Who gives a fuck about greenhouse gasses. All the creatures we create are our children, and all are owed the unconditional love and protection of their creators. The experiences of animals are real and matter. Their suffering is identical in nature to your own. It harms us when we take pleasure in cruelty and violence.
You work so hard to block out that simple reality. The destruction of climate, personal health, and ecosystems, those are all just incidental to the atrocity that we are committing on intelligent creatures. You cannot enjoy a cheeseburger or bacontho while you are watching Dominion. Your enjoyment is predicated on fucking DENIAL.
Nah Corporations and industries creates 1000x more greenhouse gases than meat and agriculture.
What about soy derivates being used as estrogens by the body suppressing testosterone. Plus to keep soy fields you have to spray more pesticides than everything else.
In fact, almost 80% of the world’s soybean crop is fed to livestock, especially for beef, chicken, egg and dairy production (milk, cheeses, butter, yogurt, etc).
https://wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/food_practice/sustainable_production/soy/
No effects of soy/isoflavones on testosterone or estrogen levels in men were noted.(conclusion of 38 clinical studies)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890623820302926 :(
the vast majority of the soybean product that is fed to animals is the byproduct of producing soybean oil. feeding animals industrial waste is a good use of it.
So fake.
im a vegan with a soy allergy. not seeing the correlation
Oh look, another article pointing the finger at the meager consumption habits of citizens and completely ignoring the massive ocean of CO2 production by large companies.
Don’t people get tired of seeing this same argument being made? The amount of carbon produced by barges carrying cargo over the Atlantic so far greatly exceeds the consumption of many millions of people every single day but I’m supposed to feel guilty for eating a piece of steak today instead of some semi-edible “impossible meat” bug protein?
ETA: Nice, my first blowup since leaving reddit. Very refreshing to see some people arguing passionately. I appreciate the vigor and the quality of argumentation, everybody. The quality of discourse here is so much better than on reddit.
I’m willing to admit the “semi edible impossible meat bug protein” gamut was a bit tongue in cheek, but I recognize how it can sound genuine. I do think Impossible Meat is disgusting, but that’s neither here nor there.
I eat plenty of plant matter and I regularly forage in the local forests to learn about edible plants. But I’m not going to stop enjoying steak just because it might put a bit more CO2 (why do people keep writing it as C02 online?) into the atmosphere. If removing subsidies and putting more pressure on the meat industry to be less wasteful, less environmentally impactful and more ethical towards animals causes steak to rise to $40/lb as some here have stated I’ll gladly pay.
FWIW, I get my steak from local farms that are free range and grass fed. Grass feeding is healthier for the cow than the typical grain, it produces less CO2 and the steak is better quality. Plus the cows are better taken care of. Again, thanks for the great messages (generally).
Meat production causes 25% of all GHGs in our atmosphere. Personal consumption, on this matter, is 100% the cause. No one is forcing anyone to eat meat on the staggering level North Americans do. If we as North Americans didn’t demand so much cheap plastic shit to buy as part of our lifestyle, there would be less of it made, less of it shipped, fewer cargo ships, less GHG. Your beef isn’t with people telling you that we consume too much, your beef is with the insurmountable prospect of convincing billions of people to cool it.
This increases food insecurity. There is absolutely no way you remove a major source of food production without more people going hungry. I don’t think I need to belabor this aspect further.
Not to mention, the logic of your argument also shifts the blame of fossil fuel emissions from corporation to consumer. No one is forcing us to use gasoline or plastic on the staggering level that North Americans do. If we simply cut back, then there’d be fewer emissions. For that matter in fact, this very discussion we’re having is possible because of electrical power, which more than likely produced GHG as well. Should we hold the blame for this as our consumption, and let dirty coal plants get a pass?
Finally, these researchers have a major hole in their research. They haven’t even looked at what emissions and resource usage we’d have if we scaled up vegan food production to replace current meat consumption. And I suspect we’d find one major health problem – there are some amino acids we only get from meat. To prevent health deterioration, we’d need massive production of vitamin supplements that are mandatory for everyone to consume for their health. Even if we somehow manage this in a vegan friendly process, it will use an extortionate amount of energy, resources, and freshwater. Enough that I can’t say definitively it would be less than meat consumption.
The difference between the calories an animal consumes vs the amount that animal provides to us is huge. If we converted the animal feed to direct food production we would not have ‘food insecurity’.
https://awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/ has sources, if you actually care to learn rather than talking from your armchair.
And yes consumers absolutely should have some blame in climate change. Corporations don’t pollute for fun, they do it for profit. It’s way easier for us to point fingers and continue to do fuck all while the planet burns.
Every time I read about meat and greenhouse gases I feel the need to explain the natural carbon circle. A cow does not produce carbon. It takes carbon from plants and releases it to the atmosphere. Then plants retake that carbon.
Humans are adding carbon to the atmosphere by digging out stored carbon from the ground and bring it to the atmosphere.
So we have to fix the part where we bring additional carbon to the atmosphere. But yes, there are other environmental issues with cattle if you read the op’s article.
The Biogenic Carbon Cycle and Cattle: https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/biogenic-carbon-cycle-and-cattle
I feel the need to explain the natural carbon circle.
You know that the problem with ruminants is that they produce methane and not CO2 which is 25 times worse? A cow takes carbon from the ground and the bacteria creates a 25 times more potent GHG. But you are right that creating new fields and tiling the soil is a huge factor.
I feel that anyone who advocates to stop eating meat for methane reasons is a vegetarian in disguise who latched onto global climate change to push their own agenda, having failed to dissuade meat eaters on animal rights grounds. They are doing the fight against climate change a disservice by muddying the waters. If they were serious about methane specifically (which anyone concerned about GHG should be, to within (x*25)% of its contribution), they would be dedicating 10 times more of their time in researching some kind of pill to give the cows to stop them from making methane - a much more feasible outcome. But doing so does not synergize with their animal welfare goals.
The other thing is that cattle needs much more space. From all the fields that we could use to grow food, a large part ends up as cattle fodder.
That’s about efficient use of land space, not related to GHG specifically other than tangentially regarding deforestation. Also elsewhere in this thread cattle was accused of being inefficient precisely because they sit in warehouses and eat cereals instead of grass. If cattle can roam pastures and eat grass, that’s an equivalent amount of cereals that did not need to be grown, farm machinery that did not need to run (on fossil fuels) to grow them, and a good amount of land possibly too hilly and rugged for any use otherwise put to productive human use through grazing.
Too bad that’s not how it works. Because beef is profitable, ranchers have all the incentive slashing and burning rainforest to make more money.
You subsidize this process every time you spend money on beef.
I feel that anyone who advocates to stop eating meat for methane reasons is a vegetarian in disguise who latched onto global climate change to push their own agenda
funny, I feel that anyone who complains about being told eating beef is bad for the environment is just two kids in a raincoat. Good luck proving me wrong!
A cow also produces a lot of methane, a much worse greenhouse gas.
Besides, the problem isn’t the grass from cows grazing, it’s the rainforests that go down all around the world to convert to farmland to produce animal feed.
It’s much more efficient to use that farmland to feed humans than to feed cows and then feed humans (1kg of meat needs 25kg of feed)
Disclaimer - I’m not vegan but I try to reduce my meat consumption overall, especially red meats.
Thank God for trees. Amirite?
That is a lie.
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But also, give cutting it out totally a try, it’s probably not as hard as you imagine
Very true, but vegans are still gonna shit on you for cutting out less that 100% of animal products from your life. Idk how they can be so desperate to be superior to others that they would actively discourage improving your lifestyle just because it could be even better
Vegans don’t eat animals for the sake of the animals, because they believe killing them unnecessarily is morally wrong.
Saying you’re only going to eat animals once a day is like saying you’re going to halve the amount of violent crimes you commit and expecting praise for it.
It depends on wether you’re actually concerned about the animals, or about yourself.
If you’re concerned about the animals, 100 people reducing by 10% is exactly as good as 10 people reducing by 100%. The difference is, 10 people don’t have to feel guilty. But no animal benefits from that.
Those 100 people would still be eating 90% as many animals as they were before. People don’t need to eat animals to live, so expecting praise for eating 10% less is pretty funny.
It’d be like a criminal deciding to decrease the amount of crimes he commits by 10% and expecting people to encourage and praise him.
The vegan brigade is back out. I dont care. I’m still eating meat. I always finish my meals and I hate wasted food. I’m not going to feel guilty that your skinny ass survives on fucking leaves, nuts and beans that turns you into an ultrapreachy unbearable cunt. And stop diverting attention from your fucking palm oil and avacado farms
I upvoted because this message still didn’t reach everyone, but I guess it’s just that people are in denial… like, isn’t this obvious? And weren’t there already dozens of studies proving it?
people ate meat for MILLIONS OF YEARS with negligible global warming effect from the animals
vegans going start blaming the Assyrianz for inventing husbandry before blaming Exxon Mobile BP
like dude pick your battles
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I am a vegan bro I hate meet Because I don’t like the taste. I hate vegans trying to turn a food PREFERENCE into a snobbery high horse thing. dude eating Factory Farm Veggies is just as bad if not worse (see Monsanto)
Maybe Boop A Pipeline if you are truly morally superior
Veganism is not a food preference, you are not vegan.
Veganism is a stance to avoid harming non-human animals.
So if we just stop subsidizing it so ridiculously it should go way down to sustainable levels then right?
Certainly if we also stop indirect subsidies like the failure to internalize externalities. Include the climate damage caused in the price tag, and people will love a veggy curry instead.
I’ll go completely meat free when the super rich go private jet free.
I’ll stop fucking sheep when everyone else stops fucking cows.
That’s you. That’s how dumb you sound.
Other people doing bad things doesn’t justify you doing bad things.
Agreed, but it’s too easy to come after plebs like me and my eating habits when comparably private air flight is responsible for orders of magnitude more co2.
Me turning down my heating or eating less bacon is not going to have the kind of impact that big corporations, government, and super wealthy could have if they curbed their destructive habits.
How do we hold evil corporations accountable if not refusing to give them our money?
We can do better in our own lives while advocating for bigger change.
I got the message and I don’t care. Humans evolved to eat animals. B12 is an essential vitamin whose primary source is meat and dairy. The entire country of India is B12 deficient because of their diet:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6540890/
For humans to live, other organisms must die. We are part of the cycle. You want to preserve the biosphere that allows humans to survive? Reduce the number of humans. I am child free.
We’re omnivores which means we can thrive with or without meat, B12 is simple to supplement.
It’s not because of meat it’s because of unsustainable farming practices being used on a massive scale. Implement some fucking laws about it and maybe we wouldn’t have this problem
Eating meat is bad, but this won’t be solved by individual action. Putting a cost on every ton of beef, plastic, and carbon created would create market conditions that would reduce the production of these things and hence the consumption
There’s nothing wrong with individuals trying to be more conscientious about their eco footprint but unfortunately that has been turned by corporations who pollute vastly more into some kind of “only you can prevent climate change” messaging. We shouldn’t discourage anyone from doing better, but we also really need to turn up the pressure on the corporations.
What does holding corporations accountable look like if not refusing to give them our money while we advocate for regulation and bigger change?
But if you know it’s a problem then you can change right now instead of waiting for regulation to force it on you.
We can make change for the better in our own lifestyle while advocating for change.
As usual, the title is clickbait. It’s not “eating meat” that produces 4 times more greenhouse gases, it’s a high-meat diet. Big difference that is conveniently left out of the title to get more clicks.
For anyone interested, high-meat diet was defined as >100g meat per day.
On the flip side, meat tastes 20x better than vegetables.
I always thought that this was true but after being a vegetarian for 2 years whenever i eat meat (because there is no other choice or something) I find it doesn’t taste “that good” anymore.
This is because your vegetables are shit. Leave the US and veggies taste amazing.
Can’t we all just agree 8 billion people is silly? Think about how much of it is just completely redundant. The main focus really should be massive population reduction.
Edit: Also, no, I don’t mean killing off anyone, just reducing birth rates will do fine. We know even just a simple high school education reduces birth rates.
