[dbingham]

If you live in the US, your order is wrong.

1. Walk or bike.

1a. If you can't do the above, use public transport.

1b. If you can't do that, consider moving to a city where you can do all of the above (if you can afford it). If you're rural, seek a land trust or farmer to buy your land when you do.

2. Insulate your house.

3. Get solar if you can afford it.

3a. Replace all gas appliances with electric (Heat pump, electric water heater, ec)

4. Don't fly.

5. Dietary changes, but remember to include ecosystem services and impact in your analysis. A little carbon is worth it if it means more land stays free of pesticides and continues to provide for the ecosystem.

At least, this is the best I've been able to make of it after a decade of study using open sources. Agriculture is important, but whenever I've actually dug into the referenced data I always find they're optimizing for the wrong things, leaving out important variables, or just all around cherry picking data with an end goal in mind.

[jeffbee]

Burning 1 gallon of motor gasoline emits the same carbon as producing 1.3lb of finished beef. Flying once from U.S. to Europe has the same GHG impact as producing 80 pounds of beef. For a typical U.S. household, transportation is a bigger source of greenhouse gas emissions than food.

[dbingham]

Source please.

There's currently a propaganda war between multiple powerful lobbies - the animal rights lobby, the meat producers, conventional ag producers, and more - which means there is a ton of misinformation flying around about the actual environmental impacts of eating meat. Really, of all things dietary.

Meanwhile there are a bunch of people exploring alternate agriculture systems through agroecological approaches that show a lot of promise, but haven't been studied enough to really make claims about either way.

Further, you cannot just say "x amount of finished beef produces y emissions" because there are so many factors that go into it. Feedlot vs traditional range vs intensive rotational vs silvopasture are all different with completely different environmental impacts - of which carbon is only one.

[ZeroGravitas]

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/food-footprints

[dbingham]

Again, that is a chart based on a single source. Which may or may not be open access and I've been through enough of these tonight, but look at my other comments on similar sources to see my problems with them. All too often they are based on "accepted dataset" which are full of all kinds of faulty assumptions and modeling. Meanwhile, there are people going out and actually measuring agroecology systems and finding a totally different result.

[jeffbee]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X1...

[dbingham]

That source is primarily examining conventional feedlot approaches.

> An all grass cow-calf – to – finish operation was included as a minor component in the eastern and northwestern regions

They examined a single all grass finished operation. There are studies that have found grass finishing can cut emissions in cattle by as much as 80%.

> The modeled operations were not intended to be actual operations; they were developed to represent the practices found in each region.

> Environmental footprints for all individually simulated ranch and feedlot operations were integrated into full production systems within their respective study regions using two methods

They also don't appear to be measuring actual operations, but rather modeling operations based on surveys of farmers and ranchers about the characteristics of their operations and then extrapolating from there.

Models have their place for sure, but I wouldn't make any kind of declaration of certainty based on a single model-based study. You have to average the outputs of hundreds or thousands of models, and even then, you can't be sure you have the answer.

A better approach would be one that measures the actual output of each operation at various phases and averages across them. Difficult to do, but I've seen studies that attempted it.

[jeffbee]

I guess I expected that if you wanted to see sources you would retort with your own published sources.

[dbingham]

Gladly, although, with the caveat that science works in the aggregate so any individual paper should be treated with skepticism and that I have no idea what quality of journals these are coming from because the open access literature is currently a royal fucking mess.

But here's a paper that found that properly grazed beef could not only potentially reach net-zero emissions, but might even be a carbon sink: http://www.thefutureoffoodjournal.com/index.php/FOFJ/article...

Here's another study that found that the soil type of the grassland and the dominant species of grass had a significant effect on whether intensively grazing it sequestered or released carbon from the soil overall:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.12144

And that one appears to be a literature review of other studies.

Related note, you have to be so careful looking through the studies, here's one that purports to compare the different systems. But when you read the abstract it uses "A deterministic model based on the metabolism and nutrient requirements of the beef population". In other words, they aren't actually measuring anything. They just have numbers in a database for "x lb of beef requires y inputs" and "x lb of beef gives z outputs" and they're crunching those numbers under assumptions about the productivity of each approach. Naturally, they find that conventional feedlots are the most environmentally friendly.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/2/2/127

Note that one's also in an MDPI journal, which MDPI has begun to get a reputation as a pay to play paper mill.

[onerandompotato]

I mean, the paper uses data from the National Cattlemen's Beef Association™, which is a beef lobbying group. The third author of the paper is also from the NBCA, and the paper was funded by the Beef Checkoff™, which a beef marketing program. I have my reservations about the accuracy of this paper.

[jshen]

Dramatically reducing meat consumption is the single best thing the average westerner could do to limit their environmental impact. Why did you remove it?

[dbingham]

a) Because that's not true. The numbers don't actually work out that way. Transportation and heating are most American's biggest carbon contribution. Agriculture is down a ways. b) Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It allows the land to function as native prairie or savanna.

There is also evidence that this sort of grazing can substantially reduce carbon emissions. Meanwhile monocultured grain, beans, and veggies - especially conventional with heavy pesticide* (edit: originally wrote fertilizer, meant pesticide) use - are devastating to ecosystems. They're essentially turning large swaths of land into killing fields, taking the bottom right out of ecosystem and contributing to the massive drop in insect populations (which form the foundation of the food web) we've seen across the developed world.

In short - the agricultural analysis is really fucking complex, multivariate, and grey.

She links a literature analysis that claims to contradict much of this, but I've read literature analyses making these sorts of claims before that just ignore most of the alternative systems, gloss over a lot of nuance, or downplay the harm of convention systems in major ways. I need to read the one she linked, but experience has taught me to treat it skeptically.

[gruez]

>> Dramatically reducing meat consumption is the single best thing the average westerner could do to limit their environmental impact[...]

> b) Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It allows the land to function as native prairie or savanna.

There's no way the method of meat production that you described can produce meat to sastisfy current US demand, let alone increasing demand from the developing world. Therefore practically speaking, reduction of meat consumption will still be needed.

[dbingham]

Yes, agreed, reduction of meat consumption does need to happen. But saying "we should reduce meat consumption and ensure the meat produced is produced through these systems" is very different from putting it at the top of the list and drawing almost all focus to it.

[jshen]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/21/giving-u...

[dbingham]

Did you actually read the study linked in the article? They didn't measure anything. They used accepted values for each phase of the process taken from databases. In several areas there weren't - notably around pasturing - there wasn't good data. So they more or less fudged and "accounted for it in their error bars".

Meanwhile, here's a study I found, which I linked elsewhere in the thread, that found that under the right circumstances, grass finished, rotationally grazed cattle can actually act as a carbon SINK. Not a carbon producer. Now that's one study and I have no idea of the quality and trustworthiness of the journal it's in, but it lines up with other studies I've read on the topic. And it tracks with the ecological model. There are ecosystems where these animals belong and in those ecosystems they play a key role in building the soil, and soil building is one of the key methods of carbon sequestration.

http://www.thefutureoffoodjournal.com/index.php/FOFJ/article...

Here's another study I found showing that many factors play into whether grazing hoofed animals builds soil or erodes it. Grass type, soil type, rainfall patterns - they all matter.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.12144

Again, single study, no idea of the quality of the journal, but it goes to show that these questions are not definitively answered. These lifecycle analyses that people keep pointing to are using a limited set of data sets that have huge deficiencies.

And that's why I push back on these narratives so hard. They are not well founded. Every time I dig into the studies being referenced, I find massive assumptions and huge deficiencies and a paucity of actual measurement.

[jshen]

There is more to the environment than carbon footprint. Meat production is the leading cause of deforestation, it’s the biggest user of water in the south west, the cause of antibiotic resistant bacteria, and that’s ignoring the horrific conditions in factory farms.

[jshen]

while shifting to a vegetarian meal one day a week could save the equivalent of driving 1,160 miles.

Carbon Footprint Factsheet | Center for Sustainable Systems

https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability...

[dqv]

>Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It allows the land to function as native prairie or savanna.

>Meanwhile monocultured grain, beans, and veggies - especially conventional with heavy fertilizer use - are devastating to ecosystems.

You're suggesting, in a very roundabout way, that we drastically reduce meat consumption. None of these things you describe can be done sustainably without a drastic reduction of livestock.

[dbingham]

Yea, I do agree that we need to reduce meat consumption and focus on sustainably grazed operations for the meat that is consumed.

But that's not the same as putting it on top of the list. Ever since Cowspiracy came out (which has been roundly debunked) there's been this segment of the environmental movement that wants to put beef on the top of the list of carbon problems. It just doesn't belong there and there are so many issues with putting it there - not least of which is the individual responsibility trap.

Climate cannot be solved by individual action alone. Individual action is necessary, but not sufficient. And since people have limited capacity to make lifestyle changes, we need them to focus that capacity where it will do the most good. Meat just isn't it - transporation, housing, energy - those are where it belongs. We should be encouraging people to eat less meat, yes, and to eat sustainably pastured an grazed meat. But we shouldn't be telling people to go vegan as their primary lifestyle change.

[dqv]

>And since people have limited capacity to make lifestyle changes, we need them to focus that capacity where it will do the most good. Meat just isn't it - transporation, housing, energy - those are where it belongs.

Diet is actually one of the easiest things for people to change. You have to eat every day. And there is evidence this personal choice has affected markets. Walmart wouldn't be selling more soy milk, selling tempeh, producing their own plant-based cheese if it was just a non-impactful minority changing their habits. Even if it takes a year to change, it helps people understand they can do things that do help the environment.

Everything you describe - transportation, housing, energy are all things that take often decades to reform. Giving people something they can do right now to make a collective impact (however small the impact) is worthwhile. It brings a certain kind of spirituality to the movement - even if I can't switch to an EV or the bus takes too long or I rent, so I can't do energy efficient changes, I can still eat food that reduces my impact on the environment. I can eat with people who share environmentalist feelings. We can come to collective conclusions, like deciding to take the bus to go downtown tomorrow instead of driving. We can share emotions about our worry, but also our optimism for the future. When it comes time to demand systemic changes, we already have a well-organized cohort to proselytize for those changes.

[dbingham]

Diet is also one of the most personal things to ask people to change, deeply tied in with their health, habits, cultures, and religion. If you ask them to do something that crosses some of those lines, you will have exactly the opposite effect you are claiming it will have. If you tell people that the most important thing they can do is adopt a diet that undercuts their health (many people cannot healthily maintain a vegan diet - including many, many vegan influencers) then you will demoralize them.

This push to tie the vegan diet to climate, it didn't come from the climate movement - it came from the animal rights movement. And it really exploded with Cowspiracy, which was a blatant propaganda film that badly abused the literature and has since been roundly debunked.

You still see some climate campaigners harping on this point, George Monboit being the most prominent to come to mind, but again, an honest accounting of the literature does not support their point -- that "going vegan is the easiest and highest impact choice an individual can make for their personal carbon reduction". It is not easy for most people and the impact of it is not nearly that clear cut.

The meme is a distraction that was imposed on the environmental movement by people who do not have the environment, or climate change mitigation, as their first priority.

I've been seeking a sustainable diet and agriculture for over a decade. Believe me when I tell you it is not simple or clear cut. There are a lot of things we should be pursuing in that area, but universal veganism is not one of them. (General meat reduction is, but that is not the same thing.)

[aradox66]

The vast majority of monocultured grains are used to feed livestock. Plant based diet, even if you ate soy and wheat and corn and nothing else, has an order of magnitude smaller impact than eating meat.

[jrajav]

I'm a meat eater and also very invested in reducing my environmental impact despite that, and I'm very interested in learning more about this. Can you point me to your original sources?

[jshen]

No the person you were asking, but this is one of the better views of data on this topic.

https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat