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by steve_adams_86 1456 days ago
Chicken is meat.

Dietary adjustments would arguably help us more from a health and medical expense perspective. In terms of energy, agriculture apparently only uses around 2% of US energy consumption.

I’m not sure if that includes industrial energy which goes into producing fertilizer. If not, it would only bump up the percentage a fraction of a percent.

Even if we all eat beans, we won’t stop climate change.

I’m not saying the effort wouldn’t be worth it. Research shows unequivocally that eating more beans is a great idea. Well, eating more plants. The energy saving would be icing on top.

But then how are you going to employ the people who grow feed for livestock, and the people who raise livestock? If we all ate beans, we’d need fewer farmers. That’s a radical change we don’t have a plan or strategy for.

1 comments

Widespread all-legume diets would accelerate climate change if anything, what with all of the methane produced.
I’m not actually suggesting we all only eat beans. If anything something like a few servings per day seems like the recommendation in plant based diets (around 2 imperial cups/500ml of cooked legumes?)

I’m not aware of legumes producing any significant amount of methane. Can you point me to that information?

At a glance I’ve found a few studies suggesting high-tannin legumes can reduce methane when fed to livestock:

https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4279&...

I was making an elaborate fart joke.
Haha how did I miss that!? My bad.