- There's 104 million km^2 of habitable land on earth
- 40 million km^2 goes to meat & dairy (includes grazing land + land used for crops for animal feed)
- 11 million km^2 goes to plants to feed humans
- 83% of the global calorie supply for humans comes from plants vs 18% from meat (i.e. meat is very inefficient)
- Demand for meat is going to continue going up so deforestation is going to keep going up: "As we get richer, our diets tend to diversify and per capita meat consumption rises; economic development unfortunately exerts an increasing impact on land resources. If we want per capita meat consumption to be able to rise sustainably at lower incomes, per capita meat consumption at high incomes will have to decrease."
> the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has estimated that agriculture (including not only livestock, but also food crop, biofuel and other production) accounted for about 10 to 12 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (expressed as 100-year carbon dioxide equivalents) in 2005[58] and in 2010.[59]
Planting trees and new technology might buy us some time, but if our idealised lifestyle is fundamentally unsustainable, we'll be back in the same situation again soon enough. I feel this uncomfortable truth is ignored by well meaning people. Waiting for lab grown meat isn't a realistic option either.
Governments have a hard time making people wear a mask that can save their lives and the one of their families. I can't imagine forcing them to stop eating meat being a solution.
And if you stop eating meat yourself there is absolutely no guarantee that it has any impact at all. If enough people do it they may marginally decrease the demand for meat and lower its price but for this price some people will start eating more meat and the net result is null.
They don't have to stop eating meat. It's already good if they eat less. Americans eat nearly 100kg of meat per year per person. That's 30% more than the average EU citizen and twice what the average Chinese or Japanese eats.
There are various ways of making meat more expensive that are relatively easy to sell to the voters. For example requiring higher standards for animal welfare.
They "can" do whatever they want but if they do too many things that are universally unpopular the politicians will find themselves out of a job, possibly also with a hole in their head depending on how the specific government handles transfer of power.
It didn't seem to have the desired effects when they taxed the hell out of smoking. While it did discourage smoking, now its yet another tax on the lower class
> And if you stop eating meat yourself there is absolutely no guarantee that it has any impact at all. If enough people do it they may marginally decrease the demand for meat and lower its price but for this price some people will start eating more meat and the net result is null.
Can you back this up? It defies logic to me that giving up meat, increasing the market for non-meat products and setting an example to others around to follow doesn't reduce animal farming. Not the best source but:
> We can see tangible changes in the farming industry specifically because people are going vegan. In the UK in 2016, sales of fresh meat fell by £328 million, fresh milk by £54 million and cheese by £73 million just in one year! Since then red meat sales have continued to fall. And the UK with its more than half a million vegans is not alone.
> In the US, sales of meat have been declining for a decade, plant-based milk sales are worth $4.2 billion, and thinktank RethinkX predicts that both the beef and dairy industries will be defunct by 2030.
> In Canada, meat consumption has been described as being 'in a decades-long slump' with 38 per cent of Canadians now saying they have reduced their meat consumption.
> In Australia, which is the third-fastest growing vegan market in the world behind China and the United Arab Emirates, sales of dairy are in decline as young people turn their backs on cheese and cows’ milk. Now, 2.5 million Australians are either fully or almost vegetarian. And in Germany, 10 per cent of people are already meatless.
Oh Common, the point is just that any individual reducing their meat intake, will reduce total meat consumption less than the amount that individual consumed.
That's hard to argue against.
One counter argument would be that his/her analysis doesn't take into account any other effects of reducing consumption, such as one's friends and family also reducing consumption as direct consequence.
The idea is that if someone able to afford a cow 1000$ does not buy it, then it will be sold to someone willing to to buy it 999$ and who could not afford it before. To have a real impact on the market and the incentives to raise cattle, you'd need a real lot of people to become vegan.
The link you shared is very weak on evidence (there are none) and a decrease in sales can be caused by a lot of factors.
The prime beef ranching lands in Canada have not been forests at least within the last several hundred years, likely longer. Mid- and southern Alberta is largely grass plains
Come visit the forests in Western Kansas where they had to clear-cut thousands of acres for the dairy farms and cattle feedlots. (sarcasm as there's probably an average of less than 100 trees per square mile here).
This is worth pointing out; a lot of the lands used for grazing simply aren't viable for much else, and thus we couldn't really plant anything else there.
I suspect on average, we will eat less meat in the future, but that we won't get rid of meat totally simply because it's the only way to get food from some areas.
> a lot of the lands used for grazing simply aren't viable for much else, and thus we couldn't really plant anything else there.
Perhaps in the some places, but 80% of deforestation of the Amazon rainforest is for cattle ranching. [0]
Here in New Zealand, European settlers managed to clear 27% of all forest in just 10 years [1], replacing it with farming, which is what it's still used for (especially cattle, these days, and obviously they didn't stop clearing forests at 27%, they kept right on going). This is land described by early European explorers as "immense woods, lofty trees and the finest timber" [2]
Also, land doesn’t have to be productive for business. We could take the cows away from land that’s not viable for other farming and just let the land be. (My guess: given sufficient recovery time we might be surprised at what does grow)
Perhaps one day we will let those areas re-grow without interference again, but until we're past the expected peak of 12 billion people on this planet about 100 years from now, we're going to need every calorie we can get hold of to prevent mass starvation, considering we're also going straight into a top-soil crisis, depleting groundwater reserves by massive irrigation, and so forth.
But yeah, I was mainly referring to natural grasslands where the original grazers have been replaced by grazing cattle. De-forested land should be re-forested if it can't be used for anything else.
If you look at the above street views posted, you will see that the area surrounding the farm and feedlot are being used for grain. Also, note that those two operations are about 20 miles apart, with no other large cattle operation between the two (you can follow the street view and see for yourself).
The point is that Kansas is used largely for plant agricultural, and actually isn't wall to wall cattle production.
While I fully support the reduction in consumption of animal products, these figures don't paint the whole picture. In Great Britain, no forests have been cut down for raising livestock. The forest were cut down over thousands of years for fuel and for farming crops. The land that could support trees now is still used for growing crops. Animals roam meadows and uplands that are not suitable for growing crops and live on grass and silage. It's sustainable. In the past pigs were raised in individual households and lived on scraps from the kitchen. Unfortunately this had to stop (it's now an illegal practice) due to disease concerns.
> 83% of the global calorie supply for humans comes from plants vs 18% from meat (i.e. meat is very inefficient)
This isn't the correct statistic to make the point you want to make. If anything this would encourage more meat consumption to balance out the calorie intake. The statistic you really want is something like: "For beef it takes 54 calories of fuel to produce 1 calorie of protein." (Yes, this is also incomplete, meat has fat as well, "fuel" is very broad and vegetables use fuel as well etc., but I don't have time to find the proper stats). Essentially cows are not very efficient at turning sunlight into food.
> In Great Britain, no forests have been cut down for raising livestock. The forest were cut down over thousands of years for fuel and for farming crops. The land that could support trees now is still used for growing crops. Animals roam meadows and uplands that are not suitable for growing crops and live on grass and silage.
What percent of animals does this cover though? This is clearly not true for all cases in the UK e.g.
"Research by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has established that the UK is now home to a number of industrial-scale fattening units with herds of up to 3,000 cattle at a time being held in grassless pens for extended periods rather than being grazed or barn-reared."
We can't just change what we eat but also how the food is produced. Nitrogen fertilizers, based on fossil fuels, can not continue being pumped out and causing havoc. The damage to the ocean, drinking water and the large contribution to global warming is not sustainable at current levels.
We are already at the point where 50% of all lakes in Asia, Europe, North America, and South America are eutrophic with decreased biodiversity and toxicity as a result. In addition the Baltic Sea is fast turning into the dead sea, releasing additional greenhouse gases in the process. Global warming also act as an accelerator in combination with eutrophication.
The best direction that we can current go would be to transition diets towards including a significant amount of seaweed and shellfish. Insect farms are also an alternative with low foot print.
Because plant based farming is unsustainable, harmful to the climate and contributing to global warming. High yield farming uses a lot of fossil fuels, uses up land and water, pumps tons of herbicides and pesticides into the environment, turns lakes and oceans into massive underwater deserts where neither plants or fish can survive, and creates mono-cultures out of bio diversity. Agriculture has it place but it need to be done sustainable and without nitrogen fertilizers.
Seaweed and shellfish farming has one of the lowest production footprint of all foods, don't need herbicides and pesticides, don't need fresh water, and don't need fertilizers produced by fossil fuels, and do not use up high quality land. The only other kind of farming that beats its efficiency in land and CO2 are insect farms.
Shellfish can also be used to clean polluted water, but for health reasons they then can't then be sold as food. The output can however be used as an organic fertilizer, depending on the amount of toxins they have absorbed and additional cleaning process, so there is some potential for an combination between plant crops and shellfish farms.
If 50% of all land was turned into man-made desert we would notice and get worried. That we have already done this to the worlds lakes shows how insanely harmful modern high yield agriculture is. Add that with the massive decline in global insect populations, with 75% loss in 26 years, and we can't just replace one harmful diet with an other.
We don't need to plant trees nor use any new technology because trees come with their own way of reproduction which comes for free with each growing tree! They will spread exponentially via seeds.
If we just let trees spread themselves around instead of championing venture backed startups to use drones or something equally bizarre to do what nature would do if we just sit back we might be able to channel our guilt or desire to control nature into some other area.
If we hardly know what good nutrition is for humans, how can we assume that meat is some ancillary part of our diet?
This dogmatic view to end meat consumption is a horrible mistake, as it’s predicated on us understanding the human body in its entirety. There’s really no studies that investigate with causality a human diet. It would be unethical/expensive to properly study causality. We have epidemiological studies that find correlation, which has been wrong many times (red meat causes cancer, saturated fats are bad, etc). Epidemiology is meant to point towards a correlation for us to separately study causality, instead of these statistics game of conflating the two via attempting to remove confounding variables.
Further, you’re assuming all land that’s currently used for livestock had no prior use. Much of the land was formally used for crops (until the soil was depleted from poor farming practices, injected with nitrogen/fertilizers, then essentially decimated) if the topsoil was nutrient dense.
Deforestation is needed for crops as well, it’s not exclusively done for animal agriculture. Removing all meat sources would still require some amount of land to fill in the caloric gap. You can’t just subtract all livestock land and say you can plant trees, and thus a net gain.
> It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes. Plant-based diets are more environmentally sustainable than diets rich in animal products because they use fewer natural resources and are associated with much less environmental damage.
- Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Vegetarian Diets
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is the largest group of professional nutritionist in the world. People putting doubt that plant-only diets can be healthy are showing the same level of anti-science that climate change deniers are.
The paper goes on to say that having a plant based diet reduces risks of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and obesity. A vegan diet is one of the most healthy diets an individual can choose when measured by the health outcomes of people that choose the diet.
Sorry but you can't infer 'A vegan diet is one of the most healthy diets an individual can choose when measured by the health outcomes of people that choose the diet' from ' It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases'.
If we hardly know what good nutrition is for humans,
This isn't particularly true. We have a very solid idea of our nutritional requirements.
For instance, we eat (approximately) kilograms of food every day and know about lots of things where we need about 1 millionth of a kg per day.
There's long term health outcomes (like obesity) that we hope to influence using nutrition, but it's likely enough that Pepsi and Doritos (and so on) are the problem rather than some subtle thing. Those products are designed to by very palatable, and to not be overly satisfying (the producers have long since achieved market saturation and increasing individual consumption is a valuable avenue for growth).
I'm not sure where you get the idea that we have a very solid idea of our nutritional requirements. Every few years milk is bad, then good again, then bed again. Some can be said about eggs or meat or coffee or many other foods.
We do know on a very, very granular level that we need some nutrients in some quantities to function at all. But we have almost zero clue on how to actually optimize our nutrition. And the biggest reason is that there are no studies actually trying to find this out.
Do you have any basis for arguing that there isn't much optimization to be done? Food is one of the largest foreign influences on our body, next to air and radiation. It's a wholly untested field so it's surprising to me to say the least to think that there isn't much to gain there.
Take your point on proving causality, but there are interesting selections of populations such as 200K health professionals or SDAs living in LA alongside their neighbors, that go a long way to mitigating confounding variables.
Here is a recent (2018) starting point into large (200k, etc.) studies, with various pooled analysis, meta analysis, RCTs, etc.:
This review summarizes the current evidence base examining the associations of plant-based diets with cardiovascular endpoints, and discusses the potential biological mechanisms underlying their health effects, practical recommendations and applications of this research, and directions for future research.
Healthful plant-based diets should be recommended as an environmentally sustainable dietary option for improved cardiovascular health.
The potentially beneficial role of plant-based diets in cardiovascular health has been increasingly recognized, with a vast and accumulating evidence-base documenting their health effects ...
Most recently, based on a comprehensive review of these studies, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2015–2020 included a healthy vegetarian-style dietary pattern in its recommendations of dietary patterns that can be adopted for improved health. In the present review, we will provide an overview of the cardiovascular benefits associated with plant-based diets, while discussing the biological pathways potentially involved, as well as clinical applications and public health implications of these findings.
Also read up on Blue Zones, and note the notion in this meta analysis of...
... the ”pro-vegetarian diet score”, defined by Martinez-Gonzalez et al. (6) as a diet which positively weighs plant foods while negatively weighing animal foods. They conceptualized such a diet as “a progressive and gentle approach to vegetarianism… that incorporates a range of progressively increasing proportions of plant-derived foods and concomitant reductions in animal-derived foods”...
... then think about the blue zones and balance/moderation and confounding variables in that light. It’s not a eating rice or olives or fishing and herding goats from a walkable village, versus sitting on couch watching TV and driving cars to the strip mall thing. Americans act American, so you can narrow down the causality to a kind of temperance.
We are working on this at Wren (YC 2019) — reforestation and regenerative agroforestry are very effective methods for sequestering and offsetting carbon. The more people that support these projects, the bigger scale they get.
Trust me, I'd love to create a JavaScript-free version of our app! But for now we are dedicating most of our time to communicating with projects, our users, and generating ideas for making a real impact in the climate crisis.
Not asking for a non-javascript version of your app, just a landing page that doesn't require it to figure out what the heck a wren is and why it matters.
You're using <noscript>, why not use that space to actually talk about what you are doing?
> (Trees also provide building materials - what a great way to sequester carbon!)
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but maybe companies should brand non-recycled paper products as carbon-sequestered paper instead, and tell people to send it to landfill rather than recycle it for maximum sequestration purposes.
Every time I see a pack of paper, it proudly says "MADE IN INDONESIA." So long as cheap paper made from clear-cut rainforests and monkey massacres exists, I think I'd rather stick to (somewhat) locally recycled, even if it's not a perfect solution.
Paper, like trees, is carbon neutral in the sense that carbon is absorbed then released. Zero net addition to the atmosphere.
Forests can be used to sequester carbon because of the large number of trees continuously in existence even if individual trees come and go.
For paper, the sequestration angle is more dubious but should also be considered based on the total amount of paper continuously in existence, not on the longevity of a single sheet of paper.
you can compost paper, but a lot of it is treated and doesn't decompose very well.
E.g. we have a compost heap in our building's garden and someone keeps putting bits of paper bags there, which last years unless you proactively go and try to break them up.
Also, wouldn't composting it release as much carbon as putting it in landfill? And landfills are bad in many ways.
Removing oxygen prevents decomposition. My home town found out the hard way when they took samples from an old landfill, expecting to be able to build a park over it. Clay layers had been added to prevent runoff into a nearby river, and as a result the newspapers were still readable decades later.
The forests were in equilibrium before we cut them down. At best reforesting them can absorb the amount of carbon it takes to get them back in equilibrium, which is the same amount that was released when they were cut down.
Afaik fully developed forests are basically carbon neutral, so it's not a permanent way to offset carbon emissions. However we have a lot of unused, deforested land on this planet so it can be a carbon sink for quite some time.
Planting more trees has many benefits to the planet and society, and trees can be a large carbon sink - but planting trees doesn't always help mitigate climate change, and in some cases can exacerbate the problem.
If land is left alone, trees will plant themselves! Instead of using humans to plant trees, we should look at why humans are not allowing trees to grow.
Two other issues:
1) Technology is the wrong way at looking at this for most of the planet. It's only in small areas of the globe where nature needs a guiding hand via irrigation and fertilization for example. Just leaving stuff alone will work for most places.
2) Tree planting efforts are great for publicity and marketing which is mainly a human benefit. The urge to meddle and "fix nature" is both a symptom and cause of the situation we got ourselves in.
It's like buying hair transplants on your head when you could just stop shaving.
Most of the coal and oil we mine comes from a time before microorganisms could efficiently break down lignin and cellulose. Now that such organisms exist, trees alone can only temporarily sequester carbon. I guess planting more trees gives us some small buffer, but even were it significant it's not really a long-term solution.
You are very right. We need to use every tool at our disposal over the next few decades if we are going to avoid a climate disaster, and afforestation plays a role in nearly all routes to avoiding that disaster [1].
But that leaves it in the biosphere, and new forest is vulnerable to rapid deforestation and conversion to CO2 (fires, cultural change, etc.). We would ideally shift some of that highly mobile bio-sphere sequestration to far less mobile geologic sequestration. Most likely with technology that we haven't yet invented.
[1] chapter 2, afforestation is part of AFOLU carbon dioxide removal (CDR) https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
If you expand forests that’s ongoing sequestration. One doesn’t count rainforests or boreal forests as “zero carbon” capture. They have an ongoing capturing capacity.
> If you expand forests that’s ongoing sequestration.
If you expand forests it's a one-time sequestration. That's my point.
> One doesn’t count rainforests or boreal forests as “zero carbon” capture. They have an ongoing capturing capacity.
Each ecosystem has a turnover time. For rainforests it's like 20 years. For tundra it's as long as 65+ years. But in a stable state these carbon "sinks" are net zero carbon capture. For every ton of carbon they capture, a ton of carbon is released through decomposition.
The problem is that we're pumping out alot of carbon: about 10GtC/year. The entire Amazon rainforest sequesters only about 100-200GtC. Actually, the biggest problem as I said is that we're pumping out carbon from a resource (Carboniferous period deposits[1]) that can never again be recreated, at least not without significant geoengineering.
[1] Carboniferous deposits occurred at a golden period, immediately after woody trees first emerged, but before microorganisms evolved that could decompose them; trees could be buried long enough to fossilize before microorganisms could release all the carbon back into the atmosphere. That can't happen today naturally, at least not at any scale that could help us.
Thank you for the well-argued and rational post. To me, buying 20 years for decarbonization sounds kind of great. So, it's a fallacy to think we could just plant trees and otherwise go on as usual. We just need to be careful about language that might feed into defeatism: planting a lot of trees is not a wasted effort, it's a great thing to do. Yes, we need to do a lot more, but every year of extra time helps a lot.
The more wood you use, the more inefficient your building methodology given the amount of energy needed for transport, construction, etc, as well as air conditioning, etc. The less wood you use, the less space you create for regrowth. (Indeed, the space taken for building a house is often space where trees could grow, so there's a very simple space trade-off at play.) And none of this factors in the huge amount of wood from demolition that we scrap every year, requiring energy to tear down, and much of which will decompose even in landfills.
Plus, a place like the United States has 0 population growth absent immigration. Are we supposed to start tearing down houses just to build new ones? That's the kind of math that begat corn ethanol.
The dynamics here are just horrible. Can we slow emissions growth this way? Sure. Can we stop growth this way? Eh... okay, maybe, since we're pretending. Can we reverse global warming, removing carbon from the atmosphere? Not a chance. The only way to turn the dynamic from zero sum to positive sum is with other, major technological advances, at which point playing games with trees and home construction would very likely be the least meaningful use of such new technology.
EDIT: Here's a study that looks at various different models for wood processing and disposal. TL;DR: See figures #2 and #3. 100 years post harvest there's at best 5% net carbon sequestration, while most models show 0% net carbon sequestered. https://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/Conservation/Fi...
You're arguing it must be a 100% solution or nothing. I doubt there are any 100% solutions. But we only need 10 10% solutions, so I wouldn't be in any hurry to reject even a 1% solution.
Oh, and also, there's always going to be a need for new construction even with 0 population growth. Better to use wood than concrete, as concrete is a large source of carbon emissions.
Concrete reabsorbs carbon over time, so the net carbon footprint dynamic is not unlike that of wood. See https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/concrete-become... Concrete's long-term net carbon footprint is simply the fossil fuel energy input minus whatever unoxidized material we dredge up. While theoretically we could manually plant trees and manually bury them in a way to minimize decomposition, we could likewise dig holes to expose and crush unoxidized rock. The former might be marginally more efficient energy-wise than the latter, but the energy consumption dynamics of both fundamentally suck.
I agree, many small solutions can help. More efficient use of existing resources is a large reason why American per capita energy consumption has remained steady for the past decade. (At least if we ignore our outsourced carbon emissions.) But many, small efficiencies is a privilege only rich countries with strong institutions are likely to achieve. Certainly historically that has been the case. Yet such countries have enormous carbon footprints. Similarly, reforestation can be helpful in a strict sense, but our primary problem is deforestation in developing countries, and even with global warming increasing the growth of temperate and boreal forests, it's rather difficult to make up the loss of tropical forests.
More importantly, none of these measures can help nearly as much as nuclear energy or renewables like wind and solar, which are both necessary and at least theoretically sufficient on their own. I think we just need to be clear about the efficacy of various measures. By all means, plant more trees. We can certainly walk & chew gum at the same time. But when people think these activities are even remotely similarly efficacious, and when the lesser one is easier to accomplish policy-wise than the other (e.g. in a country where we've effectively already accomplished an efficient market for wood products), I worry about misdirected attention.
More specifically, we need to discard this widespread notion that trees (naturally, or even in an industrial life cycle) are perpetual carbon sinks. That's really what I was getting at by pointing out the Carboniferous period--that the fundamental dynamic of carbon sequestration by trees does not and cannot work as commonly believed. The article for this thread is interesting (though only experimentally showing what was already well predicted), but it's misguided to believe it's of any consequence in the fight against global warming. The oceans are a different matter, though I don't know how greater is the long-term sequestration potential--I don't think we understand the carbon cycle as well as we do on land; for example, we know less about the microbiota, especially on the ocean floor.
I'm glad that the trend of reforestation is happening in Europe and will contribute to co2 capture. I think it's less due to deliberate efforts and more a product of food production efficiency, closing of small farms and people transitioning to urban env.
Besides being noticeable on satellite images it also affects local climate so in my area (NW Croatia) due to reforestation they had to update the climate models due to forests holding more moisture. (another side effect is increased number of wild boar)
A question for an Entomologist - how does the woolly adelgid insect kill so many trees so quickly? They look so small and cute, is it from sucking too much sap from trees?
They measure carbon release from the soil of tree's, and data shows that the trees are storing more carbon (actually, releasing less carbon if I understand correctly) as they get older and larger, the trees referenced are 200+ years old now. I don't see anything to justify the 'warming world' mentioned in the title, but trees capture more carbon as they grow larger fwiw.
It makes me wonder if we should remove some percentage of fallen trees in forests and sequester them? Otherwise all that co2 goes back into the atmosphere.
It's good to read about these kinds of studies. Ecologists typically don't seem to account for evolution in their models for global warming. Nature is excellent at adapting to changes. If there is a surplus of anything, certain specimens will benefit from this surplus and nature will adapt and balance things out.
It might take 100000 years to achieve the balance which will be quite different balance (eg all people die and Earth populated with giant crocodiles), but technically yes, nature will adapt and balance things out.
I disagree about this. Populations can evolve rapidly within a few decades if the selection pressures are significant enough.
If you look at the farming industry, there are many examples of evolution happening very quickly due to artificial selection pressures.
Within a few decades, cows evolved to produce much more milk, chickens evolved to grow faster and produce large amounts of eggs, fruits evolved to have smaller seeds, grow faster and look better.
Artificial selection pressures created by humans have a way of greatly speeding up evolution.
1) How many existing forests we wouldn't have to cut down if we transitioned away from meat & dairy ?
2) How much extra space that would also give us to plant more trees?
3) How much green house gas are from animal farming in the first place?
https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets:
- There's 104 million km^2 of habitable land on earth
- 40 million km^2 goes to meat & dairy (includes grazing land + land used for crops for animal feed)
- 11 million km^2 goes to plants to feed humans
- 83% of the global calorie supply for humans comes from plants vs 18% from meat (i.e. meat is very inefficient)
- Demand for meat is going to continue going up so deforestation is going to keep going up: "As we get richer, our diets tend to diversify and per capita meat consumption rises; economic development unfortunately exerts an increasing impact on land resources. If we want per capita meat consumption to be able to rise sustainably at lower incomes, per capita meat consumption at high incomes will have to decrease."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...:
> the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has estimated that agriculture (including not only livestock, but also food crop, biofuel and other production) accounted for about 10 to 12 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (expressed as 100-year carbon dioxide equivalents) in 2005[58] and in 2010.[59]
Planting trees and new technology might buy us some time, but if our idealised lifestyle is fundamentally unsustainable, we'll be back in the same situation again soon enough. I feel this uncomfortable truth is ignored by well meaning people. Waiting for lab grown meat isn't a realistic option either.