This just in, environmentalists discover human-activity is the cause of human greenhouse gas emissions. Only solution they can come up with? Ban humans.
For the vast vast majority of people eating corpses is not a medical necessity or vital cultural ritual or something, (and no i dont consider just really liking the taste of flesh to be a cultural neccessity). Yes i’ve tried two of the lab grown meat brands out of curiosity (i think the first was beyond burger and the second one was an impossible burger) and both were simultaneously more expensive than the standard vegan/vegetarian and even the normal meat based versions of the food and tasted worse.
Like i dont think that consuming lab grown meat is evil or anything but I do think theres a lot of people who focus on lab grown meat being too expensive as an excuse for why they’re not vegan/vegetarian when its actually pretty mid, like i know a ton of vegans and i cant think of a single one who regularly eats lab meat, most have tried it a few times but no one really likes it too much
Beyond meat and impossible burger is not lab grown meat. Lab grown meat is using stem cells to grow real meat, just not using an animal but in some other way. See en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat
oh ok, i stand corrected on that. the point still remains though that i dont see why people need to wait for lab grown meat to become affordable to just stop eating meat, when imo, even when its cheap enough it still wont be very good outside of certain things like burgers and sausages because of the texture (i.e. not being able to mimic how the fat feels when in between the flesh) not being able to match up to the original.
and even when it does enter the market it will probably only be available for like for upper middle class people for years and years
I get your point and I’m all for vegan diets. but it just won’t happen unless meat gets taxed like crazy worldwide. And even before that there will be armed riots if you take away meat from certain demographics. Just look at people going completely nuts once you mention we could introduce one veggie day per week. I just don’t see it. That’s just how we humans behave…
Just equip the livestock with ostomy pouches and collect their waste in vats, then use chemistry to break down the methane into more friendly and usable compounds for agriculture etc. There you go. I’ve solved climate change in one paragraph.
The stats touted around seaweed and other feed adatives are highly misleading. Even looking at the highest touted claims you only get an 8% reduction of overall emissions. The high numbers you see are only reporting the feedlot reductions which aren’t where the majority of the missions come from
What’s more, feeding cattle algae is really only practical where it’s least needed: on feedlots. This is where most cattle are crowded in the final months of their 1.5- to 2-year lives to rapidly put on weight before slaughter. There, algae feed additives can be churned into the cows’ grain and soy feed. But on feedlots, cattle already belch less methane—only 11 percent of their lifetime output
[…]
Unfortunately, adding the algae to diets on the pasture, where it’s most needed, isn’t a feasible option either. Out on grazing lands, it’s difficult to get cows to eat additives because they don’t like the taste of red algae unless it’s diluted into feed. And even if we did find ways to sneak algae in somehow, there’s a good chance their gut microbes would adapt and adjust, bringing their belches’ methane right back to high levels.
[…] All told, if we accept the most promising claims of the algae boosters, we’re talking about an 80 percent reduction of methane among only 11 percent of all burps—roughly an 8.8 percent reduction total
That’d still be quite high in emissions. Land deforestation and the massive amounts of feed are large portions of emissions for meat and dairy products. It takes far more feed than it does to eat crops directly due to the energy loss from creatures using that energy to move around, on their body functions, etc.
The practices somewhat similar to what’s suggested there work out too well in practice. Manure lagoons, where waste is stored in huge pools to break down, have several environmental problems
Rates of asthma in children living near a CAFO are consistently elevated.[4] The process of anaerobic digestion has been shown to release over 400 volatile compounds from lagoons.[13] The most prevalent of these are: ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, methane, and carbon dioxide
[…]
Contaminants that are water-soluble can escape from anaerobic lagoons and enter the environment through leakage from badly constructed or poorly maintained manure lagoons as well as during excess rain or high winds, resulting in an overflow of lagoons.[2] These leaks and overflows can contaminate surrounding surface and ground water with some hazardous materials which are contained in the lagoon.[2] The most serious of these contaminants are pathogens, antibiotics, heavy metals and hormones. For example, runoff from farms in Maryland and North Carolina are a leading candidate for Pfiesteria piscicida. This contaminant has the ability to kill fish, and it can also cause skin irritation and short term memory loss in humans[20]
[…]
Antibiotics are fed to livestock to prevent disease and to increase weight and development, so that there is a shortened time from birth to slaughter. However, because these antibiotics are administered at sub-therapeutic levels, bacterial colonies can build up resistance to the drugs through the natural selection of bacteria resistant to these antibiotics. These antibiotic-resistant bacteria are then excreted and transferred to the lagoons, where they can infect humans and other animals.[13]
Each year, 24.6 million pounds of antimicrobials are administered to livestock for non-therapeutic purposes.[23] Seventy percent of all antibiotics and related drugs are given to animals as feed additives.[4] Nearly half of the antibiotics used are nearly identical to ones given to humans. There is strong evidence that the use of antibiotics in animal feed is contributing to an increase in antibiotic-resistant microbes and causing antibiotics to be less effective for humans.[4] Due to concerns over antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the American Medical Association passed a resolution stating its opposition to the use of sub-therapeutic levels of antimicrobials in livestock.[13]
I hate to provide such a short answer to such a well written response, but perhaps shit lagoons aren’t the only way to process manure cleanly. Also, I’m not convinced that we can’t use high rise facilities for these animals and give them a matrix type experience. Each animal gets a cell, treadmill, VR screen/googles, and feed. Something along those lines.
If that plan worked perfectly, you’d solve the land use and, giving you an extremely generous benefit of the doubt, the emissions from manure problems.
All you have to now is figure out how to build and maintain these high-rises cost effectively, and how to generate enough power for a matrix-like experience and all the VR headsets and treadmills for the cows. And even then you’d still be wasting a lot of food by feeding it to animals rather than just eating it directly.
Use the methane and solar to fuel the facility. Capture the emission and reuse them in fertilizer as well. Have the facility be a one-stop-shop, which produces the feed from hydroponics. The VR for a cow is not going to be that difficult. Just project fields in front of them. The treadmill can just have bearings and not require power. If anything they can be used to generate it.
I think focusing on the entire meat industry is counterproductive. Meat forms the foundation of a lot of cultures (in terms of cuisine, if nothing else). However, not all meat is created equal. Beef, for example, is notoriously bad for the environment and uses an astonishing amount of land. Replacing beef with chicken, fish, or even pork or lamb would do wonders for the emissions footprint of the agriculture industry.
Sounds like a good thing. With a recipe like that, you can be confident that everything said there is completely untrue and you should do the opposite of whatever they suggest.
They might be, precision fermented, and other processes that don’t require unholy amounts of land or poisonous chemicals that wreak havoc on our planet. just like crops grown in vertical farms.
Sure but that's not what's happening here, they are lobbying to keep doing what they are doing now:
Big meat companies and lobby groups are planning a large presence at the Cop28 climate conference, equipped with a communications plan to get a pro-meat message heard by policymakers throughout the summit...
The files show how the world’s largest meat company, JBS, is planning to come out in “full force” at the summit, along with other big industry hitters such as the Global Dairy Platform and the North American Meat Institute...
Members of the alliance have been asked to stick to key comms messages, which include the idea that meat is beneficial to the environment.
Yeah it is terrible, I just wanted to sound a different signal from the all meat bad and never possible in the sustainable future.
At the risk of sounding old, when I was a kid the world in terms of consumerism was vastly different. The change to our current reality happened quickly and therefor I’m not completely pessimistic about the possibility of this change continuing in a similar pace. Albeit this time the direction of the change should be set a little more specific.
This is also the reason why this “lobbying” is so worrysome.
I truly wish the meat, dairy, and egg industries would just die already. Consuming animal products in *current year* is silly and completely unsustainable.
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