The planet’s vital signs are getting worse. One of the easiest fixes is your diet.
One way of doing that, clearly, is producing and eating less meat. “I think this is an important opportunity for climate action that sometimes gets overlooked,” said Ripple. “Shifting toward more plant-based diets, especially in countries with high meat consumption, could make a meaningful difference.”
Raising cattle for human consumption is also one of the main drivers of deforestation, which contributes to warming by eliminating carbon sinks. Timothy Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton University who studies the relationship between agriculture and the climate, noted that “we can’t solve climate change unless we stop” such clearing of carbon-rich habitats, “and we probably cannot stop that unless the world’s wealthy eat less meat, and particularly less beef.” (Searchinger was not involved in the report.)
He added, “Just eating 1.5 hamburgers a week on average instead of 3 is one of the basic ways Americans can help address climate change.”
https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/the-planets-vital-signs-are-getting-worse-one-of-the-easiest-fixes-is-your-diet/Open linkView original on lemmy.ca
19 replies
On one hand, yes, eat less meat, compensate by getting better quality and making it a treat.
On the other, let's maybe do something about the pollution by the 1%
Eat the rich!
Burning them is a lot less carbon than they burn
If we can't do both right now we should do the best we can. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
The worst part about the "personal responsibility" astroturfing is it's not even technically disinfo, this would actually help if the consumer was the customer. all that land will be cleared and all those cows turned into hamburger if you eat it or not because feeding people isn't the goal.
They will get your tax money in subsidies and burn fossil fuels to move the food anyway; so it might as well be as calorie dense as possible.
Economics get in the way, too. As demand for beef for ethical or environmental reasons go down, that just reduces the optimal price for beef, which means those who would have bought more but didn't because of the price can now buy more of it.
Not saying this is a reason to not reduce your beef consumption, just that the system is so complex and the results are delayed (farmers need to guess how many calves are worth raising for beef/dairy vs just turning to veal long before any of that meat will make it to market, and those calves are getting made either way because that's how the dairy industry works: milk requires pregnancy).
I'm down to half a kilo of chicken kebab per week and up to a bit over 1 kilo of red lentils a week.
It's not hard, and lentils and beans are more filling, not to mention 4 times cheaper than meat.
But even just switching beef out with chicken and pork is 3x better CO₂ wise, that's how bad cow farts are.
Hang on, if the difference is coming from cow farts, that CO₂ would have been released back to the atmosphere eventually anyways when whatever the cow would have eaten decayed.
As I understand it, the main process that reduces atmospheric CO₂ (other than the ocean, which is more of a reserve than a sink) is when it reacts with silicon/silica in the rocks, which is more or less a constant process, though increased frequency of things like landslides can increase it. Most of the CO₂ that gets used by plant life is just temporary until animal or microbial life converts it back to CO₂ for energy.
At least that's how I understand it. Though if you mean greenhouse gases in general, maybe it's extra methane being produced by the cow's digestive process rather than going straight to CO₂?
The article I read about the difference between pork/chicken (which I recall was roughly similar) and beef was in a Danish article a good while back, and as I recall it it was including transport of the animals but also the transport of the food of which a lot of soy is imported from Brazil IIRC. And it is possible they just talked about greenhouse gasses in general.
Yeah, that seems to be where the main issue is, though that methane from their farts isn't trivial either. The CO₂ they release themselves over their lifetime is carbon neutral (in the long term).
The difference lies in the amount of feed required for one(1) kilogram of meat and that ruminant livestock emits quite a bit more methane than others.
i went looking for the paper that this is based on. i can't find it.
It is from videnskab.dk if you scroll to the bottom there’s a list of their sources.
I can't figure out what's going on there, nor find the paper
skill issue.
While methane is a potent greenhouse gas; the main issue is CO²-equivalent per produced calorie. Growing edible plant is orders of magnitude more efficient than growing them + converting it to meat, before consumption.
There is just a lot of lost energy in the meat production chain. Therefore we have to produce so much more plants to feed the meat. And any production has a greenhouse cost to it.
Countries should ban import of meat and stop any subsidies for their own meat production. Then prices would influence customer choices appropriately; with dramatic drops in CO²-equivalent emissions.
this requires political will and less corruption.
Yeah, I did some more reading about it and if I'm understanding correctly, the main issues are from the machines involved in the process (eg, fertilizer production chain, farm machines used to plant, grow, harvest, and process the feed crops, transport of the feed and the animals) and the carbon being converted to and released as methane from the cows themselves.
Chickens and pigs aren't as bad because they convert their calories to meat more efficiently and chickens don't release as much methane from their digestive process (not sure about pigs, didn't dig that far).
Land use is another issue, though that's more for biodiversity than climate change. Though all the land that used to be forests did contain some of the carbon, even if it was just temporary, new trees would replace the old in forests but that doesn't happen in pastures.
Its that fucking easy and people still won't do it lol. Human trash.
I enjoy meat sometimes and a burger maybe once or twice a week. Otherwise rice and beans yo. But Holy shit the people I talk to think to be a MAN you are required to eat meat on every single meal. I hate people.
The vegetables are making the frogs gay!