations matter — the guidelines are used to set food policy in schools and other big institutions, which in turn influences the behaviour of big food suppliers. And they’re only updated once every five years.
“Hundreds of thousands SumOfUs members have taken action to protect our food system from corporate control. Last year, we delivered over 170,000 signatures to Monsanto calling on the food giant to be transparent about the risks of GMOs. Tens of thousands of SumOfUs members chipped in to support Vermont in its legal battle with Monsanto for the right to label GMO products, and we continue to hold giant agribusiness accountable for terrorizing farmers in Guatemala, Mexico, India and around the world.
“Don’t let cattle industry cover up how beef impacts climate change — submit a comment to the USDA now.
“Thanks for all that you do,
Paul, Kat, Angus, Ledys, and the team at SumOfUs
**********
More information:
New U.S. Dietary Recommendations First to Consider Environmental Impact, National Geographic, February 20, 2015
Study: To Cut Down On Environmental Impact, Eat Less Beef, Huffington Post, July 21, 2014
I could go on and on, jimbills. There HAVE been plenty of reports – and lots of them have figures on resource use that are wildly different than the U.N. report.
But all of them also share another big problem. They compare resource use between crops and livestock – but they only evaluate livestock as a meat source. Meanwhile, we get dairy products from livestock, and leather, and wool, and organic manure, etc. Pigs alone provide a low-cost source for over 100 products that would be much more energy-intensive to produce artificially.
Let’s talk about water usage. The common perception is that water use for livestock is a HUGE drain on resources. But this makes no sense at all. We have a lot of livestock. They all drink water. But they all piss or respire it out, don’t they? Not included. No, what they do include is rainfall that falls on pastures or corn fields. Do they also attribute that rainfall water for vegetable production? I don’t know – do you?
This argument gets chewed around a lot, and typically it gets to the point where small-scale farming, hopefully organic, gets lauded a s acceptable. But the fact is that large-scale livestock production is actually less resource intensive.
Pigs play a big role in that organic small-scale picture. They are a perfect efficiency machine, turning food waste into meat. They are more efficient than cows at turning resource into meat. Is it going to be OK to eat pork, then, or should we just broad brush the whole topic?
The fact is livestock production is just not evaluated properly, and in many cases, evaluated fairly. With a macroscopic view, there is very little to complain about. It is a distraction.
But you wouldn’t know that from the internet. There is article after article saying truly stupid falsehoods about meat.
But how about you tell me – how exactly does livestock have a “very heavy water and environmental cost?
“There HAVE been plenty of reports – and lots of them have figures on resource use that are wildly different than the U.N. report.”
And yet, no links. I’ve seen figures that put up higher numbers than ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’, and figures lower, but they all tell about the same story – that the meat industry costs an inordinately high share of resources and pollution. It’s projected to dramatically grow in the future, and this in a time of decreasing freshwater availability, increasing carbon emissions, increasing freshwater and seawater pollution, heavy soil erosion, problems with fertilizers and pesticides, species loss, less and less available land, increasing resistance to antibiotics, expanding waistlines and higher health insurance costs, increasing debt, and on and on.
“Let’s talk about water usage. The common perception is that water use for livestock is a HUGE drain on resources. But this makes no sense at all. We have a lot of livestock. They all drink water. But they all piss or respire it out, don’t they? Not included. No, what they do include is rainfall that falls on pastures or corn fields. Do they also attribute that rainfall water for vegetable production? I don’t know – do you?”
Here’s what I can see in this comment – you think cattle are purely or mostly grass-fed and pasture-raised, when they’re not. Most cattle end up in feedlots for several months, where they’re fed corn and other grains – which amounts to a large portion of their total water usage:
http://www.goodfoodworld.com/2012/01/grass-fed-vs-feedlot-beef-whats-the-difference/
You ‘think’ your questions haven’t been accounted for in previous studies and reports, when if you’d take the time to actually read them, you might learn something beyond amateur guesswork.
Here’s the basic issue – in your fantasy vision of reality, all humanity needs to solve its problems is to switch to solar generation and EVs, then mop up the ‘smaller’ issues with the abundant power created. To really hold such a vision, one has to have incredibly dense blinders about all the other problems. Those blinders are maintained with denial, and so I have little reason to expect this conversation to take any different direction than it has.
“But how about you tell me – how exactly does livestock have a “very heavy water and environmental cost?”
All you had to do was read a handful of the links I initially provided – which you refused to do. Here’s one more:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/03/eating-less-meat-curb-climate-change
But you’ve blinded yourself to this problem, so in your mind it either doesn’t exist or is minor, so fine. You wonder why I’m so skeptical about humanity’s chances in the future? This discussion is a perfect illustration of why I’m skeptical. Humans can’t even understand their problems, let alone solve them.
CAFOs in two states:
Michigan:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?ll=43.119855,-84.609682&source=embed&ie=UTF8&msa=0&spn=2.75743,3.909255&hl=en&mid=z6MfoFTj0Eec.k0JpsrAXmO20
Pennsylvania:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=zgczrZgJIAck.kCMaeUyyWFoU
How do CAFOs impact the environment?:
http://www.epa.gov/region07/water/cafo/cafo_impact_environment.htm
This is an old study, almost 20 years ago, but if anything these numbers have increased:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat
“Animal protein production requires more than eight times as much fossil-fuel energy than production of plant protein while yielding animal protein that is only 1.4 times more nutritious for humans than the comparable amount of plant protein, according to the Cornell ecologist’s analysis.”