A Discounted Threat: Environmental Impacts of the Livestock Industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article provides an overview of the environmental effects of the livestock industry. Current industry practice, specifically the proliferation of concentrated animal feeding operations as the primary means of production, has left far-reaching ecological consequences in its wake. Animal agriculture is implicated in numerous environmental threats including rising greenhouse gas emissions (particularly through release of nitrous oxide and methane, in addition to carbon dioxide), overconsumption of water for both live animals and feed crops, and decreased water quality. Furthermore, localized pollution owing to copious animal waste has tainted many regions and compromised human health. Alterations of land use and the resulting loss of biodiversity are also of major concern. The problem has expanded as developing countries’ appetite for these products grows – however, the issue has tended not to be a focal point of environmental debate. The article details the environmental destruction wrought by current practices, while outlining recommendations for reducing the environmental toll, at both the individual and systemic level
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".