Environmental and community groups have sued Utah officials over failures to save its iconic Great Salt Lake from irreversible collapse.
The largest saltwater lake in the western hemisphere has been steadily shrinking, as more and more water has been diverted away from the lake to irrigate farmland, feed industry and water lawns. A megadrought across the US south-west, accelerated by global heating, has hastened the lake’s demise.
Unless dire action is taken, the lake could decline beyond recognition within five years, a report published early this year warned, exposing a dusty lakebed laced with arsenic, mercury, lead and other toxic substances. The resulting toxic dustbowl would be “one of the worst environmental disasters in modern US history”, the ecologist Ben Abbott of Brigham Young University told the Guardian earlier this year.
Ruminants might be more efficient processors of plant fiber, but the transformation of plant fiber into meat for consumption is a hugely inefficient process.
Meh. Most of it isn’t traveling very far. You’re tilting at windmills now. None of it travels half as far as the bananas you put on your oatmeal, which has also traveled farther to most Americans than cattle feed to most cattle.
There are a lot of processes we could be doing now efficiently. It would be better to eat exclusively locally grown meat and produce and pasture raise every farm animal. It wouldn’t be affordable but it would be environmentally better.
I don’t think you’ve been following the science.
I’m not going to sit here and spell it out for you, because it’s a fruitless effort. But know that you’re wrong and the vast majority of the world’s scientists agree.