Dramatically reducing meat consumption is the single best thing the average westerner could do to limit their environmental impact. Why did you remove it?
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have no idea why you keep bringing up these very niche methods that can’t produce the volumes of beef that people consume today by a very large margin. It’s like saying that it would use a lot less carbon to ride your bike from Los Angeles to New York than to fly there. It’s an absurd comparison. Honestly, what point do you think you’re making?
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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.)
No one is suggesting people become vegan. You keep constructing strawmen, and proposing things that will in fact dramatically increase the costs of meat and force the things you say you don’t want. It’s non-sensical.
“… while shifting to a vegetarian meal one day a week could save the equivalent of driving 1,160 miles.”
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.
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?
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.