2) Nice to have some agreement about reductions in
meat. However the reason that fast food will be hard to
reduce/eliminate is that factory farms aren’t inefficient
relative to traditional methods of producing meat. The rise
of hamburgers as a food was predicated on the increased
yields you get from mincing the meat and incorporating
the fat. Take the fat out and you have less meat and a
increased disposal problem. The meat waste disposal problem is
already quite large and has serious consequences. When
the EU banned feeding bone-meat-meal to ruminants in 2001,
soymeal imports doubled to 6 million tonnes between 2001
and 2003 — unhappily there was plenty of capacity in
the Amazon to fill the shortfall.

3) The global spread of McDonalds and the rise of factory
animal farms in developing countries is reasonable evidence
of my “dominant culture” claim. India is an exception. The
torching of the odd McDonalds tends to slow the spread
… now that’s really extreme.

3a) Energy efficiency, as a strategy, is full of holes best
exemplified by Barney Foran a couple of years back. He was
being interviewed about his super duper energy efficient
house in Sydnay, solar panels and so on and the reporter
asked how much money he saved on power bills. Barney gave a
big grin because he realised exactly what he was about to
say and why it was a problem: “enough to take the family
on a holiday to the gold coast” :). The economists call it
the “rebound” effect and it bites into the savings, for
example, of any vegan — because the food is (or can be)
cheap, people can spend the savings on items which might
be even more polluting than food. Far too many people
think we can buy our way our of climate change.

4) I never said vegans are “somehow in harmony with it
all”. I don’t go much for spiritual/religious mumbo-jumbo
and don’t happen to have children. I do claim that vegans have
less impact on biodiversity than anybody eating anything
remotely like a normal Aussie diet. Could I lower my impact
on biodiversity by killing ferals? Probably, depending
on the impact of shooters driving round in a 4WD shooting
them. A roo shooter friend of mine (strange but true!) once
told me that he shot the first 35 each night just to pay
for the Toyota. Caring about individual animals as well as
about biodiversity does create problems for me. I suspect
there aren’t any pareto optimal strategies.

Hansen has argued for deep (40%) cuts in anthropogenic
methane to buy time for CO2 cuts to come on line. He has
said that the second biggest thing any individual can do
to reduce their load on the planet is to “move toward”
a vegetarian diet.

Am I zealous and pious? I guess I don’t mind being called
zealous but, as an athiest, pious is a bit annoying. When
somebody says that air travel has a huge carbon footprint,
then it isn’t long before somebody works out the obvious
corollary — no air travel is best. We
can’t all manage it, but it is obviously true. People who
cite this obvious corollary are generally not denounced
as zealous extremists until they start blockading airports.

5) Neither ethics or science are done with opinion polls
and an aboriginal living a traditional lifestyle may not
think much of veganism. But if you check out the NUTTAB
Nutrient Tables, you will find that some traditional bush
tucker plants have astonishing nutrient profiles. Would
a plant based bush tucker diet be healthier than one with
plenty of animal foods? That’s an interesting scientific
question. I’d be guessing yes.

“Let’s see, you can’t eat any more fish, turtle, dugong, roo, wallaby, goanna, magpie goose, etc., etc., etc., because white fellas say so. Trust us – it’s better for you.”

I reckon that would go down about as well as genocide did.

Propose, however, a shift towards higher consumption of buffalo, camel, rabbit, goat, banteng, deer, etc., you might actually get (some) participation and a net positive benefit.

Second, I’m certainly agreeing with you that least meat consumption would be a good thing, especially if we could get rid of the low-efficiency, high by-product, low-health components of fast food.

Third, the ‘dominant’ culture is a complete furphy. There is no such thing. Each country, sub-culture and society chooses what it wishes to do. If you want to change a culture’s general performance, you don’t promote extremism; rather, you promote viable alternatives that are less destructive. Sure, everyone choosing to live in complete darkness at night and eating cold vegetables will be the most effective at reducing resource demand (in this case, electricity), but it’s a plainly ridiculous proposition. Promoting energy efficiency, alternative power sources and responsible living will bring the best long-term result.

Fourth, you have ignored my major proposition – if you really want to make a difference, eat more feral animals and stop touting the line that vegans are somehow in harmony with it all. You still eat, you still shit, and you still have an impact. How many children do you have, Geoff? By far and away the biggest driver of environmental degradation is over-population so with two or more children, you have already committed the biggest environmental ‘crime’. Climate change isn’t going to be slowed by sudden (intangible) shifts to veganism – carbon emissions on the industrial scale need to change before we have any hope of mitigating our woeful prognosis.

In the spirit of ecological triage, let’s hit the meaningful and biggest contributors first, and avoid petty arguments over the largely inconsequential. I reiterate, though, fundamentally we have similar views – I disagree entirely however with your zealous delivery and pious hypocrisy.

I don’t eat animal foods because it isn’t necessary and invariably
involves pain and suffering to the animals involved. Most people aren’t
interested in such matters, so I don’t discuss them unless people are
interested, and if they are, they should read Peter Singer.

On the other hand, I also aim to minimise, as far as reasonable,
my destructive impact on the planet. Plenty of other people and
organisations claim to have similar goals. So this is what I tend to
spend time arguing/discussing/… because these are matters of fact and
amenable to normal scientific methods.

For example, you say that if the human population became vegetarian then
we would need “vegetable matter farmed at much higher intensities and over
broader areas than currently”. This is a testable claim and using figures
from “Livestock’s Long Shadow” (its downloadable) and FAOSTAT, I think
it’s clearly false. I’ll deal with the vegan case, because its simpler.

Globally, 1/3 of all cropland is dedicated to feeding livestock. The
global production of animal products (meat, milk, fish etc) is 16% of
total calories (477 calories of 2808). So providing those 477 calories
uses 1/3 of all cropland, plus 34 million square km of pasture plus the
ocean fisheries, plus rivers, etc. The other 2/3 of croplands provide
2331 calories of plant food. If we were all vegan we could use that
1/3 which is now producing feed, allocate about a third of it to produce
what meat currently produces and release 2/3 back to wildlife. We could
release the entire 34 million square km of pasture, we could stop fishing.

If you want a more careful treatment looking at a particular region,
then have a look at “Sustainable Protein Production and Consumption
Pigs or Peas” — Aiking et al. I can lend it to you if it isn’t in
the Barr Smith. It deals particularly with Europe and looks at a range
of environmental indicators: Acidification, CO2eq, Eutrophication,
Pesticide Use, Fertiliser Use, Water Use and land use. It compares
protein production using either pork or peas on these indicators.
Pork is typically between 3 and 6 times worse on all measures and 61
times worse in terms of acidification.

There will be some regions where my reasoning falls apart (e.g, up
in the arctic circle), but it will hold in most places.

How likely is it that people become vegan? Most of the planet doesn’t eat
much meat anyway — but they would definitely like to, because this is what
the dominant culture does. I think that if we are to have any chance at
preventing run-away climate change, we need to change the dominant culture and
meat eating has a lot to do with deep seated attitudes of dominance over
nature and control.

Thanks for the nice words. Flannelette – one of those fashion statements I was talking about. Add black beanie, Acca-Dacca t-shirt, ugg boots and black jeans, and you have yourself a winning combo.

I think you’re forgetting several important components here.

First, even if by some unfathomable turn of events the entire human population switched to vegetarianism, from where do you think the extra demand would be supplied? Of course, it would be vegetable matter farmed at much higher intensities and over broader areas than currently. The SW of Australia didn’t become a biodiversity hotspot because of cattle (it was wheat – I assume you eat bread, don’t you, Geoff?), SE Asia’s top-ranking deforestation is driven mostly by rice and oil palm, and great expanses of the NA prairies grow maize and wheat.

You are stuck in the fallacy that demand somehow drops when people switch diet, when in fact, demand just takes on a different form. It’s partly the problem associated with Joseph Wright’s mistaken belief that tropical urbanisation will reduce land clearance rates (see Brook et al. 2006 for discussion).

This is also embodied by the protein-switching phenomenon. Justin Brashares showed conclusively that protein intake merely shifts to alternative sources once policy/market forces drive declines in another. Bushmeat over-harvest and over-fishing are the unfortunate consequences of switching from livestock, so perhaps we should consider the sacrifice of already destroyed terrestrial habitats to avoid continued natural harvest crises.

More importantly, extremist views like yours don’t tend to convince people to change their ways – it likely breeds resentment that is counter-productive. Rather than impose what most (especially the yobs) might consider green totalitarianism, doesn’t it make more sense to preach a reduced meat intake, switch to more environmentally friendly meat sources, and to consider the health implications? You go some way to doing that, but your hard line McCartney-like stance is entirely counter-productive. Indeed, if you really wanted to make a difference, Geoff (apart from killing yourself), you’d eat Australian feral animals like gorging tick (goats, camels, deer, buffalo, rabbits, etc.). We should convince every Australian to eat a feral a week, not embrace misplaced vegetarianism.

CJA Bradshaw

Maybe there’s room for an offset trading scheme here – tank of avgas for a cupla trees and a quarter pounder or three.

Just a thought.
Nice post and awesome blog by the way!!

Fang

Hamburger mince has a high level of saturated fat. Its the beef in a Big Mac
that makes it junk food — its not the bun, or the lettuce, or … anything else …its
the beef. BUT, from an environmental perspective the mince in a big mac is
more friendly than the lean red meat so beloved by the CSIRO diet. Why?
How do you get lean red meat? You remove the high calorie
fat. This means you need more animal per kg of edible meat and a lot
more animal per food calorie. A study last year (Peters et al,
“Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems”, 22 (2),145–153. estimated
you need about 70% more land for the same amount of edible meat.
A similar result holds for low-fat dairy products.