We have dogs and cats as pets and we eat cows and pigs (in Western countries). As if cows and pigs didn't also have personalities, memories, parental bonds, the ability to feel pain. It's a mass wilful ignorance.
What's the difference between us and animals? I would argue that it's our ability to take ethical decisions and not inflict suffering even if it goes against our base instincts.
Unless you decide to go on a full mineral diet.
Plants don't cry out for days when their children are taken away from them. Plants don't remember your face, come up to you and want attention. Plants don't scream when they are killed (no matter what some edgy research shows).
Or to put it more simply, would you feel bad pulling a plant out the ground? I would imagine probably not. Would you feel bad pulling the lever and watching as a pig is lowered into a gas chamber? Or while slitting a cow's throat? I would imagine probably yes (hence why slaughterhouse employees have so many mental health issues and there is such high turnover).
That's just a random line you have drawn.
> Plants don't cry out for days when their children are taken away from them.
Plants do feel pain and react to their surrounding. They are more primitive creatures though.
> would you feel bad pulling a plant out the ground?
Yes, I wouldn't do it and I am from a country where pulling an olive tree is illegal (with a jail sentence).
That said, plants do have defense mechanisms, of course. But that's not the same thing as pain or emotions.
In any case, generally strawberry pickers aren't traumatised in the same way as slaughterhouse workers.
Even if one were to view animal and plant lives as equivalent, around 40% of all crops are grown to feed animals.
Needless to say, it's a lossy conversion. Calorie-wise it's far less efficient for an animal to eat the food and for us to eat the animal, than for us to just eat the plant directly.
So if you really want to reduce un-necessary plant deaths/suffering, then ultimately eating less meat is the way to do it.
we don't know that for sure. just to be safe don't eat plants or plant based products too. Eat dirt, that's 100% safe and also feed your children dirt too. The evolution would do the rest and rid your genes from the gene pool
not accusing, but in case any commenter is going down a slippery slope: what produces the most harm? people! why dont we just kill ourselves instead of cutting out beef? vegetarian options have never been more accessible, and increasingly so
its certainly regional and cultural in the US. there are many towns and cities i visit where its quite difficult to find menu items without meat. i expect it will change over time
https://www.merkur.de/reise/reduzieren-sollte-besser-reisen-...
Subbed pork, poultry, and eggs for the most part, some fish but that's not particularly cheap either.
Beef is too expensive for many Europeans because GDP per capita/standards of living are declining in many European countries. People in East Asia, the Middle East, Oceania and South America still eat plenty of beef too.
And it seems here its about 1/4 carbon per kg of food as beef:
>IE a chicken filet is about the carbon impact of 8oz of milk.
They said cheese not milk. Note that it takes more than 1 unit of milk to produce 1 unit of cheese. From this source I found, they estimate ~10 input units of milk per output unit of cheese [1].
Assuming both of these are true, and assuming that the cheese making process produces no carbon, then a chicken filet would have the same carbon impact as .8oz of cheese or roughly a single slice of cheese.
The cheese making process does produce carbon (e.g. heating the milk) but it also produces whey as a valuable byproduct.
If we could change culture and the global diet, there are many exciting low carbon foods being promoted, especially in aquaculture. Shellfish and seaweed do not rely on artificial fertilizer, fresh water, or people burning down the rain forest.
Ah, I see, your graph says CO2-equivalent, not CO2. It's the methane.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-nasa-study-tallies-carbon-...
>Stoked by Canada’s warmest and driest conditions in decades, extreme forest fires in 2023 released about 640 million metric tons of carbon
Forest fires are a natural part of the life cycle of many forested regions - particularly in Canada and the Western US.
Suppressing all fires as soon as possible means that dead, dry plant matter continues to build up for decades longer than it naturally would, creating a "tinderbox" effect where eventually you have vastly more intense and destructive forest fires than would typically have occurred if you'd just left nature alone in the first place. And because these fires have so much more concentrated fuel they also burn hotter and can make the recovery of the forest in the area take far longer to come back.
The correct answer is to regularly perform controlled burns in areas near human settlement and to mostly leave things alone in areas away from it. Much of Canada's land area is literally uninhabited and dozens if not hundreds of miles from the nearest road, much less actual settlement.
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Additionally: Strongly discourage new construction in the Wildland-Urban Interface (aka: low density settlement in a wooded setting, your typical picture-esque rural mountain home - that wood is meant to burn one day, taking your cute house with it). Beyond that, strict building codes for whatever does get built there + ordinances for maintaining the space around the home to reduce risk.
Although to a significant extent, property insurers are basically already taking on this role in recent years. I have family out in the hills in CO, their insurance rates are multiple times that of their property taxes and they are now quite strict on evaluating properties in terms of risk-mitigation. And failure to adhere to all of what they want to see means you're getting dropped by the insurer and you will have a very hard time getting a different company to pick you up.
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Anyway, as another poster noted: The forest grows back and recaptures all that carbon in a few decades, making those fires basically carbon-neutral.
- healthier
- tasty
- cheaper
- a small contribution to keeping the planet livable for their children
- as a sign of respect for $DEITY/the planet/...
Many people will see some sense in at least one of the above arguments at one point in life.
I would never argue for banning red meat as it will certainly backfire and end up counterproductive.
Why do you think outside of the coffee shops of the large metropolises people aren't
Rather than saying "hey shift your car to electric as its cheaper and more powerful and less smoke in your neighbourhood", it's "you need to stop consuming energy"
Rather than saying "support that local solar plant rather than growing ethanol", it's "stop eating meat otherwise you kill the planet"
Rather than saying "hey maybe we should get rid of oil so we're not reliant on fragile international supply chains, here's how we can make fertiliser from thin air" it's "you shouldn't drink milk"
I actually was curious about his reasoning though.
1. It's not the true Carbon or CO2 figure. It's weighted for other greenhouse gases. That's kind of an issue because methane naturally breaks down (into CO2 and water) over time. The methane issue comes up all the time in such estimates (eg leaks in natural gas pipelines) where methane is a worse greenhouse gas but temporary (7-12 years) and CO2 is essentially forever (until sequestration or photosynthesis);
2. Production method really matters here. American beef, for example, is primarily grain fed. That grain requires fertilizer (more natural gas) and distribution. Australian beef, for example, is largely fed on natural grasses and vegetation, typically until the last 60-120 days where it's transitioned to grain for marbling. American cattle is also heavily fed on corn, which really shouldn't exist in the quantities it does;
3. Ecosystems are complex. One of the big causes of the dust bowl, for example, was the destruction of the great bison herds. Replacing the natural grasses with crops like wheat was just the last straw. The point of the bison is that they're heavy, like up to 2000+ lb heavy, and they leave deep hoof prints on the plains. Water collects there when it rains and feeds cgrasses and the aquifers.
This has been backed up elsewhere too. China has had long projects to stop the desertification of the Gobi and spent a ton on planting trees with varied successes. You know what did work? Horses. They released horses and the same thing happened. Horse hoof prints allowed water to collect and grasses to grow and spread. Grasses, as it turned out, were key to stopping desertification, not trees.
So the point is that certain ecosystems need large herd herbivores to survive. So if you got rid of cattle entirely, what other second order effects would there be?
More practically, people just arne't going to give up meat. Sorry. Unless it become sprice prohibitve (as beef arguably is rapidly becoming now).
Wild bison live 15-20 years.
Cattle raised for beef ~18 months.
That's beyond the natural carbon cycle an existing ruminant population.
Also horses, in my reading of the data, actually have less of a methane impact. They have a different digestive system entirely.
On the methane point, methane, yes, is a greenhouse gas that breaks down over years (~12 years). But has far worse impact on climate while its in the atmosphere.
The carbon cycle is basic scientific fact yet confidently ignored by people who hate things like logging and meat.
I live close to a large meat processing facility, and it appears to be quite an energy intensive operation from the outside. Never been inside though, so I can't say for sure. But transporting live cattle, feed, water, slaughter, freeze, freeze+transport all might be pretty carbon heavy.
The problem is we have too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not too much of various assorted carbon-based compounds on the planet.
If humans stopped eating meat, the only way to reduce the amount of carbon that animals “emit” would be to kill all of them and bury their carcasses underground where they can’t decompose (as that would turn them into CO2).
Burning oil introduces new carbon into the cycle, animals existing does not.
It's a topic that's way more complex than you seem to think. Climate scientists did not miss the simple fact that all carbon in a cow originates from the atmosphere. That's understood. But there's all the other stuff.
For the record I'm not vegan or even vegetarian. Attacking vegans for their beliefs is poor formimo
Scientists didn't miss this; there's just a lot of grifters trying to use people's desire to fight climate change to get them to support unrelated issues.
Doing an appeal to authority is poor form.
Sure, get rid of factory farms and CAFO's, but I see nothing wrong with raising animals on family farms where they eat a nutritious diet in line with what they evolved to eat.
Grass for cows, pasture and bugs for poultry, silvopasture for pigs. Anyone who wants to go vegan for ethical or environmental reasons is fine, but I hate this idea that all of us have to fall in line with your crazy ideas.
The reality is that the only way to feed people's insatiable demand for meat is to use factory farms. You can't factory farm without causing suffering to animals, and you can't factory farm without use of antibiotics, etc.
Also you say, 'evolved to eat'. Do you think people were eating meat every day throughout human history? This started after WWII with mass agriculture and factory farming. That's why so many cultures have beans and rice as their primary dish: it's a perfectly balanced protein.
If 'evolved to eat' is your primary concern then actually you should be eating meat like once or twice a month, max. Evolution doesn't happen in less than a century.
I'm just sharing my personal choices based on what I've learned.
What could be more American than that? :)
Nature needs animals as well. In fact it is essential.
Agricultural reform or innovation is certainly an avenue to explore; but this strange obsession with "stop eating red meat" is a bit too much.
That most red meat is very co2 expensive compared to getting the proteins from other sources is a relevant argument for many of us, and not a particularly 'strange obsession' for those of us caring about reducing our co2 footprint.
Most of the people pushing it are doing so because they believe it's immoral to eat meat, so they'll latch onto whatever excuse they can to try to stop people.
We'll expand the herd, and do mob grazing to maintain our species rich grasslands and our SSSI fields, while also providing the best beef to those that appreciate it, family first of course.
Grass fed and pasture fed, are not good enough. The cattle need a wide variety of food, which starts with more than grass or a monoculture pasture.
People drive cars, and people eat burgers. Is that the context you were looking for?
We've identified two ways to reduce carbon production. 1) reduce production per human. 2) reduce humans.
Only the first one is being argued for here. Conflating it with the second is just a confusion.
It would be bad enough with all the burping and farting but at least we would not destroy the rain forest so we could produce more soy for fodder