Meat
Carnivorous Coronavirus
Large scale meat production is dangerous - Nipah, bird flu, antibiotic resistance, bioaccumulation of pollutants. It also requires huge amounts of food to feed confined farm animals. Before fossil fuels, there were about a billion people. Natural gas is the foundation of modern artificial fertilizer. Petroleum is needed for farm machinery and distribution networks. Solar and wind are nice but not energy dense enough to substitute (and they require fossils and mineral ores for the panels and turbines). There won't be solar powered transcontinental food delivery trucks and Boeings, due to physics, not politics. Coronavirus is a warning that we are far beyond carrying capacity on a round, abundant, finite planet.
Nipah virus and pig production
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O79e2bwC8s
From the archives: Hunting viruses
May 10, 2020 60 Minutes
In a 2004 report, Scott Pelley traveled to Malaysia, where Peter Daszak was capturing bats to determine causes-and remedies-of a killer virus.
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"Hunting viruses" is the very best virology video I have viewed.
Nipah is a virus that lives in bats. It didn't jump directly to humans.
The intermediate animal was pig. Bats ate fruit directly above pig pens, remnants of fruit fell into the pig pens, and the pigs amplified the virus. The coughing pigs then transmitted Nipah to people.
If you've seen the movie CONTAGION (film of the decade!) the fictional virus in that story was based on Nipah. The scriptwriter had input from virology and public health experts (it's not a zombie film with gratuitous violence).
Antibiotic resistance from factory farming
"The use of antibiotics in poultry-raising has led to the development of new disease-causing microbes that are resistant to antibiotics."
-- Dr. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, "Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom," 1968
reprinted in "Sakharov Speaks," Harrison E. Salisbury, ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 77
"Man has succeeded in polluting his environment [sic] with an astonishing variety of noxious agents. The development of an antibiotic resistant microbial milieu might be a logical extension of this self-directed biological warfare …"
-- New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 281, No. 12, September 18, 1969, p. 677
