U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat (Trees And Things)

thefadd: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:16:18 EST

Could be. I eat mainly raw foods and no processed or baked goods while exercising constantly, though, so fat isn't a bad way for me to pick up my calories.

colakong: Re: Animals first

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 20:08:56 EST

I think that our problem with over-population is that we are afraid of death. We can have sex without reproducing, but people want to have babies so that they can prolong their genetic existence. As long as that fear remains, our collective destiny will be

Secondus: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:21:45 EST

World to U.N.: NO.

skeptic: How to reduce the population

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:23:04 EST

It is true that if we attempt to reduce the global population by (somehow) getting people to have fewer children, it would still take something like a century before the population was reduced to a more appropriate level for the carrying capacity of the pl

skeptic: Re: logical

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:09:32 EST

Oh yes it does.

zyxwvutsr: Re: logical

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:27:38 EST

...it is logical to expect that you would try to construe my desire for a lower global population as an intention to commit mass murder

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

skeptic: excuse the digression

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 09:58:04 EST

I have noticed on many occasions that you go out of your way to misinterpret my comments in a way that is insulting to me, and therefore, it is logical to expect that you would try to construe my desire for a lower global population as an intention to comm

skeptic: Re: mass sterilization

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 09:44:17 EST

If I felt that the world was in the process of becoming more affluent and better educated and hence less overpopulated, I would then have no need for plans to prevent people from having as many children as they want. Unfortunately, the actual trends

jwb: Re: Animals first

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:51:02 EST

That would definitely be a net improvement, because the advance of science and culture would be radically increased. Just the knowledge produced by the universities in a society twice as large would be more than worth having given up meat.

thefadd: C'mon

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:14:59 EST

How many prius drivers do you know who eat red meat? They're all freakin' wusses. So much fun to cut off, too...

thefadd: Re: mass sterilization

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:01:08 EST

Geeze, remind me never to trust you as world leader. As people's affluence and education rise, their desire to have children decreases. Some subtle, fair social engineering is all that's needed not creepy sci-fi plots.

joshv: Re: The problem with arguments like yours ...

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 09:48:59 EST

I am merely pointing out that unless population is addressed, most other solutions will fail in the long term. If we become more efficient, or discover a new source of energy and have no self-imposed bounds on population, we've done nothing but incre

MayorBob: The problem with arguments like yours ...

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 08:46:43 EST

... is that they fly in the face of the facts. You say the earth can only sustain a total population of one billion. Fine -- I don't know what you're basing that estimate on but let's say you're correct. The fact is we (the world) have ov

Lou: Saturn's Race

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 08:34:48 EST

Niven and Barnes explore mass sterilization in this book.

skeptic: mass sterilization

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 08:28:19 EST

I think that there are a lot of people in the third world (or any other world) who would not agree to be sterilized even if you paid them. However, perhaps if we cooked up some kinds of HIV vaccination which had the unfortunate side-effect of causing

zyxwvutsr: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 08:14:01 EST

This does not mean (as zyxwvutsr will otherwise hasten to claim) that I want to kill off most of the world's population

Why would I claim that? Have I accused you of being a mass murderer before?

joshv: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 07:00:05 EST

This is actually one of the reasons I really worry about a breakthrough in fusion research. Suppose they actually do come up with a power source that's "too cheap to meter". It would solve most of our current environmental problems - but probab

Shy Elf: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 03:21:45 EST

Welcome, Brian, and please consider sticking around here.

As you point out in your blog page, total methane generation from rice growing is of the same order of magnitude, and I haven't been able find good estimates. However, there are more

Shy Elf: Scientifically Illiterate Reporters

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 02:26:28 EST

The IPCC is not equal to the IPCC chairman. IPCC reports are approved by a huge committee composed mostly of reputable scientists in the field. The IPCC chairman is just some random politically-appointed bureaucrat.

The statistics abo

Shy Elf: Re: Animals first

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:42:53 EST

You're right. I vote to shoot all cows seen driving an S.U.V.

Shy Elf: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:12:15 EST

This argument would logically preclude any curtailing of exponential growth at all, or any finite recommended population for the planet. Even if we managed to solve all the other problems, everyone would die from heat pollution.

Shy Elf: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:05:32 EST

You're on a low-protein low-carb diet? Unless you've drastically dropped your calories, isn't that the same thing as a high-fat diet?

Lou: Fewer

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:10:12 EST

Prof, you make 100% sense about why we should be saving the planet. But there are a few points I would like to make.

Less art? Maybe. But also fewer Britney Spears [insert your own craptastic "artist" here] wannabees.

Less Technology? Dou

thefadd: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:02:10 EST

Actually, in that regard, the best thing you could do would probably be to pay a whole bunch of third world residents to get sterilized.

profwhat: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:52:08 EST

What gets me about this entire discussion--and your comment about a "you-sized hole" crystallizes this for me--is the sad realization that the modern ecology movement is focused on cutting harm to the environment at all costs, irrespective of all other con

MayorBob: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:47:37 EST

Hey, I'll even promise to eat a vegetarian today (and help out with that overpopulation thing skeptic and josh are worried about).

profwhat: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:38:42 EST

I get it on the second page of Google results (10 results per page). Hey, our SEO is better than I thought!

welcome, brian. If I promise to eat vegetarian tomorrow, will you stick around another week?

joshv: Re: Animals first

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:53:22 EST

But you are talking about the same net environmental burden in the end. Suppose we had a world of 4 billion heavy meat eaters, stretched to the limit of its resources. Then everybody quits eating meat - suddenly now there are enough resources t

thefadd: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:18:52 EST

Hi Brian, great to see you here! Neat blog you've got there. What about Gary Taubes' 2007 book "Good Calories Bad Calories" convinced you to go low carb? You seem to be putting forth something of an atkin's based diet. Personally, I went atkins first, ditc

thefadd: Re: Animals first

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:13:23 EST

If we can support more people through sustainable resource management then over population ceases to be the "root cause." It's an interplay, not a cause-effect operation.

joshv: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:12:47 EST

Not accusing anyone of blog spam here - but either Brian is a deep-lurker or he found us via a search engine. Surprisingly this story pops up in the first page of google search results for "un meat eating".

brian: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:44:16 EST

I have a kind of "low carb perspective" on this. The UN panel is really talking about India and China - where the people are getting richer, and so they are eating more meat than before. So we should all eat less meat to compensate, he says.

But those c

joshv: Re: Animals first

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:47:40 EST

The root cause is human overpopulation. Address that, not the symptom. Your solution might allow the human population to expand a bit more - but to what end? So what if the earth can support 8 billion vegans and only 4 billion meat eaters

profwhat: Animals first

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:21:23 EST

If you favor a population-reduction solution, shouldn't you start by reducing the population of animals before humans? And what better animals to target than the massive herds of cows who are born solely to provide meat?

joshv: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:07:24 EST

In the long term this is probably a pretty good solution. We'd be down to a billion people within a few centuries if every country had the birth rates of Italy. In the short term however, there'd be a massive increase in consumption as the thir

skeptic: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:58:25 EST

Your suggestion will doubtlessly become more popular if the American Social Security system goes bankrupt. Although it seems wasteful to kill the elderly without giving them a chance to make their deaths more meaningful. Why not get them to bec

port1080: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:52:09 EST

Honestly, the best thing any environmentalist (especially American environmentalists) could possibly do for the environment, if they really care about such things, is to not have children.

This brings up an interesting thought for the near-long-t

singularity: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:41:39 EST

A bigger problem than having babies is people living way too long. Carnival anyone?

skeptic: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:31:29 EST

I agree completely. The most effective form of conservation is to refrain from having children. However, even if you do, there are other people who will continue to have excessive amounts of children, so as I mentioned earlier, you will at most

joshv: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:23:16 EST

Honestly, the best thing any environmentalist (especially American environmentalists) could possibly do for the environment, if they really care about such things, is to not have children. Every child you don't have creates a "you sized" hole in futu

skeptic: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:13:46 EST

It is true that all efforts at conservation or responsible management of the global environment will fail if the world's population continues to increase, and indeed, the population is already too high. My guess is that a sustainable global populatio

zyxwvutsr: get your hands off my ethanol, you damn, dirty ape

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 07:53:48 EST

...corn based ethanol...

Hey! Corn-based ethanol is as American as apple pie!

joshv: Re: U.N. to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 07:42:06 EST

"said Chris Lamb, head of marketing for a pig industry group" - is Steve Hamm the head of marketing for the mutton industry?

Look folks, meat is what people eat. It's what we (and our ancestors) have been eating for millions of years. If it

zyxwvutsr: Re: Me to World: Stop Eating Meat

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 07:38:20 EST

I think the only reasonable solution is for people in nations that have only recently begun to eat a lot of meat should give it up so that I can go on living my life as I am accustomed. After all, it's less of a sacrifice to end a new habit than an old one