The Nitrates/Cancer link is old news (about 30 years old, in fact). WHO is just reiterating it. So, in that, at least, Faux News denial is similar to Climate Denial.
It’s just more FUD sowing by the propaganda arm of the Repugnants. “First eggs and milk were bad for us, now they’re not. Bacon is bad for you but you can live to 116 if you eat it every day”. “Those scientists just don’t know what they’re talking about…..(wait for it)…..just like they don’t with climate change, which is a hoax and left-wing conspiracy”. Such subtlety!
(Cut to legions of low IQ Faux News watchers nodding in agreement and drooling).
I can’t stand it—-It’s music break time. This is the ONLY reason to watch Fox News (do it with the sound turned off and no lip-reading allowed).
Factory farming is a major contributor to climate change. But naturally raised animals in conjunction with plants is the only way we can have sustainable farming – which means we needs to change our agriculture BOTH for better health and to address climate change.
The only reason there are so many humans on the planet is that “factory farming” has been successful. If we abandon i”factory farming”, we cannot maintain the current human population level on the planet. Are you ready to accept the deaths of many hundreds of millions of people (if not billions)?
Perhaps we need to better define terms so that you can think before you spout YOUR own BS?
I wasn’t speaking of “factory farming” exclusively in terms of the inhumane caging of pigs and chickens, as you seem to have interpreted it. IMO, “factory farming” also encompasses all the technological advances we have made over the past 40 or 50 years—-the “green revolution” in the third world, larger farms, more mechanization and fossil fuel use, genetic engineering, more fertilizer and pesticide use on crops, more hormone and antibiotic use on animals, more “chemicals” everywhere, the transportation of “food” over great distances, etc. It has allowed the human population to hockey-stick, and it is unsustainable. So we ARE to some extent trapped in a system that would, if abandoned, cause a lot of people to die.
And yes, you’re correct in saying that the “asshole corporations” have fueled it all and are sticking it to the farmers. That’s the way it goes in the world of unfettered capitalism and “free” markets—-make $$$ for the shareholders, profits above all else, the little guy, the planet and future generations be damned (and vote Republican to keep it going).
That’s the way it goes in the world of unfettered capitalism and “free” markets—-make $$$ for the shareholders, profits above all else,
On the money as always. There is a recently published book which, in plain language easily understood by those with even half a brain (rules out many exclusively Fox watchers maybe) describes the road of the global economy since Bretton Woods in 1944. The context of the bankers bail out where their own greed – since rewarded – caused the collapse and how they insured themselves against the fall out by credit default swaps pushing the burden onto taxpayers by hitting them with austerity.
I think I still have an expose of the US Meat Packing industry around here somewhere and Al Franken raised issues about pigs and chickens to with his book ‘Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them’.
But then NSdog I figure you have the gist of most of this anyhow.
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Look at the work Joel Salatin is doing in Southwest Virginia using herbivores and omnivores to sequester carbon and produce healthier beef, pork, chicken and eggs. As ruminants mow down grasses, the carbon in their roots is deposited into the soil, building topsoil and pulling down carbon from the atmosphere. Grass fed beef emits less methane, and, without the carbon emissions tied to producing feed corn, are better overall for the atmosphere and the land. His pigs are instrumental in maintaining a healthy forest and his chickens do the work of keeping the flies in check as they follow the cows across the paddock, just like flocks of birds follow herds of herbivores in nature.
Salatin’s farm is located in Swoope, VA, a bit over 2 hours from my home in Northern VA. It’s in the Shenandoah Valley, which is prime agricultural land. It was known as the “Breadbasket of the Confederacy” during the Civil War, and even back then was known for its high productivity and mixed agriculture practices, similar to what Salatin practices today. Sheridan’s scorched earth attacks in the Valley in 1864 helped to accelerate the end the Civil War by starving the Confederacy.
It’s too bad that Salatin’s plan is not very scalable, and that there is not enough land in the U.S. or worldwide of the quality found in the Shenandoah that would be needed to implement it. It MAY prove workable for a greatly reduced human population if and when we get a “do over”.
“It MAY prove workable for a greatly reduced human population if and when we get a “do over”.”
Well, it DID do that for millennia before we started using fossil carbon in earnest. Salatin isn’t really doing anything new. He’s using very old techniques in an intelligent way.
But, it is delusional to think we can have a population of 7-10 billion humans using those techniques in place of the mechanized and mass produced system we have now. But then, it’s also delusional to think that our current mechanized and mass produced agricultural system can and will continue indefinitely.
Yes, you got my point. Still reading a great book—“Rust—The Longest War”, which has a chapter on food and beverage cans and how they must be coated to prevent the contents from eating through. Packaging is an important part of factory agriculture—the Jolly Green Giant needs to ship his green beans and peas a lot farther than Salatin.
Did you know that a can of Mountain Dew is “essentially a can of bright yellow-green battery acid” and would eat through the can in just days without the coating? Did you know that the world goes through 180 billion aluminum beverage cans every year, that’s FOUR six-packs worth (24 cans) for every last human on the planet, and that’s only aluminum? And that the can coatings are an epoxy and contain BPA, a carcinogen?
Studies have shown that one would have to eat ~250 pounds of food daily from coated cans in order to get a significant dose of BPA, but that doesn’t take into effect possible synergistic effects or potentiation. Who knows?, perhaps eating bacon along with food from cans, breathing the nasties from the polluting VW diesels, and drinking water that is laced with all kinds of hormones and antibiotics from factory farming work together to kill a few thousand or more people a year? Maybe tens or hundreds of thousands? No one knows.
My point is that we ARE in fact engaged in a multitude of great experiments in addition to the rapid burning of fossil fuels—-factory agriculture is just one—-and any and all of them may rear up and bite us in the ass before long.
My point is that we ARE in fact engaged in a multitude of great experiments in addition to the rapid burning of fossil fuels—-factory agriculture is just one—-and any and all of them may rear up and bite us in the ass before long.
I agree, hence my citing of Professor Callum Roberts and others which is such a shame that many more do not know about these sources let alone study them.
Of the mainstream media had not failed so abysmally then humanity, and all our fellow traveller species, may be in with a better chance of survival, or at least evolution in a more geological time span.
Humanities big problem is that the brains of those with the power have not evolved beyond the hunter-gatherer stage where collecting more and more, irrespective of need, is the overarching goal.
I fear for our species’ mathematical reasoning evolution every time someone makes the argument against a scientifically derived correlation/causation study by presenting ONE counter example.
Oh, and the conspiracy theory accusation makes one fear for our species reasoning abilities, period.
“It’s our 12-alarm fire, because if they determine that red and processed meat causes cancer—and I think that they will—that moniker will stick around for years,” Betsy Booren, vice president for scientific affairs at the North American Meat Institute, said at a recent conference, trade publication Meatingplace reported. “It could take decades and billions of dollars to change that,” she added.
and:
The IARC classifies substances on a scale of 1 (“carcinogenic to humans”) to 4 (“probably not carcinogenic to humans”). Booren said a 2B designation, or possibly carcinogenic to humans, would be “a win for our industry.” Glyphosate was classified as a 2A, probably carcinogenic to humans.
In other words, how bad is it? Are we talking each piece of bacon is equal to one cigarette, is it like cracking open a wall inside a 1950s classroom and breathing in deeply, or is it more like, if I eat 6 pieces of bacon a day, I’d have a higher risk of disease?
I already knew the last possibility was hardly scientifically questionable. Studies have strongly indicated that for years. That’s also what the WHO is saying, basically, but it tends to confuse the issue by placing processed meats in the same category as asbestos and tobacco.
What the WHO announcement does mean is that processed meat is unambiguously harmful – but how harmful (in what amounts, at what frequency), especially as compared to other known carcinogens, is very poorly communicated by the WHO.
In substance, it’s not that different than the Fox clip, although it’s quite a bit funnier, and it’s another example of how people rationalize what they want rather than think rationally. Perhaps Colbert was reverting to his Colbert Report persona, but I think he was probably being genuine.
Colbert and much of late night TV (heck, nearly ALL TV) is just “bread and circuses” as the “human empire” heads into decline. We can throw in “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” and “just whistling past the graveyard” as well, and top it off with “What, me worry?” and Pogo’s “We have met the enemy and he is us”.
“Factory farming is a major contributor to climate change”
See….this is the sort of bullshit broad-stroke statement to which Fox was tangentially referring.
They were not wrong to imply that the environmental movement is guilty of perpetrating a disinformation campaign against livestock farming. Nobody seems to be able to – or want to – fact check any of the hyperbolic journalism on the topic.
Give one sleazy point to Fox, who is still down by a billion points.
Hi GB, do you acknowledge that most of the deforestization globally is done in order to grow more grain for our farm animals? How is this not a major contributor to climate change? Please to inform us.
“Factory farming is a major contributor to climate change”, says Neil B, and many of us agree, since it’s really incontrovertible.
“See…this is the sort of bullshit broad-stroke statement to which Fox was tangentially referring”, says gingerbaker, and many of us say—-“WHAT? Has GB been into the Vermont Maple Syrup Vodka again? Is that clouding his mind?”
Talk about hyperbole! GB offers up “…the environmental movement is guilty of perpetrating a disinformation campaign against livestock farming. Nobody seems to be able to – or want to – fact check any of the hyperbolic journalism on the topic.”
First, GB needs to sort out “livestock farming” and “factory farming” in his head. I’ve offered a redefinition in another comment. “Livestock farming” of cattle, pigs, and chickens using “factory” methods has been well-documented by many groups to be cruel and inhumane, and I myself have signed many petitions to the corporate food giants about it. Some have responded positively. Do some research, GB.
I worry far more about the other environmental issues with factory farming (both agriculture and livestock), namely water use, topsoil erosion and degradation, pesticides and fertilizers and their unintended consequences, and land use changes to local ecosystems than I do about farming’s direct contribution to climate change. We’re in a macabre death dance with industrialized farming – we need it to sustain our current population, but we respond by increasing the population and consumption further, creating a deeper need for it, which also creates greater and greater strains on the system.
In terms of climate change, there is lower hanging fruit in GG emissions in terms of energy production and consumption, but agriculture’s contribution is still real.
On “huge”, it depends on how one defines the term. Is it “huge” in that it has a majority share of causing climate change? No. Is it “huge” in that it has a significantly large enough effect in terms of CO2 equivalent GG? Yes, it does.
A place like Fox News could call the EPA estimates “hyperbole”, or misinformation from the environmental movement, as they are doing by completely dismissing the recent WHO announcement, but I mostly got from the Fox clip that idiots enjoy being idiots.
Direct or indirect, 7% or 10%, huge or just big—-all semantics and basically irrelevant. All of man’s activities on the planet are part of a “huge” web of interactions and unintended consequences that we do not fully understand. We are playing catch up ball and the clock is winding down.
(And I like “macabre death dance”—-also an apt description for the idiots on Fox News that enjoy being idiots—-the dance of the death of truth and reason)
It’s easy to assign methane or water or NO2 loads onto livestock. The question is – how much of these loads would be seen if there was no livestock and we were all vegetarians? These reports don’t consider this.
Instead of being eaten by livestock, additional foodstuffs would still be grown, transported, eaten, digested, rotted, etc anyway, causing methane and CO2 to be released into the atmosphere. In other words, vegetarian agriculture could be charged with ‘huge’ environmental impacts. If we wanted to, we could charge the natural rainfall which falls on agricultural fields as ‘water use’ (this is what the infamous U.N. report did for rainfall on pasture lands). Imagine the case to be made for oats or kale as injurious to the planet!
And what would be the environmental impact of replacing all the products (more than 100 for pigs alone) that livestock provide *besides* milk and meat? They would have to be synthesized. Think of the fun you could have with that!
Th real devastation accrued to livestock was the atrocious behavior of South Americans and Indonesians who were and are clear cutting and burning rain forest to grow beef or palm oil. These depredations too are charged against
first-world livestock production in the U.N. report.
I think one could make a case that save for fossil fuel use, farming and livestock have very little AGW footprint at all. Everything that goes into a plant or an animal comes out again. If humans all died tomorrow, and the world returned to undisturbed forests and grasslands, we would have additional billions more wild animals digesting cellulose or shitting it out to rot, where microbes would happily produce such GG’s. Additional grasslands would appear producing more decaying matter than our roads and parking lots do today. There is a baseline of normal GG release in the carbon cycle – how much do we humans really add?
Besides – we all gotta eat. And factory farms are far more efficient at producing pounds of product per unit of fossil fuel than small-scale farming.
But let’s continue to righteously point our fingers at the evil beef industry. Anything to keep us thinking about something besides actually building and deploying the new energy system we all know we need.
GB – I’m curtailing my comments here in general, but I’m stopping responding to you, and I’m sorry if that’s too personal, but I have a policy of avoiding people who have a consistent pattern of completely ignoring my comments. I have a mental picture of a great whooshing sound every time I read one of your responses.
The sad part is that you don’t see how you are using many of the same techniques that climate change deniers use.
No amount of data on agriculture, especially factory farmed livestock, has an effect on you. You instantly justify it away and replace it with wild conjectures of your own drawn out of the blue. You never point to studies refuting the presented data. We just have to take your word for it.
You accuse the “environmental movement” of hyperbole about factory farming, when your comments are full of hyperbole. Don’t you see that?
“Anything to keep us thinking about something besides actually building and deploying the new energy system we all know we need.”
Why can’t it be both? As DOG is saying, and he’s absolutely correct, all of these problems are inter-related. We increase factory farming, which helps increase our populations. We add heavy meat consumption with a Western diet, which adds further stress on several environmental issues. All of this adds to our energy consumption in total as well. None of this exists in your world, though – you rationalize it all away.
I’m not being self-righteous. I’m analyzing our situation as best as I can. I happen to eat meat, although probably a lot less than many Westerners. I’ve never called for an end to all meat production, nor would I.
I see this all as a great tragedy – a very sad one.
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Pigs eat bacon. Saying that is like saying people eat people because they taste like chicken, or is that bacon. Yikes! Sorry I am a bit off topic here. Had to comment. Love reading all your post though.
No brains.
Yup. Live to 120?
What’s the point of living that long when your last brain cell died 50 yrs prior?
The Nitrates/Cancer link is old news (about 30 years old, in fact). WHO is just reiterating it. So, in that, at least, Faux News denial is similar to Climate Denial.
It’s just more FUD sowing by the propaganda arm of the Repugnants. “First eggs and milk were bad for us, now they’re not. Bacon is bad for you but you can live to 116 if you eat it every day”. “Those scientists just don’t know what they’re talking about…..(wait for it)…..just like they don’t with climate change, which is a hoax and left-wing conspiracy”. Such subtlety!
(Cut to legions of low IQ Faux News watchers nodding in agreement and drooling).
I can’t stand it—-It’s music break time. This is the ONLY reason to watch Fox News (do it with the sound turned off and no lip-reading allowed).
https://youtu.be/gNj0T4uK3lE
Factory farming is a major contributor to climate change. But naturally raised animals in conjunction with plants is the only way we can have sustainable farming – which means we needs to change our agriculture BOTH for better health and to address climate change.
The only reason there are so many humans on the planet is that “factory farming” has been successful. If we abandon i”factory farming”, we cannot maintain the current human population level on the planet. Are you ready to accept the deaths of many hundreds of millions of people (if not billions)?
Our big brains have gotten us into quite the pickle…
Bullshit.
Factory farming just took off in the last 10 years.
We’ve never needed factory, inhumane conditions, to raise animals.
And these asshole corporations cut profits to farmers. This is a pure Monopoly play to suck every penny out of farmers.
Factory farming started in the 1920s, well, using that name anyhow.
All farming is done with a profit motive in mind, if you don’t make enough to feed your chickens, you’ll lose your land and the chickens.
http://www.factory-farming.com/factory_farming.html
One little google search, was all that was needed to refute your BS.
Bullshit?
Perhaps we need to better define terms so that you can think before you spout YOUR own BS?
I wasn’t speaking of “factory farming” exclusively in terms of the inhumane caging of pigs and chickens, as you seem to have interpreted it. IMO, “factory farming” also encompasses all the technological advances we have made over the past 40 or 50 years—-the “green revolution” in the third world, larger farms, more mechanization and fossil fuel use, genetic engineering, more fertilizer and pesticide use on crops, more hormone and antibiotic use on animals, more “chemicals” everywhere, the transportation of “food” over great distances, etc. It has allowed the human population to hockey-stick, and it is unsustainable. So we ARE to some extent trapped in a system that would, if abandoned, cause a lot of people to die.
And yes, you’re correct in saying that the “asshole corporations” have fueled it all and are sticking it to the farmers. That’s the way it goes in the world of unfettered capitalism and “free” markets—-make $$$ for the shareholders, profits above all else, the little guy, the planet and future generations be damned (and vote Republican to keep it going).
Not so dumb old guy:
On the money as always. There is a recently published book which, in plain language easily understood by those with even half a brain (rules out many exclusively Fox watchers maybe) describes the road of the global economy since Bretton Woods in 1944. The context of the bankers bail out where their own greed – since rewarded – caused the collapse and how they insured themselves against the fall out by credit default swaps pushing the burden onto taxpayers by hitting them with austerity.
See: Austerity by Kerry-Anne Mendoza which is not only of interest to UK readers.
I think I still have an expose of the US Meat Packing industry around here somewhere and Al Franken raised issues about pigs and chickens to with his book ‘Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them’.
But then NSdog I figure you have the gist of most of this anyhow.
Look at the work Joel Salatin is doing in Southwest Virginia using herbivores and omnivores to sequester carbon and produce healthier beef, pork, chicken and eggs. As ruminants mow down grasses, the carbon in their roots is deposited into the soil, building topsoil and pulling down carbon from the atmosphere. Grass fed beef emits less methane, and, without the carbon emissions tied to producing feed corn, are better overall for the atmosphere and the land. His pigs are instrumental in maintaining a healthy forest and his chickens do the work of keeping the flies in check as they follow the cows across the paddock, just like flocks of birds follow herds of herbivores in nature.
Salatin’s farm is located in Swoope, VA, a bit over 2 hours from my home in Northern VA. It’s in the Shenandoah Valley, which is prime agricultural land. It was known as the “Breadbasket of the Confederacy” during the Civil War, and even back then was known for its high productivity and mixed agriculture practices, similar to what Salatin practices today. Sheridan’s scorched earth attacks in the Valley in 1864 helped to accelerate the end the Civil War by starving the Confederacy.
It’s too bad that Salatin’s plan is not very scalable, and that there is not enough land in the U.S. or worldwide of the quality found in the Shenandoah that would be needed to implement it. It MAY prove workable for a greatly reduced human population if and when we get a “do over”.
“It MAY prove workable for a greatly reduced human population if and when we get a “do over”.”
Well, it DID do that for millennia before we started using fossil carbon in earnest. Salatin isn’t really doing anything new. He’s using very old techniques in an intelligent way.
But, it is delusional to think we can have a population of 7-10 billion humans using those techniques in place of the mechanized and mass produced system we have now. But then, it’s also delusional to think that our current mechanized and mass produced agricultural system can and will continue indefinitely.
Yes, you got my point. Still reading a great book—“Rust—The Longest War”, which has a chapter on food and beverage cans and how they must be coated to prevent the contents from eating through. Packaging is an important part of factory agriculture—the Jolly Green Giant needs to ship his green beans and peas a lot farther than Salatin.
Did you know that a can of Mountain Dew is “essentially a can of bright yellow-green battery acid” and would eat through the can in just days without the coating? Did you know that the world goes through 180 billion aluminum beverage cans every year, that’s FOUR six-packs worth (24 cans) for every last human on the planet, and that’s only aluminum? And that the can coatings are an epoxy and contain BPA, a carcinogen?
Studies have shown that one would have to eat ~250 pounds of food daily from coated cans in order to get a significant dose of BPA, but that doesn’t take into effect possible synergistic effects or potentiation. Who knows?, perhaps eating bacon along with food from cans, breathing the nasties from the polluting VW diesels, and drinking water that is laced with all kinds of hormones and antibiotics from factory farming work together to kill a few thousand or more people a year? Maybe tens or hundreds of thousands? No one knows.
My point is that we ARE in fact engaged in a multitude of great experiments in addition to the rapid burning of fossil fuels—-factory agriculture is just one—-and any and all of them may rear up and bite us in the ass before long.
I agree, hence my citing of Professor Callum Roberts and others which is such a shame that many more do not know about these sources let alone study them.
Of the mainstream media had not failed so abysmally then humanity, and all our fellow traveller species, may be in with a better chance of survival, or at least evolution in a more geological time span.
Humanities big problem is that the brains of those with the power have not evolved beyond the hunter-gatherer stage where collecting more and more, irrespective of need, is the overarching goal.
FOX News: “Where truth and journalism are dead.”
Don’t forget “UNfair and IMbalanced”
I fear for our species’ mathematical reasoning evolution every time someone makes the argument against a scientifically derived correlation/causation study by presenting ONE counter example.
Oh, and the conspiracy theory accusation makes one fear for our species reasoning abilities, period.
Some back story on the announcement (from July, this news has been anticipated for a while, and so a place like Fox News was well prepared):
http://qz.com/465043/the-world-health-organization-is-expected-to-say-red-meat-is-linked-to-cancer/
“It’s our 12-alarm fire, because if they determine that red and processed meat causes cancer—and I think that they will—that moniker will stick around for years,” Betsy Booren, vice president for scientific affairs at the North American Meat Institute, said at a recent conference, trade publication Meatingplace reported. “It could take decades and billions of dollars to change that,” she added.
and:
The IARC classifies substances on a scale of 1 (“carcinogenic to humans”) to 4 (“probably not carcinogenic to humans”). Booren said a 2B designation, or possibly carcinogenic to humans, would be “a win for our industry.” Glyphosate was classified as a 2A, probably carcinogenic to humans.
Shades of ‘doubt is our product’:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/doubt-is-their-product/
A very good article on why the announcement itself is confusing:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/why-is-the-world-health-organization-so-bad-at-communicating-cancer-risk/412468/
In other words, how bad is it? Are we talking each piece of bacon is equal to one cigarette, is it like cracking open a wall inside a 1950s classroom and breathing in deeply, or is it more like, if I eat 6 pieces of bacon a day, I’d have a higher risk of disease?
I already knew the last possibility was hardly scientifically questionable. Studies have strongly indicated that for years. That’s also what the WHO is saying, basically, but it tends to confuse the issue by placing processed meats in the same category as asbestos and tobacco.
What the WHO announcement does mean is that processed meat is unambiguously harmful – but how harmful (in what amounts, at what frequency), especially as compared to other known carcinogens, is very poorly communicated by the WHO.
Two more links. A good analysis of the announcement:
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34620617
And I happened to see Colbert last night:
http://www.ew.com/article/2015/10/28/stephen-colbert-bacon-late-show
In substance, it’s not that different than the Fox clip, although it’s quite a bit funnier, and it’s another example of how people rationalize what they want rather than think rationally. Perhaps Colbert was reverting to his Colbert Report persona, but I think he was probably being genuine.
Colbert and much of late night TV (heck, nearly ALL TV) is just “bread and circuses” as the “human empire” heads into decline. We can throw in “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” and “just whistling past the graveyard” as well, and top it off with “What, me worry?” and Pogo’s “We have met the enemy and he is us”.
“processed meat is unambiguously harmful – but how harmful … is very poorly communicated by the WHO.”
Short answer: not very harmful.
Longer answer:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/8809
Uh, GB? Nice link, but this is really all about Fox News, not bacon.
“Factory farming is a major contributor to climate change”
See….this is the sort of bullshit broad-stroke statement to which Fox was tangentially referring.
They were not wrong to imply that the environmental movement is guilty of perpetrating a disinformation campaign against livestock farming. Nobody seems to be able to – or want to – fact check any of the hyperbolic journalism on the topic.
Give one sleazy point to Fox, who is still down by a billion points.
Hi GB, do you acknowledge that most of the deforestization globally is done in order to grow more grain for our farm animals? How is this not a major contributor to climate change? Please to inform us.
“Factory farming is a major contributor to climate change”, says Neil B, and many of us agree, since it’s really incontrovertible.
“See…this is the sort of bullshit broad-stroke statement to which Fox was tangentially referring”, says gingerbaker, and many of us say—-“WHAT? Has GB been into the Vermont Maple Syrup Vodka again? Is that clouding his mind?”
Talk about hyperbole! GB offers up “…the environmental movement is guilty of perpetrating a disinformation campaign against livestock farming. Nobody seems to be able to – or want to – fact check any of the hyperbolic journalism on the topic.”
First, GB needs to sort out “livestock farming” and “factory farming” in his head. I’ve offered a redefinition in another comment. “Livestock farming” of cattle, pigs, and chickens using “factory” methods has been well-documented by many groups to be cruel and inhumane, and I myself have signed many petitions to the corporate food giants about it. Some have responded positively. Do some research, GB.
I worry far more about the other environmental issues with factory farming (both agriculture and livestock), namely water use, topsoil erosion and degradation, pesticides and fertilizers and their unintended consequences, and land use changes to local ecosystems than I do about farming’s direct contribution to climate change. We’re in a macabre death dance with industrialized farming – we need it to sustain our current population, but we respond by increasing the population and consumption further, creating a deeper need for it, which also creates greater and greater strains on the system.
In terms of climate change, there is lower hanging fruit in GG emissions in terms of energy production and consumption, but agriculture’s contribution is still real.
On “huge”, it depends on how one defines the term. Is it “huge” in that it has a majority share of causing climate change? No. Is it “huge” in that it has a significantly large enough effect in terms of CO2 equivalent GG? Yes, it does.
Most estimates put the total contribution from farming at 7-10% of man’s total GG contribution. Here are the EPA’s recent estimates (7.7%):
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/Downloads/ghgemissions/US-GHG-Inventory-2015-Chapter-5-Agriculture.pdf
A place like Fox News could call the EPA estimates “hyperbole”, or misinformation from the environmental movement, as they are doing by completely dismissing the recent WHO announcement, but I mostly got from the Fox clip that idiots enjoy being idiots.
Direct or indirect, 7% or 10%, huge or just big—-all semantics and basically irrelevant. All of man’s activities on the planet are part of a “huge” web of interactions and unintended consequences that we do not fully understand. We are playing catch up ball and the clock is winding down.
(And I like “macabre death dance”—-also an apt description for the idiots on Fox News that enjoy being idiots—-the dance of the death of truth and reason)
re EPA study:
It’s easy to assign methane or water or NO2 loads onto livestock. The question is – how much of these loads would be seen if there was no livestock and we were all vegetarians? These reports don’t consider this.
Instead of being eaten by livestock, additional foodstuffs would still be grown, transported, eaten, digested, rotted, etc anyway, causing methane and CO2 to be released into the atmosphere. In other words, vegetarian agriculture could be charged with ‘huge’ environmental impacts. If we wanted to, we could charge the natural rainfall which falls on agricultural fields as ‘water use’ (this is what the infamous U.N. report did for rainfall on pasture lands). Imagine the case to be made for oats or kale as injurious to the planet!
And what would be the environmental impact of replacing all the products (more than 100 for pigs alone) that livestock provide *besides* milk and meat? They would have to be synthesized. Think of the fun you could have with that!
Th real devastation accrued to livestock was the atrocious behavior of South Americans and Indonesians who were and are clear cutting and burning rain forest to grow beef or palm oil. These depredations too are charged against
first-world livestock production in the U.N. report.
I think one could make a case that save for fossil fuel use, farming and livestock have very little AGW footprint at all. Everything that goes into a plant or an animal comes out again. If humans all died tomorrow, and the world returned to undisturbed forests and grasslands, we would have additional billions more wild animals digesting cellulose or shitting it out to rot, where microbes would happily produce such GG’s. Additional grasslands would appear producing more decaying matter than our roads and parking lots do today. There is a baseline of normal GG release in the carbon cycle – how much do we humans really add?
Besides – we all gotta eat. And factory farms are far more efficient at producing pounds of product per unit of fossil fuel than small-scale farming.
But let’s continue to righteously point our fingers at the evil beef industry. Anything to keep us thinking about something besides actually building and deploying the new energy system we all know we need.
GB – I’m curtailing my comments here in general, but I’m stopping responding to you, and I’m sorry if that’s too personal, but I have a policy of avoiding people who have a consistent pattern of completely ignoring my comments. I have a mental picture of a great whooshing sound every time I read one of your responses.
The sad part is that you don’t see how you are using many of the same techniques that climate change deniers use.
No amount of data on agriculture, especially factory farmed livestock, has an effect on you. You instantly justify it away and replace it with wild conjectures of your own drawn out of the blue. You never point to studies refuting the presented data. We just have to take your word for it.
You accuse the “environmental movement” of hyperbole about factory farming, when your comments are full of hyperbole. Don’t you see that?
“Anything to keep us thinking about something besides actually building and deploying the new energy system we all know we need.”
Why can’t it be both? As DOG is saying, and he’s absolutely correct, all of these problems are inter-related. We increase factory farming, which helps increase our populations. We add heavy meat consumption with a Western diet, which adds further stress on several environmental issues. All of this adds to our energy consumption in total as well. None of this exists in your world, though – you rationalize it all away.
I’m not being self-righteous. I’m analyzing our situation as best as I can. I happen to eat meat, although probably a lot less than many Westerners. I’ve never called for an end to all meat production, nor would I.
I see this all as a great tragedy – a very sad one.
Pigs eat bacon. Saying that is like saying people eat people because they taste like chicken, or is that bacon. Yikes! Sorry I am a bit off topic here. Had to comment. Love reading all your post though.