Meat: Causing more climate problems than transport and getting away with it.
- Thread starter taffboy gwyrdd
- Start date
untethered
For industry & decency
_angel_ said:
That is the pertinent question.
I think we need to move towards more high-density cities and convert much of the suburbs to farmland. That should both give us more agricultural land and enable a lower energy lifestyle too.
fredfelt
Mostly unknown member
Strategies for meat eaters, or those with a protein intensive diet:
Denial
Express feelings of guilt, but then do nothing about your consumption
Blame China
Initailly consider a nationwide policy for meat reduction, but after assessing details claim that this policy is unfair to a specific group, or that you have a god given right to continue with your consumption unchecked
Alternatively eat lentils and your farts will smell of roses
Denial
Express feelings of guilt, but then do nothing about your consumption
Blame China
Initailly consider a nationwide policy for meat reduction, but after assessing details claim that this policy is unfair to a specific group, or that you have a god given right to continue with your consumption unchecked
Alternatively eat lentils and your farts will smell of roses
Maurice Picarda
Actually, might as well flounce.
BigPhil said:
I'm pinning all my hopes on bird flu. A 50% drop in the global population and suddenly my steak'n'petrol lifestyle will be perfectly sustainable.
editor
hiraethified
Only if you lack imagination and creativity. Who's saying that all imported food should be banned anyway?_angel_ said:
Ah, no one. It's just a pointless strawman you've constructed. Britain has traded with other countries since before the Romans but the point is, we don't need to be flying in food.
untethered
For industry & decency
Printing the number of food miles on the packet would be a good idea.
A great deal of food is grown in the EU, then flown to Africa for washing and processing, then flown back to another part of the EU for warehousing before finally being trucked to the UK.
A great deal of food is grown in the EU, then flown to Africa for washing and processing, then flown back to another part of the EU for warehousing before finally being trucked to the UK.
untethered
For industry & decency
Bring back the Cutty Sark! Your country needs you.Crispy said:
untethered
For industry & decency
editor said:
Very true.
The main reason why supermarkets are economically efficient is because they've externalised a large chunk of their costs onto the environment and the great British taxpayer.
citydreams
on the road again
Aye, Unfortunately he gets to act as advisor to the government on immigration. He performed a statistical analysis on the nationality of school children to show that the government had under-estimated the proportion of ethnic minorities living in the UK.
untethered
For industry & decency
The Optimum Population Trust think the UK has a sustainable population of around 30 million people.
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/
taffboy gwyrdd said:
Maybe the solution is to find some way to stop all the animals from breathing.
WouldBe said:
you are right specifically but the point is entirely irrelvent
mass veg production is same as mass animal/meat farming .. simply agro business .. they use soils that are very easy to grow on/in but need a lot of water ..
small scale and intensive organic farming would use soils high in organic matter and so use FAR less water and less than shed farmed meat production
WouldBe
Dislicksick
durruti02 said:you are right specifically but the point is entirely irrelvent
mass veg production is same as mass animal/meat farming .. simply agro business .. they use soils that are very easy to grow on/in but need a lot of water ..
small scale and intensive organic farming would use soils high in organic matter and so use FAR less water and less than shed farmed meat production
How much food is grown organically?
The point raised was simply that rearing animals used more water than growing veg. So unless animals are capable of drinking more than their own body weight in water a day then that's simply not true.
.. mass veg protein agro business is not better than mass animal protein agri business to me kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
I'm impressed with the level of farming knowledge being displayed here, I really am.
eoin_k
Lawyer's fees, beetroot and music
Despite the ethical issues that some people have, I think that exploiting animals would be a necessary part of keeping mass society going sustainably on a crowded island in the North Atlantic.
We would need leather and wool as well as flax and hemp to provide textiles without the synthetic materials produced by heavy oil based industry.
Chicken tractors and pigs could eat domestic waste and plow our allotements and small holdings. Horse could deliver copiced wood pellets to our suburban combined heat and power boilers as well as doing other labour when biodiesel and autocomponents are in short supply.
Male animals are generally more agressive and less productive members of the community so most boars and cocks would end up in the pot at an early age.
Some of the methane from animal and vegetable waste could be trapped to produce biogas before the waste was composted.
I think the arguments against eating meat on sustainability grounds are missdirected. Industrial agriculture rather than meat eating is the problem. Small scale, localised polyculture food production is the solution. The problem is that this is out of step with capitalism and it is labour intensive even with horses, donkeys, ponys, chickens and pigs doing alot of the hard work. For such a system to work the population would probably need to be more spred out in low lying agricultural land. I like to imagine that we could create a network of ecovillage suburbs along existing transport infrastructure. The per hectare yield from allotements, and small holdings using techniques like forest gardening can far exceed that of industrial farming. If we could produce enough truely local food in this way, hill farms might fall by the way creating the opportunity to restore ancient woodland in our highlands.
Of course if you value an animal for its wool, eggs, milk or labour you might think twice about killing it, and if we aren't grain feeding cattle on an industrial scale we will have a lot fewer beef brugers. Less militant hardworking vegans will be highly respected - if only for the larger portions of Coq Au Cidre they leave the rest of us.
Finally, can I take this opportunity to volunteer for the first crew of the Urban 75 Tea Clipper? I'd suggest that having dropped off our supply of IPA in India and stocked up on tea and spices, we leave some room for a few mediterranean delicacies on the way back!
I wish it wasn't pie in the sky.
It sounds like a nice place to live to me.
We would need leather and wool as well as flax and hemp to provide textiles without the synthetic materials produced by heavy oil based industry.
Chicken tractors and pigs could eat domestic waste and plow our allotements and small holdings. Horse could deliver copiced wood pellets to our suburban combined heat and power boilers as well as doing other labour when biodiesel and autocomponents are in short supply.
Male animals are generally more agressive and less productive members of the community so most boars and cocks would end up in the pot at an early age.
Some of the methane from animal and vegetable waste could be trapped to produce biogas before the waste was composted.
I think the arguments against eating meat on sustainability grounds are missdirected. Industrial agriculture rather than meat eating is the problem. Small scale, localised polyculture food production is the solution. The problem is that this is out of step with capitalism and it is labour intensive even with horses, donkeys, ponys, chickens and pigs doing alot of the hard work. For such a system to work the population would probably need to be more spred out in low lying agricultural land. I like to imagine that we could create a network of ecovillage suburbs along existing transport infrastructure. The per hectare yield from allotements, and small holdings using techniques like forest gardening can far exceed that of industrial farming. If we could produce enough truely local food in this way, hill farms might fall by the way creating the opportunity to restore ancient woodland in our highlands.
Of course if you value an animal for its wool, eggs, milk or labour you might think twice about killing it, and if we aren't grain feeding cattle on an industrial scale we will have a lot fewer beef brugers. Less militant hardworking vegans will be highly respected - if only for the larger portions of Coq Au Cidre they leave the rest of us.
Finally, can I take this opportunity to volunteer for the first crew of the Urban 75 Tea Clipper? I'd suggest that having dropped off our supply of IPA in India and stocked up on tea and spices, we leave some room for a few mediterranean delicacies on the way back!
I wish it wasn't pie in the sky.
It sounds like a nice place to live to me.
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