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Maybe we should subsidize the fake meat industry instead.
Hear ye hear ye. This is the actual visualization
Source:
seeing this all at once. its a lot. There is so much you can learn about the US just by looking at this. I hate it.
Not a single one of these sections is the correct size. Except maybe the maple syrup and the beer.
Replacing half of the cow pasture with (properly managed) timber would solve the worlds lumber shortage. I'd like to see more bamboo being grown. Its great for any buildings that are 4 stories or less. Or is it 3?
LOOK AT RURAL HIGHWAYS VERSUS TRAINS. FOR FUCKS SAKE.
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That's mainly because you can raise livestock/ruminants on non arable land. But the idea that ranchers should be able to just use any land without proper consideration for the environment is crazy.
My responses to that are:
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What counts as arable? Can you grow literally nothing on it, or is it just unusable for mass industrial mono-cropping at a scale that competes?
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IIRC even if ruminant grazing is the most efficient way to produce food on this land, it's still be a severe environmental net negative as opposed to other non-food uses, namely rewilding. Of course this is true for cash crops as well, and I don't know how the payoff compares, but a lot of animal agriculture defenders like to use this argument to imply that grazers can just be slotted in on the margins with no downside.
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Based on the map in the article, a substantial portion of land still goes to farmed livestock feed. Eliminate all of that first and then we can actually see how much of this beef is purely ranched.
Meat eaters do love to champion the most ethical and environmental corners of their supply chain, and I appreciate that, but everyone I know that buys a half cow for their deep freezer from a sustainable local farmer refuses to draw the hard line in the fast food drive-thru. "Conscious" meat exists to justify all meat consumption rather than replace it in the supply chain, from my experience growing up on a small hobby farm trying to produce it.
What you're describing in your last paragraph is virtue signaling, e.g publicly expressing some moral position to gain approval without actually following through on that moral position. That's not something to appreciate.
It is extremely commonplace in meat eater circles to virtue signal about ethical meat and then completely ignore that for the vast majority of consumption. This is a huge difference between vegans and meat eaters.
Vegans aren't virtue signaling, we actually have an understanding of what we believe to be a moral truth; it's wrong to kill and harm things for your own pleasure, whether that be taste pleasure, sexual pleasure, whatever, and we extend that as far as we're able to. We actively avoid food that purposefully necessitates killing and suffering.
Meat eaters advocate for some local maximum, like "I can't give up meat because it's too tasty, but I can at least avoid factory farming", and then they'll go to McDonalds 3 times a week once they're outside of a discussion with a vegan.
I'm much less frustrated with people who both advocate for and commit to some moral position. If someone abstains from all sources of fast food and factory farming meat and only goes out and handpicks cows to slaughter that they've known from birth, that's better. It's still wrong to kill something without it's consent, but at the very least if they're not virtue signaling they're at least not trying to deceive others.
If someone abstains from all sources of fast food and factory farming meat and only goes out and handpicks cows to slaughter that they've known from birth, that's better.
There's zero chance there's a measurable amount of carnists who actually commit to that. There's also no way you could produce the amount of meat carnists want to eat without factory farming.
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A 2020 study published in the journal Nature Sustainability highlights the immense environmental potential of changing how we farm and eat. Researchers found that if all high-income countries shifted to a plant-based diet from 2015 to 2050, they’d free up enough land to sequester 32 gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of removing nine years of all those countries’ fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere. Globally, if we shifted to plant-based diets over that same time period, the land saved could sequester the equivalent of 16 years of global fossil fuel emissions.
I agree, the meat industry should be nationalized along with agriculture and the energy sector.
Unlike agriculture and the energy sector, the meat industry isn't needed for anything. It should be ended.
More like taxed out of existence
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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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