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Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than being vegan, landmark study finds (www.independent.co.uk)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Aaaaand we're getting into the US defaultism again

[+] [email protected] -14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Damn an extortionate amount of energy, resources, and freshwater? Good thing all those cows and chickens don't need any of those to put them through an entire life cycle before we eat them.