Comments by "Cinderball" (@cinderball1135) on "How climate crisis threatens world’s food supply and land" video.

  1. A friendly reminder to some peculiarly angry commenters on this video: Channel 4 reports the news - it doesn't make the news. If you're interested, I'll provide a broad overview of the problem below - please keep your replies civil: It just so happens that we live on a planet with limited resources. I'm going to keep it simple, but the two resources which matter in this case are arable land and CO2 absorption. If you emit more CO2 faster than plants can absorb it, then that excess gas remains in the atmosphere, building up over time. Elementary stuff, I know, but not everybody's as clever as you, smartypants. The purpose of farming is to produce calories for human consumption. Again for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to just boil it down to two broad ways we can obtain calories - meat and vegetables. Using the same amount of land and allowing the same amount of carbon emissions, vegetable farming wins every single time. When you want to produce meat calories (by raising animals) you actually have to create vegetable calories first and then feed them to your livestock. At a conservative estimate, when you farm animals, 90% of the calories produced by the system are straight-up wasted this way. Remember, the amount of arable land in the system is a fixed quantity. So once we reach a certain population count, the land simply cannot support a growing population that relies on meat. If we swap over to vegetable production, then we can increase the carrying capacity almost ten times over. In fact, because of the cavernous difference in efficiencies, it would be very possible for people to continue eating meat in reasonable quantities well into the future, without cutting the population at all, and potentially leaving quite a bit of arable land to spare. However, there will be a tradeoff. Either we exceed the carrying capacity of the Earth, or we cut our present meat consumption down. Notice how I explained this without once adopting a political viewpoint. That is what Channel 4 has also done. Raging against vegans isn't going to change the cold, hard, mathematical realities of living on a planet with finite resources.
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