• commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 months ago

    but much of the plant matter that animals eat is grazed or waste from some other agricultural product.

    • Cypher@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      TBF land clearance for grazing land is a catastrophic issue for the environment and going on in places like the Amazon rainforest.

      Some ecosystems are naturally evolved to supporting grazing species like the grasslands of North America which was once home to millions of Buffallo but that’s not true of most land currently used for grazing.

      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        land clearance for grazing land is a catastrophic issue for the environment and going on in places like the Amazon rainforest.

        absolutely. I have some ideas about what to do about it, but none of them involve buying beans

        • Cypher@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          It’s at a point where I’m all for a UN resolution to end land clearance in locations like the Amazon Rainforest, to be enforced by lethal means if necessary.

          Billions of lives may depend on securing such important ecosystems.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 months ago

      that can be true, but we also grow a substantial amount of feed for agriculture usage, even if it’s not local to us. A lot of alf alfa being grown is exported.

      It’s all dependent on whatevers cheapest at the end of the day. And regardless of this fact, a lot of energy is still lost in this process, cows are a significant contributor to climate change, ironically.

      • LengAwaits@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        There was a good discussion of this on Reddit recently. Sorry to link to Reddit, but it’s a good, topical post worth perusal.

        https://www.reddit.com/r/Agriculture/comments/1dv7fw9/how_much_good_land_is_used_to_grow_food_for/

        ETA:

        We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).

        https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 months ago

          yeah that pretty much checks out. The best solution to climate change is to kill shit like private jets and yachts. But that’s unlikely to happen.

          • RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 months ago

            The best solution to climate change is to kill shit like private jets and yachts.

            I severely doubt those emissions are anything but negligible because there are so few yachts and jets.

            Edit: Yeah, just downvoting is cheap, so here’s just a single statistic for you: https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions

            Total aviation is responsible for about 2.5% of worldwide carbon emissions. That’s all air travel, private jets included. While it’s obviously very popular to focus on the luxuries of the rich, it just won’t be effective to focus on those when fighting climate change, let alone being a solution as you claimed.

            • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              3 months ago

              wait until you find out about all of the infrastructure and build costs for these things.

              realistically we should do everything, but transit is one of the significant providers of emissions, along with power production and agriculture.

      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        all of agriculture is only about 20% of our GHG emissions. cows are a fraction of that… there are definitely bigger issues.

        as for the alfalfa, it’s also a small fraction of global crops. 2/3 of all crop calories go to humans with only 1/3 going to livestock… this includes about 70% of the weight of the global soy crop (after we have pressed it for oil), as well as fodder like corn stalks. we basically fed livestock trash and get food. it’s a pretty good deal.

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          3 months ago

          all of agriculture is only about 20% of our GHG emissions. cows are a fraction of that… there are definitely bigger issues.

          obviously, but in terms of livestock, cows are pretty significant.

          30% of all global stock going to feed is a pretty large percentage of global crop production.

          • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 months ago

            I think it’s probably fine. it will work itself out when the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

            • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              3 months ago

              i think it’s a lot more likely to work out better in a highly decentralized system, i’m not much of a commie myself personally, as i prefer to live outside the bounds of normalcy, and unless i get a lot of say in the commie meetings i’m not sure i can justify existing in that society lol.