As negotiations get underway at COP28, we compiled a list of the leading research documenting the connection between meat and greenhouse gas emissions.
I think the whole issue is that this is more complex than any discrete set of metrics because so many industries are interconnected. in a world without any animal agriculture, how much corn and soy would we raise? it is just unknowable.
I’m out doing grocery shopping so replies are flakey. I want to avoid confusion between inexact and unknowable.
We can establish the difference between plausible and implausible thing, and rule out the impossible.
We know that historically and contemporarily crops are favoured over animal ag (with the exception of a few things like chickens widely, and sometimes cows/goats/or camels in particular niches) by subsistence farmers and poor urban workers. That meat is expensive, and only recent developments (and subsidies) have really changed that in the global north/west/rich mc exploity whitey land whatever you want to call it.
So while it’s not impossible that modern developments have somehow dramatically changed things in terms of efficiency, or that poor people are idiots and don’t know what to grow to survive (highly unlikely, subsistence farming kills the idle or wrong), or that in some weird niche in Shenzhen farming the Peruvian fluffy marmoset is particularly efficient: there’s probably some sensible conclusions we can draw about what an optimally land efficient agriculture could and could not look like and it seems unlikely to be animal ag centric or even particularly heavy.
I think the whole issue is that this is more complex than any discrete set of metrics because so many industries are interconnected. in a world without any animal agriculture, how much corn and soy would we raise? it is just unknowable.
I’m out doing grocery shopping so replies are flakey. I want to avoid confusion between inexact and unknowable.
We can establish the difference between plausible and implausible thing, and rule out the impossible.
We know that historically and contemporarily crops are favoured over animal ag (with the exception of a few things like chickens widely, and sometimes cows/goats/or camels in particular niches) by subsistence farmers and poor urban workers. That meat is expensive, and only recent developments (and subsidies) have really changed that in the global north/west/rich mc exploity whitey land whatever you want to call it.
So while it’s not impossible that modern developments have somehow dramatically changed things in terms of efficiency, or that poor people are idiots and don’t know what to grow to survive (highly unlikely, subsistence farming kills the idle or wrong), or that in some weird niche in Shenzhen farming the Peruvian fluffy marmoset is particularly efficient: there’s probably some sensible conclusions we can draw about what an optimally land efficient agriculture could and could not look like and it seems unlikely to be animal ag centric or even particularly heavy.