I don’t want to be excessively grim about this - but the largest source of GHG emissions from the beef industry is the cows themselves. Deforestation is a close second.
You can reduce that with certain feed additives, but if we can’t manage that, the honest-to-gods truth is that almost all of the cows have to die, and we have to stop breeding them - at least at the levels we do right now.
That’s what “ban beef” means.
I’m not arguing against it, mind you. It’s a problem we created in its entirety by breeding meat cattle in the first place, and so our solution has to be to stop doing that and we have to deal with the ethical problem we have created.
? I’m not quite sure how you’re getting that from what I posted.
There’s no “instead,” it’s that it’s still going to be an issue. I’ve seen a lot of fanciful ideas that we could have pet cows or cow sanctuaries or something like that, and I am pointing out that the actual cows are the major contributor, and that we need to come to terms with that in order to actually ban beef.
The most recent estimates I saw were that McD’s buys about 7 million head of beef cattle a year (as of 2019). Best estimates are that there are 1 billion head of cattle total in the world today, so McD’s uses fairly close to 1% of the global beef supply.
Oh yeah. I say handle it like cats and dogs, such as with spaying and neutering.
I mean, a more grim answer is release them into the wild and use them as a tool to help bring back big predators to many places, like wolves and cougars.
But you were talking about it as though nobody had considered that no beef means no need for cows. That’s the point, right? Nobody wants feral cows.
It’ll be like horses. 100 years ago horses were a big part of the economy. Now they aren’t. There are way way fewer of them. The horse to human ratio has probably dropped by a factor of ten.
But nobody is sad for all the horses that haven’t come into existence. Same with the cows.
That’s more complicated. Their population will balloon then dwindle but it would depend on the environment. Returning much of the farmland to natural habitat would be necessary even if not doing my wild idea. Large predators are a necessary part of ecosystems that’s missing entirely in some areas, like the east coast, and whatever helps get them back would be helpful. For example, if hunting gets abolished in Georgia and Florida (unrealistic but stick with me) then the natural forests there could come to ruin pretty quickly without something to keep deer in check.
PETA (who I like to think of as vegan Libertarians) advocates letting the population get out of control and hoping the ecosystem recovers after the collapse but that’s if it can recover.
Ecology is wild and finding the right decision for what do with cattle and the area they currently occupy is hard but my ridiculous recommendation was more to show we could use the shift for multiple good projects and not just as a singular action.
Fair enough. I was taking the video and rolling it into arguments I’ve had elsewhere, not here, so that’s my bad. I can assure you I’ve run into people who think that we can have happy feral cows running around and it’ll be fine.
Horses are it exactly. Cows need to go the same way.
I dont see why there is some thought of banning beef or wild cattle or whatever. Put strict caps on cattle breeding and land used for such, have incentives or subsidies or whatever to phase it in, and then those who really want brisket can pay out the nose for it a few times a year vs having it every Tuesday.
We’ll just eat the cattle that we got at that point, and the population will shrink as most farms transition away from it.
Regulating the beef industry is great, but it won’t do anything to curtail demand. As long as demand is high, the problem will persist. The most effective single thing I believe we can do is ban advertising of beef and beef products such as burgers, leather, etc.
If we don’t want to criminalize an activity, but we want people to stop doing it, banning advertising is the way to go. It worked for tobacco. If I were in charge, advertisements for beef, cars (especially trucks/SUVs), alcohol, gambling, prescription drugs, and crypto would all be banned.
If a cut of authentic beef costs even 20x more than before, then you can bet most demand will dry the fuck up. I rarely choose beef as it is cuz the price is up there so any major bump due to scarcity would be enough for most to stop bothering for a while, and a year or so the demand will be permanently down to the point some might start wondering what the big deal was.
Of course some will still get that occasional $100 hamburger and be reminded of what’s what. But it’d become a more rare thing that only certain restaurants carry, and overall what was cooked would be the high quality stuff worth the effort and time.
This makes sense on paper, but historically it’s not very effective. Higher prices will reduce some consumption among those who literally can not afford it, but demand will not go down. People still want the thing. They’ll just get the thing less, or sacrifice in other areas of life to get the thing as much as they can. People who can afford it will consume the same, or at higher levels than previously.
I don’t want to be accused of hand-picking things that agree with me, but I really encourage you to look up what research has been done on the effectiveness of sin taxes. They are effective, but not very. It’s a really weak impact. Taxes on tobacco didn’t reduce smoking even remotely as much as banning advertising. I mean, just look at the gas prices going up. You don’t see too many people ditching their SUVs because SUV ads are everywhere.
The most efficient and effective way to change behavior is to change what people want. Ads work. Many studies, especially with soda, show an extremely strong correlation between how much Coke/Pepsi spend on ads and their sales figures. When they advertise more, they sell more, and vice versa. If we ban ads for something, the sales of that thing will absolutely tank. Other methods may have an effect, but none as efficient and effective as banning ads.
I get what you’re saying, but I’m not talking about taxing beef, I’m saying cut the source off and let the demand be what it is. “The national limit is max 100,000 new heads born per year. You have to apply to get a license that allows you to raise a maximum of Y cattle.” If someone wants to raise 1-2 cows on their little private farm maybe there’s separate allowances for that, but basically just limit the amount of land that can possibly be put towards large scale commercial beef cows, and a hard cap on the number of cows per acre or whatever, and pretty soon the farmers will do something else with that land. If the real goal is to affect the impact on the environment than that limit is the actual thing needed, not convincing everyone to just be vegan cuz it’s good and hope the farmers eventually give up on raising cattle. Just tell the farmers they can’t fucking make many more cows.
That kind of framework on its own won’t work much better than prohibition of alcohol did. You’ll have all kinds of black/grey markets for beef. You have to setup regulatory and law enforcement frameworks to go after beefleggers. You’ll need a whole agency of inspectors going around the country checking on farms to make sure they are following the rules. You’ll have a huge increase in beef imports. If you ban those, now you have to fight against smuggling. Are you going to start fining or jailing people just for breeding a cow too many or for smuggling some steaks?
And as long as the desire for beef exists, you’ll have beef tourism. Other countries will increase their beef production. Travel will increase. Some people might even leave the country permanently. This means the climate related goal of banning beef will not be achieved, just moved from the US to elsewhere.
Banning advertising is easily enforceable. It’s inexpensive. It’s extremely effective. In the US, it’s constitutional.
Towards putting regulations in place to restrict beef’s effect on the environment, I’ll drop this piece. In the US, banning is significantly more successful than limiting.
