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
I don’t think it’s worth fighting the meat industry when the other big Corp companies are harming the ecosystem far heavier. The Argicultural industry is 4th largest, so I think main efforts should be regulating big power, manufactoring sector or the oil sector honestly.
41% of the land in the US is used for meat production, and 1/3rd globally. The Amazon rainforest is being slashed and burned for cattle farming. Animal agriculture means habitat destruction and is a large part of why 21 species were declared extinct in the US this past year. We can and must fight them both.
If you want to hit climate targets, it’s extremely important
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
(emphasis mine)
you misunderstand, what I’m saying is I think that it’s a wasted effort to split your concentration the way it is being done, the agricultural industry is going to be one of the most resistant changes out there, the other Industries such as manufacturing and oil, you have your lesser groups that are not going to be impacted so it’s going to be fairly easy to gain support for those groups, however with the agriculture industry there is a vast more people that are going to be out to disregard the entire study because they won’t want to change their lifestyle. You can have all the statistics in the world however at the end of the day those deciding actors are generally decided by the general public who isn’t going to bother looking at complicated statistics. So therefore it would be a better move to go towards the path of least resistance which is going to be the other top emitters. My opinion is that if reducing the top three emitters somehow makes it so you don’t hit your climate goal, the climate goal isn’t going to be feasible to hit in the first place.
This isn’t me saying that it shouldn’t happen I’m just saying that the changes posted won’t happen all at once and likely won’t happen at all if too many Focus points are attempted at once.
I don’t think the goal is feasible, but I would love to be proven wrong
There already is momentum in the right direction in many countries such as Germany. I don’t think it’s a hopeless fight at all
In 2011, Germans ate 138 pounds of meat each year. Today, it’s 121 pounds — a 12.3 percent decline. And much of that decline took place in the last few years, a time period when grocery sales of plant-based food nearly doubled.
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
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.
I tell people to try going without beef temporarily. What often happens is in doing so they learn to cook a bit and cut it out (maybe not fully but mostly) long term. Then they go after pork, chicken, etc. You’re right that beef is the worst offender, but we want to be careful not to overemphasise and make it seem like its the only offender. I think a lot of it is setting a tone. I’m veg not vegan but pick vegan options when available. I think the more we can normalise ‘eat less meat’ the better as that’s pretty hard to argue with
I mean, if we’re looking at the graphs, beef really is the only “offender” (if you can call it that) and only in the current consumed amounts. If people ate a lot more chicken and less beef, the GHG effect from animals would be lower than the same number 500 years ago due to animal population culling and advancements in agricultural methane reduction.
At that point, the term “negligible effect” becomes unreasonably harsh. Even with the worst claims against the effect of livestock on the environment (many of which we might not see eye to eye on), it’s simply objectively not an environmental issue if people are eating chicken and some pork as their staple proteins. You can call it an animal rights issue if you want. Considering chicken is almost objectively a correct and healthy food to eat, two thirds of the diet triforce (health, environment, animal rights) become non-issues.
And the cool thing, even if I disagree with the outcomes it’s healthier for us to eat a bit less red meat as long as our meat protein intake stays reasonable from white meat and seafood.
What’s the impact, if any, of any of these crops/livestock in non-water-short areas? Do other areas thousands of miles away cannibalize excess water if available to prevent draught, or are these numbers sometimes meaningless in the medium-term?
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.
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.
Coffee and chocolate are not substitutes for animal meat though. If you look at the chart and compare animal proteins to substitutes like tofu, beans, peas, and nuts the plant based options win every time.
Coffee and chocolate are not substitutes for animal meat though. If you look at the chart and compare animal proteins to substitutes like tofu, beans, peas, and nuts the plant based options win every time.
You came so close to the answer, and then fell away. Factory farming as a process is what jacks up those numbers dramatically, not the thing that’s being farmed. A few large corporations have seized the cattle and chicken industries, so their numbers would be far lower if regulations reversed that horrific trend (with a few caveats regarding methane in cattle, but I’m trying to stick to the topic). Remember how I mentioned “leaves out a lot of important variables”? That’s another of them. Nobody cares that Tyson collects a feed subsidy that’s paid for by small-scale farmers, or that small-scale farmers’ animal products are 100% environmentally sustainable in most countries. There’s nothing inherent about animal agriculture that means it NEEDS to be factory-farmed, or that we need to penalize small farmers so we can kick money over to Purdue.
But even in the current graph, poultry, pork, and seafood are in the same realm as most crops and are dramatically more usable calories. Several things that are not on the chart (wild-caught seafood, animals raised with certain processes, the influence of the symbiotic relationship between animals and crops) put most animals comfortably in with plants.
As for beef, that would deserve it’s own entire conversation because those numbers misrepresent a lot of the reality. But that’s another topic and I’m starting to tire of having 10+ people reply to me every hour on this topic, most of whom are angry at or belittling me (not you, just in general)
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.
Why not? If the right eco answer is to eat more of a certain kind of meat instead of quitting meat,
First of all that’s not likely correct info. I can’t see the uncited chart you posted but it certainly sounds untrustworthy. I’ve seen several charts in documentaries and research papers and they generally show roughly the same pattern, comparable to this chart.
But let’s say someone managed to convincingly cherry-pick some corner-case legumes that are bizarre outliers to the overall pattern. Maybe there are some rare fruits that get shipped all over the world. It certainly does not make sense to divide, disempower, and diffuse the vegan movement in order to make exotic fruit/veg X the enemy of climate action in favor of preserving chicken factory-farming. Not a fan of Ronald Regan but there is a useful quote by him:
“if you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
IOW, you’ve added counter-productive complexity to the equation at the cost of neutering an otherwise strong movement – or in the very least failed to exploit an important asset we need for climate action. This is not an environmental activist move. It’s the move of a falsely positioned meat-eating climate denier strategically posturing.
The wise move is to consider action timing more tactfully. That is, push the simple vegan narrative for all it’s worth to shrink the whole livestock industry (extra emphasis on beef is fine but beyond that complexity works against you). No meat would be entirely eliminated of course (extinction mitigation is part of the cause anyway), but when a certain amount of progress is made only then does it make sense to go on the attack on whatever veg can really be justified as a worthy new top offender. The optimum tactful sequence of attack is not the order that appears on whatever chart you found.
The somewhat simplified take is: “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, then beat ’em”. Vegans are united and it’s foolish to disrupt that at this stage.
And don’t neglect the disease factor. Recent research shows that stressed animals (both human and non-human) have weakened immune systems. And as you might expect farmed animals are stressed in high numbers. This has been linked to diseases. Diseases in non-human animals sometimes jumps to humans. There would be substantial overlap between climate activists and those valuing safety from pandemics. And indeed, that same political party in the US who fought masks and vaccines happens to be the same group of people who deny climate change.
And don’t neglect the disease factor. Recent research shows that stressed animals (both human and non-human) have weakened immune systems. And as you might expect farmed animals are stressed in high numbers
Good news. Much of the livestock industry is incredibly incentivized to keep livestock stress levels down because it is the cheapest way to include meat quality and (as you say) keep disease down.
Diseases in non-human animals sometimes jumps to humans. There would be substantial overlap between climate activists and those valuing safety from pandemics
Couldn’t agree more. Nobody with a brain is trying to deregulate the agricultural industry.
First of all that’s not likely correct info. I can’t see the uncited chart you posted but it certainly sounds untrustworthy
Because its results disagree with your opinion? I’m not sure what constructive can come in any discussion after a line like that.
I’ve seen several charts in documentaries and research papers and they generally show roughly the same pattern, comparable to this chart.
So evidence that concludes anything other than “everyone has to stop eating meat now” is immediately untrustworthy. Understood.
But let’s say someone managed to convincingly cherry-pick some corner-case legumes that are bizarre outliers to the overall pattern
Let’s say someone made the brash presupposition that the only way to show eating meat isn’t destroying the environment is cherry-picking corner cases.
Not a fan of Ronald Regan but there is a useful quote by him:
“if you’re explaining, you’re losing.”
IOW, you’ve added counter-productive complexity to the equation
I agree with your statement about as much as I agree with Ronald Reagan. Like many Republicans, he was a fan of the tactic of oversimplifying an issue until it was easy enough to pretend to fix it with a trivial solution. Economy? Trickle-down! Anything more than saying “trickle-down” is adding counter-productive completixy to the equation.
The problem here, specifically, is that there are more farmers in the US than vegans in the US. You might have a point in that many farmers are already working towards improving the environment and most vegans tend to have such a shallow view of the issue that you need to reconcile veganism with the environment to get them to help the environment. But in the process you’re losing environmentally conscious educated people who are in a position to take action, which most vegans are not.
This is not an environmental activist move. It’s the move of a falsely positioned meat-eating climate denier strategically posturing.
And here is the problem. You just did it. You just told me I’m not allwoed to be an environmental activist because I support ethical meat-eating. Another guy (well I assume it’s someone else) was attacking UC Davis, a reputable college.
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.
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.
who tf is eating beef in India?
Not nearly as many people as in the US. But between ranching and leaving them in the wild, about 1/3 of all cows in the world are in India. As you might have caught, most of the cows in India are actually used for milk… which is a real problem because the lower tech means they get dramatically less milk per cow than we get in the US. As in, 1/4 as much.
The environmental impact of the Indian cow population is non-trivial, both because of how many cows are not used for food and how inefficient their food processes are with cows. In comparison, the environmental impact of the US cow population is arguably quite trivial. Ditto with the other large beef/milk consumers of the western world like Spain.
Also, in general, eating no or less meat and dairy can be a healthier diet https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/6nh87mb/vegans-are-they-right
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.
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.
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’m just just curious, what do you think Elon Musk(or whoever is the richest person in the world at this point) could do to save the whole world?
Socialism but with more steps, more then likely.
And itd still be a drop in the bucket compared to government spending.
Also,not everything can be solved by throwing money at it
Isn’t it impossible for a Capitalist to individually transition to Socialism, no matter how powerful, unless they had an economic monopoly? They could transition their own businesses to worker self-management and ownership, but that’s it.
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.
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.
it would be better for the environment and animal welfare of it diminished the effects of the industry. it doesn’t. production continues to grow year over year.
Production keeps growing because there is still a demand for meat. The demand for meat isn’t coming from vegans btw. ie more vegans less demand, less climate impact.
even with more vegans, we have seen production increase. it’s not as simple as you make it sound.
It is
Massively agree, it’s made me get into food science and it’s just so cool
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.
yeah. keep shoving that meat into your mouth and take zero responsibility.
Ok…Damn, nothing happened. But if anybody asks, I’m telling them you gave permission.
Zero responsibility for doing my research and coming up to a different conclusion than you? Oh hell no. I take 100% responsibility for it. I live it. I breathe it. I know more about the environmental impact of meat than 9 out of every 10 vegans I end up dealing with on the internet.
The 10th is either not a jerk to me, or is clearly a zealot. I allow for zealotry (not happily). I’m not a fan of willful ignorance.
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.
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”
Ok I’ll humour you: what are vegans wrong about?
Land usage?
water usage?
Fertiliser usage?
That animal farms are hubs of disease outbreaks?
Thermodynamics?
Where the Amazon is going?
That killing/branding/doing surgery/forced impregnation etc when you don’t have to is wrong?
My one rule on this topic is never getting into a gishgallop. Vegan advocates love to play the roulette of swapping topics every time they lose ground on one, until they manage to win the argument having lost every piece of it by just tiring the other side out. You pick one of those topics, and I will field that topic only with you. It might surprise you, I will agree with you on some of them (like saving the Amazon).
But if you make me choose, I will choose land use because it’s a slam-dunk. 2/3 of agriculture uses marginal land that cannot (and I believe should not) be made arable. If resources were spent changing that instead of vegans fighting with farmers, that number could approach 100%. There’s important asterisks about that (both crops and livestock become more environmentally friendly if done close to each other due to their symbiotic relationship) that need to be kept up. But reducing livestock population directly WRT marginal land is wasteful.
If you want to discuss this you’re going to have to get more specific. What agriculture, where in the world, are feedlots used etc You’re obviously excluding aquaculture, and non grazing animals like pigs, I suspect you’re also excluding egg production since that is almost monolithically cage farming.
Like you can’t really say “oh these pigs are on non arable land” if that merely refers to their physical location and not where their food is grown.
So could you please drill down a bit? what specifically are you referencing?
If you want to discuss this you’re going to have to get more specific
Which part of this? Marginal land? That’s a very specific topic. Why should we bring in 100 different variables unless you can show those variables matter to marginal land.
Or are you sayign there’s some prima facie point I’m missing where “nothing but wild animals on marginal land” will produce more sustainable food than “cattle on marginal land”?
Or are you just trying to get me to provide enough information to overspecialize my rebuttal so that your side need only say “ok, everything but that”?
Relax I want to talk this out.
I just need to know where you’re pulling that from and how it was calculated. Otherwise we’re just going “tis!” “tisn’t!” till one of us gets bored.
Like are you referring to cattle farming in Botswana? global stats? all animal ag including fishing in Japan?
I can’t discuss a magic number, I have to know how it was derived and under what assumptions. Then we can examine the assumptions and methods of derivation and determine whether or not we agree it to be true and why or why not.
My argument on marginal land is prima facie so far. I picked it because it seems obviously true on the surface, so I can let you provide your points to try to blow it up. I’m referring to the land use problem, which is the often-cited vegan argument that livestock land could be instead used as forests or croplands to sequester carbon.
If you want to contest the 2/3 marginal land number, I’ll cite a few references, but it seems an odd number to consider “magic”
He chose gymnastics he just doesn’t realise it lmao
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:
bad for climate change? good! i hate climate change!
well bad in the way that it makes climate change worse… not that it’s detrimental to entity of climate change…
oh bother! i was thinking it was finally some good news.
I think the comment was a joke lol
So is “Return To Office” but the U.S. government hasn’t made a peep about that.
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.
Very true but these are separate things and both can be done.
Or convince 2-3 people to give up meat. If they each convince 2-3 people who each convince 2-3 people who… ok, I’ll stop…. But the point stands. They don’t even need to stop, just reduce their meat consumption.
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!
make your own meat then
