Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It
Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It
As negotiations get underway at COP28, we compiled a list of the leading research documenting the connection between meat and greenhouse gas emissions.
Saving the climate is not going to be done by guilting consumers into changing individual consumption habits. Enough with the green consumerist bullshit that only serve as neoliberal justifications for inaction.
If the meat industry is hurting the planet, REGULATE IT.
The problem is not that the method that meat is produced, it is that it is produced at high levels at all. The inefficiencies don't go away by changing regulations. We are going to have to have changes in production and thus consumption levels. It's going to be difficult politically to get any policy like that through if people are unwilling to reduce any on there own as well
Do I think systematic actions are needed, yes, but if we're going to get there we'll have to start with some degree of individual action before any of it is paltable to the larger society
In order for regulations to stick, they should come from the people. If you try to regulate meat consumption without convincing people that it's good, it will just not stick. It needs to be a consolidated effort, and guilting regular people into better choices is a big part of it
Guilting people makes them dig their heels in. Especially when bacon is on the line. There is no good vegan bacon substitute
Right because capitalism is bad we should all feel free to never care about our choices
You've got some downvotes ... and there's a pretty strong "don't be obnoxious to people if you want to persuade them to do something" attitude here ... which I generally agree with.
Just to provide my own sentiment here ... at a broad, like "historical" level ... it does bother me that it seems like we've kinda become this coddled culture. Yes, we can be obnoxious about how our choices are better than someone else's bad choices.
But having frank discussions about what choices and actions are good and bad without getting stuck into ego shit fights is not only healthy but I'd argue pretty fundamental. And that includes whether it makes sense for an issue to be elevated to the government/regulatory level ... and then ... how we as the electorate are going effect that (because in the end, leadership from government these days isn't really a thing ... which is also part of the this coddled "make every feel good about themselves" culture I feel).
I recently started calling this something like "secondary climate denial" (which I got from somewhere I can't remember). The idea being that a fair amount of people (myself included I'd say) have acquired a sort of learnt helplessness and passiveness about the climate crisis ... have learnt to deny the possibility of there being things that they can actually do and that are actually worth doing. Sometimes we expect things to be more effective and more quickly than is reasonable, so we do nothing. Sometimes we think the world is too big and powerful for us to move it, so we give up.
Sometimes we get worried about letting perfect be the enemy of good and so we give up. And what have we all got to show for it ... what have we actually done?!
If/when it goes to shit and we're sitting grand-children who are asking us why we didn't stop it from happening and what we actually did ... are we really going to be satisfied that, well, we had some arguments online about it and tried to eat vegan as much as possible? Won't the grand-children then say "I'm vegan too, but what did you do to stop it? Didn't you do anything?"
>If the meat industry is hurting the planet, REGULATE IT.
i'd say "attack it". i don't care to ask people in the seats of power to pwease pwease hewp.
You can’t even get people to oppose livestock subsidies, and you’re talking about proactive blocks? The action you propose has the least chance of success. Individuals with self-control is the only certain action you can count on.
You know who opposes livestock subsidies? Cattle ranchers. You know why? Because they pay for most of them.
A lot of people don't realize what's up with the livestock subsidies, and just treat them as a boogeyman. The biggest monsters are usually the feed subsidy and the LIP. The LIP is just like FEMA for food, and it applies to all farms to prevent disasters cutting off our food supply. The feed subsidy, otoh, is truly a monster. It's mostly funded by a tax levied on farmers when they put their livestock up for wholesale. Think of it as an "origination fee" or a VAT tax. For red tape reasons, virtually all of it goes to providing discounted or free feed to a few large corporations. You know, like Tyson.
Ask any farmer who owns a few cows. Killing the feed subsidy would be a massive windfall for local animal agriculture.
Of course, since they're the ones paying for it, people who discover it's not really hitting their own tax dollars stop complaining about it and that's why it never changes.
>Saving the climate is not going to be done by guilting consumers into changing individual consumption habits.
💯
Vegans love to conflate all meat into one big group because their goal is to make veganism look good in comparison.
In reality, beef is the main problem.
It would be a lot more environmentally effective to convince people to reduce beef consumption and replace it with chicken/pork instead, but vegans aren't interested in that because for them it's not really about the climate - it's about reducing animal suffering and death.
This duplicity muddies the waters and makes getting real actual change that would benefit the climate harder to achieve and less likely to happen.
I would hazard saying "environmentally effective" here unless we are willing to ignore some of the other large environmental issues with meat production outside of just green house gases emission. Plant-based foods are lower not just on GHG emissions, but water usage, land usage, eutrophication, fertilizer usage1, etc.
There's all kinds of other pollutants such as Nitrogen runoff. The rise of the pig farming is has helped fueled a crisis in Nitrogen runoff in the Netherlands for instance
There's the high level of antibiotic usage to maintaining the high levels of production fueling antibiotic resistance.
And so on.
If we do want to look at the suffering, we should also note that chicken farming does not just keep things the same, but actually makes it worse with more chickens required than other creatures due to their smaller size.
1 Even less synthetic fertilizer even compared to the maximal usage of manure per https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344922006528
EDIT: I should also mention that land use change (deforestation) factor can change as you rapidly increase these industries size. Deforestation makes up a large portion of beef's current emissions. Plant-based foods require overall less cropland due to not needing to grow any feed and removing that energy loss. This is not the case for chicken production. Currently beef does make up the majority of Amazonian deforestation, however, the second largest portion is growing animal feed primary for chickens. Switch from beef to chickens and you might risk just moving around where the deforestation comes from
Yes. Sloppy choice of words on my part but this is a climate change topic, here.
Chicken meat uses 4x less water than beef. I'm not disputing your point, just firming up the perspective for anyone lurking.
Clearly, vegetables are way way better. But in terms of what kind of behavior change people are willing to consider, cutting out beef is a way way easier sell than cutting out all meat.
Yes. Sloppy choice of words on my part but this is a climate change topic, here.
Chicken meat uses 4x less water than beef. I'm not disputing your point, just firming up the perspective for anyone lurking.
Clearly, vegetables are way way better. But in terms of what kind of behavior change people are willing to consider, cutting out beef is a way way easier sell than cutting out all meat.
one aspect of this is that many vegans care about the environment and the victims of animal agriculture. Things are so bad for the animals (we kill trillions per year. That's insane.) that people are desperate to do or say anything to get people to stop supporting it.
Clearly not, as, humans being as humans are, merelly getting people to just start having vegetarian meals once in a while, reducing meat consumption (which is even a good thing healthwise) and eating more of the less environmentally harmful meats and less of the worst ones, is a far faster path to reduce the Environmental problem and avoiding the kind of push-back reaction that will put many people altogether against the idea.
The genuine, pragmatic approach to maximizing the Environmental outcomes both on the long- and short-term is the very opposite of how Moralists, driven by their own Moral standpoint and self-righteousness, are abusing broader Environmental concerns to push their morals.
People putting Environmentalism first aren't pushing for absolutist "abide by my Morals" pseudo-"solutions".
Then keep beef. One cow is a hundred meals, one chicken is two. 50 chickens die to save one cow.
And chickens don't give milk
If tofu is still ten times better for the planet than cheese I don't think it's "mostly beef" that's the problem.
Given cheese is a beef-related product I don't see the issue with the reasoning
It would be a lot more environmentally effective to convince people to reduce beef consumption and replace it with chicken/pork instead,
Let’s not drive a wedge between the eco-vegans and the animal welfare vegans. Beef is the worst for climate while chickens get the least ethical treatment.
This duplicity muddies the waters and makes getting real actual change that would benefit the climate harder to achieve and less likely to happen.
Dividing an already tiny population of much needed activists is not how you get progressive change. Non-beef meats still shadow plant-based food in terms of their climate harm.
Your pic was too big for me to download but if it’s the same data I’ve seen, then beef is the worst and lamb is 2nd at about ½ the emissions of beef, and all the meats are substantially more harmful than plant based options.
Honestly this whole argument reminds me of the importance of intersectionality. Yes different groups have different forms, levels and styles of oppression, but there is still a joint cause for dismantling oppression as a whole.
To summarize his infographic. Pork, Chicken, and farmed seafood are better than some plant-based options, and worse than some other plant-based options. The graph seems to leave off some of the famous outliers (like wild-caught seafood).
Unfortunately the graph leaves out a lot of important variables, like the usability of the land (whether growing corn on an acre that can support a forest is better or worse than having pork on an acre that cannot support much plantlife). It also uses global averages, which leaves out situations where many regions may be looking at entirely different calculations.
Let’s not drive a wedge between the eco-vegans and the animal welfare vegans
Why not? If the right eco answer is to eat more of a certain kind of meat instead of quitting meat, then eco-vegans aren't eco at all (and should admit it to themselves) if they can't embrace that fact. The willful oversimplification of the environmental impacts of meat-eating is a Tell that a given vegan couldn't care less about the environment.
Dividing an already tiny population of much needed activists is not how you get progressive change
I'm an environmental activist that the vegans try to burn because I'm also an advocate for small aggriculture and local rancher protections. How is that not "dividing an already tiny population"? You should let the eco-vegans join our team for a while, too, if the environmental side matters to you.
You know who the eco-vegans would have marching side-by-side with them if they focused on the environmental impact instead of the animal rights side? BLOODY FREAKING RANCHERS . There'd be 10x the people fighting for the environment. Get us all hugging fluffy bunnies after we save the world. Seems reasonable enough for me.
EDIT: Whoops. Double-post unintended. Just ignore one or both or reply to both or whatever.
I came to say that. Not everyone has to change completely, reducing meat intake a little, eating meat with less emissions and even different beef farms haslve large range of emissions. There are different ways of raising beef.
So for sustainability there are multiple solutions.
For promoting veganism and reduce animal suffering only one, which I do support, but don't put them together. It will only pusg people away from any improvement.
Wow. I didn't know chocolate was so bad.
Coffee too
Note as well that if the chocolate comes from:
- #Nestlé
- #HaagenDazs or
- #Hershey’s
then the supply chain has child slaves as well.
Note that there are developments in reducing the methane production of cattle. Supplementing their food with seaweed lets the bacteria in their gut fully digest the grass, breaking the methane to CO2
As it is if you removed the cattle and re-wilded the land they were on, that land would produce as much methane and CO2 as the cows did, as the same bacteria would break down fallen grass, or work in deer guts and no one will feed the wild land and deer seaweed
This is sometimes true, sometimes false. In areas where forests are cut down for cattle, the carbon offset of the forest "just wins".
But in marginal land, the cattle are arguably a net gain in greenhouse gasses over leaving the land untouched
Do you eat beef?
I feel like it's so unfair that there's so many people in the world we need to stop eating our favorite foods. How about reduce the human population instead? Such that we could all sustain an enjoyable existence where we don't have to worry about what we eat...
I'll double down. In reality, beef in Africa, India, and China are the problem (except agriculture isn't a significant enough problem to call "the problem"). In most countries, the climate impact of beef is low for the number of people fed by it.
And even in a full vacuum, plant-based food STILL accounts for 29% of greenhouse gas emissions caused by agriculture/horticulture.
The majority of corn beans and a lot of grain all go to feeding livestock. You could be a lot more efficient growing the food directly.
Corn isn't very sweet (read energy rich). It's ridiculous to farm it for fuel. There are crops that are good, but they don't grow well in the continental US.
Feed/residual doesn't that include running sheep on harvested fields to eat the stubble and turn it into fertiliser?
I don't think so, since that wouldn't be counted in the bushel yield.
ITT people do all sorts of gymnastics instead of saying "I know but I just don't care enough"
Just be honest with yourself, if the emissions, pollution, land useage, and staggering cruelty don't bother you more than the 15 minutes of pleasure you get from a Burger pleases you just say it.
If it does, and you feel the need to defend yourself because of it just change. I promise you it's less difficult than you think and there are millions of people waiting to help you learn new delicious and nutritious methods of preparing food. Remember basically all vegans were raised carnist and most of us are complete garbage fires (as the internet so loves to point out (-; ) I promise you that you can do it and you won't even really miss meat after a few months.
People want to change nothing and point at corporations or billionaires like their own choices couldn't reduce suffering and emissions.
And some people will point at people individual choices rather than the corporations and states who promoted this lifestyle.
What pisses me the most about ecologists nowadays is how liberals they are. If you want to feel good about yourself, feel free, but don't pretend all people are responsible for climate change by themselves because they're eating meat.
Systems can be broken and incentivise poor behaviour while individual actions also make a difference.
Besides, where will your political change come from? people who wont even change their diet? Just like how all those environmental protections were brought into being by people who criticised the people chaining themselves to trees for thinking individual actions mattered?
The meat industry is terrified of vegans, they spend millions rewriting laws and producing propaganda to limit us. maybe they have reasons why.
ITT people do all sorts of gymnastics instead of saying “I know but I just don’t care enough”
Because the reality is that there's more than two people in the world. Most people are neither vegans nor assholes who don't care enough. There's those of us who think vegans are wrong. It's funny how many environmental scientists are not in support of a world exodus towards veganism and yet my choice are "stop eating meat or admit you just don't care"
How about "having spent my life around cattle farms, I know more than the person talking to me on this topic so they can go fly a kite"? Or "I have cattle specialists with advanced degrees in my family and after long discussion with them, I see all the gaps that these half-ass arguments online are missing"
...no, you're right. We just don't care enough. Oh look, I just found a study that shows that eating vegetables might be bad for the climate. Stop eating vegetables too, or you "just don't care enough"
He chose gymnastics he just doesn't realise it lmao
Reminder that good is not the enemy of perfect. It is much easier to convince 100 people to eat 10% less meat than to convince 10 people to become vegetarian.
I've started eating vegetarian several days a week and all it's done is introduce me to some amazing tasting food that I haven't tried before because of the dumb stigma that vegetarian means not tasty. I find that I enjoy some of these vegetarian dishes more than it's meat counterpart because it's not ruined by tough overcooked tasteless meat.
Substituting some of your mince for plant based alternatives is something I highly recommend everyone does.
You'll be hard pressed to tell the difference because you still get all the oils and flavours from the meat, and the substitutes have a nearly identical texture. It's a super easy way to reduce your meat intake without changing your food much.
I've been vegan for a week now, shits hard - snacks suck but Oreos are on the menu.
Remember to supplement the missing vitamins. I think B12 is the big one, but also about 40% of people can't turn beta carotene into vitamin A (retinol) and need to supplement it. If you run into odd vision problems, try vitamin A - the first sign of a deficiency is night blindness
(Hardly a full diet when one supplement is needed for everyone, and several more for some)
All worth it to punch a heart on moon for your SO.
I'm in the process of going vegan. It's taught me how to cook and how to appreciate food more. Veganism is awesome. You should try it.
Massively agree, it's made me get into food science and it's just so cool
Same, meat is just something you don't need in life. The satisfaction I get from a nice delicious meal is no different than it was before I was vegan just now it is better for the environment, my health and animal welfare.
The great thing about meat and dairy consumption is that it is linear; if you eat 50% less you cause 50% less pain. Instead of trying to go full vegan, go half-vegetarian first. The next step can be taken later.
China's world wide illegal fishing operations begs to differ with their blue ranking.
The above map doesn't include fishing, it's showing land use. This shows fishing:
Here is another one about land animals:
OK, well tax everything that harms the environment equally and appropriately, and I'll choose if I want to carry on eating it.
mhm, and you won't be screaming "cost of living crisis", right?
No, but it should be applied to everything, not just the weekly boogeyman industry.
All those out of season fruits and vegetables that get transported from southern Spain or Israel. All that plastic tat imported from China on a dirty old boat. Everything. Hell, put it on the price tags so people know exactly how much of that price is down to climate tax.
Cry poverty? Increase the minimum wages then. Somebody has to pay, and it has to be the ones doing the consuming. Us. We won't choose the cleaner option unless it's cheaper, so make the dirty stuff cost more.
That won't work because a <$0.01 tax on steak relative to the impact caused by meat-eating in most countries won't change anyone's mind. If everyone went vegan, the world still fails. If nobody went vegan but the businesses went carbon neutral, we're all fine.
In the US point of view, we only produce 20% more methane emissions than in the pre-colonial days, and the only way these changes will actually be a meaningful net positive is through anti-natal terraforming to lower animal population than was ever really natural.
I'm ok with some countries bearing more weight to help than the harm they cause, but only if it will actually make a difference. 100 million people in my country choosing to stop eating meat suddenly (or being forced to at gunpoint) doesn't change anything.
The biggest polluters are
- Transport 28%
- Electricity 25%
- Industry 23%
- Commercial & residential 13%
- Agriculture 10%
Agriculture (fertiliser, wild rodents, diesel, animals, rotting plants, not including plants wasted by consumers) is only 10%
We're making the best inroads into electricity. It is clearly possible and economical to convert all electrical grids to carbon neutral technology
We're starting to convert residential and commercial to entirely electric (except for the carbon and methane emissions from humans and pets, especially ones that eat beans) so that 13% is solvable
So at the moment 38% of greenhouse gases are easy, just needing political will
Another 23% is harder, industry needs some inventions, especially a green steel making process, and a green concrete making process. Both are years away and probably possible
Transport is hard. 6% is personal transport. That's easy to electrify. Trucking is harder, planes are harder still. I don't know how feasible wind power is for shipping, at least the trade winds blow the right way for Asia to America
The best bet for transport was a green liquid fuel, but the company trying to grow diesel from bacteria folded several years ago.
We are never going to decarbonise agriculture by abandoning any part of it. We can do a bit by practicing permaculture - that keeps more carbon in the ground; we can clean up animal agriculture by not feeding cattle human food, let them eat grass, and there is promising technology for reducing their (and other ruminants') methane emissions by feeding them seaweed
If we waved a wand and removed all farm animals from the world it wouldn't make a dent in carbon emissions or methane, cows would be replaced by deer which also make methane in exactly the same way cows do, but with no one feeding them seaweed
Uneaten grass would rot and be turned into methane (it's the same bacteria that work in cow and deer guts to break down grass). No one's treating rotting grass with seaweed.
Our best bet is to keep the marginal lands occupied by cattle and regulating people running cattle, requiring them to minimise their animals' emissions, or offset them
*Edited to fix typos
It looks like you're citing the EPA estimates for US GHG emissions by sector: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions
Unfortunately this is only a small part of the overall picture. For instance, it notably doesn't include carbon sinks (areas that have a net reduction of GHG) like protected wild lands. One of the biggest climate issues is deforestation, since it not only produces emissions, but also damages the earth's ability to sequester CO2. https://thehumaneleague.org/article/meat-industry-deforestation-cop26
In fact, if you look at total land use, an alarming percentage of habitable land is being used to produce meat and dairy, accounting for a relatively small percentage of protein and calorie consumption.
You also have to be careful using GHG emissions as your only metric. Animal agriculture is a major contributor to many of the environmental issues we face:
Biodiversity loss and mass extinction attributed to deforestation and use of land for agriculture.
Antibiotic resistant bacteria resulting from overuse of antibiotics to promote livestock growth.
Eutrophication and dead zones from fertilizers used to produce animal feed and runoff from farms.
Zoonotic diseases which very often originate in livestock before jumping to humans: see swine flu, avian flu, etc.
Additionally, the claim that eliminating livestock would result in a 1:1 replacement in wild mammals is patently false. Livestock is farmed intensively, whereas wild animals live in areas that are, again, carbon sinks. Just looking at the numbers, wild mammals are only a tiny fraction of mammalian biomass, with the vast majority being humans and livestock.
Considering the greater picture, the best bet is for those who are able to eliminate their consumption of animal products to do so.
He was actually unfairly charitable be looking at global figures. Unfortunately, the "meat problem" is largely Africa, India, and China. Yes, about 20% of US meat comes from those regions because it is cheaper. But it is entirely sustainable for countries like the US, one of the largest meat consumers, to produce all the meat we consume and stay well within reasonable greenhouse gas footprints.
Your reply to him unfaortunately made the same mistakes his statements did. If you laser-focus at the countries where most vegans are pushing to make changes, it takes bad-faith analysis of figures to see the meat industry as anything but entirely sustainable.
People who want meat-eating to stop have an agenda. People who want to farm meat have an agenda. You have to look through TWO agendas, not just one, to find the real answers.
The problem is only 9% of the beef production and 30% of global sheep and goat production are feed using grazing. The rest so most of them are feed using some form of human edible plants and they would not be replaced by wild animals. Furthermore it is something, which can be easily done today. We would still be able to produce enough food for every human on the planet and it would even be easier, as all the feedstock for animals would no longer be needed. So it really is a nice and easy few percent to get, which pretty much everybody can easily do themself.
https://www.fao.org/3/X5303E/x5303e05.htm#chapter 2: livestock grazing systems & the environment
The problem is only 9% of the beef production and 30% of global sheep and goat production are feed using grazing
The rest so most of them are feed using some form of human edible plants and they would not be replaced by wild animals
These two statements exclude the middle. There is grazing. There is feeding animal edible foods. And then there is feeding animals inedible waste. Your same source organization (FAO) points out that 86% of animal feed is inedible by humans. Realistically, a very high percent of that would be destroyed in a landfill or in burning if they were not being fed to animals.
Of the remaining 14% of feed that is edible to humans, they are the worst sorts of calories, empty and non-nutritious carbohydrates. And they are largely fed to the animal intentionally at certain parts of the feeding process (the end) to produce the highest quality of meat. Why? Because it's a waste of money to give animals feed that you could sell to humans if you have no good reason.
- Transport 28%
- Electricity 25%
- Industry 23%
- Commercial & residential 13%
- Agriculture 10%
I can opt to significantly reduce my impact for no extra money in one of these sectors.
Self reply. I wonder what the climate impact of my compost pile is. Should I add seaweed? I live a long way from the sea, is the pile worse than a 400km round trip (presuming the right weed grows in the nearest bit of sea).
I hope fixing electricity, residential, commercial, transport, and industry is enough. The world could handle the carbon load of the same sort of biomass as we have now before we started burning all the oil
Usually compost is made from stuff that would otherwise be waste. The stuff in your compost would rot and off-gas anyways. I think intentionally composting actually results in less emissions than what would happen naturally or in a landfill. I wouldn't buy stuff just to compost it (I'd just buy compost, which, in my area, is usually made from yard waste collected by local municipalities). If you need a lot of compost you can usually intercept quite a bit of material from the normal waste streams for free. I.e. you can usually get arborists to dump tons of woodchips in your yard, talk to coffee shops to see if they'll give you their spent coffee grounds, etc.
Meat, fish from overfished oceans, plantations from pesticides and deforestation.
Guess ill starve
For anyone unaware, deforestation is driven by animal agriculture. In fact, most of the crops grown are for animal feed. It’s inefficient, and the more efficient we make it, the crueler it is for the animals.
Eating plants will definitely do the least harm.
Sucks, but that will provide decades of benefits for the rest of us
Don't worry, we're all gonna starve. The rich are making sure of it. It'd really only take one of the super rich to choose to do good instead of evil and literally save the whole world, but humans, evidently, just don't make good people.
I get that tons of folks just don't want to stop eating meat. I'm the same. I cut out red meat because it's very much the worst offender. It was much easier than I thought to do, and I can't say I miss it or even really think about it aside from months like this.
Give it a shot. Nothing to lose except a little weight maybe.
I cut out red meat because it’s very much the worst offender
Have you ever mathed out your actual carbon footprint, or exactly how your carbon footprint changed by cutting out red meat? Do you even know where your meat comes from to figure out if it's environmentally friendly beef or unfriendly? You might be surprised either that you did more than you think to help.... or absolutely nothing.
Do you drive an electric car and charge it on solar or wind? Or an ICE car and run it on alcohol?
Personal transport is about the same as red meat emissions-wise. Red meat is getting better though, because farm animals are in the control of farmers (unlike wild animals that might replace them) the farmers can try different things to reduce the cow's emissions. So far they have had success, with fairly light public pressure the good practices will spread.
Now replace the cows with wild deer. Try to fix their methane emissions. All ruminants make methane in their fore gut.
Incidentally I lost the most weight on a very low carb diet. Lower carb, better weight loss (and weight gain – muscle). You can go low carb as a vegan, but not very.
Stop telling me what to do and get the corporations to oblige with laws. Oh wait! No one gives a shit because the corpos are running the world now? Oh no, guess i gotta eat shit to make up for their mistakes :(((
As someone who makes delicious plant based foods from inexpensive and available ingredients, I take a lot of issue with the idea that plant based food is "shit".
Yeah, vegetables and legumes and grains. Horrible, horrible. Woe is you.
Climate change isn't my fault! It's those corporations that I refuse to stop buying from fault!
🙄
No one is telling you what to do, but the studies are undeniable. Even if the oil industries weren't such a massive environmental disaster, that wouldn't change the wild levels of inefficiency and waste in animal agriculture. As a whole the meat industry is unsustainable, whataboutism doesnt change the facts.
No one is telling you what to do, but the studies are undeniable
The studies have studies and experts denying them.. The rebuttals are a gamut of:
- pointing out that the "eat less meat" conclusions are fraudulent misrepresentations of the facts
- pointing out that only way cutting out meat in most developed countries would be good for the environment is if we also start ecologically re-engineering for a lower natural footprint than our regions ever had, since the livestock footprint nearly resembles that of pre-colonial days (here in the US, methane emission is within 20%)
- pointing out that most attacks on meat-eating make the mistake of mathematically treating marginal land as if it could support a forest, when it cannot
- And finally, pointing out that improvements in cattle diet shows dramatically more real-world promise than this contrived idea of forcing or coercing all humans to stop eating meat, with far fewer risks and side-effects to availability of balanced nutrition
Even if the oil industries weren’t such a massive environmental disaster, that wouldn’t change the wild levels of inefficiency and waste in animal agriculture
...in some countries like India. Here in the US, the cattle industry is fairly efficient, in a large part because it is highly profitable to be efficient. In my area, cattle is largely locally fed. That local feed will just as largely end up in a bonfire if we decided to wipe out the cattle population, and there would be a large increase in synthetic fertilizers that are themselves terrible for the environment. If we decided to keep the cattle population without eating them, you might be surprised to note that it would be worse for the climate than eating the cattle we have.
As a whole the meat industry is unsustainable
If that were true, it would be dying instead of dramatically improving in both margins, efficiency, and climate footprint in most countries.
whataboutism doesnt change the facts.
No. Whataboutism doesn't change the facts. On that, we can agree.
Who is telling you what to do?
Stop absolving yourself of responsibility by claiming that the decisions you make are inconsequential. The reason things don't get better is because people don't make them better ffs.
We grow our own vegetables, raise our own meat, hunt, fish, forage, buy used everything with a few exceptions and we live on much less than most. Our house is appropriately sized but we drive a truck out of necessity. It's our one vehicle, 16 years old and works every day. We take so much shit over that damn truck from folks who "know better". How about we fuck up the trillion dollar capitalist corpos who rape and pillage the people, land and sea for God's Almighty Profits instead of judging our neighbors whom we don't even know many whom are struggling to even exist.
That's exactly the problem is they aren't on this crusade because it's the #1 cause. If they can tie their crusade to a bigger problem then it gains them more traction. Even though it's a drop in the bucket compared to corporate effects on the environment. the idea that it's anything but a power move to convert more people to their life choices is hilarious at best. Not to mention the ableist BS that it is to believe everyone can stop eating meat, but I'm not explaining that to the 20 internet doctors that will message me after this like last time I brought it up.
Exactly. Why do these articles also act like the consumer is at fault and not the giant corporations selling these things?
So far, I see lots of consumers here in the comments justifying their continued consumption of the thing in question.
I think because we all know people could just learn a new recipe and buy something else at the grocery store they were already shopping at.
Because in this instance companies are just meeting consumer demands.
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
Look at how much impact that first thing has, y'all. If you convince one person not to have another child that has the same impact as convincing sixty people to go plant based.
Fighting for reproductive rights is one of the most impactful things you can do for the climate.
Save the Earth, have an abortion.
More people is more minds working on solutions.
So is "Return To Office" but the U.S. government hasn't made a peep about that.
Greenhouse gas emissions from Agriculture has been well known for quite a while, though not as long as Fossil Fuels.
From this very article you can see it's the United Arab Emirates pushing hard for the Agriculture-angle on their COP - it's almost as if they have a vested in interest in moving the focus away from Fossil Fuels.
One has to wonder just how many years' worth of cow farts add up to the same greenhouse effect (over the long term, as methane is a stronger greenhouse gas but has a far lower half-life in the athmosphere than CO2) as more than 100k people flying over to COP28 (kudos to the genuine Environmentalists, who went by boat) or just a couple of hours of private-jet flight emissions.
Then there are all the moralists who are trying to use Climate Change as an angle to push their morals on others when it comes to using animals as food: the very same people who are usually (in my personal experience) unwilling to forego having a car or two and driving rather than cycling (from my observation, their "environmentalism" stops at chosing an electric car, which still polutes - micro-particles from tires, electricity generation emissions, manufacturing and end-of-life emissions - a lot more that my own personal choice of more than a decade of selling my car and walking and cycling instead) will blow out of all proportion the propagandist messaging put out by fossil-fuel fatcats and elites protecting their priviledge, distorting the reality and proportion of what is a genuine concern, because it helps force their own morals on others.
Changes in Agricultural practies - including reduction of meat consumptiom at the consumer level - are indeed things that need to be looked at, all of which is hard to do seriously and in a proper and proportionate way due to the subversion around the subject from an unholly alliance of people with a self-interest in pushing this angle: moralists, elites who want to keep their priviledges and fossil-fuel fatcats keep poluting the subject and destroying any chance at a serious, well-ballanced and proportionate approach at reballancing Agricultural emissions, because none of those actors have a genuine environmentalist objective.
Then there are all the moralists who are trying to use Climate Change as an angle to push their morals on others when it comes to using animals as food: the very same people who are usually (in my personal experience) unwilling to forego having a car or two and driving rather than cycling (from my observation, their "environmentalism" stops at chosing an electric car, which still polutes - micro-particles from tires, electricity generation emissions, manufacturing and end-of-life emissions - a lot more that my own personal choice of more than a decade of selling my car and walking and cycling instead) will blow out of all proportion the propagandist messaging put out by fossil-fuel fatcats and elites protecting their priviledge, distorting the reality and proportion of what is a genuine concern, because it helps force their own morals on others.
It’s funny how you criticize one group for moralizing and then do the same thing about cars.
The fact is, people emphasize the things that affect them the least. Vegans and vegetarians will tell you animal agriculture is the biggest issue. Those that don’t like driving/cyclists will tell you cars are the problem. Anti-capitalist will point the finger at corporations. Anti-consumerists will point the finger at people buying stuff. People that’s don’t like to travel will point at aviation. I’ll gladly point out that studies show the largest individual climate action is having one fewer child, but I admit it appeals to me because I don’t want children.
I really feel climate will never be solved because no one will make uncomfortable drastic changes.
I think you've got it backwards. I'm an anti capitalist (at least partially) BECAUSE of the damage capitalism is doing to the environment. I don't drive a car BECAUSE of the damage it does to the environment. I avoid planes and ordering stuff from China because of the impact etc etc. My agenda IS climate change. And I eat meat. I eat meat because animal agriculture won't make enough difference to the climate, and because I like to eat meat.
Making those other changes is highly uncomfortable, every single day.I would love for you to explain how cars by themselves, ex their polution, are a moral subject.
Is there some kind of "cars suffer" angle? Or is it about the "pain of roads"?
Yeah, Environmentalism can be a form of Moralism, in turn meaning that anything that polutes - cars, planes, factories - is by extention looked at in a moralist way, but there is no such thing as a belive in the inherent badness of using four wheeled vehicles.
Your entire "argument" starts with a massive False Equivalence and then goes on into a massive display of Projection - just because your "Environmentalism" is secondary to your convenience doesn't mean that everybody else's is - and missing the point - the problem never was vegans and vegetarians who are also Environamentalists, the problem is vegans and vegetarians willing to sacrifice positive Environmentalist outcomes to their need to preach their moral standpoint on meat-eating and even force others to obbey their morals on that, and hence they are not genuine Environmentalists (their hypocrisy often noticeable by their actual anti-Environmental choices in domains other than meat-eating).
If that is so hard to understand, imagine two types of Christians who claim to be Environmentalists: the first talk about Environmentalism by itself and evaluate ways to improve the Environment on their own merits, the others go on and on about how the Almighty created the Universe and how you should read the Bible and join the other "Followers of Our Lord Jesus" in "Protecting God's Creation".
It's pretty obvious that the second group are not genuine Environamentalists and are just leveraging Environmentalist concerns to preach their Morals to others and in doing so are even turning people away from Environamentalism.
However as I try to make clear in my alegory with the first group, it's perfectly possible to genuinelly be both, and people who are don't sacrifice Environmentalism to their need to preach their other Moral Beliefs.
I'm putting my money on microplastic/steroids/antibiotics infested meat just destroying the bodies of those who eat it.
You, person who eats red meat! Never get a colonoscopy, it's gay!
imagine being concerned about the environment and still eating meat.
It encapsulated the whole human problem.
This attitude is why meat eaters will tell you to shut the fuck up when you bring up the subject. Your statement is reductive, dismissive, and pretentious to the point that you would be more convincing by not saying anything at all.
Whats wrong with what they said? Eating meat is disproportionately more environmentally damaging than a plant based diet. Going vegan absolutely has a positive environmental impact so if you do want to help, go vegan. The fault is absolutely not on them if people read it and get annoyed because they don't actually want to make a sacrifice they just want things to get better without any personal change on their part.
Because eating meat and farming meat aren't the same thing and the problem isn't from eating it. I could stop eating meat today and it won't make a lick of difference. Everyone would have to stop at the same time to make raising the animals no longer profitable. And getting everyone everywhere to agree to anything is fucking impossible.
Instead of giving shit to people who eat meat, attack the fucking industry that raises the animals and has all the fucking power.
I say give shit to people who eat meat and go after big agriculture because you can do both those things actually
^ likely said while sitting on disposable furniture made it China.
Meat is a problem, but there are a lot of contributing factors. Shaming people doesn't help them hear you.
" 'The Pentagon is a larger polluter than 140 countries combined’ — Speaker Pelosi and U.S. delegates at COP26 responded to a question on how the military contributes to the climate crisis." Please stop blaming your neighbor for eating food. Divide and conquer is the oldest strategy there is. Stop falling for it...
Agriculture accounts for 20% of the global emissions. Meat is the vast majority of that. It's not divide and conquer, it is a reality (and the military contributes a lot to that as well, as they very much promote meat consumption).
I know climate change is real, but I hope you know that the ruling elite of WEF, will spin this so you cut your emission while they continue their private jet setting lives. While "You will eat ze bugz" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TaSZ_DDQjcM
In what country? In the US it's 10%
Huh.
Obvious solution is to start hunting if you want to eat meat. Anyone want to go on a pig hunt with me in east Texas, or southern Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, or northern Florida? I can supply guns/ammo, you supply the land to hunt? (Might also need nods or thermal, depending on the area.) I figure about two feral hogs would be enough for a year, give or take. I'm not interested in deer hunting; lots of people do that, and deer were extinct for a few years in my state due to over-hunting, and had to be re-introduced. Also, I don't want to use dogs; hogs fuck dogs up pretty badly
Oh no not the poor dogs 🥺
Obvious solution is to start hunting if you want to eat meat.
While I disagree with the overall sentiment of the parent article, I'm 100% on board with your solution. In my area, deer are constantly overpopulated (unlike in your area), and it leads to starvation in the worst possible way. Predator populations skyrocket, kill off the excess deer, and then terrorize areas as they starve out.
If I had land in any of those areas, I'd take you up on it. I'd love to have the opportunity to do good and eat for a year.
I got 4 hectares in northern Sweden you can have hunt on it we split the meat and skins, I am halfway proficient in butchering and such
So is taylor swift flying around the world on her jet every day.
Oh well such is life.
Repeat a lie a thousand times, and it becomes the truth. A hundred scientists came together in disapproval of Einstein. His response was, something along the lines of. - why a hundred scientists? If I was wrong, all it would take is one.
“Although I have been prevented by outward circumstances from observing a strictly vegetarian diet, I have long been an adherent to the cause in principle. Besides agreeing with the aims of vegetarianism for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.” - A. Einstein
Eating meat isn't doing shit. It's the raising of the animals to be eaten that's fucking shit up.
Edit: To those who disagree: if we stopped raising cattle do you think that would stop hunting wild animals for food? Do you think hunting and trapping is harming the environment more than thousands of acres of animals causing soil erosion and belching greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and requiring millions of gallons of water? You can eat meat without ever contributing to the meat industry.
Yeah so we should stop raising animals for meat and start getting people to go vegan?
Eating meat financially supports the raising of those animals, that was originally why I went vegetarian.
Edit: Before I get flamed, I agree with you. It's the industry not the consumer who needs to change. I decided to stop being part of the system for my own sake (and with the vague hope of putting some financial pressure on the industry).
On hunting, I'm conflicted. While yes it would be better in general, there's of course the risk of over hunting and the like. Here in Australia we have the opposite problem and have to constantly cull kangaroos to protect the environment, the meat is then available in supermarkets (it's also significantly healthier than beef, and IMO has a better taste).
In favour of hunting: the animals get a life in the wild, making methane and CO2 at the rates of mass they grow
In favour of farming: the animals are in a farmer's control, they grow bigger, give milk, have fewer parasites so you can eat the meat rare, and they can be treated to reduce their methane production
If enough people stop eating meat for a beef farm to collapse and the land to be let go wild that will turn the grass over to wild deer that will have exactly the same emissions as the cows had, but with no chance of treating them to reduce their methane
The hunted animals are not in our control. Most of the large hunted animals (eg deer) are ruminants like cows. Deer belch methane just like cows.
Cows taste better than deer, of we're going to have methane belching animals I'd prefer they were cows
Also farmed animals can be treated to prevent their belching methane. No one's working on deer methane
Agricultural run off is the main polluter of US waterways. It does include the meat industry, but switching to an all vegetarian diet would ramp up the pollutants caused by fruit and vegi farming.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-09/documents/ag_runoff_fact_sheet.pdf
This is technically true, but rather misleading.
Meat animals eat plants. By not eating meat, you don't need to grow the plants to feed to the animals. Animals aren't perfectly efficient. To grow 100 calories of chicken breast takes way, way more than 100 calories of corn.
In fact, more land is used to grow feed crops than to grow crops directly eaten by people, even though most calories in our diet are from plants. And that's not not counting pasture and rangeland, which makes up an absolutely absurd amount of the US.
So yes: you'll increase the amount of runoff from chickpea and lentil fields, but you'll more than make up for that from much larger decreased runoff from soy and corn fields.
There were studies that "proved" vaccines caused autism, take your psuedoscience and shove it.
One study. Only one. Compared to study after study after study coming to the same conclusion: Meat is bad for the environment.
Those studies are ages ago and terribly executed. And researchers have learned from that and since upped research standards. But I guess it's easier to be in denial and ignore it.
Do you just not know how to interpret information?
The biggest deterrent for me ever switching to being a vegetarian/vegan is…
Well, vegans.
If they weren’t so god-awful arrogant, I’d consider it, but I would never want anyone to associate me with that type of behavior. And there’s been several times where I was prepared to make the switch. In the end, the consideration of of being linked to such a hateful culture was just too much.
I’d imagine a lot of people feel the same way about Christianity- and if I were more clever then I am, if probable be able to spot the irony in this.
And yet you're here because you hate something, mired in a culture of expats from that thing, talking this trash about somebody else; at least vegans have real reasons for it, such as data like OPs. (no i am not vegan.) Your only stated reason is your dislike of what amounts to morality.
Spotted your irony for you.
Maybe stop spewing shit about strawmen? You're no better a monkey than anyone else. I guess you shouldn't be shamed for at least trying, but that's all the vegans are doing. They're just trying harder than you. (with, not to put too fine a point on it, some success.) Perhaps you should try forgiving them that. Maybe even make a decision bigger than "nah, i can't" from deep down in those cojones you probably have, males being 51% of the population.
🙄
I mean… Most people don’t really care what you eat most of the time, so you could switch (or mostly switch or whatever) without telling anybody. Vegan is a little harder than vegetarian if you’re going out with people, but if you really don’t want to say you’re vegan you could always suggest a place that works for you or just bite the bullet that one time (if you want to avoid eating meat but won’t because you don’t want to be associated with vegans, it’s probably still better to go meatless most of the time, and sacrifice the diet whenever is socially convenient for you). To be clear, I’m not trying to preach to you (I’m not vegan, but I am vegetarian, if that’s relevant context). It’s your diet, not mine… But if it’s something you legitimately do want to do on some level there’s a lot of flexibility in how you can make it work for you!
It’s nearly impossible for it not to come up. Dinner over friends houses? Need to inform of diet. Dining out? Ordering from the vegan menu. Going to wedding? Advance choosing vegan meal… these are just a few examples.
I wouldn’t want anyone knowing I was a vegan. Vegans make it shameful to have to admit.
This is not the reason you aren't a vegan. Nobody eats meat because they care what people associate them with, it's for convenience, taste, and tradition. I've cut down drastically on meat and nobody has mentioned it in the slightest, because nobody cares.
All this is is a dig at vegans who are doing far more individually than you or I to try to salvage this planet and reduce the absolutely inhumane conditions animals are subject to just so you and I can have a cheeseburger.
You're just virtue signaling. Or, anti-virtue signaling. Vice-signaling? Idk.
Steak is already on the menu tonight.
I tried to get the lemmy.world carnivore subreddit working, but there are five militant vegans for every carnivore on lemmy and in that sub. You could downvote troll here just by playing the meat eater
They're hardly touching your total karma though :)
Ha! You mean you started a carnivore community and kept getting brigaded by vegans? Funny if true since they always complain about meat eaters invading their safe spaces, as of they don’t disturb me in person about it while I’m trying to eat. It’s one of the most consistent double standards I’ve ever encountered.
Thanks for the note about the karma. I generally have vote counts turned off and don’t pay attention to that, but it’s good to know I’m not in the negative.
Any that do not say it's bad since most of the carbon is part of the earth's existing carbon cycle?
The organic stuff itself, maybe. But there's a lot of carbon involved in driving tractors and transport. All of which is vastly reduced by eating 1 plant instead of growing 10 plants to grow one steak.
Don't the largest most polluting machines work on the plant farms?
I'm talking grass fed animals. I agree with you that we shouldn't have grain fed cattle
Animals it's light trucks and tractors up feed the animals during winter or drought, then transport to market, eventually to the consumer.
Plants it's fertilising machines, crop dusting planes, massive harvesting machines then usually through factories eventually to the consumer. If you eat while foods only and nothing manufactured then it's massive harvesting machines then to market to the consumer
Yes. That's what I am referring to. Where are those studies?
I'm less concerned about tractors and transport, those are a matter of replacing with green alternatives.
The truth seems to be that the best choice is somewhere in the middle. Less meat, more vegetables. Attempts to zero out meat requires higher carbon input else where.
But if you're a vegetarian that mostly eats at restaurants, you've cancel out the benefits against someone who eats meat once a day, from a local farmer and prepares all their meals at home.
most of the carbon is part of the earth’s existing carbon cycle
I'm afraid that's a bit too simplistic. I'll name a few reasons to give a hint why.
For example, both carbon dioxide and methane are "part of the earth's carbon cycle", but both have different climate impacts. Ruminants transform one into the other; from bad to worse.
Another person pointed out how meat production also involves burning fossil fuels, for example for transport. Or synthetic fertilizers.
Yet another reason is land use change. Meat production, being inherently less efficient due to more intermediate steps (see trophic levels), uses more land for the same amount of nutritions compared to plant based agriculture. This translates to more deforestation, more dried up wetlands, more desertification, and more stress on other species.
Finally, scale and speed make a difference. It's true that both carbon dioxide and methane are part of Earth's existing carbon cycle. Yet, the scale and speed at which we emit those is unprecedented.
I don't know what you're on, but it's impolite not to share. You should also read these studies so you don't say stupid shit like this.
denial
47 negative karma for calmly arguing with a good point. This place is hopeless. This isn't rationality, it's religion
