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None of that has anything to do with the subject of discussion though. How are those US ranchers burning down the amazon? US beef consumption and production are completely irrelevant to the developing world burning forests to produce their beef, which again is what the article we're discussing is talking about.
I do not understand the relevance of that tabloid article. It has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. I live in Canada. All my beef comes from Canada. The fact that people in other countries burn forests to graze cattle does not mean that Canadians consuming Canadian beef cause those other countries to burn forests. My beef consumption is 100% irrelevant, they will burn the same amount of forest regardless of what I eat, because they are not burning it to feed me.
This is not a productive method of communication. You need to clearly state what you mean instead of expecting me to spend 5 comments asking questions to try to extract an actual meaning from your post. I have no idea what you think I inferred. I did not confuse correlation with causation, so you need to explain clearly what you think I mean, since it is not what I said.
https://mathildasanthropologyblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/l...
You can only make that claim by examining a single locus. When you examine multiple loci, human populations are clearly separated into distinct groups. The fact that this oft repeated myth is so commonly addressed that it is a named fallacy should be an indication that it warrants a little investigation into its accuracy. Here's a handy graph to help visualize how Lewontin's claim is dishonest and false: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03069877090053...
If you want to argue about the science, please research the subject first. There's no way anyone could do even a cursory bit of research and not come across this as it has been beaten to death, resurrected, and re-beaten to death.
But that hasn't happened. These people did not lose land from "extreme meteorological events". They simply exhausted the stored fertility in the soil, and it is cheaper to burn another chunk of forest than it is to purchase fertilizer. A hypothetical scenario that could happen in the future does not explain the actual scenario that the article we're discussing is about.
It's true in East Asia as well.
No it isn't.
In fact, where is it not true?
Everywhere? Nothing in your link contradicts what I said already. You can only make the correlation if you cherry pick start and end dates, and cherry pick western nations or nations that had coincidental birth rate declines like China. If the correlation is real and not spurious, then why doesn't it hold now? Why didn't it hold before the 1930s? Why has it never existed in Africa?
And what does that have to do with anything I said?
You can't say "you are completely wrong" and then support that by showing I am right. You showed 5 crops that produce more protein per acre than an absurdly low fake figure for beef. That's precisely what I said, that we would have to cut down to just a small handful of highest value crops. 5 is a small handful, we currently grow thousands. You know full well lettuce produces fewer calories and less protein per acre than beef. But you are not demanding that we stop growing lettuce, just beef. Your demands are inconsistent with the premise you use to support them.
Because none of the factors you list explain the difference. There is 100% scientific certainty that there is a genetic basis for the racial IQ divide. This was never a real debate, it was always reality being attacked by ideologues. But modern technology has simply side stepped the ideologues shouting "racist pseudo-science" at facts they don't like. Over a dozen specific genes have been isolated that affect IQ, both positively and negatively. The distribution of these genes in racial groups is as would be expected based on the measured IQs of those racial groups. Many people were conned by the "IQ isn't real it is racist pseudo-science" lie. I do not believe "DNA isn't real it is racist pseudo-science" will be as effective.
That's stopping growth, that's what I am suggesting we do. The alternative which I think can only be draconian is "modifying our behavior" to accommodate a huge population. This means eliminating almost all food in favor of the half dozen highest producing crops. It means eliminating all natural spaces and consuming all resources for ourselves and leaving nothing for non-humans. I can't see any reason why a high population is a good thing, much less so good that it warrants making all those lives as miserable as possible. A billion people with high quality of life and a diverse planet full of billions of creatures beats the hell out of a hundred billion people living like factory farmed chickens on a planet virtually devoid of non-human life.
That premise is only accurate if you are planning to have everyone consume livestock feed. If that is the plan, then you shouldn't be fixating on beef, you should be going after almost all crops we grow, which produce just as few calories per acre as beef, and even lower protein per acre. Depending on where you draw the line, your argument effectively requires all farms to only grow a small number of very high calorie crops like field corn and potatoes.
Literally all beef in Canada and the US is grazed on open pastures. The majority of it is sent to feed lots for the last couple of months of their life to be fattened on grain, but they spend the first year in pasture no matter what. Second, absolutely none of the feed is imported from South America. It is from Nebraska and Iowa in the US, and Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada. Both nations produce massive amounts of grain, far more than needed to feed all the livestock we raise, much less just the cattle. Third, this is the point, it isn't attempting to minimize deforestation. My eating beef or not eating beef does absolutely nothing, as my beef did not cause any deforestation. My habits do not cause people half way around the world to change their behavior.
And just as a note of interest, your first link is quite incorrect. It uses the lowest production pasture figure for its math rather than the average, it does not consider the idea that grass fed beef becoming a major industry might involve people switching to more productive grazing systems which we know produce at least double the calories per acre. It ignores the huge quantity of idle grassland we currently have which could be used for cattle production. And it neglects to factor in the millions of acres of corn and soy fields that would no longer be needed for cattle feed and can be converted to pasture.
https://bovinepracticum.blogspot.com/2018/03/another-land-us...
Exactly, environmental destruction caused by the beef industry
Not in Canada or the US. We have vast prairies that used to be inhabited by millions of bison. Now a fraction of it is inhabited by cattle instead.
water requirements vs other types of protein.
How is temporarily using local water in the US, which is returned to the natural water cycle, causing deforestation in South America or Africa or Asia?
This is a huge blanket statement to make as well as being factually inaccurate.
Then provide contradictory evidence. I can not exhaustively prove every single ranch in the US isn't clear cutting forests. You only need to provide a single example to disprove me. Please do.
None of those things have anything to do with the discussion though, which is developing nations torching natural ecosystems. Neither my beef nor my car is in any way a factor in this. Also, your comparison is disingenuous. A pound of beef or chicken contains far more calories and protein than a pound of any vegetable. And grass fed beef actually requires less energy to produce than vegetables.
Or more accurately, destruction is slower in developed countries, largely because there's so little left to destroy. It is pretty hard to deforest Scotland any more than it already is.
Kindergarden is not an organization. If you want to decree that people who commit wrongthink offenses are by definition incorrect in everything they ever say, you need to provide a list of wrongthink offenses. I don't even know what you think is racist about that comment, much less how anyone could logically extrapolate that everything I say is wrong as a result.
A rise in standards of living is directly correlated with lower birth rates.
No it isn't. That is based on a single observation, increasing standards of living in the 20th century in western nations. Living standards in western nations were increasing before that and birth rates were not declining. Living standards stopped increasing decades ago, and birth rates have not gone back up. So the evidence that this is even true in western nations is quite poor, but there is no evidence at all that it holds true in other cultures.
We can't just exploit the world and then blame those who live in systems that offer no alternative.
It isn't about blame, it is about solving the problem. You can not give 5 billion Africans a western standard of living, that is not a physical possibility. So we need to prevent the 5 billion Africans from happening while there's still only 1 billion Africans. We're not trying to prevent 5 billion Europeans from happening because the European population is falling, not rising.
He didn't say anything about targets though, he was talking about total population. Which is exactly the thing, none of them were trying to reduce the global population, so their lack of success in that endeavor is meaningless. The fact that the non-violent solution actually worked is very important, but is slipped in at the end after the red herrings about mass murder.
Please explain how CO2 is causing people to burn forests, wiping out ecosystems and killing millions of animals. You know, the subject of discussion.
Getting carbon output down will not do anything about the massive ecological destruction this article is about. That's the point. And where on earth does genocide come into this from?
CO2 is a problem.
Not the problem the article is talking about.
But the notion that this planet can only support 5, 7 or 10 or 15B people is patently false.
It is also a strawman. People don't say that, they say that the world can only support X many people with our current lifestyle. I do not want to make my life, and the life of every other person on the planet worse, simply to increase the population of humans. We are not endangered. We have more than enough humans. There is no need to breed even more replacements, we're covered. Why cause every single person on the planet to have a worse life simply to pack more people onto this rock?
Where is the logic in your statement? That makes absolutely no sense. You honestly think the world can support the same number of humans as it can chickens? And even if it did, do you want to live the way those chickens live?
What? This was done overwhelmingly by very poor people in an effort to make themselves slightly less poor. How do you figure they didn't consent?
A single prediction being wrong does not mean the concept is wrong. Especially a single prediction that was not based on evidence and that the scientific community said was nonsense. Al Gore said there would be no snow on any mountains by 2012. Since that was wrong, climate change is debunked right? Science is all wrong because one guy said something dumb one time!
Technology can not magic you up some more land. The earth is finite. When people say "technology will save us" they actually mean one of two things. Either "I don't want to think about this so star trek will come true!" or "we can develop the technology to completely eliminate all non-human life on earth and live in pods being fed an industrial slurry that has the highest % return of solar energy to chemical energy so stop worrying!". Both are dumb. Our standard of living is already going down. It does not make sense to choose to have more people living worse lives rather than fewer people living better lives. There is no benefit to increasing our population.
Science fiction is not a good argument here.
The fallout myth isn't true. And chernobyl is a perfect example. It caused the accidental creation of a huge nature preserve where species thought to be locally extinct are now thriving. Most wild animals don't live long enough for the slightly increased cancer rates to matter. The lack of humans destroying everything makes a huge difference on the other hand.
The tree cover is almost back to pre-contact levels
The number of trees is not the issue. The ecosystem is. Huge plantations of SPF in rows that are all the same age and size does not make a natural ecosystem, and biodiversity is very low.
lakes & rivers are potable
Public drinking water isn't even potable in many places, nevermind lakes and rivers. This is pure fantasy talk.
IOW, local environmental problems have been solved
No, they have been relocated overseas so they are out of sight and out of mind.
The challenge is global problems; climate change is a fairly classic tragedy of the commons.
Yes, I am sure the animals going extinct really just wish we could come together and tax people for breathing. Of course they don't care about their ecosystem being destroyed to grow corn for 5 years before exhausting the land and burning down another 1000 acres of forest for another 5 years of corn.
Our track record in culling is much worse. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot only managed to kill about 1% of the population
None of them were trying to lower the population. Funny how you want to equate "lowering global population" with "mass murder" even though you clearly are aware that limiting births is the actual strategy, which actually works.
Except that my diet and car have absolutely nothing to do with the problem. You're fixating on CO2 when the problem the article talks about is clearly environmental destruction. Canada and the US produce all of our own beef. There is no environmental destruction happening here for beef production. We can in fact produce much more beef using the existing idle grasslands we have now. And the only relevant problem from cars here is the mining, which is worse with an electric vehicle. Nothing you suggested even attempts to address the issue at all.
There is no evidence that any acceptable behavioral alteration will help. The kind of behavioral modification needed is horrifying dystopian nightmare stuff, people naturally resist things like that. The population is going to be reduced no matter what. The question is purely "are we going to do it by lowering birth rates, or are we going to wait until India or Africa unleashes an antibiotic resistant super plague on the world that kills a few billion people?"