[chunkyslink]

It's old news but

Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...

If we all did it today we would make a huge difference to a collpasing system.

https://josephpoore.com/Science%20360%206392%20987%20-%20Acc...

[jwr]

Yeah, but… We won't all do it today.

And this is really just blame-shifting and conscience-cleaning: we'll kind-of try to reduce our impact on Earth, feel better about ourselves, but the total impact will be minimal.

Also, if you look closely at meat production, by far the biggest problem is methane, and that's a problem that's been pretty much solved (seaweeds added to diet), except there is no incentive to implement the solution on an industrial scale. Instead of avoiding meat, we should make sure that the solution is actually used.

I believe the first step towards actually dealing with the problem is putting a significant price on carbon emissions (CO2 and CH4) and sticking to it worldwide. The current attempts, unfortunately, are half-assed. It should be really expensive to emit CO2, so expensive that everybody would immediately start looking for mitigations. Unfortunately, I also believe that humanity is too stupid and disorganized to do it, what with the local politicians pulling this and that way.

Personally, apart from trying not to do stupid things myself (e.g. avoid buying an SUV, ride an E-bike around the city, etc), there isn't much I can do. If I were young, I would look to join one of the companies trying to implement carbon capture, because that's the only thing that can save us.

[tchvil]

An animal hate about 5 times, if I remember well, the quantity of food you will get by eating its meat.

Add then the energy to grow it and its food, shelter, kill, transport, and cool the meat to preserve it. Add then quantities of single use plastic for some of these steps.

I eat less meat than before more because of this than CH4 emissions.

[Isinlor]

You should read about "cap and trade system" implemented by European Union. The idea is to cap emissions according to the Paris Climate agreement and auction resulting remaining emissions.

https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emissions_Tradi...

[gdubs]

This cultural meme of the past several years that people shouldn’t make what changes they can because no one else will change is pretty awful. There’s a good argument to be made that by building a critical mass among some percentage of the population, we can actually lead to a change.

And methane is the one solvable problem with meat production. Far worse is the land use change. We’ve destroyed natural forests to grow soy beans that go primarily to feeding animals. Crops grown with a fertilizer heavy, petrochemical driven process. This food is shipped all over the planet. Even if we switched entirely to regenerative pastures, we would come up short — unless we magically solve carbon capture engineering, natural forests remain our only serious method for re-sequestering carbon and slowly undoing the damage we’ve done, for future generations.

[jwr]

Again, a few of us changing our habits will not move the needle. It will make us feel better, but the situation will be much the same.

But introducing a high price on carbon emissions and sticking to it will force meaningful change.

[gdubs]

You know who’s more likely to vote for a carbon tax? People who are already committed to making a change. People who are already making changes in their own lives. To fix climate change, everyone will need to make changes to their lives. Doing it now might not be enough to move the needle, but it also doesn’t hurt, and it also primes people for meaningful action.

[brandmeyer]

I hear this meme all the time, and its absolute garbage.

The entire agriculture sector of the US economy produced 8.6% of US carbon emissions in 2016. About half of that is from fertilizer (soil management). Even if you impute the entire carbon footprint of us ag to beef production, combustion for transport beats it by 3.5x. Combustion for electricity also exceeds it by 3.5x.

Meat is a tiny slice of your CO2 footprint.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2018-01/documents/20...

[hypertele-Xii]

Reminder that the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed, in Brazil, as we speak, to grow more beef. Let that sink in.

[brandmeyer]

Beef is not to blame for this, though. Beef just happens to be the most economical right now. If it wasn't beef, it would be something else. Possibly soybeans since they are the world's largest exporter of them.

[Vivtek]

It's almost like Brazil is switching from a crop (oxygen) which pays nothing to another (beef - or literally any other use of that land) which will.

If the richer nations cared about the Amazon rainforest, we'd pay rent on it.

[fartcannon]

It's not to grow beef, it's to make money. If we all went vegan tomorrow, they'd grow soybeans there.

Now lets start to argue over what plants to replace the rainforest with and we've lost to point.

The rain forest is being destroyed for greed. Fix greed and you can fix the planet.

[hypertele-Xii]

Human consumption of soybeans requires less farmland than human consumption of beef, because humans can eat the plants the cows would've needed to eat.

So less rainforest needs to be felled for the same amount of nutrition.

Arguing what the land should be used for is the point. Some uses are more destructive than others.

"If we didn't put gasoline in our vehicles, we'd just put something else in them, so arguing over what to put in our vehicles for fuel is besides the point."

[asdff]

Whether they grow soybeans or beef or doing whatever they are cutting the same amount of trees. The crop choice doesn't change the fact that forests aren't protected, and the market will expand to fill available space like a gas.

[hypertele-Xii]

Have you ever cut a tree? It's hard work. No one clears forest unless it makes for profit. If beef doesn't sell, there's no need for excess farmland.

[Vivtek]

Brazil is well within their rights to say, "Fuck you. Pay me."

[bookofsand]

The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed to grow more money. Money is fungible, if beef were banned they's cut the forest to do something else with the land.

[david422]

If it's being cut down for beef it _might_ be cut for something else. You can only control what you can control. Maybe ecotourism would be more lucrative if beef were off the market.

[uxcolumbo]

Meme?

That research was done by Oxford University over a 5 year period.

It's not a meme - it's scientific research.

But I get it, it's easier to label it a meme, so we can continue our destructive lifestyle.

And it's not just about GHG, it's also about biodiversity and habitat loss caused by the large scale animal agriculture industry.

But hey, burgers first, right?

And screw future humans having to live on a more hostile planet.

[cmurf]

Well, ironically, the behavior will eventually make the planet less hospitable to humans. Fewer humans, fewer problems. We either adapt to continue. Or we end. Just like millions of other already extinct species.

I think humans needed to be this remarkably selfish to get to this point. But now selfishness risks a quick demise. Quick as in faster than evolution can be an aid.

If there isn't a technical solution that's economically and politically equitable, we will end.

[brandmeyer]

Other way around. Misinformation about climate impacts leads to poor choices. Replacing your electricity with personally-owned solar, upgrading your vehicle to a high-efficiency hybrid or electric, and lowering your HVAC costs on your home are all far more impactful to your CO2 footprint than changing your diet.

[uxcolumbo]

So Oxford Uni and other academic institutes are now spreading misinformation. Ok got it.

And buying solar panels and upgrading to a hybrid or electric car which costs thousands is easier than replacing your meat burger with a plant-based meat burger. Makes total sense and lets ignore biodiversity and habitat loss while we're at it.

Why not do both?

Why not eliminate / reduce consumption of large scale dairy and meat products AND use renewable energy sources?

Surely you would agree doing both is actually even more impactful, no?

[gdubs]

The EPA graphs on Agriculture emissions are misleading. They don’t include things like the petrochemical production that goes primarily to creating fertilizer, the transportation costs that are baked into the global food production system, and they don’t adequately account for land use change related to agriculture. On land use alone, if we ignore the fact that natural forests have been destroyed for mono crop animal feed production, we’re missing a huge carbon sink. That land wasn’t always farm land.

[brandmeyer]

I urge you to read the report. It is quite accessible by the lay reader without resorting on the media to filter it for you.

For example, there are detailed models and measurements for both soil management (significant) and fertilizer (negligible).

[gdubs]

I have read the entire report — several years ago. I also own a farm that’s converting from conventional to regenerative practices, and around 20 acres of conservation projects to restore natural savanna and oak woodland.

What you’re seeing under Agriculture fertilization is the application of fertilizer, not the production of it. They’re talking about the c02 released by using it, or the c02 expended generating the fertilizer in the first place.

Land use change is an entirely different category in the report. So even though the reason we’re changing land use is to farm feed crops for animals primarily, it’s listed as it’s own thing.

It goes on and on.

For an actually accurate picture of how land and agriculture actually affect the climate, see the incredibly well-researched, encyclopedic book “The Carbon Farming Solution”.

[brandmeyer]

There are separate line-items for the industrial process to create urea and the release after application to soil. Both of them are very tiny fractions of the total CO2 budget.

[gdubs]

It sounds like you feel strongly that agriculture is accurately represented by this very outdated EPA assessment. I really don’t have time to have a drawn out debate on it and we’ll have to agree to disagree.

But for you or anyone else who wants to see an alternative take, a quick search pulled up this McKinsey analysis which, while I’ve only skimmed it, seems much more in line with my understanding which is that agriculture — when fairly measured — represents more like a quarter of our emissions. And there’s no getting around the fact that the vast majority of that is currently tailored towards meat production, directly or indirectly.

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/agricul...

[fallingfrog]

I echo this- went vegan last year. It’s not as scary as you think. There are lots of sources of good vegetable protein (tofu, peas, beans) and you can have one of those impossible burgers if you’re craving meat on a particular day.

[bwindels]

or if you're not up for going cold turkey, just drastically reduce your intake. If you eat meat only once a week rather than every day, this already reduces your footprint massively.

[feanaro]

This isn't realistic advice for most people eating meat every day. It's better to suggest trying to not eat meat for a single day per week as a start.

[uxcolumbo]

Thanks for making the effort.

Why folks are down voting your post, especially here on HN - a group apparently made up of rational and logical thinking folks - beats me.

Feeding the world with animal meat is not sustainable, it requires more energy and resources.

I guess it's called meat addiction for a reason.

[fallingfrog]

I think that for some people they feel like they are being attacked if someone suggests a change in behavior. It’s not my intention to attack anyone though, just to give words of encouragement. I’m just like everyone else, making it up as I go along.

[joelbluminator]

Jeez people downvoting this comment maybe we deserve to all collapse