From what I recall, this dude bought something like 1500 sq km. The amazon rain forest is 6-7 million sq km.

Wasn't the Amazon bought by a Swedish billionaire to preserve it? What happened to that?

for now, yeah. it's gonna be a long road to keep it that way.

Thank you, Finland's government, for continuously allowing foreign corporations to do as they wish with Finland's nature for a fucking pittance. Fuck the bougies, no war but class war.

I mean maybe you are, but I'm making a critique of the article. The articles second point is immaterial to their premise.

we’re in agreement that plant-based diets are a bigger improvement which, to me, is the more important point.

It seems to you are more concerned with the moral signaling the article is doing, and evaluating the quality of the arguments based on how well they agree with your moral codex. I'm making the point that a plant based diet is immaterial to beef being good, bad, or indifferent.

I think we have different understandings of what the premise is/should be.

I'm taking the authors word for it with regards to their premise. Its the headline is the premsie of the article: "regenerative grazing can’t make beef climate-friendly", and they make 8 arguments to support that premise. That's the premise I'm evaluating the article against.

I think it’s unlikely that either of our minds will change on what that premise is in any case

You not having reading comprehension, or not understanding the article or forms of argument is a separate thing. You're quite literally projecting what you want the premise of the article to be. You had an opportunity to have an informed discussion with someone who literally is a primary source for the contents of these kinds of articles, and you've done, whatever this is, with that opportunity.

You should take the time to learn to distinguish between tribalism and moral signposting, and actual argument. And if you aren't going to make that distinction, expect regular pushback when you confuse these things.

I think we are talking in circles on minutia. Seems like we're in agreement that plant-based diets are a bigger improvement which, to me, is the more important point. I think we have different understandings of what the premise is/should be. I think it's unlikely that either of our minds will change on what that premise is in any case

But thats not the argument the article is making. And its still a non-sequiter. If your second point of 8 in an argument is a non-sequiter, it says something about the nature and structure of your argument, and it speaks poorly of your ability to reason and understand your own premise.

Honestly, I would take less issue if it wasn't their second point. If the article was titled "7 reasons regenerative grazing can’t make beef climate-friendly, and one bonus thing", it would be better, because at least the other 7 points (agree or disagree) support the premise.

Plant based diets "being good" remains a non-sequiter to their premise, and serves more as a value signal than it does to support their arguments. It would be a strong thing to land on, and the article could have been ended with something like "... and even if these 7 things aren't enough to convince you, (facts and data) plant based diets are demonstrated to be a (better for the planet) way of doing things", yada yada. The second point is a moral signpost that might work for you or me, but it doesn't support their argument.

I think the problem here is that "climate friendly" is inherently a relative term. No amount of emissions is good to have, so you're comparing it to other emissions sources. If we leave out the biggest comparison point (no beef at all), we're missing the forest for the trees. We're just optimizing the status quo a little bit

If the argument in favor was "this can maybe reduce emissions a bit" while we look to work on reducing meat consumption and production levels, it'd be one thing. That's generally not what people touting this claim, however

The premise is "regenerative grazing can't be made climate friendly".

Any argument not in support of that premise is a non sequiter. Scenario B being climate friendly has no bearing on scenario A being climate friendly. This is a basic rhetorical mistake the author is making and it's sloppy.

A and B are cars. The premise that I'm making is that car A won't get you to Chicago.

If I make the argument that car B is sufficient to get you to Chicago, this has no bearing on my premise.

Vegetarian diets being "better" has no bearing on the sustainability of beef production. A diet of only dark chocolate would be "worse" for the climate than one which consumes beef. It also has no bearing on the sustainability of beef production.

How does counter scenario we can do instead not have bearing? This is something scientists should be looking at all the time. Ignoring an important counter scenario is having the status quo as an implicit assumption baked into research

Like here's a hypothetical: we model different deserts production and find that A uses 1000 units of some resource but we've found a way to maybe (we're unsure) to get it down to 900 units of some resource. Should we ignore that desert B, C, D use 10, 15, and 20 units of that resource and say we've made A sustainable now?

You might feel that way, but these kinds of non-sequiter only work on people who start from the premise the argument is trying to lead you to. I mean its up to you to decide what your rhetoric is for, who it is meant to work/ operate on. If you are only interested in convincing those whom already agree with you, I guess this works on you (I realize you didnt write the article)

However, as a scientist and one that actively is doing research, working with other researchers, reviewing others research, collecting field data, building and applying large models to better understand the impacts of land use and land cover, you insisting on including an unrelated to the argument non-sequiter doesn't add to your point; it takes away from it. You can still make your argument without that particular point. And the problem with injecting it, is that it frames you in as being unserious in your argument because "plant based diets being good" has no bearing on the sustainability or lack of sustainability of some other practice. Swap out "beef production" with "dark chocolate" production, and nothing about the non-sequiter's point actually changes.

Shifting towards plant-based diets being a better than any form of beef production is very much related here. The promoters of "regenerative grazing" claim that no action is needed because of it, so the baseline is not "what if we consumed the exact way we always did"

Its a non sequiter. Thing A being bad isn't related to thing B being bad.

I am not sure I follow what you mean that shifting to plant-based diets is not part of the argument? Many/most of the promoters of "regenerative grazing" claim that it negates need to do any shifts towards plant-based diets (which is the most problematic claim in my view)

Mmm...

1 sure

2 not part of the argument

3 depends

4 depends a lot

5 no.

6 so does most science. Welcome to science.

7 ok.

8 it depends. Even in high biodiversity area disturbance is a patchwork and in some places, abandoned agriculture lands become monocultures if invasives. The degrees matter here.

Anyways, here is from a paper I just got into publication on the matter...

TL;DR

1. Beef already has too massive a baseline footprint to build a regenerative future on

2. Shifting to plant-rich diets results in more food and higher carbon sequestration

3. Wild ecosystems have higher and more stable soil organic carbon than pastureland

4. Rain, temperature, geology, and previous land use determine soil organic carbon more than grazing techniques do

5. Most grazing land is too arid to store meaningful amounts of soil organic carbon

6. The regenerative case for beef relies on flawed studies without baselines or proper geographic controls

7. Grass-finished cattle are still not wild ruminants

8. Beef drives biodiversity loss, and even reducing grazing intensity doesn’t mean ecosystems recover

Beans

Eat More Chik'n

Indeed, around 1% of free-range are actually on pasture, but fully pasture-based systems are also significantly worse on resource and land efficiency, so the stats are worse for pasture systems. They also require an increase in the number of chickens

There is really not an at scale way to get there. Production and consumption levels of animal products have to go down

The title is misleading. The problem is industrial scale egg-farming and the meaningless "free-range" label; most people see "free-range" and think "pastured." The marketing is unfortunately working exactly as intended. Industrial scale anything is going to be bad for ecosystems, animals, and people.

Copying my comment from earlier in this thread:

Per capita consumption of animal products have risen significantly over the past few decades. Even if 0 new people were born starting this instance, there will still be large populations for decades to come

Should we just sit around waiting for decades for a population to decrease to eventually happen and let the environment burn in the meantime?

Why does "per-capita" production need to decrease? Is it really the best course of action to have the population of earth be infinitely growing and then respond by constantly decreasing per-capita consumption? What's the endpoint?

The problem is much more than how things are produced, it's what you produce in the first place. There is no way to do things at scale that does not turn into factory farming or make the environmental impacts even worse. This whole study talks about even some tiny changes making the emissions significantly higher

Per capita production levels and thus consumption levels have to change if we want a better world

Deleted my response before your edit since I misunderstood what you were saying

I can't believe that human populations aren't zero entropy entities. What's their problem?

Animal Welfare is a petite-bourgeois distraction to foment infighting and ensure that the economic system that mandates this kind of farming and production is turned into a moral failing of the individual.

Per capita consumption of animal products have risen significantly over the past few decades. There is not much getting around that the consumption levels need to change

Even if 0 new people were born starting this instance, there will still be large populations for decades to come