Greenhouse gas fear over increased levels of meat eating (BBC)
Global consumption of meat needs to fall - to ensure future demand for food can be met and to help protect the environment - a study says.Research from Cambridge and Aberdeen universities estimates greenhouse gases from food production will go up 80% if meat and dairy consumption continues to rise at its current rate.
That will make it harder to meet global targets on limiting emissions.
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"The average efficiency of livestock converting plant feed to meat is less than 3%, and as we eat more meat, more arable cultivation is turned over to producing feedstock for animals that provide meat for humans.
"The losses at each stage are large, and as humans globally eat more and more meat, conversion from plants to food becomes less and less efficient, driving agricultural expansion and releasing more greenhouse gases. Agricultural practices are not necessarily at fault here - but our choice of food is."
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more: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29007758
= new reply since forum marked as read
your health reasoning ("for years" even! 
) is more reasonable than your funny "meat candy" .. even better than DU's proud "meat industry isn't bad for the planet" thread that you wrote. Why is it so far down the list of reasons?
And no, no one can decide anyone else's morality, but you also said "As a Deep Ecologist I believe that they have intrinsic value beyond their simple utility as food sources." Having to eat meat means you can't draw an easy little line at pigs?
Just because we've done it for our whole history does not mean we can't evolve. A change that big is the only hope we have. Or did have. I know there is no use now and we are fully completely screwed, but what if we did change in time? You'd still think that industry should keep going?
If morality is so relative then why protect the planet at all? Why bother learning about it?
Last edited Fri Sep 19, 2014, 01:30 PM - Edit history (1)
I suppose I put health issues that far down my list because I really would much rather preserve the planet than eat it. I eat it because I have to. It's the way life works.
I don't think that people are intrinsically moral in any fundamental sense. IMO morality is mostly a self-justifying story we tell ourselves to make us feel better about what we're already doing. Morality tends to change with our physical circumstances, as anthropologist Marvin Harris has noted.
Just because we've done it for our whole history is precisely the reason we can't evolve our collective preferences willy-nilly. I agree with the evolutionary psychologists, that some universals (like a dietary preference for meat and animal fat) are indicators of underlying neurological structures that evolved over time in order to adapt our behaviour to an environment that we have now eradicated. This feature of our neuropsychology makes it very difficult to shift peoples' collective behavior through education. Individuals can manage it, but there is tremendous resistance when it comes to collective behavior, resistance that comes from our unconscious mental processes and the behavior patterns they produce.
We can't protect the planet. the planet doesn't need protecting, IMO. It is what it is, and will develop as it does, with us or without us. I see Homo sapiens as just another species, nothing special at all. However, that doesn't keep us from wanting to learn about it - even though since very ancient times we have learned about it mainly in order to control it better... 
