‘If We Don’t Change, We’re F***ed’: Greta Thunberg Begs The World To Change Its Ways Before It’s A Wasteland

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Greta Thunberg urges the world to change its ways or “We’re F*****,” according to The Daily Wire.

“Let’s face it, if we don’t change, we’re f***ed,” she says in a new video, which has garnered more than 117,000 views as of this writing.

“Millions have died from COVID-19, Zika, Ebola, Swine Flu, Mad Cow Disease, West Nile Fever, COVID-19, SARS, MERS, [and] HIV-AIDS. Up to 75% of all new diseases come from other animals,” Thunberg said.

“Every year we kill more than 60 billion animals, excluding fish, whose numbers are so great that we only measure their lives by weight. What about their thoughts and feelings?”

“If we continue, we will run out of land and food.”

“If we change toward a plant-based diet, we could save up to 8 billion tons of CO2 every single year. We could feed ourselves on much less land, and nature could recover.”

From The Daily Wire:

Thunberg tied several contemporary social crises into her apocalyptic view of climate change, including the spread of disease, the possible starvation of the human race, and the mass slaughter of what she apparently views as thoughtful and emotional fish. “What they all come down to is the way we treat nature,” she said, because we ignore the fact that “we are part of nature.”

Thunberg said that deforestation speeds the spread of diseases from animals to humans.

What are the facts?

The most easily verifiable claim we can check is a common one: that higher levels of prosperity mean the world will run out of resources, in this case, food and farmland. The extreme environmentalist movement, especially its population control wing, has made the same, baseless argument for decades. Population control guru Paul Ehrlich wrote in 1970 that overpopulation will “completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make” — which would trigger a “great die-off,” where 65 million Americans will starve to death in the 1980s together with 4 billion people around the world.

Obviously, that didn’t happen. Ehrlich made a common mistake: He ignored the fact that technological progress lets the world sustain life more effectively with fewer resources.

The world is not running out of farmland, because advances in productivity have made it possible to grow more food on less land. People globally consume more calories, pay less for food, and use less land for cultivating food than in decades past. “Between 1961 and 2014, global cereal yields per unit of land increased by 154%,” according to the invaluable website HumanProgress.org. Erosion fell by 43% between 1982 and 2007.

But what about meat? The same process is at work for every kind of livestock, which have gotten larger over the decades without taking up more space. Cows, chickens, and pigs produced 150-169% more meat per carcass in 2018 than in 1961. And this trend will continue.

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We’re in no danger of running out of meat. Over the next 10 years, the global supply of meat will outpace global demand by 15 million tons (megatons, or “Mt” for short), driving down real prices. Demand for meat will increase to 350 million tons (or megatons, “Mt”), while the supply will increase to 365 Mt, according to an estimate from the OECD.

It’s true that, if we made no technological progress, the world could not live on the same kind of diet as the average American does today. Greta’s beef with beef is a red herring, because most global demand is for chicken and pork, which takes less land. And it’s not clear that the current American diet is healthy for Americans, either.

Her claim of animal-to-human disease transfer rests on better ground. “At least 61% of all human pathogens are zoonotic, and have represented 75% of all emerging pathogens during the past decade,” according to the World Health Organization. But it doesn’t help Thunberg’s case to raise this just as public authorities are finally beginning to investigate the possibility that COVID-19 originated inside a lab like the Wuhan Institute of Virology.