I’ve read in an Article that meat production causes a lot of co² emission. Now I was wondering if we stopped eating meat completely, would that be sufficient to get under the threshhold of emissions what the planet can process? What is that threshold? Where are we now? How much does meat add to this?
For the most part, not only does vegansim have the biggest positive impact on the environment that can be made with a personal choice, the animal products industries are like the third biggest contributor to climate change after energy (coal, oil, gas, etc) and manufacturing. Plus, as most farm land in the world is used for animal feed, it would free up land for reforestation.
P.s When talking about GHG emissions, it’s a really bad idea to use % of total emissions as an indicator of impact. Livestock produce plenty of methane, which is roughly 84 times more impactful than carbon dioxide on the short term (20ish years) but carbon dioxide is more impactful over the long term (centuries) as it does not break down as quickly.
When talking about GHG emissions, it’s a really bad idea to use % of total emissions as an indicator of impact.
we have a tool for mitigating your concern: we rate greenhouse gasses by their co2-equivalence. the co2e of methane is 28.
Avoiding one long flight probably saves more carbon than a year of switching from eating meat to eating vegan. Also as others pointed out, not having kids would be by far more impactful by default.
I already fly only if there’s no alternative, and usually once a year to see my family. I know a lot of people that basically also make one trip per year. For these people, going vegan would be much easier than further reducing flying.
I don’t like the anti-kids arguments. Even better for the environment than not having kids is suicide but no one goes around suggesting that. Having kids is a very personal choice and someone has to do it, or we’ll be in a very bad place soon.
(virtually) No one is suggesting suicide. The “kids argument” is just something to consider. It’s one of several reasons I chose not to. I find it highly dubious that one datapoint is going to tip someone over the edge that will later regret it.
Yes, flights are a huge deal. One really long flight (like to the other side of the planet) should still be less co2e pollution than a non-vegan diet for a year, but not by much.
No doubt that flying often is the biggest impact, but most people don’t fly often.
not only does vegansim have the biggest positive impact on the environment that can be made with a personal choice
there simply isn’t any reliable data to support this claim.
There is:
https://www.wri.org/insights/climate-impact-behavior-shifts
Other than going car free (not possible in many countries where roads are just not bikable or walkable) not flying (yeah, you probably shouldn’t and personally I rarely ever do) and switching your home to green energy (again, not really possible in some countries plus high up fron costs keep it impossible for many) the biggest impact is achieved through veganism.
Having fewer children is the biggest https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541
Yeah, I guess that makes sense even without needing a source
going car free …not flying … switching your home to green energy …veganism.
there are probably a thousand other things people could do. this study, for instance, didn’t account for the impact of sabotaging fossil fuel extraction, refinement, or transportation infrastructure. almost anyone can turn a valve. by limiting the scope of this study to consumer choices, they have chosen to artificially limit the possibilities.
That is illegal. while you can choose to do illegal things, it just makes you look like a troll to suggest it as a viable option.
there are still probably thousands of options besides the four proposed.
Wow you really want to justify eating meat.
this accusation of bad faith is, itself, bad faith
i don’t find this paper compelling evidence that being vegan has significant impact. it relies heavily on ivanova(2020), and additionally cites poore-nemecek(2018). ivanova, themselves, rely heavily on poore-nemecek for the data about food impacts.
so the question is: do you trust poore-nemecek 2018? i don’t. meta-analysis of LCA studies is bad science, and poore-nemecek not only designed a poor study, they didn’t bother acknowledging the problems their methods could incur.
Why don’t you bring a source to contradict?
This is absolutely not the only paper to support my claim
dismissing your source doesn’t require a contradictory study.
the rational thing to do, if there is insufficient evidence for a claim, is just to suspend judgement. it’s possible their conclusion is correct, but the evidence used to support it is insufficient.
it would free up land for reforestation.
there is no reason to believe the land would be reforested instead of being further developed.
Lol, do you realize how much land that is? We wouldn’t have the resources to develop it, plus most of it is remote.
Also, even if we do develop it, that is a completely different story than using it to feed animals to eat them. It produces a different value to society with different GHG amounts and kinds.
Not an answer, and I won’t get a lot of upvotes for saying this, but if your plan for saving the world is for people to change their behavior en masse, you’ve already lost. And we need population-level change in order to have a meaningful impact.
The way we get people off meat is by making the alternatives more (or equally) tasty, convenient, familiar, and affordable. The day we do that, the war is won. There will be some stragglers (of the “beef! murica!” variety) but not many.
We’ve made inroads. Indian food is delicious, way more popular in the West than when I was growing up, and vegetarian-inclined. Vegetarian burgers are more popular and varied than ever. New meat substitutes are being invented all the time. People are interested, but there’s not a well-lit path to vegetarianism for working-class folks just yet.
If you want to eat less meat, do it. But also, find some good meatless recipes and cook them for/with your friends. If they add those to their rotation and pass them along, that’s the kind of thing that can build toward change.
“Everyone will just X” when X individually makes obvious sense for most people.
For some, it’s a matter of cost. The cheaper option tends to get a lot of adopters. Making the better option cost less is sometimes a matter of engineering and innovation improving the cost of the better option. Or sometimes it’s making the worse option cost more, sometimes directly through taxation or indirectly through regulations. Electric cars are pretty much on a self sustaining path at this point, where the economics of electric cars can be a much better financial decision for themselves personally, compared to similar ICE vehicles.
For others, it’s a matter of cultural influence, where trends in adoption just make things different. Tobacco use, especially actual smoking, is way down. Drinking alcohol is down, too. In my lifetime, helmet use for bicyclists and skiers is way up. These broad societal preferential shifts can happen without necessarily having big mandates from government.
And even if nudged somewhere by temporary government policy or price, sometimes people stick with that option long term if that’s what they learn to prefer. Seat belts kinda went this way, where seat belt usage rates went way up between 1980 and 2010, so that even after federal regulations were struck down by the courts and state level enforcement dwindled in the past decade, everyone still wears seat belts (including when visiting places where they’re not required).
And of course, the big influential force for changing behavior is government policy. As a society, we’ve pretty seamlessly moved off of things that were banned (leaded fuel, CFCs), even if the transition took a few decades (lead pipes, lead paint), or quickly adopted things that were mandatory (child car seats, bike helmets).
Emissions from food production is one of those things that can shift a bit from all of these factors. We’ve shifted away from beef towards chicken in the last few decades, and that alone has made a difference in greenhouse emissions. We might see more shifting down that line, just culturally. Or we might see some economic nudges from the fact that beef and dairy production are so costly for reasons correlated to their environmental impact.
But ultimately, meat doesn’t contribute nearly as much as driving does, for the typical American household. The real impact comes from how we design our cities, not on how we eat.
Wasn’t there this product (cfc i guess )they put in fridges that caused harm to the ozon layer. And every fridge producer just stopped using it after we found out its really not good? to be fair its not common to happen but it proves its also not impossible that “everyone just…” I think if there’s an easy solution, it is poasible.
That was done by multiple governments banning CFCs, which is the opposite of “everyone just.” The point isn’t that better things are impossible — a better world is absolutely possible. The point is there has to be real action to make it better, and that action often takes the form of governments stepping in to do the right thing.
I could argue “everyone just banned cfc” where everyone is not an individual anymore but governments. I see your point tho and you are right, action has to take place this way or that way for something to change. I just wanted to visualize sometimes things do happen because the initial thought of some scientist was probably “if we just stop using cfc, the ozone layer can be safe again”(symbolic for" they found out whats causing the problem") …is not a solution in terms of action but the action that caused the stop was initiated by exactly such a thought. So i wouldn’t categorically throw such thoughts in the wind…
I naively thought we were finally heading this way with climate change. It was always too little, too late, but there seemed to be a global movement by countries to finally take the right actions. Everything was coming together. But then the pendulum of politics swung the other way
Perfect example is talk of Lab Cultured meat regulation in Canada. Some people are dead set on not consuming it and are making a big stink about it being properly labeled.
Animal agriculture only produces 5.8% of greenhouse gasses[0], so even if everyone stopped eating meat tomorrow the effect would be less than 5.8% (not all animal agriculture is for meat).
That doesn’t Account for the deforestation caused by ever expanding beef pastures. It’s also unclear whether that slice includes the farming of soy, corn and alfafa grown exclusively to feed animals. And then there’s the “energy in agriculture and fishing” section that you probably missed. And let’s not forget how far meat has to travel, that’s in another slice in the energy section.
So probably there’s a couple percent more on top of that.
You forgot ocean acidification from farm runoff and the overfishing destroying the oceans ecosystem.
Google says livestock production creates 11-20% of global human co2 emissions. Even If we could make that disappear, it’s not enough
Meanwhile energy production is 73% so it’s critical to focus there
Realistically there is to switch to zero for any category of emissions so the only right answer is to cut as many as possible as much as possible
On an industrial scale you basically have to ban meat to protect the environment. There simply can’t be 8+ billion meat eaters.
Maybe bug meat could be environmentally friendly, but at that point why not just eat plants?
There are also strong movements to healthier eating and a good strategy might be to build on that.
While it’s always dangerous to generalize from personal experience, I know far more people who have reduced their consumption of red meat, or even overall meat, For health reasons over climate reasons
Me included, I started bc i had some minor health issues and i was recommended to change my diet. What actually worked, but now i realised how this isn’t even an effort and can have an impact. Even if we would eat only half the meat we eat now, there would be a noticable change in these statiscs.
This isn’t going to be a popular answer, but the only meats I don’t feel guilty about eating are those that come from my family’s farms, their, neighbors farms, or the wild game my family hunts. Commercial, large scale agriculture is damaging in many ways, but for most people who choose to eat meat it’s very difficult to avoid. We need to advocate for a more localized food supply for so many reasons.
Local is better. But even local cows are horrible. Grow rabbits instead.
Mmmm, meat. I typically enjoy 2 big, juicy burgers and one nice size steak (12oz minimum) per week.
ok
