The False Ecology of Bernie Sanders (2019–2020)

here's a tweet from Bernie Sanders from
just a few months ago quote factory farms are responsible for 1.4 trillion pounds of animal waste in America they are a threat to the water we drink in the air we breathe and is unbelievable to me that Republicans in Congress have been working overtime to exempt factory farms from environmental laws and yet here we are just a few months later and Bernie Sanders is being a shill for the meat and dairy industry a shill for cattle herders a shill for grass-fed quote unquote free-range great beef steak without mysteriously without taking the two minutes to do a google search to figure out which one actually has a worse impact on the environment so we're really into grazing as a means of approaches water quality climate change water cooling if I were asked to make a video promoting a charity a nonprofit organization collecting donations in pursuit of these objectives a charity claiming that they were doing something to improve water quality improve climate change and bring about quote unquote global cooling I would be incredibly skeptical before I made a YouTube video endorsing that Jerry but well I've got a really look into what you do here if the for-profit beef industry if people who are raising and slaughtering cattle at a profit asked hitmen video endorsing those same ecological claims the level of skepticism would be pretty high at this end but not for Bernie Sanders essentially what we're trying to do is take carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back into the ground to grow more feed to produce a high-end product so the claim made there the claim presented by Bernie Sanders is that grass-fed beef pasture-raised beef isn't just carbon neutral no butter no Bernie Sanders is advancing the claim that it's ecologically positive that it's gonna have a net positive it's gonna have a net benefit on the world's ecology for you yes you to buy and eat for moths free-range grass-fed beef steak wow I can imagine all kinds of completely corrupt probe industry organizations that put this message out but here's left-wing ecologist bernie sanders delivering you the same message and boy wow i sure would love to believe that bernie sanders sincerely believes this these sincerely had a momentary lapse in judgment and didn't decide to check a single United Nations report a single scientific source to verify whether or not these claims are factual whether or not this would even just be shall we say marketing height or false advertising whether or not this might actually be massively ecologically destructive and being misrepresented to the public as a charity case when it's not it's just more mass media manipulation from a grubby for-profit private industry we as a world have got to come together to develop bold solutions to the crisis of climate change my ex-wife would remember this I used to say all the time that somebody was making a sub Wikipedia error they were making an error at such a low level that if you used googled it and checked Wikipedia you know it was false you know there was something wrong with it Bernie Sanders has been a shill for the cattle industry for the beef industry for animal husbandry for many years now he just put out a new YouTube video it is not his first time being a show for actively lying and promoting this industry it is an especially brazen especially shameful example of Bernie Sanders dishonesty because he tries to take this industry and wrap it in the green flag of the ecological movement he tells lies in this video trying to promote the the raising and selling of grass-fed beef as if it were an ecological charity and not a for-profit business that is ecologically irresponsible and devastating the world's atmosphere devastating the world's ecology also devastating our water resources blah blah blah unites the list um this is significant in itself because ecology matters veganism matters there other things to the matter it's also significant in showing that Bernie Sanders has bad judgment jump cut Gorge mom vo writing for the Guardian the answer we are told by celebrity chefs and food writers is to keep livestock outdoors to eat free-range beef or lamb not battery raised pork but all this does is to swap one disaster mass cruelty for another mass destruction almost all forms of animal farming caused environmental damage but none more so than keeping them outdoors pause pause pause what we're saying here is that so-called free-range grass-fed grazing beef is worse for the environment worse for ecology than factory farmed animals the reason is inefficiency grazing is not just slightly inefficient it is stupendously wasteful roughly twice as much of the world's surface is used for grazing as for growing crops yet animals fed entirely on pasture produce just one gram out of the 81 grams of protein consumed per person per day a paper in science of the total environment reports that livestock production is the single largest driver of habitat loss grazing livestock are a fully automated system for ecological destruction you need only release them onto the land and they do the rest browsing out tree seedlings simplifying complex ecosystems their keepers augment this assault by slaughtering large predators in the United Kingdom for example sheep supply in terms of calories around 1% of our diet yet they occupy around 4 million hectares of land the United Kingdom doesn't have that many million hectares to play with it's not that big country compared to Canada the United States Australia or what have you this is more or less equivalent to all the land under crops in this country and more than twice the area of the built environment the rich mosaic of rainforest and other habitats that once covered our hills has been erased the wildlife reduced to a handful of Hardy species this damage has caused out of all proportion to the meat produced the point is even if you don't have an ethical bone in your body if you don't care what the suffering and deaths of these animals you should be able to look at the facts do the math and recognize that grazing livestock grazing cattle grazing sheep are simply put a disaster so we're really into grazing as a means of approaches water quality climate change water cooling we might ask ourselves is Bernie Sanders intentionally lying or is he just unbelievably optimistic about the difference in ecological damage between beef that's raised eating soybeans corn other processed meal and beef that's produced by cows eating grass how is it possible that he is honestly not lying non attention doesn't mean that he is honestly convinced that this difference in the cows diet and giving the cow a little bit of space to wander around it's just a pending you know field but whatever gave him the cow a little bit of space to walk outdoors and feeding it a slightly different eye that this would be the difference between beef production being an ecological disaster and an ecological benefit when I say I'm a grass farmer why that's important to grazing is that my goal is to grow the biggest most diverse grass layer all the way up through shrubs and trees not only are you slowing rainfall and providing wildlife habitat we are also sequestering carbon above and below ground there's sort of a bad stereotype still floating around in American politics from the collective memory of politicians lying on behalf of the cigarette industry or lying on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry I mean you might have some cartoon notion of what that might be in your mind but guess what Bernie Sanders lying on behalf of the free-range beef industry is much worse there's there's a sincere debate that could be had about the ecological impact of farming tobacco tobacco it's a plant there's a sincere debate that could be had about you know carbon sequestration and ecological responsibility for tobacco farmers there's a sincere debate to be had about you know the future of the American healthcare system all these things there is absolutely no sincere debate to be had about the lies lies that Bernie Sanders is here telling and not for the first time to support the free-range beef industry Bernie Sanders who hypocritically vilifies Republicans for supporting not a no agriculture in general or beef farmers in general now turns around and pretends that the fig leaf of morality provided by feeding cows grass instead of soybeans is a pretext to whitewash or should I say green wash one of the most destructive the most ecologically irresponsible industries in the history of the world we as a world have got to come together tan tan-tan [Music]