Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It
Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It
As negotiations get underway at COP28, we compiled a list of the leading research documenting the connection between meat and greenhouse gas emissions.
Vegans love to conflate all meat into one big group because their goal is to make veganism look good in comparison.
In reality, beef is the main problem.
It would be a lot more environmentally effective to convince people to reduce beef consumption and replace it with chicken/pork instead, but vegans aren't interested in that because for them it's not really about the climate - it's about reducing animal suffering and death.
This duplicity muddies the waters and makes getting real actual change that would benefit the climate harder to achieve and less likely to happen.
Also, in general, eating no or less meat and dairy can be a healthier diet https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/6nh87mb/vegans-are-they-right
ITT people do all sorts of gymnastics instead of saying "I know but I just don't care enough"
Just be honest with yourself, if the emissions, pollution, land useage, and staggering cruelty don't bother you more than the 15 minutes of pleasure you get from a Burger pleases you just say it.
If it does, and you feel the need to defend yourself because of it just change. I promise you it's less difficult than you think and there are millions of people waiting to help you learn new delicious and nutritious methods of preparing food. Remember basically all vegans were raised carnist and most of us are complete garbage fires (as the internet so loves to point out (-; ) I promise you that you can do it and you won't even really miss meat after a few months.
Reminder that good is not the enemy of perfect. It is much easier to convince 100 people to eat 10% less meat than to convince 10 people to become vegetarian.
I've started eating vegetarian several days a week and all it's done is introduce me to some amazing tasting food that I haven't tried before because of the dumb stigma that vegetarian means not tasty. I find that I enjoy some of these vegetarian dishes more than it's meat counterpart because it's not ruined by tough overcooked tasteless meat.
The great thing about meat and dairy consumption is that it is linear; if you eat 50% less you cause 50% less pain. Instead of trying to go full vegan, go half-vegetarian first. The next step can be taken later.
The biggest polluters are
- Transport 28%
- Electricity 25%
- Industry 23%
- Commercial & residential 13%
- Agriculture 10%
Agriculture (fertiliser, wild rodents, diesel, animals, rotting plants, not including plants wasted by consumers) is only 10%
We're making the best inroads into electricity. It is clearly possible and economical to convert all electrical grids to carbon neutral technology
We're starting to convert residential and commercial to entirely electric (except for the carbon and methane emissions from humans and pets, especially ones that eat beans) so that 13% is solvable
So at the moment 38% of greenhouse gases are easy, just needing political will
Another 23% is harder, industry needs some inventions, especially a green steel making process, and a green concrete making process. Both are years away and probably possible
Transport is hard. 6% is personal transport. That's easy to electrify. Trucking is harder, planes are harder still. I don't know how feasible wind power is for shipping, at least the trade winds blow the right way for Asia to America
The best bet for transport was a green liquid fuel, but the company trying to grow diesel from bacteria folded several years ago.
We are never going to decarbonise agriculture by abandoning any part of it. We can do a bit by practicing permaculture - that keeps more carbon in the ground; we can clean up animal agriculture by not feeding cattle human food, let them eat grass, and there is promising technology for reducing their (and other ruminants') methane emissions by feeding them seaweed
If we waved a wand and removed all farm animals from the world it wouldn't make a dent in carbon emissions or methane, cows would be replaced by deer which also make methane in exactly the same way cows do, but with no one feeding them seaweed
Uneaten grass would rot and be turned into methane (it's the same bacteria that work in cow and deer guts to break down grass). No one's treating rotting grass with seaweed.
Our best bet is to keep the marginal lands occupied by cattle and regulating people running cattle, requiring them to minimise their animals' emissions, or offset them
*Edited to fix typos
I get that tons of folks just don't want to stop eating meat. I'm the same. I cut out red meat because it's very much the worst offender. It was much easier than I thought to do, and I can't say I miss it or even really think about it aside from months like this.
Give it a shot. Nothing to lose except a little weight maybe.
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
So is "Return To Office" but the U.S. government hasn't made a peep about that.
Greenhouse gas emissions from Agriculture has been well known for quite a while, though not as long as Fossil Fuels.
From this very article you can see it's the United Arab Emirates pushing hard for the Agriculture-angle on their COP - it's almost as if they have a vested in interest in moving the focus away from Fossil Fuels.
One has to wonder just how many years' worth of cow farts add up to the same greenhouse effect (over the long term, as methane is a stronger greenhouse gas but has a far lower half-life in the athmosphere than CO2) as more than 100k people flying over to COP28 (kudos to the genuine Environmentalists, who went by boat) or just a couple of hours of private-jet flight emissions.
Then there are all the moralists who are trying to use Climate Change as an angle to push their morals on others when it comes to using animals as food: the very same people who are usually (in my personal experience) unwilling to forego having a car or two and driving rather than cycling (from my observation, their "environmentalism" stops at chosing an electric car, which still polutes - micro-particles from tires, electricity generation emissions, manufacturing and end-of-life emissions - a lot more that my own personal choice of more than a decade of selling my car and walking and cycling instead) will blow out of all proportion the propagandist messaging put out by fossil-fuel fatcats and elites protecting their priviledge, distorting the reality and proportion of what is a genuine concern, because it helps force their own morals on others.
Changes in Agricultural practies - including reduction of meat consumptiom at the consumer level - are indeed things that need to be looked at, all of which is hard to do seriously and in a proper and proportionate way due to the subversion around the subject from an unholly alliance of people with a self-interest in pushing this angle: moralists, elites who want to keep their priviledges and fossil-fuel fatcats keep poluting the subject and destroying any chance at a serious, well-ballanced and proportionate approach at reballancing Agricultural emissions, because none of those actors have a genuine environmentalist objective.
" 'The Pentagon is a larger polluter than 140 countries combined’ — Speaker Pelosi and U.S. delegates at COP26 responded to a question on how the military contributes to the climate crisis." Please stop blaming your neighbor for eating food. Divide and conquer is the oldest strategy there is. Stop falling for it...
Huh.
Obvious solution is to start hunting if you want to eat meat. Anyone want to go on a pig hunt with me in east Texas, or southern Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, or northern Florida? I can supply guns/ammo, you supply the land to hunt? (Might also need nods or thermal, depending on the area.) I figure about two feral hogs would be enough for a year, give or take. I'm not interested in deer hunting; lots of people do that, and deer were extinct for a few years in my state due to over-hunting, and had to be re-introduced. Also, I don't want to use dogs; hogs fuck dogs up pretty badly
So is taylor swift flying around the world on her jet every day.
Oh well such is life.
Eating meat isn't doing shit. It's the raising of the animals to be eaten that's fucking shit up.
Edit: To those who disagree: if we stopped raising cattle do you think that would stop hunting wild animals for food? Do you think hunting and trapping is harming the environment more than thousands of acres of animals causing soil erosion and belching greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and requiring millions of gallons of water? You can eat meat without ever contributing to the meat industry.
Agricultural run off is the main polluter of US waterways. It does include the meat industry, but switching to an all vegetarian diet would ramp up the pollutants caused by fruit and vegi farming.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-09/documents/ag_runoff_fact_sheet.pdf
The biggest deterrent for me ever switching to being a vegetarian/vegan is…
Well, vegans.
If they weren’t so god-awful arrogant, I’d consider it, but I would never want anyone to associate me with that type of behavior. And there’s been several times where I was prepared to make the switch. In the end, the consideration of of being linked to such a hateful culture was just too much.
I’d imagine a lot of people feel the same way about Christianity- and if I were more clever then I am, if probable be able to spot the irony in this.
