this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Eating meat and dairy is not sustainable in terms of resources and greenhouse gases, and non-vegan environmentalists are clowns on the level of people flying private jets to climate conferences.
I mostly agree with you, with the caveat that industrial meat and dairy is not sustainable. Communal farms could be.
I saw it somewhere, and now I use it all the time. If you need an example of why capitalism is destined to fail, just look at the cheese caves. We have to bury cheese like nuclear waste just to be able to keep its market value up to a level that makes it worth producing.
This so much this. A mostly vegetarian lifestyle with the occasional meat IS sustainable. People forget that before industrialization, we ate meat like once every one or two weeks. You could count the number of times we ate meat in a month on one han
this argument that non industrial cattle is sustainable is totally moot. please check the literature available.
I apologize, but I'm struggling to catch your meaning.
it's not because a product is not made in a industrial fashion that it's de facto good, sustainable or eco friendly. it's like calling natural stuff better than chemical stuff. it's just a common bias.
you can't get meat without giving a lot of proteins to an animal. at the end if you end up eating this protein instead of giving it to the animal to grow tissue you always will win in efficiency.
some will argue that we can't eat grass. that's right we can't. but with all things considered if we eat proteins from plants we can digest, the balance will always be positive, regarding CO2 emissions, natural ressources being wasted like soil and water, and naturally the cruelty.
some will argue that prairies are stocking CO2. yes they are, but the cattle growing on them will produce more.
some will argue that eating soy will give you boobs. I'm sorry but it won't. too bad if it's boobs you were looking for.
etc etc. the scientific literature is quite explicit on this matter. all that I know is that if we decided to switch to a total plant based alimentation right now, we would need a period of transition were cattle or fishing will still be needed in some specific countries with specific ecosystem.
but most people don't want to eat what we feed to livestock. and a lot of what we do feed to livestock is actually parts of plants that we have already taken what we want from. another significant part of livestock food is just grazed grass, which takes almost no effort on our part and which we can't eat anyway.
Still not worth it regarding the outcome if not for the dollar generated for the few.
We need to stop destroying our resources.
Please go read some papers on the subject.
it's cute you think i haven't. i have some real problems with poore-nemecek 2018, and i will flat-out dismiss any paper based on it. i was recently linked to one that came out same year but whose author i cannot remember that dealt with LCAs that also had terrible methodology. if those two papers are representative at all of the state of the current research into agricultural ecology, the field is a fucking disgrace to the academy. and, unfortunately, many of the papers that have come out in the last 5 years are based on poore-nemecek, and should be rigorously evaluated.
but since you seem like you have read some papers on the subject, do you have any to suggest?
edit:
minor typo AND i looked up the paper: Heller, MC (2018)
I am cute and hope that you feel so too.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11382?origin=ppub
https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000010
https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
IPCC reports are on their website.
the owid links are heavily dependent on poore-nemecek and i'm not going to bother trying to separate the wheat from the chaff there. i don't know if i've seen cassidy2013 or Erb 2016, but i will certainly be digging into them and their methodology. i am very concerned about the fact that poore-nemecek shows up in the references for Eisen 2022. if you've read these can you explain the methodology? if not, can i task you with actually reading eisen et al (and its references) so you can explain its methodology while i read the other two?
Oh no this would be a waste of your time Iβm afraid Iβm not a researcher in this field but follow the work of some. Unfortunately they are not active around here so I canβt even tag them.
You seems pretty articulate tho. Can I ask for your credentials?
Well the main flaw in your reasoning is thinking that it's an issue addressed at the individual level rather than a greater systemic issue that cannot be addressed by the choice of individuals. And on top of that you colpevolise would-be allies whose life you don't know, ironically playing right into oil tycoons and meat industry's hands
It has to be both. Our World in Data puts it one way:
Or to cut through the flowery language - farms need to stop producing meat, and people need to stop eating it.
And that's cool and all but ain't no way you will convince everyone to quit eating meat. Especially given that it's not always a matter of choosing. Even then acting morally superior ain't helping.
It's the same discussion with cars, people will do whatever is most convenient and available, if you don't want people to use cars you don't go around telling tjem not to use it, you act on the city's design and public transport to make it so it is convenient to use the alternatives and then you start banning cars from city centers, then move towards the periphery, etc etc. All these are actions taken at the source. Sure telling people to mot use cars as much, to carpool, etc will help a bit but it ain't gonna solve your issues chief.
Maybe we can't convince everyone to quit eating meat, but I would hope that we could appeal to self-described environmentalists, who have a stated interest in making sustainable changes.
That's the OP's point, after all. That the science unambiguously states that we need to stop eating meat if we care about meeting our climate goals. Any environmentalist who learns that this needs to happen and still chooses to eat meat is acting against their own ethics.
But you're still pushing the responsibility to individuals, which is literally an oil company tactic.
"You eat meat? Guess you aren't a real environmentalist after all!" Is not the way we'll get more people to quit eating meat. In fact you can't even know why they eat meat despite knowing it's bad for the environment. And it still won't address the problem.
This isn't a race to moral purity.
Ok but remember this part?