Predator inefficiency

completely eats the difference.

As a life member of PETA (People Eating Tasty Animals) I wish your argument worked. But it doesn't, because the amount of resources (land, water, energy, chemicals) it takes to produce X calories of beef is far higher than the amount of resources it takes to produce X calories of most kinds of edible vegitation. Even taking into account the fertilizer that cows produce.

It doesn't take evil technology to make eating plants less damaging than eating cows. At pretty much any technological level, carnivores do more damage. Except perhaps in terms of making an economy run. Farmers can produce more edible calories without expanding the fields or resorting to exotic biotech, simply by reducing the number of cows. Fertilizer might be a challenge without any cows, but the number of cows could be reduced quite a bit before a fertilizer shortage would occur. Except for those exotic biotechs, which tend to require fancy chemicals instead of dung.

No, I'm not some kind of vegitarian activist - I buy my dead cows by the quarter cow, and there is a chunk of dead cow ready for my lunch right now. Also some rice. I recognize that I am consuming more resources than I really need to. So be it. I do not aspire to be harmless.

You are correct that producing animals requires much higher more stuff. But that wasn't my point. You could have substituted your argument for producing more veggies in place of mine for producing more veggies. The result would be the same. We still have to produce the infrastructure to manage the change. And that infrastructure is complicated, expensive, and requires a lot of technologies. Anyhow, I doubt we could eliminate raising animals in place of veggies because animal products are used in a lot more than just food. You'll be wanting to replace all those too. That will require more tech, start now, time's awasting...

My point was that in order to fail to consume all that Ashton wishes us to fail to consume, he has no way to get from here to there. We get in the way because we want too many things. We even want the things that will allow us to consume less, and have to produce those things, thus starting the cycle all over again.

But I do not think it is a zero sum game. We can consume less, but we won't get there by attempting to change human nature, we'll get there because we've learned how to become more efficient and do it in such a way that we would want to do it.

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