Nah Corporations and industries creates 1000x more greenhouse gases than meat and agriculture.
It’s time for this unfortunate headline to go away. I see a variation of this posted in nearly every thread about climate and emissions, a complex topic that the average person understandably doesn’t know much about beyond some headline that stuck with them. Snopes has a good article debunking The Guardian’s grossly misleading headline.
To see the actual sources of GHG emissions, at least in the US, the EPA has good resources. In short, agriculture is 10% (methane from cows fits here), transportation is 28%, electric power generation is 25% (fossil fuel power plants generating electricity), residential and commercial buildings are 13% (in practice, the building sector overall is about a third of emissions after attributing the emissions from the electric power slice. Residential and commercial buildings use 75% of the power generated in the US), and finally industry is 23% (again, a bit more factoring in their share of the electric power emissions. Industry uses about a quarter of all power in the US).
As you can see, emissions, or at least GHG emissions, are spread across the economy. Some industries are heavy polluters (e.g. cement manufacturing), but that’s ultimately to make products for the market, even if they do have plenty of room to improve efficiency and reduce emissions, as do all other areas of the economy, especially buildings.
If you choose to drive a car and burn 10 litres of fuel, the responsibility is on you, not the oil company that produced it for you
Exactly. While certain dietary habits will most certainly have to shift if we’re to adequately tackle climate change, the framing of this as “everyone should just go vegan” falsely puts the onus on individual consumers to solve what is ultimately a systemic problem of production.
Meat and agriculture are part of the greenhouse gasses that corporations emit…
And who supports these corporations and industries by buying their shit?
“Companies have customers and therefore they have no responsibility to climate change whatsoever. They don’t have to manage their waste, they can dump recyclables into the landfill, and it’s the customers fault!”
Fuck off with this shit.
So you think there is some perfect way to manage waste? Because if you can understand that’s not the case, then you can understand that the more people like YOU support these companies, the more waste there will be. This really is not complicated. I know the average person is adamant about not taking any responsibility and shifting it onto politicians and corporations, but that’s the kind of retarded thinking that got us to 8 billion redundant people.
The maximum number of people who care enough about this to change their lifestyle is the number of people who are doing it right now. How do you increase that number? I can’t even convince my family to cut down on meat. My wealthy friends don’t give a shit. My right wing friends care even less.
People do not like change. Least favourite part of my job is trying to convince something they need to change their habits.
Companies can be regulated and fined. The government is supposed to represent the people, I’d rather them penalize companies than me.
one time i was sad that i buyed a product from nestle, i still ate it because i notiden only after opening but still. I did not like it ;.;
I upvoted because this message still didn’t reach everyone, but I guess it’s just that people are in denial… like, isn’t this obvious? And weren’t there already dozens of studies proving it?
people ate meat for MILLIONS OF YEARS with negligible global warming effect from the animals
vegans going start blaming the Assyrianz for inventing husbandry before blaming Exxon Mobile BP
like dude pick your battles
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I am a vegan bro I hate meet Because I don’t like the taste. I hate vegans trying to turn a food PREFERENCE into a snobbery high horse thing. dude eating Factory Farm Veggies is just as bad if not worse (see Monsanto)
Maybe Boop A Pipeline if you are truly morally superior
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your right I’m sorry
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Veganism is not a food preference, you are not vegan.
Veganism is a stance to avoid harming non-human animals.
I think you forgot to take your B12 supplements like a good vegan.
it’s actually extremely sad that you are correct I was so moody and angry all day. 500 calories ain’t cutting it
So if we just stop subsidizing it so ridiculously it should go way down to sustainable levels then right?
Certainly if we also stop indirect subsidies like the failure to internalize externalities. Include the climate damage caused in the price tag, and people will love a veggy curry instead.
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dude people will never change because you tell them too if yall actually cared you would talk about the end of factory farms (which also incudes Veggies) the corruption Comes from the system itself. you are absolutely naive if you thing a a capitalist run Vegan Diet Enforced by Law would Help the environment
mate the cut down the rainforest to grow all kinds of food. growing Veggies with Monsanto juice literally gave millions of people cancer 🙄
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You have no idea of the scale we are dealing with.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
Vegans still care about the ban of oil and many other topics like zero waste, it is not exclusive.
Due to the current infrastructure not everyone can just stop using fossile fuel based transport, but we all can go vegan. So yes, we pick battles, those we can win now and we still fight against what we cant change as individuals.
the whole world can choosd to be a Catholic mate. and it would be a good thing
thats what you sound like. a fascist. People have the RIGHT to choose what they eat
I’ll go completely meat free when the super rich go private jet free.
Other people doing bad things doesn’t justify you doing bad things.
Agreed, but it’s too easy to come after plebs like me and my eating habits when comparably private air flight is responsible for orders of magnitude more co2.
Me turning down my heating or eating less bacon is not going to have the kind of impact that big corporations, government, and super wealthy could have if they curbed their destructive habits.
How do we hold evil corporations accountable if not refusing to give them our money?
We can do better in our own lives while advocating for bigger change.
private air flight is responsible for orders of magnitude more co2.
Aviation worldwide creates 2% of man made GHG, food production 25% and could be reduced by 75% with a plant based diet.
Well, if everyone thinks like that nobody does anything ever… even the richest of the rich can say “it’s not because of me”, because it really isn’t. This is a man made disaster, but not by any single man. Some contribute more, others less, but the idea that only the rich polute is complete bonkers.
I think that’s the point. People don’t want to change, so they say: “I’ll change when they’ll change.” Knowing full well that it is a deadlocked situation.
I’ll stop fucking sheep when everyone else stops fucking cows.
That’s you. That’s how dumb you sound.
Interesting comparison there. But hey, I’m not kink shaming.
I got the message and I don’t care. Humans evolved to eat animals. B12 is an essential vitamin whose primary source is meat and dairy. The entire country of India is B12 deficient because of their diet:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6540890/
For humans to live, other organisms must die. We are part of the cycle. You want to preserve the biosphere that allows humans to survive? Reduce the number of humans. I am child free.
We’re omnivores which means we can thrive with or without meat, B12 is simple to supplement.
Humans evolved to eat animals.
humans also evolved to die from cholera before the age of 3 what’s your point
B12 is an essential vitamin whose primary source is meat and dairy
so add b12 to foods, or take b12 supplements
I am child free
not having children because you never wanted children isn’t an argument unless you avoided having them specifically for the climate
you’re allowed to eat meat, but can we please stop with all the limp-wristed excuses for why it’s actually morally justifiable and just own it?
I eat meat myself. But I reduced a lot my consumption, most people in Western countries consume far too much, even for their own health. We should consume less and better, chosing meat from sustainable farming instead of cheap meat from pastures where there should be the Amazon…
You can do more than one thing to help the climate.
Sure, humans evolved to eat meat. Let’s just assume that’s correct, and you have the right interpretation of it.
But that doesn’t mean we have to.
Humans didn’t evolve to type things on a cell phone, yet here we are.
Vegans: “all you have to do to save the planet is to turn your back on millions of years of evolution, and one of the few sources of pleasure remaining to you in your day to day life… And convince everyone else in the world to do the same! … And then, we will have maybe made a partial dent in climate change … But not enough to actually really change our prospects in any meaningful way … And also, we used bad science to come up with this plan to begin with.”
Do you have a source for that vegans think nothing else needs to change?
Nope.
This is more a comment about their priorities and the absolute futility of their tactics and goal.
Apparently you don’t know the first thing about vegans.
First of all there are nearly 100 million vegans nowadays. They are not all the same. Second of all veganism isn’t even about climate change, it’s an ethical position towards the mistreatment of animals. Lastly, most vegans don’t deny evolution or our history, but simply look at the situation that we find ourselves in today. Mass slaughtering 80+ billion land animals in factory farms annually may indeed be the result of our evolution, but evolution isn’t finished either.
Oh well.
So who’s having burgers tonight? Maybe with bacon too.
I had mini burgers as an appie, with bacon, then had a crispy tofu bowl.
Why choose? Just eat tasty food!
Why choose?
Because meat is very destructive and cruel…?
No, meat isnt.
How people treat animals can be, meat isnt destructive or cruel. Its just meat. Im very much in touch with the natural world and guess what? All life feeds on other life. And it is usually brutal and violent.
But my point that you missed or intentionally ignored is that I chose to not have some other form of protein for my entree and instead chose to have a vegan dish. Which was fucking delicious. And people need to see that our choices matter and that it isnt some horrible thing to eat tofu. Im okay with eating the flesh of animals Its cool if you arent comfortable with that. But its one of the most natural things you can do to continue existing. And since i was never given a choice on whether i wanted to exist, I will not be shamed in doing something that our ancenstors have done for survival for hundreds and thousands of years
Wow so cool how you’re destroying the planet bud
By eating a burger? Jesus christ give your head a shake.
Why don’t you go harass some plastic manufacturers and oil companies and leave people alone man? Christ
I don’t see how that original comment was any different from the dickweeds that think rolling coal is a great way to troll the libs. “Doing this thing is bad for everybody and we should stop” --> “oh yeah I’m gonna do it even more and brag about it” is intensely obnoxious behaviour.
Go ahead and eat your burger or whatever. Sure, there are bigger targets to make. But bragging about it in a thread about how it’s harmful is top shelf assholery.
Oh look, another article pointing the finger at the meager consumption habits of citizens and completely ignoring the massive ocean of CO2 production by large companies.
Don’t people get tired of seeing this same argument being made? The amount of carbon produced by barges carrying cargo over the Atlantic so far greatly exceeds the consumption of many millions of people every single day but I’m supposed to feel guilty for eating a piece of steak today instead of some semi-edible “impossible meat” bug protein?
ETA: Nice, my first blowup since leaving reddit. Very refreshing to see some people arguing passionately. I appreciate the vigor and the quality of argumentation, everybody. The quality of discourse here is so much better than on reddit.
I’m willing to admit the “semi edible impossible meat bug protein” gamut was a bit tongue in cheek, but I recognize how it can sound genuine. I do think Impossible Meat is disgusting, but that’s neither here nor there.
I eat plenty of plant matter and I regularly forage in the local forests to learn about edible plants. But I’m not going to stop enjoying steak just because it might put a bit more CO2 (why do people keep writing it as C02 online?) into the atmosphere. If removing subsidies and putting more pressure on the meat industry to be less wasteful, less environmentally impactful and more ethical towards animals causes steak to rise to $40/lb as some here have stated I’ll gladly pay.
FWIW, I get my steak from local farms that are free range and grass fed. Grass feeding is healthier for the cow than the typical grain, it produces less CO2 and the steak is better quality. Plus the cows are better taken care of. Again, thanks for the great messages (generally).
I don’t think we can call the 18.5% of CO2 emissions that the meat industry creates “meager”.
You’re correct that the most effective way to tackle this is for governments to restrict the source, but you need to change people’s habits too. Simply making meats more expensive isn’t the entire problem.
This is an absolutely massive chunk of our emissions and it can not be left out of response to the crisis.
Meat production causes 25% of all GHGs in our atmosphere. Personal consumption, on this matter, is 100% the cause. No one is forcing anyone to eat meat on the staggering level North Americans do. If we as North Americans didn’t demand so much cheap plastic shit to buy as part of our lifestyle, there would be less of it made, less of it shipped, fewer cargo ships, less GHG. Your beef isn’t with people telling you that we consume too much, your beef is with the insurmountable prospect of convincing billions of people to cool it.
This increases food insecurity. There is absolutely no way you remove a major source of food production without more people going hungry. I don’t think I need to belabor this aspect further.
Not to mention, the logic of your argument also shifts the blame of fossil fuel emissions from corporation to consumer. No one is forcing us to use gasoline or plastic on the staggering level that North Americans do. If we simply cut back, then there’d be fewer emissions. For that matter in fact, this very discussion we’re having is possible because of electrical power, which more than likely produced GHG as well. Should we hold the blame for this as our consumption, and let dirty coal plants get a pass?
Finally, these researchers have a major hole in their research. They haven’t even looked at what emissions and resource usage we’d have if we scaled up vegan food production to replace current meat consumption. And I suspect we’d find one major health problem – there are some amino acids we only get from meat. To prevent health deterioration, we’d need massive production of vitamin supplements that are mandatory for everyone to consume for their health. Even if we somehow manage this in a vegan friendly process, it will use an extortionate amount of energy, resources, and freshwater. Enough that I can’t say definitively it would be less than meat consumption.
The difference between the calories an animal consumes vs the amount that animal provides to us is huge. If we converted the animal feed to direct food production we would not have ‘food insecurity’.
https://awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/ has sources, if you actually care to learn rather than talking from your armchair.
And yes consumers absolutely should have some blame in climate change. Corporations don’t pollute for fun, they do it for profit. It’s way easier for us to point fingers and continue to do fuck all while the planet burns.
There is plenty looking at how it scales up and they account for nutrition
we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
The research suggests that it’s possible to feed everyone in the world a nutritious diet on existing croplands, but only if we saw a widespread shift towards plant-based diets.
[…]
If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
This is because it takes a lot of human-edible feed to produce animal products
1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
Before anyone mentions something like grass-fed production let’s note that grass-fed production very much doesn’t scale and has enormous land use giving high pressure for deforestation as well
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
[…]
If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
Aaaaand we’re getting into the US defaultism again
Wait until you see the giant super-yacht couriers that ship super-yachts for the supper rich.
No, but you should feel guilty for the atrocity that you inflict in intelligent creatures. I don’t understand why that does not even enter the equation for people. Even if you must insist that an animal’s life is not worth the same as a human beings, that doesn’t mean it is worthless. That does not mean you are morally entitled to make decisions that require vast cruelty. Your preference for the same three fucking animals over the tens of thousands of culinary plants available to you isn’t more important than not raping animals, not mutilating animals, not traumatizing animals, not forcing the dependence of animals, not torturing and murdering intelligent creatures.
Isn’t meat one of the things being shipped across the Atlantic?
What do you think big companies produce to make CO2? What do you think the big barges are transporting? At the end of the day, companies make what consumers want. And the meat industry is a horrible contributor to climate change, not to talk about land and water usage. So say all you want to make you feel better, which is fine, but the facts are that we as a society need to eat less meat to be more sustainable. Eating meat twice a day is not necessary, and nor is it even common, both on a global and historical scale. It is a luxury that we have to think hard about whether we should reduce the use of.
You realize this is included in a large chunk of the CO2 that companies produce, right? Do you think they simply spew CO2 into the air for funsies? They produce shit that people are buying. That production spits out CO2. A good chunk of the CO2 produced is from the meat industry. Most of our meat is produced in large scale farms. To get that meat, you need feed. That takes land and harvesting. Those combines don’t run on hopes and dreams. Those run on fossil fuels. Then the feed has to get to where the meat is. That happens on trucks and barges which run on fossil fuels. Then once the meat is actually slaughtered, it is shipped out on trucks and barges which, again, run on fossil fuels.
But don’t feel too guilty when eating a steak. But also don’t bitch when steak becomes $40/lb when subsidies for the cattle industry are removed and the government also properly taxes CO2 emissions. In fact, given your comment, you should be actively advocating that to your representatives.
And lastly, Impossible meat is fucking pea protein. Where the fuck are you getting that it is made from insects? You sound like one of those conspiracy freaks who is constantly worried about being forced to eat bugs. Are bugs to icky for you? Are you not man enough to eat them because they are scary?
I replied via an edit to the parent comment. Thank you
We’re long past the point where focusing on just one or two sources of carbon is enough. Everything needs to be examined. We can choose a more sustainable diet AND curb mindless consumerism.
Also, I find the impossible/beyond burgers to be pretty good. I dunno what you’re on about with “bug protein”. At worst, they’re made from yeast but plant material otherwise?
Bugs, crickets specifically iirc, have been touted as the miracle solution to getting protein in everyone’s diet without the ethical or environmental ramifications of the current meat industry.
This has nothing at all to do with the impossible burger, or any burger that I’m aware of… maybe the previous guy just thinks it tastes like bugs? …and fuck if they can make a bug patty taste as good as the impossible burger, then sign me up - the impossible is NOT bad. It’s not great either, I’d rank it as slightly better than the average fast food burger patty, but that’s good enough for me.
When the vegetable meat costs more than the animal meat, I can feel the “I’m being ripped off”. Make fake meat cheaper than real meat and I’ll eat it all day long.
I wouldn’t say I’d feel ripped off, but for my broke ass, cost is probably the most heavily weighed feature of my food. Ethical and ecological concerns come in 2nd. To really push consumers toward meat alternatives, those alternatives need to, at the very least, cost the same as meats.
I don’t know why this is downvoted. It seems perfectly reasonable to me as someone who has managed to cut most of the meat out of my diet. We definitely need affordable alternatives. Real meat is cheaper right now and that is the deciding factor for a lot of people.
Hopefully we will see this change soon.
Animal meat is subsidized heavily, plant meat is not. All we’d have to do is stop subsidizing animal agriculture and start subsidizing more plant alternatives.
Do you want to REALLY cut down on pollution? Stop giving free money to the giant corporations that are causing the most of it.
I’m not going to be vegan and I’m not going to eat bugs. If the corporations want to stop climate change, the corporations are causing the most of it.
If they stopped giving free money to corporations, people wouldn’t eat nearly so much meat. A large chunk of people would go vegan by economic necessity because the price of animal products would jump so high. And corporations tend not to care about stopping climate change.
meat is good for you. eating bugs isn’t
Seems like a baseless claim
Edible Insect Consumption for Human and Planetary Health: A Systematic Review https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36141915/
I’m not qualified to say whether bugs are good for you (although muix send to have found evidence that they are). But I didn’t mention bugs. They’re different to vegetables and other plant-based products.
In any event, whether bugs share the nutrition of meat, it’s a simple equation of
eating a different balance of food or dying from an extreme weather event. It’s not even close.Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying this is entirely down to personal choice or that solely amending diets will fix the problem. I’m not even saying that people need to cut out animal produce entirely. I’m saying that radical changes in the structure of human society are crucial if we want a human society to exist in any semblance of peace and prosperity. Sustainable food is a key component of that shift.
So stop giving money to giant agribusiness corporations to subsidize the most polluting food source. Got it.
I’m not eating bugs. Real meat from animals is good for you. stop giving hundreds of billions per year to oil companies
Real meat from animals is good for you
It’s objectively bad for you in the quantities eaten by the west. Cutting out red meat, milk and most of the other animal products from your diet is measurably better for your health.
Stop giving billions to giant multinational cattle farming companies. It’s just as large an emissions source as oil (which you can also stop funding directly by avoiding driving where possible and going solar-powered electric for the rest)
If I can get meat from a local farm is that ok? Am I excused from causing pain if I know it’s from an actual farm where I can go and pet the cow before eating it? Asking for a friend…
Smugly attempting to mock people who care about animal welfare doesn’t justify all of the other harms you are doing.
I have access to meat from a farm, this was a real question from my friend.
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…”than being vegan”? Look, I don’t care if you’re vegan and not and I’ll respect you if you are, but the title already makes this article sound biased and untrustworthy.
So triggered, so fast.
Titel translation is “Eating something creates more greenhouse gasses than being something.”
So… “Eating meat creates more greenhouse gasses than being meat.”
“Eating grass creates more greenhouse gasses, than being grass.”
Study of greenhouse gas emission of different alimentation choices finds an expected result
this is biased and untrustworthy!
This is not how biases work, every result you don’t like doesn’t make the study biased
To add on to this, the title should really end with, “than being vegetarian”, or else the title should be " Consuming animal products creates four time more greenhouse gases than being vegan,…"
It’s not really a 1 to 1 comparison if you’re comparing a meat eater with someone who doesn’t consume milk, meat, eggs, or any other animal products. You can also have meat eaters that don’t consume milk due to allergies and such.
Plus, technically speaking (with cultured meat on the rise), there could be vegans that aren’t vegetarian, as vegans could still eat cultured meat.
It’s not really suprising, is it? Just take two people and give them the same basics, but swap everything non vegan with the stuff those animals got to eat for one of them. Not only did he save the middle man to save on emissions, he also ended up with way more food. So you could save a lot more emissions by cutting down the vegan pile to the same amount of calories.
Replacement products bring down the comparison, but making stuff out of soy will always be more efficient than feeding soy to animals and then eating those. So with otherwise equal lifestyles a vegan will always produce less emissions.
As you’ve presented it, the vegan has poorer nutrition than the other person. We also need to consider the vitamin supplements to get amino acids we only get otherwise from meat.
Soy is a complete protein, meaning it has all essential amino acids. Seitan has 8 out of 9 essential amino acids, is made from wheat and has about the protein density of beef or chicken (~25% according to a quick search).
You get a ton of soy and wheat which would otherwise be feed to animals. Just make tofu and seitan.
However, you’re right, you need to supplement some things - at the very least B12. Which a non vegan diet mostly gets from fortified products, meaning its supplemented anyways.
How well do you digest grass?
Only fancy meat gets fed grass anymore
Very poorly which is why ruminant animals like sheep and cows have three or four stomachs - they need the extra digestive cavities filled with very interesting bacteria cultures to process all that tough cellulosic material.
However, people do eat grass, at least a seed, in the form of various cereal grains like wheat and barley and rice. Those are all grasses!
Fun fact of the day…
The figure may be wrong, but a quick search told me about 4% of cows in the US are gras-fed. They mostly eat grains, which you could eat too.
Sounds like an fairly unhealthy diet to have so much grain.
No food is “problem free” and, much like normal agriculture where different crops cause different problems, different meats (poultry, pig, cow) cause different problems and have different costs.
Are insects a valid protein source? Apparently yes! Am I willing to eat them? Maybe! I’ve never had the chance to try any, none of the markets I go to stock anything like that.
Ditching all meats for soy and other vegetal proteins? Doable, but more expensive than eating chicken or pig, in my case. Fully getting rid of eggs and milk is also problematic for me because they are even cheaper than the meat itself.
You know what would be really funny? If cattle ranchers were forced to come up with big diapers for all the cows, harvesting the methane and turning that into somewhat cheap extra gas for cooking.
I’m a part time vegan and plant protein is quite a bit cheaper. Tofu costs nothing from the Asian shop and it’s super versatile. It takes some time to learn how to cook.
Soy milk, beans, chickpeas and lentils are also very cheap.
It’s just the beyond burgers and stuff that are horrendously expensive.
There’s an order-of-magnitude difference here. The worse case production of crops for human consumption comes out ahead even compared to best case production of animal products
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm
In terms of cost:
It found that in high-income countries:
• Vegan diets were the most affordable and reduced food costs by up to one third.
• Vegetarian diets were a close second.
• Flexitarian diets with low amounts of meat and dairy reduced costs by 14%.
• By contrast, pescatarian diets increased costs by up to 2%.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-11-11-sustainable-eating-cheaper-and-healthier-oxford-study
In terms of biogas, here’s a video looking at hog farming and talks about the problems with biogas at this point in the video:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/WsUNylsiDH8?t=825
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Sincere question, is it difficult to create harvest methane from animals? Most livestock basically never sees the sun so it’s not like there’s an interminable area to harvest from, and stories of farmyard methane fires aren’t exactly uncommon so the concentration is there.
I thought the number was higher.
Every time I read about meat and greenhouse gases I feel the need to explain the natural carbon circle. A cow does not produce carbon. It takes carbon from plants and releases it to the atmosphere. Then plants retake that carbon.
Humans are adding carbon to the atmosphere by digging out stored carbon from the ground and bring it to the atmosphere.
So we have to fix the part where we bring additional carbon to the atmosphere. But yes, there are other environmental issues with cattle if you read the op’s article.
The Biogenic Carbon Cycle and Cattle: https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/biogenic-carbon-cycle-and-cattle
I feel the need to explain the natural carbon circle.
You know that the problem with ruminants is that they produce methane and not CO2 which is 25 times worse? A cow takes carbon from the ground and the bacteria creates a 25 times more potent GHG. But you are right that creating new fields and tiling the soil is a huge factor.
I feel that anyone who advocates to stop eating meat for methane reasons is a vegetarian in disguise who latched onto global climate change to push their own agenda, having failed to dissuade meat eaters on animal rights grounds. They are doing the fight against climate change a disservice by muddying the waters. If they were serious about methane specifically (which anyone concerned about GHG should be, to within (x*25)% of its contribution), they would be dedicating 10 times more of their time in researching some kind of pill to give the cows to stop them from making methane - a much more feasible outcome. But doing so does not synergize with their animal welfare goals.
I feel that anyone who advocates to stop eating meat for methane reasons is a vegetarian in disguise who latched onto global climate change to push their own agenda
funny, I feel that anyone who complains about being told eating beef is bad for the environment is just two kids in a raincoat. Good luck proving me wrong!
if you are not leading an advanced bio-chemstery research team you are not a real vegan
Good thing then that the argument I made is the exact opposite of that one!
“if you are not leading an advanced bio-chemstery research team, then what you really care about is the veganism and not climate change”
The other thing is that cattle needs much more space. From all the fields that we could use to grow food, a large part ends up as cattle fodder.
That’s about efficient use of land space, not related to GHG specifically other than tangentially regarding deforestation. Also elsewhere in this thread cattle was accused of being inefficient precisely because they sit in warehouses and eat cereals instead of grass. If cattle can roam pastures and eat grass, that’s an equivalent amount of cereals that did not need to be grown, farm machinery that did not need to run (on fossil fuels) to grow them, and a good amount of land possibly too hilly and rugged for any use otherwise put to productive human use through grazing.
Too bad that’s not how it works. Because beef is profitable, ranchers have all the incentive slashing and burning rainforest to make more money.
You subsidize this process every time you spend money on beef.
Dedicating time researching a magic pill isn’t actually solving the problem today, while stopping animal consumption does. People who really only care about the climate and not the animals should go vegan today and then dedicate their time researching a pill, such that afterwards they can resume consuming animal products.
Full disclosure: I care about the animals and the climate. Nevertheless I belief there are no gaps in my logic.
For sure, if you care about climate change you can reduce your personal GHG emissions right now by going vegan! But how are you going to dedicate the rest of your time? I fear that someone to whom veganism is more important would never spend any time researching such a pill. They would rather spend the next 100 years arguing with the 90% of the population who have already heard the ethical argument for veganism but were not convinced by it. The existence of a pill would remove the only leverage they have left - the threat of literal burnination. If anything, vegans have an incentive to sabotage any mitigation research efforts if possible (for example by lobbying).
I don’t know where you are getting these stereotypes, but there are nearly a 100 million vegans nowadays and they come in all shapes and sizes.
I’m personally connected to a group of vegan activists here in Amsterdam and they are very hard to stereotype. One is in fact a researcher who is currently working on organs on chips so as to provide an alternative to animal studies, another regularly goes undercover to film what goes on within factory farms and slaughterhouses, yet another is a columnist for one of our well known newspapers and often writes about the situation with animals, we’ve got a politician who is in fact lobbying for cutting meat subsidies (good friend of mine), we’ve got a neuroscientist, another is working in the field of artificial intelligence (myself), we’ve got a lawyer who works with a group of animal rights lawyers, etc. Yes, there are some that aren’t too smart as well and will just spent their time arguing with people, but to think that vegans in general are too dumb to understand that arguing is not the only and not always the most effective way to affect change just goes to show that you know very little about vegans in general.
Look, veganism just makes logical sense from an ethical (if you care about animals) and climate perspective. That’s it. People of all ages are coming to this conclusion. How they spent the rest of their time is as diverse as humanity is. Some will not shut up about it, others won’t tell a soul and just move on with the rest of their lives (quite a few actually, but they are always overlooked by the stereotypers for obvious reasons).
Dedicating time researching a magic pill isn’t actually solving the problem today
Dedicating time researching magic pills solves all kinds of problems. Saved several billion lives just a couple of years ago, did you forget?
Dude, read my comment in full. Emphasis on the word today. I am not saying researching pills is pointless. I am saying that if you really care about the climate, you should refrain from animal consumption until that magic pill has been invented that makes animal consumption okay again in terms of the climate.
Never mind the fact cows release methane which is 25 times more warming than CO².
I’m not really sure the point your trying to make here.
Ok, but you can not eat beef and still not be a vegetarian
Eh, cows are the biggest contributor but all ruminants are applicable as another poster highlighted.
Also the study does include fish eaters too, as a separate dietary category.
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One great option instead of going cold turkey is just to drastically reduce your meat intake. Eating red meat from cows and white meat for pigs also has a disproportionately large environmental footprint compared to say chickens or turkey. Chickens and turkeys are also fairly stupid and undeveloped from me consciousness perspective if that is your reasoning for going vegan, so one could argue that it is objectively less bad to eat a stupid bird/decendant from a dinosaur (they had their day) Rather than our mammalian cousins who may actually deserve to roam the earth unfettered aside from the occasional lion or hyena attack.
I digress.
That being said, humans have evolved over this millennia to occasionally or more often feed on the flesh of air vegetarian cousins. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, as many species that have existed and exist today are in fact carnivorous. It is of course the rapacious nature of mankind and its insatiable appetite for consuming as many resources possible that is the biggest problem, aside from our over abundant numbers that are largely responsible for wholesale destruction of the natural environment on our planet.
I have opted to reduce my meat intake by about 75% or so and to limit my red meat intake and mostly eat chicken and eggs which are interestingly don’t directly cause the death of the chicken. You could opt to follow this strategy to help mitigate your environmental impact, or you can take it a step further and support your local small family farm by doing a direct purchase of meat from your local farmer of choice. That way you can have your meat pie and eat it too by subsidizing local Farmers over the giant agribusinesses that are really responsible for fucking over our planet.
If you have read this far thank you very much, I appreciate your interest in the subject. I grew up on a small family farm where we raised approximately 60 sheep every year and even though it was very sad to have them slaughtered, they were all grass-fed locally raised animals that never saw anything close to a feedlot. Well killing animals is never pretty, killing has been a core part of humanity since its inception including our ancestors like the chimpanzee.
One other thing, vegan meat substitute like impossible Burger is actually a really good option for burgers. Almost nobody in my family and friends who I’ve had tried them can even tell that they aren’t really meat.
That being said, humans have evolved over this millennia to occasionally or more often feed on the flesh of air vegetarian cousins. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, as many species that have existed and exist today are in fact carnivorous. Well killing animals is never pretty, killing has been a core part of humanity since its inception including our ancestors like the chimpanzee.
These are appeal to nature fallacies. Whether something is good or bad has nothing to do with what other species do, what happens in nature and what we’ve done in the past. The choice has to be made today in 2023 within your context (income, society, social circles, location, education level, etc.).
There is a huge difference between a Maasai tribe member in northern Kenia killing a cow for his family and a German dentist going to the supermarket and choosing to buy a killed cow instead of one of the other gazillion healthy, affordable, plant based options he has available to him at the store.
Good that you’ve reduced your intake by 75%, but how do you justify that 25% in your context?
A cow also produces a lot of methane, a much worse greenhouse gas.
Besides, the problem isn’t the grass from cows grazing, it’s the rainforests that go down all around the world to convert to farmland to produce animal feed.
It’s much more efficient to use that farmland to feed humans than to feed cows and then feed humans (1kg of meat needs 25kg of feed)
Disclaimer - I’m not vegan but I try to reduce my meat consumption overall, especially red meats.
Methane is broken down within 10 years which is pretty short. Yes, the other environmental issues are real. BTW, I am eating less and less meat. I just see a lot of false assumptions regarding carbon in the atmosphere.
This sounds like a balance. Is that balance still intact? Doesn’t the combined effect of unprecedented scale of animal consumption and existing global warming necessitate a compensatory and proportional reduction of GHG?
I like eating meat, but I feel like this is not the complete picture.
Yeah, the main focus of greenhouse gasses in the literature is from land use. The amount of land used for rumanents and their feedstock could plant forests the world over. And don’t get me started, noone is farming on the sides of mountains
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It’s also much tastier.
There are plenty of things that create more greenhouse gases that should be more thoroughly regulated than eating meat.
There are also plenty of ways to improve the carbon foot print of cows (the worst offenders), like feeding them seaweed: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249053
I’m looking forward to cultured meat becoming cheap and available. Then we can haz peopleburgers!
I’m all for lab grown meat if it can taste even 90% the same as real meat and have the same benefits.
Would you be good with Bezos saying
I’m all in for robots if they work as fast as humans and are cheaper than the slave wage I pay them now
Yes. I’m all for automation of menial jobs.
But it is cheaper to hire slaves and let them piss in bottles, so you have to accept that as long as robots are not cheaper and faster. As long as robots are not 90% as fast and cheap as humans.
My only problem with lab grown meat, is what if it actually ends up using more resources and energy then raising a cow or chicken?
What happens if lab grown meat is so successful that say chickens or cows go extinct? That’s an interesting idea. I feel like that could be a Black mirror episode.
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That is fun!
Not it doesn’t, and that was basically industry propaganda: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/13/seaweed-cow-feed-trial-fails-methane-reduction-australia
Did you read the article you posted?
"Australian trial of seaweed cow feed fails to achieve hoped-for methane cuts
Longest trial so far of supplement derived from red seaweed produced 28% less of the greenhouse gas – a much smaller reduction than in previous studies."
So, not as much as the 97% in the shorter trials, but 28% is certainly statistically significant, and doesn’t really fall under the category of “industry propaganda.” They also used less seaweed for this trial and used a breed not tested before, along with an open air sampling process, while other trials had been indoor, sealed environments. Even if other breeds had the same weight gain issue (no evidence of that so far) and needed to wait longer until slaughter it’s still a 19% reduction.
Land use is the main contributor. The OP article is knot great. Seaweed only helps with methane. Still, good.
It’s not because of meat it’s because of unsustainable farming practices being used on a massive scale. Implement some fucking laws about it and maybe we wouldn’t have this problem
Unfortunately, more sustainable (e.g. organic) farming practices generally do not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions [1]. The main issue is that these methods reduce crop yields and thus have a higher land use.
[1] L. Smith et al. “The greenhouse gas impacts of converting food production in England and Wales to organic methods”
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