This land isn’t for you or me. It’s for the meat industry. | Almost half of the continental US is used for meat production. There’s something better we could do with it.

Maybe we should subsidize the fake meat industry instead.

Hear ye hear ye. This is the actual visualization

Source:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/

Sometimes I feel like dae le epic bacon treat defenders have a number of trenches to fall back to, where one dismisses animals' right to life, another dismisses animal cruelty, another dismisses industrial waste and environmental damage, and the one behind that dismisses inefficient energy use and the waste of land and resources. Ultimately, all of it amounts to "don't tell me what to do" with layers of decoration on top.

That's mainly because you can raise livestock/ruminants on non arable land. But the idea that ranchers should be able to just use any land without proper consideration for the environment is crazy.

A 2020 study published in the journal Nature Sustainability highlights the immense environmental potential of changing how we farm and eat. Researchers found that if all high-income countries shifted to a plant-based diet from 2015 to 2050, they’d free up enough land to sequester 32 gigatons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of removing nine years of all those countries’ fossil fuel emissions from the atmosphere. Globally, if we shifted to plant-based diets over that same time period, the land saved could sequester the equivalent of 16 years of global fossil fuel emissions.

I agree, the meat industry should be nationalized along with agriculture and the energy sector.

Unless fake or lab meat is cheaper or just as expensive, this won’t change. Except maybe if costs go higher than what is considered profitable.

Most of the US is empty and fertile unlike other parts of the world, land use is not really the biggest issue with meat farming

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“The problems are huge, sprawling, and major,” said Erik Molvar, a wildlife biologist and executive director of the Western Watersheds Project (WWP), the group that sued numerous federal agencies for failing to preserve the habitat of the Mojave desert tortoise and 77 other species.

WWP alleges that for decades, the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and other agencies have violated an agreement they signed in 2001 that forbids cattle grazing in a part of Nevada’s Gold Butte National Monument in order to protect the desert tortoise, whose population has plunged since the 1980s.

The permitting program is costing the federal government tens of millions of dollars annually to administer, all while giving cattle ranchers a deep discount on public lands.

Even worse, the federal government spends millions annually on its “Wildlife Services” division, which kills wild animals it deems a threat to grazing livestock.

The programs that subsidize the beef industry represent some of the most striking examples of America’s tradition of “agricultural exceptionalism” — giving farmers and ranchers special treatment, like sweeping exemptions from critical environmental, labor, and animal welfare laws.

Agribusiness also benefits from getting large swathes of the West to itself, illustrating a simple fact of land use in America: Contrary to the famous Woody Guthrie song, much of it isn’t for you and me — it’s for the meat industry.

The original article contains 1,123 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Theme parks? Meat-themed theme parks!

The statistics they parrot
That tells me everything i need to know, you cant be convinced with science.

Woody Guthrie sucks

What a stupid and annoying title, trying to imply that I am on some team that is not the "meat industry" team. I eat meat and I have nothing against ranching.

Because America is so short of land...

basically everyone eats meat. If it's making meat it's broadly serving the people.