You make some good points. That said, the impact of cattle on the environment at the levels we currently enjoy, cannot be denied. Somewhere there's a sweet spot between lower demand, reduced intensity, and balancing diet better than many of us do.
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We must face facts - meat is the problem
- Thread starter mspohr
- Start date
At least in the shorter term - more vegetarianism would lead to longer life expectancy and a greater population. People might also feel better and would go out and travel more. On the flip side, they could do with smaller cars but the planes would be the same.
CyberGus
Not Just a Member
There is a part of me that thinks that humanity deserves the extinction it seems to be attempting on itself.
Unfortunately, the people who are becoming extinct are not the same ones causing the extinction.
I think we'll all go down with the ship: captain, crew, and passengers.
CyberGus
Not Just a Member
Every time NASA announces some asteroid near-miss, I think "awwww, we were so close to solving all these problems"
Revealed: Tyson Foods dumps millions of pounds of toxic pollutants into US rivers and lakes
Nitrogen, phosphorus, chloride, oil and cyanide among the 371m lb of pollutants released by just 41 plants in five years
www.theguardian.com
Tyson Foods dumped millions of pounds of toxic pollutants directly into American rivers and lakes over the last five years, threatening critical ecosystems, endangering wildlife and human health, a new investigation reveals. Nitrogen, phosphorus, chloride, oil and cyanide were among the 371m lb of pollutants released into waterways by just 41 Tyson slaughterhouses and mega processing plants between 2018 and 2022. According to research by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the contaminants were dispersed in 87bn gallons of wastewater – which also contains blood, bacteria and animal feces – and released directly into streams, rivers, lakes and wetlands relied on for drinking water, fishing and recreation. The UCS analysis, shared exclusively with the Guardian, is based on the most recent publicly available water pollution data Tyson is required to report under current regulations
The midwest is already saturated with nitrogen and phosphorus from industrial agriculture – factory farms and synthetics fertilizers – contributing to algal blooms that clog critical water infrastructure, exacerbate respiratory conditions like asthma, and deplete oxygen levels in the sea causing marine life to suffocate and die.
“There are over 5,000 meat and poultry processing plants in the United States, but only a fraction are required to report pollution and abide by limits. As one of the largest processors in the game, with a near-monopoly in some states, Tyson is in a unique position to treat even hefty fines and penalties for polluting as simply the cost of doing business. This has to change,” said the UCS co-author Omanjana Goswami.
Cows Are Just an Environmental Disaster https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/...annah-ritchie.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
And a new politics is starting to take hold: that maybe we can invest and invent and build our way out of this crisis. But some very hard problems remain. Chief among them? Cows.
CyberGus
Not Just a Member
The new company, which is also Mr. Araújo’s new employer, is a forest restoration business called Re.green. Its aim, along with a handful of other companies, is to create a whole new industry that can make standing trees, which store planet-warming carbon, more lucrative than the world’s biggest driver of deforestation: cattle ranching.
You know that people who handle cattle don’t care much about this reforestation stuff,” said Anderson Pina Farias, a rancher whose farm is almost completely deforested. But, he added, “if selling carbon is better than ranching, we can change businesses.”
Jose Villeigagnon Rabelo, the mayor of Mãe do Rio, a city in the northeastern part of the Amazon, is worried. A brutal drought fueled by climate change and deforestation has recently dried out much of the grass that ranchers there use as feed. And, after decades of pounding by hooves, millions of acres across the region have become so degraded they can’t nourish much of anything. “The cattle are starving,” Mr. Rabelo said sitting in his office, with wooden paneling and benches made of angelim-vermelho, a tree that’s become hard to find in the region. “We’ve never had a summer like this.”