485
Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It
(sentientmedia.org)
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
485 points (85.1% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5369 readers
681 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Stop telling me what to do and get the corporations to oblige with laws. Oh wait! No one gives a shit because the corpos are running the world now? Oh no, guess i gotta eat shit to make up for their mistakes :(((
As someone who makes delicious plant based foods from inexpensive and available ingredients, I take a lot of issue with the idea that plant based food is "shit".
rite? I take pride in my vegan food, and my non-vegan friends and family always ask me to bring entrées, treats and baked goods whenever I visit.
I eat GOOD, and if you think the contrary about vegans as a whole then that's your own limited, small, sheltered little view.
Anything someone feels forced to eat against their will is "shit". You'd have every right to call meat shit if someone made it the only food available to you.
Who's being forced to eat something against their will? People should be able to make the choice to eat what they want based on all the information available. Unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation about animal agriculture so many people don't have all the info.
can we all start eating dog again?
If you want to. I'm not sure why you would. It doesn't taste that good, as most dog breeds were bred for work and not flavor.
Horse sausage is the way to go then.
I've never tried horse meat. I've heard bad things about it being incredibly muscly and gamey, as well as expensive. Are there any upsides for me to consider it?
I was half joking, but I had some by accident in France and it was very good as sausage. I've never had it in any other format.
Interesting! I recently had gator jerky I enjoyed. I'm not one of those "off-put" by what animal meat comes from. But I often want to know why I should try it. As you can see in my other replies, I'm a foodie and I like to truly understand what goes into the food I consume both literally and figuratively. To the extent I learned how to distill my own whiskey when I learned it was legal/decriminalized where I live.
but it's just not legal. how are you able to survive while laws and social norms stop you eating absolutely anything?
Yeah, vegetables and legumes and grains. Horrible, horrible. Woe is you.
🙄
No one is telling you what to do, but the studies are undeniable. Even if the oil industries weren't such a massive environmental disaster, that wouldn't change the wild levels of inefficiency and waste in animal agriculture. As a whole the meat industry is unsustainable, whataboutism doesnt change the facts.
The studies have studies and experts denying them.. The rebuttals are a gamut of:
...in some countries like India. Here in the US, the cattle industry is fairly efficient, in a large part because it is highly profitable to be efficient. In my area, cattle is largely locally fed. That local feed will just as largely end up in a bonfire if we decided to wipe out the cattle population, and there would be a large increase in synthetic fertilizers that are themselves terrible for the environment. If we decided to keep the cattle population without eating them, you might be surprised to note that it would be worse for the climate than eating the cattle we have.
If that were true, it would be dying instead of dramatically improving in both margins, efficiency, and climate footprint in most countries.
No. Whataboutism doesn't change the facts. On that, we can agree.
It's kinda wild to post "it's not that bad... studies" funded by corporate interests in /climate. It's always the same old denial lines served from the same ole' boiler plate. Do you also give BP the same benefit of the doubt too? Are the innovations of" clean coal" going to revive the industry so nothing has to change?
The wildly ineffecient ineffecient industry has long been supported by goverment subsides.
The obvious answer is to stop breeding them. Their numbers are this high because they are treated as a commodity.
Studies and experts funded by the livestock industry, yes. Why are the studies and experts always Mitloehner, I swear...
Who is telling you what to do?
We grow our own vegetables, raise our own meat, hunt, fish, forage, buy used everything with a few exceptions and we live on much less than most. Our house is appropriately sized but we drive a truck out of necessity. It's our one vehicle, 16 years old and works every day. We take so much shit over that damn truck from folks who "know better". How about we fuck up the trillion dollar capitalist corpos who rape and pillage the people, land and sea for God's Almighty Profits instead of judging our neighbors whom we don't even know many whom are struggling to even exist.
Stop absolving yourself of responsibility by claiming that the decisions you make are inconsequential. The reason things don't get better is because people don't make them better ffs.
What's your take on a meat eater with a net-zero or net-negative carbon footprint? The same? What about a vegan that has to drive to work and can't quite get their carbon footprint to zero? Which one is better, the climate-hurting vegan or the climate-helping non-vegan?
I would tell the meat eater that going vegan would further reduce their climate impact and the vegan that commuting less would further reduce their climate impact
So your take was to dodge the entire question. Ironically, I had a discussion about how I expected you to answer this question in another thread, and you did not disappoint.
Wouldn't both of those scenarios be better outcomes than a meat eater that doesn't care about reducing their carbon contributions at all? The vegan with a long commute is better than a meat eater with a long commute, ecologically. And if a meat eater can reduce their carbon in other ways, then that's certainly a better situation than if they didn't reduce it at all.
Personally, I still eat meat, but I try to reduce my beef consumption the most, since that's the biggest emitter.
Better outcomes in terms of what? If we only focus on the environment, then the only thing that matters is total environmental impact. While intelligently choosing your foods may reduce the environmental impact of your diet, naively reducing meat eating alone simply doesn't.
Disagreeing only slightly with Dr. Hannah Ritchie from OurWorldInData (steelmanning the less-meat side IMO), transport arguably counts for J>7% of the environmental impact of food, so eating locally-sourced chicken every day is clearly better than ordering out from the vegan joint every day, especially after accounting for the caloric quality.
I asked the previous commentor for takes on the specific scenario to start to depolarize her position. Many vegans here have this polar position, and won't stand beside me as an environmental advocate because I don't agree with them on quitting meat being a necessary or even good environmental decision. Challenging her with the decision of what's environmentally right and what's "morally right" (to her) is a form of deprogramming. It usually fails especially online, but I still do it.
You perhaps can see why it is important to help give and get context from people in that situation?
The strongest environmental advocates I know are small-town farmers in rural-but-liberal areas. But approximately zero of them are vegans. I still want them fighting for the environment.
EDIT: I saw your update. The irony is that your graph comes from the same article I was referring to myself. There is an argument in the vacuum if you focus on beef-herd and lamb only (but you have to understand those are world averages and the methane production from cattle in most countries is a lot lower than that number)... but I'd like to point out that 1kg of poultry is simply a superior food product to 1kg of rice. Eggs are arguably the perfect food for those not allergic to them (like me). Replacing many crops with egg-laying chickens is a no-brainer from that graph (and sorry, but you DO get some chicken meat in every egg coop if you're being efficient).
It’s not just about GHGs. It’s also habitat destruction, loss of biodiversity, manure runoff infecting nearby veggies, all the extra land dedicated to growing crops just for animal ag.
And there's answers to all the "it's about..."'s. Of the ones you listed, only the first two would even need answering since the last two are largely fabricated issues.
Last one is directly connected to the first two lol
Edit: Since the thread got locked I guess I'll have to dunk on the guy below me from here.
Damn, that's weird. Because this article shows the majority of US cropland is dedicated to growing food just for livestock. And before you bring up grazing land, that's separated out. There's even nice pictures if the words confuse you.
Feel free to source your claims at any time. But even if the 86% number is right, that's crazy that to make up the rest we need the majority of US cropland hu?
I brought fuckin' receipts boy.
I got to this position based on data (and morals). Feel free to present data at any time.
"lol".
Nobody is growing crops "for livestock". 86% of what they eat are inedible waste, and the other 14% are things they are being grown anyway. The most common two feed crops, corn and soy, are being grown for a different part of the crop to be used for industrial purposes. Yes, they feed a little edible corn to cows shortly before slaughter to maximize the return and quality of meat. Nobody is waiting in line for that corn because it's terrible and non-nutiritious calories for humans. If you suddenly passed a law that forced us to euthenize all the cows and threatened us with prison time if we ate meat, those same crops would be grown only to be destroyed in ways that are just as bad (or worse) for the environment as feeding to animals
Thank you for invalidating the first two arguments by tying them to a propagandist's fantasy. Nobody will ever change a zealous vegan's view, but anyone else that reads this will realize all the coercion to quit meat has nothing to do with valid environmental concerns.
Thank you for winning my argument for me.
being vegan doesn't make it better.
"ffs"
The article is right there explaining how it's better for the environment
it's full of insinuation and half truths and bad science and wishful thinking. it's a bedtime story.
No it's quite credible
saying it doesn't make it so
I've declared it
That's exactly the problem is they aren't on this crusade because it's the #1 cause. If they can tie their crusade to a bigger problem then it gains them more traction. Even though it's a drop in the bucket compared to corporate effects on the environment. the idea that it's anything but a power move to convert more people to their life choices is hilarious at best. Not to mention the ableist BS that it is to believe everyone can stop eating meat, but I'm not explaining that to the 20 internet doctors that will message me after this like last time I brought it up.