That is a lie.
Eating the rich is by far the most eco-friendly approach as it can dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Jeff bezos probably tastes like drywall and hooker spit.
Compost them first then you can eat the rich while also being vegan = Billions and billions of carbons.
I vehemently disagree with this statement.
We need to compost the rich and use that as a soil amendment to grow heirloom vegetables.
One Elon musk can feed a family for a year.
One farm fertilized with musk mulch can feed a city block!
This crucially important caveat they snuck in there:
"Prof Scarborough said: “Cherry-picking data on high-impact, plant-based food or low-impact meat can obscure the clear relationship between animal-based foods and the environment."
...which is an interesting way of saying that lines get blurry depending on the type of meat diet people had and/or the quantity vs the type of plant-based diet people had.
Takeaway from the article shouldn't be meat=bad and vegan=good - the takeaway should be that meat can be an environmentally responsible part of a reasonable diet if done right and that it's also possible for vegan diets to be more environmentally irresponsible.
That’s both absolutely true and a massive distraction from the point. An environmentally friendly diet that includes meat is going to involve sustainable hunting not factory farming. In comparison an environmentally friendly vegan diet is staples of meat replacements and not trying to get fancy with it. It’s shit like beans instead of meat, tofu and tempeh when you feel fancy. It means rejecting substitutes that are too environmentally costly such as agave nectar as a sweetener (you should probably use beet or cane based sweetener instead).
So in short eat vegan like a poor vegan not like a rich person who thinks veganism is trendy
Yes, I think it’s vital to avoid thinking in absolutes over carbon footprints if we are to make real progress. We can argue endlessly over the “necessity” of consuming meat, but that becomes a distraction. Many things are not “necessary”, but most people are not realistically going to live in caves wearing carbon neutral hair shirts.
We need to continue increasing transparency on the impact of different animal products, so consumers can make informed choices. While also accepting they may not always be perfect.
A couple of people have spoken to me before about wanting to cut back on, or completely cut meat from their diets, but didn't know where to start. If anyone reading this feels the same way, here's some fairly basic recipies that I usually recommend (Bosh's tofu curry is straight up one of the best currys i've ever had - even my non-vegan family members love it)
Written:
Videos:
Tofu is also super versatile and is pretty climate-friendly. there's a bazillion different ways to do tofu, but simply seasoning and pan frying some extra/super firm tofu (like you do with chicken) with some peppers and onions, for fajitas, is an easy way to introduce yourself. Here's a little guide for tofu newbies: A Guide to Cooking Tofu for Beginners - The Kitchn. If you wanna level up your tofu game with some marinades here's six.
Lentils and beans are also super planet friendly, super cheap, and super versatile! You'll be able to find recipies all over that are based around lentils and beans so feel free to do a quick internet search.
Sorry for the huge, intimidating wall of text! I do hope someone interested in cutting back on meat found this useful though :)
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In this thread: Shit loads of people who will say they care about the climate crisis on one day, then say they don't care about the 18.5% of global carbon emissions that the meat industry causes the next day because they can't get over the decade worth of anti-veganism jokes and memes that they've constantly repeated uncritically.
Individual habits MUST be changed to solve this part of the problem, there is literally no way around that. Getting triggered and writing screeds because you've spent decades getting caught up in hate over food choices won't stop the planet burning.
It's insane how hard the cognitive dissonance hits. Everyone is trying to find excuses to justify their choices
OK, but what if instead of going vegan, I just don't have kids. Because adding more people to the world also creates more greenhouse gasses.
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).
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.
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?
Well that's no surprise. Raising animals for meat is horribly inefficient compared to plants.
Haven't we known this for a long time? With good peer reviewed studies?
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?
And the type of meat changes the math significantly. Beef is notoriously inefficient and produces an insane amount of GHG emissions compared to more efficient meats like chicken, pork, and farmed fish.
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.
It amazes me how people can wail about the record breaking heat on one hand and the effects of climate change, and sit in these comments and rationalize that eating meat isn't contributing. Of course it is.
Going vegan was the best decision I ever made for myself.
IMO people should've dialed down their meat consume for years, everybody knows what it's doing. I'm not a vegetarian by any means (I love many veggy recipes though & I adore good (!) tofu), we (my family) are getting meat from organic farms or from hunters for years, that's more expensive but 2 times a week is absolutely sufficient. Same price as before, roughly. Even my meat devouring daughter thinks like that, but she gets real cranky after 5 days of lentils, bulgur wheat and paprika ;)
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
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.
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.
Better title "Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than not eating meat".
No, the title is correct as far as I can tell from quickly skimming the actual Nature article.
Unrelated rant - I hate the fact independent.co.uk hyperlinks the word 'study' which just searches it's own site for the fucking word 'study' rather than linking to the actual source data. Fucking shitstain practices.
I found the original article by plugging the independent article into ground.news. Fucking love that website.
Edit: what's more is that it's eating more than 100g of meat per day is 4 times more GHG than eating vegan. Eating <50g per day is about 2 times more than veganism.
Eating meat is bad, but this won’t be solved by individual action. Putting a cost on every ton of beef, plastic, and carbon created would create market conditions that would reduce the production of these things and hence the consumption
It's both.
Enough people need to reduce meat consumption and realize there are alternatives (and make it interesting to innovate alternatives for meat – just look at the explosion of alternatives over the last five years). They also contribute to creating awareness around this subject, influencing others to change or at least consider changing their behaviour.
Because in the end you need enough support to enact changes such as a meat tax. This has been tried in the Netherlands, but there still isn't sufficient support to introduce this.
Nah Corporations and industries creates 1000x more greenhouse gases than meat and agriculture.
It's not just the CO2. It's also the water consumption. Wait another 10 years and the water might be the bigger problem.
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