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Comment by solinent | Hacker News Reader

Animal farming simply doesn't have to be so destructive. There's a simple solution to a simple problem. Look at New Zeland, regenerative agriculture. By allowing cattle to eat grass instead of grain (ha) we can avoid using pesticide and actually increase biodiversity, while planting trees as well. This increases carbon sequestration and has plenty of other benefits to the local wildlife.

In fact, it can have a positive carbon impact (well, negative, but you catch my drift).

In short, the solution: buy grass-fed or pasture raised animals.

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> In short, the solution: buy grass-fed or pasture raised animals.

It's worth noting though that for this to work we'd need to eat less meat and pay more for it because grass-fed takes much more land. The reason we have industrial animal farms with soy fed cattle is we need so much meat and we want it cheap (and countries that used to eat less meat want more meat as they get richer).

Seems like that would be a fine compromise.

This is a frequent paradox of industrialization: it makes certain things too cheap and that turns out to actually not be good for us. Corn Syrup, as one case in point. Plastic packaging as another. Traffic congestion on roads. Carbon in general.

If we were more comfortable pricing in externalities we could accomplish massive societal change in a quick and easy manner without most people even noticing too much. This was done all over the west to mostly eliminate smoking, and I'm surprised it isn't used more often.

So, to take your point, pass regulatory reform that only pasture raised cattle with appropriate limits on density etc. to be actually regenerative, and then the price of meat would go up quite a bit, and naturally most people would start to see it as a delicacy and eat less of it (and more importantly, expect less of it).

I've found that I perform way better when I eat well. So that has allowed me to eat more grass-fed meat. I think it's easily possible to do it in a ecologically conscious way if it was something anybody cared about. But they care more about the coast line they're still holding on to that's inevitably eroding.

We can also plant trees, it doesn't have to be a traditional farm. If we planted a certain number of conifers we could easily soak up all of that c02 and even convert it into oxygen, if that's your biggest concern.

Maybe look into what top plant based athletes eat if you're convinced you can only perform better with meat e.g.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elite-athletes-who-are-vegan...

This is a more convincing anecdote to me.

They eat all the nutrients in meat, just in pill form. It's not very convincing. Also they have tons of problems with insulin resistance and supplements have tons of flaws. Most of these athletes are spending much more and destroying the environment much more than the equivalent amount of meat or eggs would do.

I don't think we're going to move away from an ecological collapse unless we stop using pesticides.

Most vegan athletes don't last too long. I'm of Indian heritage, so I'm well aware of vegetarianism.

I should also mention that there are many, many ways to do a vegan diet wrong. The studies probably don't include too many sources of sugar, which is probably the bane of a vegan's existence since they're constantly looking for blood glucose in order to do things as their body can't use gluconeogenesis as there is less protein (and therefore more cortisol!).

> They eat all the nutrients in meat, just in pill form.

> Also they have tons of problems with insulin resistance and supplements have tons of flaws.

> Most vegan athletes don't last too long.

Sources?

An Oxford research report refutes many of the claims made in favor of "regenerative animal agriculture" [1]. It's basically the clean coal of factory farming.

Also, to the extent "regenerative animal agriculture" works at all, it can be done without slaughtering the animals for their flesh.

[1]: https://www.fcrn.org.uk/sites/default/files/project-files/fc...

I personally don't believe in anthropocentric climate change, so greenhouse emissions aren't a big deal for me--we've been warming for 10000 years and we're still -2C, and the temperature is always correlated with C02. I'd say there's no comparison to clean coal at all, you have the burden of proof there. Clean coal has no advantages other than less C02. Good farming practices can prevent ecological collapse. Especially avoiding use of roundup, which contains dioxin (!) now. Dioxin has been used in chemical warfare in the past. So is the problem meat, or agriculture?

Bigger deal is total ecological collapse. We can lose the coast, or we can lose the most. I don't think it's a choice we can avoid.

So yeah, it's really just a sell to those who believe C02 has a major impact on climate change. It's definitely well correlated--and it has been throughout time, before humans started combusting.

I'll read that study tomorrow and post back, you could be right in terms of the impact of C02 could be negligible, but there are other possibilities like planting trees to divide the cows up.

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