Ramjet said:
I think many who replied didn't bother to watch the video.
Why do you say that (although it might be true of most things others post)? I assume you mean the Mark Rober video? It is full of inaccuracies and common false greenie arguments.
For example, more land may be used for cattle in the usa than for crops - but crops require arable land (less than 20% of the USA is arable, 6% of Australia). So this is the reason for lesser land being devoted to crops, one could not simply replace grazing land with crops. Australia is a good example - much beef is not produced from the concentrated cattle farms he shows, but from poorer quality land unsuitable for most or any crops. And the water used is local (and in Australia mostly underground water) - it is not being brought to the cattle from elsewhere, so it is not depriving others of its use (much less crops). One needs to watch its usage (danger of "mining" water), but it is still only relevant to the livestock (humans in outback towns use a negligible amount by comparison - and most of them are only there because of the livestock).
The argument also fails to consider than many sheep and cattle are used for wool or dairy (and a dairy cow produces up to 5 times as much methane as a beef steer) - the issue is not just protein production but also things like calcium.
The argument that makes me laugh most is the farting and burping cattle. Where do people imagine the carbon for the methane in the cattle's gas emissions comes from? It comes from grasses (the cattle do not invent it). If the cattle were not eating the grass, the grass would die annually, would oxidise in the air as it rots, and would produce carbon dioxide - only a small part remains in the soil as carbon. Cattle and sheep are just intermediaries in the process - instead of dead grass carbon oxidising to produce carbon dioxide, the cattle convert some to methane (and much to crap). The methane and crap then oxidise to carbon dioxide and go back into the atmosphere, and are then used by plants (that the stock then eat, and so on).
As for the claim that 20% of the Amazon has been cleared - only 12% has been cleared so far, not 20% (it is about 18% of Brazil, but Brazil is only 60% of the rainforest there) - and that cleared is more temperate rainforest similar to what we have cleared in Australia, not wet tropical rainforest as often portrayed by the media (which is unsuitable for farming) - in Brazil it is marginal land to the savannah grasslands to the south in Uruguay and Argentina etc.. That wet tropical forest of the Amazon Basin farther to the north will probably mostly not be cleared for that reason (swampy and muddy wetlands).
Not underplaying that these issues do matter, but they are misrepresented and inappropriately adopted to suit vegan arguments etc.
