Is this your first time using the internet? If so, you’ll be fucking amazed at the minutiae you find that people are interested in. Hope all is well in Brisbane!

And if you look at the effect on greenhouse gas emissions if you quit feeding corn to U.S. beef cattle, here it is. The corn will be used to increase the human population of the world by 300 million people. If the surplus grain goes to China, the 300 million additional Chinese will increase global emissions by 2.0 billion metric tons. If the surplus grain goes to Russia, the 300 million additional Russias will increase global emissions by 3.6 billion metric tons. If the surplus grain stays in the U.S., the 300 million additional Americans will increase global emissions by 4.8 billion metric tons.

Wake up and smell the roast beef people! Christian Peters’ research at Cornell University (published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems) concluded that land suited to the production of dairy and meat but not fruits, grains, and vegetables is more readily available. So production of beef and milk is necessary to produce food from all available land.

A vegetarian diet is not the most efficient in terms of land use.

And starvation is caused by a local unsustainable population of individuals (more people than the land will provide for living in the same area). That is called overpopulation. People are going to have to learn how to control their population, and how to produce food for themselves, if they intend to be sustainable. How much food did you grow today?

UC Davis is in the heart of Central Valley, where there are a lot of farms. Frank Mitloehner works in the Agricultural Air Quality lab (see cows in picture at lab’s home page (http://animalscience.ucdavis.edu/faculty/mitloehner/people/index.htm). The millions of dollars in funding includes industry, according to the pdf available from the google cache by googling “uc davis air quality fact sheet”. Looks like that fact sheet is no longer available. Also, the google cache for “uc davis air quality funding private industry” gives original wording as “Budget/funding: $4-5 million annually. Sources: Private industry …”

Or you can check Frank’s other group, the UC Davis ASI, discussing industry donations (http://childrensgarden.ucdavis.edu/newsroom/ASI%20EAB%20Report%202009.pdf). That pdf has not been buried.

Nice, that one is a classic.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/googlereader/vegan-carnivore

A whole book-worth of words

No doubt there are issues with the agricultural system, but they are not simply issues with meat. It really boils down to being a grain-based agricultural system. Subsiding on grains is no less devastating to the environment as subsiding on meat fed by grains, but consuming beef fed on grass is actually the way nature intended, because an overpopulation of herbivores degrades land as well.

The point is, giving up meat isn’t some sudden cure-all to the environment, in fact it can harm the environment a lot more than people think.