Why did Gintis call those who lie with statistics slimebags?

You may say that they are well-intentioned, but that does not change the fact that they are liars out to mislead the uniformed. . . . how are we to identify and solve social problems if we do not know what they are?

That earlier post faulted Krugman for pervasive slimebaggery, but the NYT in general is slimebag central for many of the issues I care about.

The world has seen the first international conference on manufacturing meat. This is the process, tested so far only at laboratory scale, of growing pork, chicken, or beef through cell culture in vats instead of raising and slaughtering animals.

My colleague Mark Bittman wrote a fine piece recently about the greenhouse-gas consequences of conventional meat production.

Fine article?

Just this week, the president of Brazil announced emergency measures to halt the burning and cutting of the country’s rain forests for crop and grazing land. In the last five months alone, the government says, 1,250 square miles were lost.

Due to meat production?

The US is the world's leading producer of soy, but many American soy farmers are shifting to corn to qualify for the government subsidies. Since 2006, US corn production rose 19% while soy farming fell by 15%.

The drop-off in US soy has helped to drive a major increase in global soy prices, which have nearly doubled in the last 14 months. In Brazil, the world's second-largest soy producer, high soy prices are having a serious impact on the Amazon rainforest and tropical savannas.

"Amazon fires and forest destruction have spiked over the last several months, especially in the main soy-producing states in Brazil," said Laurance. "Just about everyone there attributes this to rising soy and beef prices."

High soy prices affect the Amazon in several ways. Some forests are cleared for soy farms. Farmers also buy and convert many cattle ranches into soy farms, effectively pushing the ranchers further into the Amazonian frontier. Finally, wealthy soy farmers are lobbying for major new Amazon highways to transport their soybeans to market, and this is increasing access to forests for loggers and land speculators.

Fine article? See the earlier post Liberal Myths for a complete rebuttal.

Also, consider the Bigger Picture of agriculture in Brazil.

From only 200,000 hectares of arable land in 1955, the Cerrado had well over 40 million hectares in cultivation by the year 2005. The phenomenal achievement of transforming the infertile Cerrado region into highly productive land over a span of fifty years, the world’s single largest increase in farmland since the settlement of the U.S. Midwest, has been hailed as a far-reaching milestone in agricultural science.

The Cerrado is an arid brush savanna stretching over 120 million hectares across central Brazil from the western plains to the northeastern coast. With soils characterized by high acidity and aluminum levels that are toxic to most crops, Brazilian farmers had long referred to the area as campos cerrados – “closed land,” with little promise for sustaining production. . .

The Cerrado region now provides 54 percent of all soybeans harvested in Brazil, 28 percent of the country’s corn, and 59 percent of its coffee. Cerrado agriculture has also diversified to include rice, cotton, cassava, and sugar. For all crops, average yields in the Cerrado are higher than in other areas, with harvests reaching 4.8 tons per hectare of soybeans and 11 tons per hectare of corn. In addition, the Cerrado supports 55 percent of Brazil’s beef industry.

This means that Brazil could more than double its already considerable agricultural output without touching a forest.

There are no sensible environmental or scientific arguments against meat production or consumption. Arguments can be made about some of the dominant methodologies, but those are recent adaptations to a world of cheap grain due to previous government interventions. It took decades for the current system to develop in a cheap grain environment, and it will take some time to readjust now that grain is no longer cheap. But be clear - the problem is grain production not meat production, and the problem was caused by government interference in markets.

The slimebags have an ulterior motive.

I asked a few folks about facets of this, among them Peter Singer, the ethicist at Princeton who’s written for ages on animal rights and environmental values on a finite planet.

For those seeking an end to animal slaughter for human sustenance, is this kind of a cheat, I asked?

“Not necessarily,” he said. “My interest is in ethics, but whatever works best. If it is harder to move people on ethical grounds than it is to provide a sustainable humane substitute, I’m all for the substitute.”

There are no reasoned ethical arguments against meat eating by humans. We are omnivores, animals just like others, and the cultivation of field and row crops is more destructive to the environment, more harmful to animal life, than the production of meat animals when it is done in rational ways.

The reason to expect and applaud the eventual development of synthesized foods is that it is cheaper. It will take less resources to produce food in this way. At the present time our technologies are not sufficiently advanced to do this, but it is only a matter of time. We are developing from an extractive species, one that finds stuff and uses it, to a productive species, one that makes its material needs out of basic materials such as rocks and gases. With technologies, raw materials and energy we can in principle make what we need. All of the political and quasi-religious confusions and rent seeking that the slimebags mutter about are irrelevant distractions that make it more difficult to identify and solve social problems.

Update:

Future Confusion.

On August 31, 2007 my wife took me out for dinner at a Japanese steakhouse where I ate my last beefsteak -- for a year, if not for the rest of my life. This occurred on the heels of a reasonably obnoxious George Dvorsky essay on why we should have all already given up eating meat and why meat-eaters are (George's words) "bad people." . .

Here we have a world-class futurist taking an "I'm good; you're bad: be like ME" approach that even the most backward fundamentalists dropped decades ago. . .

Dvorsky fired back with what I think was a fairly sound defense of his approach:

Let's imagine for a moment that I had written an article titled 'Racists are bad people,' or 'Homophobes are bad people.' Do you think I would have received the same kind of negative response? Hardly. Aside from a few anachronistic and unenlightened perspectives I'd get a slew of comments saying, 'right on, brother.'

But the fact that I didn't get these sorts of supportive comments, aside from a small minority, indicates to me that our transition to a mostly meat-free society is a process still in its infancy.

I think he's essentially correct . . .

Racism and homophobia are people on people issues. It isn't even remotely analogous. Racists don't eat people, except in some very rare instances in the fairly distant past. People of other races were never food, especially a staple food and the foundation of civilizations. If this is the work of a world-class futurist it speaks poorly for them. It's exceedingly muddled reasoning based on willful ignorance of readily available scholarship. The problem isn't that he is shrill, the problem is that he is only shrill.

We need to get livestock populations under control for environmental reasons, and I'm also arguing that we should stop slaughtering cattle for humanitarian reasons. So suppose we end up with a world where there are only a few cows, kept more or less as pets on some historical farm-themed parks and petting zoos. Otherwise, they don't exist. I guess the question is -- what about all the cows who will now never see the light of day? Are they better off never having lived than living a life that just ends in slaughter? And how can we possibly make that determination?

Cattle, and other ruminants, are very good for the environment. There's a reason that they were the dominant species in ecosystems. They are uniquely able to digest cellulose and so recycle plant leaves and stems. Other species, such as birds (to address the chicken issue) are omnivores (like people) that can't survive on such a diet. In fact, they thrive when ruminants are around since this increases the number of insects and grubs available for their predation. So-called free-range commercial chickens get the overwhelming majority of their diet from corn provided by the grower. Only a small fraction, 10%, is scrounged on their own.

The idea that there would only be a few cattle around if people didn't raise them blinks reality. There have always been lots and lots of cattle around. We didn't invent them, we just domesticated them. Many species depend on them. The classic example is the Paul Ehrlich gaffe where he excluded cattle from a parcel where a certain endangered butterfly lived. That nearly killed the rest of the butterflies. They depend on cattle to graze and indirectly create habitat for butterfly food. The Drake exclosure is another classic study that demonstrates the environmental devastation that results from excluding grazers.

Would-be futurists need to bone up on reality if they wish to make useful contributions. They need to have at least an elementary grasp of how things work now to divine how they might work in future.

If you have environmental concerns you could make an effective dietary choice to eat only ruminants, and only those raised on their natural diet of grasses and forbs. No grain. Chickens, hogs and farmed fishes can't be raised without grain. This matters since grain production is exceedingly destructive to the environment. It would be all but impossible for people to entirely avoid grain, but the lower the consumption the better for the environment. This is also a healthy diet.

If you have ethical concerns you might ask yourself if causing the death of countless life forms by cultivating land to grow monocultures is somehow OK. Don't ask, don't tell? It's OK if you don't see it and don't think about it? It's OK to kill them, even drive them to extinction, so long as you don't eat them? A relatively barren world of monoculture crops is ethically superior in some way? Many may agree, but it's not a compelling ethical vision. It doesn't compare well to an ethic that says that if you kill it you must eat it, that this is the only justification for killing.

the conclusion of the first conference on manufactured meat was that the initial options will be considerably more expensive than the livestock-produced alternative for some time to come. And, for now, all they are talking about producing is highly processed or ground product: no drumsticks, no t-bones, and no lamb chops. Sigh. Not for a while, anyhow.

I have little doubt that the market will eventually take care of both the cost and the lack of a realistic meat-eating experience provided by the manufactured alternative. As I noted above, I and many others like me are willing to pay more for free-range chicken. People will also pay more for manufactured meat, even if it's just ground stuff good for making sausage or putting into spaghetti sauce.

As with my decision to take a break from eating mammals -- it's a start.

You can't win. You can't break even. You can't get out of the game. History happened. The world is altered. The leave-it-alone assumption, in Dan Daggett's terms, is false. Human's will be responsible for environmental management forever. They will make life and death decisions. The leave-it-alone assumption is a death decision, as naive park rangers have discovered. The ethical quandary deepens for those spinning in confusion about natural systems. If humans left the planet entirely and left things to sort themselves out then some natural system would eventually develop, but initial conditions matter. It won't be as if humans never existed. Hysteresis happens.

The real environmental and ethical advance would be to figure out how to eliminate cropping, ripping the breasts of mother earth with steel fingers to grow monocultures of field and row crops. We will manufacture our food and fiber at some point, but ethics will have nothing to do with it. And we will never escape responsibility for management, never wash the blood from our hands, so to speak. That's life.