Even on a site like HN, where rational and logical thinking is held in high esteem, and where few could be suspected of climate change denialism, a factual statement such as this one from the article:
"On average, animal-sourced foods are associated with eight times more carbon loss and 14 times more biodiversity loss per calorie than plant-sourced foods."
is very likely to be countered by listing personal preferences, anecdata, concern for vegans' health or mockery of that lifestyle choice, and generally nitpicking.
Honest admissions like 'I am part of the problem and will maybe try doing something about it' are very rare.
Indeed, that's the same answer when topics like public surveillance or dependency-inducing media are debated. It's difficult to criticize a problem, when you're a part of the problem, respectively paid to be the problem.
Plenty of people (including me) are vegan, healthy, and happy. As omnivores above the poverty line, we can all make conscious and conscientious choices about what we eat. Going vegan is one of the most effective ways to combat global warming (if you're not in a position to donate large sums of money toward climate change research or mitigation).
This is bullshit. The vast majority of CO2 is created by energy production.
The problem is systemic and blaming other people for their lifestyle choices is neither effective nor helpful and just leads to further division. It's exactly this sort of division that helps fossil companies to destroy the planet and keep making money.
I am not vegan, will never be, but I have known vegans for more than two decades and they are doing fine. We need to make it easy to make the right choice about food, and one way to do that is to stop making meat meat meat the ONLY cool thing. I am fine with vegans serving me tasty food, they make alternatives easier. If you do not want to be a full time vegan just switch to 3 out 7 days of the week or something like that.
Not to mention that beef/dairy production is a primary source of methane which is 80x more potent than Co2, but constantly under reported due to its shorter half life. Yes in the long run that matters, but its all the more reason that we should reduce animal agriculture right away as the payback is much faster than limiting Co2.
I never understood this argument. With Oil & Gas you release green house gases that have been sealed away back into the air.
For methane produced by farming all components remain in a cycle. Everything released by animals eventually finds its way back to plants, which get eaten, which become exhaust of animals, etc.
This sounds to me more like a spin by big oil to finger point at another industry.
It isn't the "cow farts" that produce most methane, but rather the anaerobic processing of cow dung emanating from feed lots, dairy operations, etc.
Grass-fed beef cattle whose dung is "recycled" in a more natural way in the fields produce the same emissions as would wild ruminants such as antelope, bison, etc.
The biodiversity problem in the above refers mostly to new land clearances intended for farming, including for feedstock. This is minor in N. America and Europe, mostly as the clearances were done decades or over a century ago.
Apparently mainly rice growing. I knew paddy fields were bad, but I didn't know they were that bad. Per calorie I am sure it is more like a tenth that of ruminants, perhaps less, but still worth replacing with other carbohydrates.
I would argue animal emissions do not matter at all, methane survives about a decade in the atmosphere. Eventually breaking down to co2, co2 that was already in the atmosphere to begin with. Fossil fuel emissions are the ones that matter.
>Yes in the long run that matters, but its all the more reason that we should reduce animal agriculture right away as the payback is much faster than limiting Co2.
The long run is the thing that really matters.
A faster payback only serves to cover the impact of those that want to keep pumping up oil and gas in the meantime(also to make synthetic fertiliser) for a few decades.
It shifts focus from that on cow farts. As if the rotting plant matter and wild animal life that could replace it didn't emit any methane.
Unfortunately, the priority is increasing efficiency and ROI, rather than sustainability. This leads to centralization and operations at a scale which are not sustainable, without external input or causing damage to existing nature. De-centralization and sustainable practices are the only way forward, as it has been for centuries before us on this earth. Maybe space is the place for these kinds of centralised and intensive practices, like being planned for data centers.
"Efficiency and ROI" can be applied to financial but also to environmental impact. Producing more with less [land use/fertilizer/water use] is also a form of efficiency, and it's good, but it requires vast capital that mom & pop farms don't have + strong government incentives. De-scaling is only an agrarian nostalgia fantasy, it's incompatible with reaching climate goals.
There's more nuance here than reducing consumption of beef and dairy. Moving over to regenerative farming practices instead of factory farming will also improve the situation.
With the ever growing popularity and success of the ketogenic diet, it becomes progressively more evident that a plant based diet is massively suboptimal for a not insignificant fraction of people.
This has nothing to do with plant and everything to do with rampant prevalence of gut dysbiosis and harmful gut bacteria feeding on otherwise healthy fibers and carbs, as well as processed carbohydrate and sugar overconsumption plus insulin resistance driven by sedentary lifestyles, inflammation, etc.
Ketogenic diet is a band aid to both, not a solution, and plants are not the cause of either problem, either.
It literally is designed to survive without meat, meat used to be a luxury that was only eaten on special occasions for most people in history, we only eat so much nowadays because it became so cheap
Supplements if you're vegan, there are vegetarian sources.
Just looked up the Wikipedia page to check on vegan, and… looks like all the animal and plant "sources" actually ingest the stuff from elsewhere?
Since only bacteria and some archea possess the genes and enzymes necessary to synthesize vitamin B12, plant and algae sources all obtain the vitamin secondarily from symbiosis with various species of bacteria,[5] or in the case of fermented plant foods, from bacterial fermentation.[86]
It's not *that* hard to prosper with even a vegan diet in the modern world, I know several who do fine.
Hardest part is knowing implicit animal ingredients you might not otherwise guess, which almost tripped me up when I visited the US and (as a vegetarian*) almost bought some yogurt before reading the ingredients list and finding to my surprise that it contained gelatine.
* it's mainly the cheese; I've substituted out other uses of milk.
you can, but you can also just reduce it, you can eat say half the meat/milk. Eat more vegetables and grains. Not only massively reduces the impact but pretty good for your body too
I am not vegan, but I found dropping beef and lamb to be literally the easiest modification to my life possible. Dropping dairy is much harder, but as I am now discovering still incredibly easy to reduce.
Milk products are very prominent in many Indians’ diets. I wouldn’t be surprised if India’s milk consumption per capita is the highest in the world, given a large proportion of Indians avoid meat, so they might source more protein/fat from milk products.
If it’s not, it’s probably just poverty holding back consumption.
Edit: upon second reading, I realize techterrier was probably refuting only the steak part of sudo_cowsay’s comment
It's also poverty holding back millionaire consumption.
There was a research, which I can't be arsed to google with mobile, that compared western vegan diet and Indian omnivore and, yup you guessed it, the western version was less costly in terms of future proof.
But as with the zillionaires the human predicament depends on weather we muster the courage to limit ourselves or die to the extinction that's already manifesting itself in forms like forest fires, droughts and crop losses.
We need a new caveat cliche for these headlines like how people love to reply “in mice” to health research. For environmental research it’s almost always “in the 3rd world”
Does this mean we should be advocating for more intensive cattle rearing? Stockyards and special breeds may not be the worst way to meet demand and reduce environmental impact (measured by CO2/methane emissions as well as biodiversity loss, for instance).
Sadly, this being Hacker News, it won't catch much attention and will be quickly flagged by people who have too much karma.
But I think we are making progress, slowly, sadly too slowly, with the current summer we are having in Europe, of the impact of our past actions in the weather. And make no mistake, eating so much meat and drinking so much milk, is a huge impact we are inflicting on our planet.
Please do not comment with "I do X" or "In our house, we avoid doing Y" - it is not about you and me, it is about society. I am convinced, you are convinced, we need everyone to be convinced.
Okay lets get this straight, animals do not contribute to global warming. The co2 they emit has been taken from the atmosphere from plants.
Methane breaks down to Co2 in the atmosphere on average in 9.6 years.
Animal rearing does not permanently affect the climate.
Increasing stock sizes does increase the methane level equilibrium but there are mitigations to this, there are additives to feed that can reduce methane emissions to 1%. Last I checked a few years ago, there were pilot programs to determine effects on animal welfare and product quality.
The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.
Everyone apart from a few stragglers agree the climate is changing. Most people agree the world won’t change its behaviour on its own to stop that.
So we can thus incentivise change (things like renewables being far cheaper than fossil fuel) globally, and adapt to reality.
There are a vocal minority whining about how we need to stop eating beef or milk annd stop using energy and there are those who make beef and milk more sustainable and make generating energy sustainable. I have time for the latter. The former can go hand out with the coal rollers.
How do you make beef and milk more sustainable? I'm honestly wondering. To me it seems similar to saying: we can make coal power plants more efficient. Equivalent to more "efficient" (however you want to define that) forms of animal husbandry.
It doesn't change the fact that you're still burning coal, while you could be putting up solar.
I would much rather have Europe install ACs instead. Stopping meat, not installing ACs, degrowth all look like masochistic ways to show that we are repenting.
The miracle would be to read the article which states the biodiversity damage is 14 times higher per calorie than plant-sourced foods. Which means you could reduce the 40% to 2-3% if you would replace it totally.
Even on a site like HN, where rational and logical thinking is held in high esteem, and where few could be suspected of climate change denialism, a factual statement such as this one from the article:
"On average, animal-sourced foods are associated with eight times more carbon loss and 14 times more biodiversity loss per calorie than plant-sourced foods."
is very likely to be countered by listing personal preferences, anecdata, concern for vegans' health or mockery of that lifestyle choice, and generally nitpicking.
Honest admissions like 'I am part of the problem and will maybe try doing something about it' are very rare.
Indeed, that's the same answer when topics like public surveillance or dependency-inducing media are debated. It's difficult to criticize a problem, when you're a part of the problem, respectively paid to be the problem.
Plenty of people (including me) are vegan, healthy, and happy. As omnivores above the poverty line, we can all make conscious and conscientious choices about what we eat. Going vegan is one of the most effective ways to combat global warming (if you're not in a position to donate large sums of money toward climate change research or mitigation).
Take a look to a soybean plantation for example, biodiversity totally destroyed. Also, are you doing a physical main work?
This is bullshit. The vast majority of CO2 is created by energy production.
The problem is systemic and blaming other people for their lifestyle choices is neither effective nor helpful and just leads to further division. It's exactly this sort of division that helps fossil companies to destroy the planet and keep making money.
Give it a couple decades. Most 'vegans' stop being vegan well before that. I'll let you Google why they do.
I am not vegan, will never be, but I have known vegans for more than two decades and they are doing fine. We need to make it easy to make the right choice about food, and one way to do that is to stop making meat meat meat the ONLY cool thing. I am fine with vegans serving me tasty food, they make alternatives easier. If you do not want to be a full time vegan just switch to 3 out 7 days of the week or something like that.
But someone still has to eat up all those cows before their methane mucks up the environment.
And if you're not willing to do your part, that just means the rest of us have to pull double duty.
Not to mention that beef/dairy production is a primary source of methane which is 80x more potent than Co2, but constantly under reported due to its shorter half life. Yes in the long run that matters, but its all the more reason that we should reduce animal agriculture right away as the payback is much faster than limiting Co2.
I never understood this argument. With Oil & Gas you release green house gases that have been sealed away back into the air.
For methane produced by farming all components remain in a cycle. Everything released by animals eventually finds its way back to plants, which get eaten, which become exhaust of animals, etc.
This sounds to me more like a spin by big oil to finger point at another industry.
What percentage of anthropogenic methane emissions can be attributed to cow farts?
I would hazard a guess that the incidental methane emissions from one gas extraction field would astronomically dwarf the emissions from cow farts.
It isn't the "cow farts" that produce most methane, but rather the anaerobic processing of cow dung emanating from feed lots, dairy operations, etc.
Grass-fed beef cattle whose dung is "recycled" in a more natural way in the fields produce the same emissions as would wild ruminants such as antelope, bison, etc.
The biodiversity problem in the above refers mostly to new land clearances intended for farming, including for feedstock. This is minor in N. America and Europe, mostly as the clearances were done decades or over a century ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_emissions
fossil fuels contribute 33% farm animals contribute 30%
Not astronomically; marginally. Anyone who's been around herbivore farm animals will tell you they fart. A lot.
Then again, farm plants are a further 18%.
Those fossil fuels emit what otherwise wouldn't be available in the carbon cycle.
A cow that's fed on gras and farts emits nothing that that gras didn't pick up and contributes virtually nothing to climate change in the long term.
I imagine the fertilizers used for the grass to support the quantity and quality of the cows’ output require quite a bit of fossil fuels.
Otherwise, I wonder if non fertilizer supported grass could support sufficient cows to satiate demand (which has not even peaked yet).
> Then again, farm plants are a further 18%.
Yeah, but they also provide 80% of the world's calories to animals' 20%
> farm plants are a further 18%
Apparently mainly rice growing. I knew paddy fields were bad, but I didn't know they were that bad. Per calorie I am sure it is more like a tenth that of ruminants, perhaps less, but still worth replacing with other carbohydrates.
All the more so since rice is relatively poor in nutrients.
With corn based feeding.
I would argue animal emissions do not matter at all, methane survives about a decade in the atmosphere. Eventually breaking down to co2, co2 that was already in the atmosphere to begin with. Fossil fuel emissions are the ones that matter.
Not following your logic. A decade is a long time for such a powerful greenhouse gas.
You would be wrong, they are about equal in size, both accounting for about a third of the anthropogenic emissions.
>Yes in the long run that matters, but its all the more reason that we should reduce animal agriculture right away as the payback is much faster than limiting Co2.
The long run is the thing that really matters. A faster payback only serves to cover the impact of those that want to keep pumping up oil and gas in the meantime(also to make synthetic fertiliser) for a few decades. It shifts focus from that on cow farts. As if the rotting plant matter and wild animal life that could replace it didn't emit any methane.
Beef & dairy the industrial way drive this. Several studies and decade long experiments show the positive impact of the non-industrial alternatives.
And which do the vast majority consume because that is the only one satisfying industrial scale consumption needs?
Unfortunately, the priority is increasing efficiency and ROI, rather than sustainability. This leads to centralization and operations at a scale which are not sustainable, without external input or causing damage to existing nature. De-centralization and sustainable practices are the only way forward, as it has been for centuries before us on this earth. Maybe space is the place for these kinds of centralised and intensive practices, like being planned for data centers.
"Efficiency and ROI" can be applied to financial but also to environmental impact. Producing more with less [land use/fertilizer/water use] is also a form of efficiency, and it's good, but it requires vast capital that mom & pop farms don't have + strong government incentives. De-scaling is only an agrarian nostalgia fantasy, it's incompatible with reaching climate goals.
There's more nuance here than reducing consumption of beef and dairy. Moving over to regenerative farming practices instead of factory farming will also improve the situation.
How about regenerative economics? I hate it.
But it's also not like we can just stop eating steak and milk.
Yes we can ... but most of us (including me) don't want to. (At least not completely)
"Most of us" is a pretty bold claim.
With the ever growing popularity and success of the ketogenic diet, it becomes progressively more evident that a plant based diet is massively suboptimal for a not insignificant fraction of people.
This has nothing to do with plant and everything to do with rampant prevalence of gut dysbiosis and harmful gut bacteria feeding on otherwise healthy fibers and carbs, as well as processed carbohydrate and sugar overconsumption plus insulin resistance driven by sedentary lifestyles, inflammation, etc.
Ketogenic diet is a band aid to both, not a solution, and plants are not the cause of either problem, either.
Our ecosystem dying is also pretty suboptimal.
You can do a keto diet without meat.
we literally cant, human body its not designed to not eat meat
It literally is designed to survive without meat, meat used to be a luxury that was only eaten on special occasions for most people in history, we only eat so much nowadays because it became so cheap
Not all meat is steak. Reducing and/or exchanging beef for other meat sources can at scale already make a massive difference.
Chicken, for example, produces 10% of CO2 per kg of meat compared to beef.
if we going for efficiency, rabbit meat is no 1 choice
Not quite true, but cooking becomes quite a bigger challenge.
But mainly, beef and meat is not the same, cattle needs way more ressources than chicken for example, or well, insects.
But the human hand was designed to hold a banana.
There are other sources of meat.
Also dairy is not a meat.
There is no health reason to eat meat. You can get your B12 elsewhere.
You can get it from supplements. That's about it though.
Supplements if you're vegan, there are vegetarian sources.
Just looked up the Wikipedia page to check on vegan, and… looks like all the animal and plant "sources" actually ingest the stuff from elsewhere?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12TBH fortified yeast flakes are a pretty good spice.
Ridiculous comment. The human body is not designed at all, and is very much capable of surviving without milk and meat. It's not even very hard!
Surviving and prospering aren't the same things, though. And you do need to mind a lot of substitutes you now need, if you just let go of meat.
It's not *that* hard to prosper with even a vegan diet in the modern world, I know several who do fine.
Hardest part is knowing implicit animal ingredients you might not otherwise guess, which almost tripped me up when I visited the US and (as a vegetarian*) almost bought some yogurt before reading the ingredients list and finding to my surprise that it contained gelatine.
* it's mainly the cheese; I've substituted out other uses of milk.
And yet the most populous country in the world has an enormous contingent of people who do not eat meat (on the order of hundreds of millions).
Sure and like half of them have anemia.
who ?? if you talking about indian, they still eat meat (around 6 - 12 pound every year)
“Indian” does not seem to be a sufficiently cohesive group to qualify referring to them as “they” (in this matter).
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-and...
you can, but you can also just reduce it, you can eat say half the meat/milk. Eat more vegetables and grains. Not only massively reduces the impact but pretty good for your body too
Genuine question, can you explain why we can't?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veganism
I am not vegan, but I found dropping beef and lamb to be literally the easiest modification to my life possible. Dropping dairy is much harder, but as I am now discovering still incredibly easy to reduce.
Dropping lamb? Something tells me that won't be a problem for most of the people in this thread lol.
Theres a billion or so Indians that might suggest otherwise
India is among the largest beef exporter in the world.
Does this make the vegetarians not exist?
Milk products are very prominent in many Indians’ diets. I wouldn’t be surprised if India’s milk consumption per capita is the highest in the world, given a large proportion of Indians avoid meat, so they might source more protein/fat from milk products.
If it’s not, it’s probably just poverty holding back consumption.
Edit: upon second reading, I realize techterrier was probably refuting only the steak part of sudo_cowsay’s comment
It's also poverty holding back millionaire consumption.
There was a research, which I can't be arsed to google with mobile, that compared western vegan diet and Indian omnivore and, yup you guessed it, the western version was less costly in terms of future proof.
But as with the zillionaires the human predicament depends on weather we muster the courage to limit ourselves or die to the extinction that's already manifesting itself in forms like forest fires, droughts and crop losses.
You can eat bugs
We need a new caveat cliche for these headlines like how people love to reply “in mice” to health research. For environmental research it’s almost always “in the 3rd world”
Does this mean we should be advocating for more intensive cattle rearing? Stockyards and special breeds may not be the worst way to meet demand and reduce environmental impact (measured by CO2/methane emissions as well as biodiversity loss, for instance).
It's far easier do avoid producing so much meat. A vegetarian diet is perfectly healthy.
I despair. Is it that hard for us to imagine eating less meat?
Sadly, this being Hacker News, it won't catch much attention and will be quickly flagged by people who have too much karma.
But I think we are making progress, slowly, sadly too slowly, with the current summer we are having in Europe, of the impact of our past actions in the weather. And make no mistake, eating so much meat and drinking so much milk, is a huge impact we are inflicting on our planet.
Please do not comment with "I do X" or "In our house, we avoid doing Y" - it is not about you and me, it is about society. I am convinced, you are convinced, we need everyone to be convinced.
Okay lets get this straight, animals do not contribute to global warming. The co2 they emit has been taken from the atmosphere from plants.
Methane breaks down to Co2 in the atmosphere on average in 9.6 years.
Animal rearing does not permanently affect the climate.
Increasing stock sizes does increase the methane level equilibrium but there are mitigations to this, there are additives to feed that can reduce methane emissions to 1%. Last I checked a few years ago, there were pilot programs to determine effects on animal welfare and product quality.
The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.
FWIW, no matter the issue, this kind of tone makes me close up for any rational arguments. I wish I could look past it, but I just can't.
Everyone apart from a few stragglers agree the climate is changing. Most people agree the world won’t change its behaviour on its own to stop that.
So we can thus incentivise change (things like renewables being far cheaper than fossil fuel) globally, and adapt to reality.
There are a vocal minority whining about how we need to stop eating beef or milk annd stop using energy and there are those who make beef and milk more sustainable and make generating energy sustainable. I have time for the latter. The former can go hand out with the coal rollers.
How do you make beef and milk more sustainable? I'm honestly wondering. To me it seems similar to saying: we can make coal power plants more efficient. Equivalent to more "efficient" (however you want to define that) forms of animal husbandry.
It doesn't change the fact that you're still burning coal, while you could be putting up solar.
Beef specifically. If everybody switched to pork, chicken and fish that would mitigate most of this and it's a much more realistic ask.
It will be flagged because of the manipulative headline.
I would much rather have Europe install ACs instead. Stopping meat, not installing ACs, degrowth all look like masochistic ways to show that we are repenting.
Thing is, will be anything left after we destroy the planet with war, data centers, rare earth minerals mines, nuclear and battery waste?
Seems causally false.
What does that mean?
cow farts lol
Another way of saying the same would be: Agriculture causes almost 60% of the biodiversity damage linked to global farmland.
Yep, is the miracle of literature. An hectare of cattle allows more biodiversity than the same hectare of lettuce.
The miracle would be to read the article which states the biodiversity damage is 14 times higher per calorie than plant-sourced foods. Which means you could reduce the 40% to 2-3% if you would replace it totally.
You think cows are the only animals that require food production from farms?