For people in the US, food emissions are almost a rounding error compared to other categories, such as transportation.
Both cars and meat are huge cultural lighting rods, and focusing on them for climate action has high risk, but focusing on meat as climate action is high risk with very few climate gains.
You linked to a global analysis, not one for the US, as I was talking about. I live in the US and am interested in tackling the massive massive amount of emissions from the US. People in the US emit far far more carbon than nearly anywhere else. Solving that huge problem means tackling transportation.
People in the US sometimes focus on global action, but as a US resident it seems completely inappropriate to be telling people who emit far far less carbon that they need to stop eating beef, before people in the US have stopped far far worse activities.
>as a US resident it seems completely inappropriate to be telling people who emit far far less carbon that they need to stop eating beef, before people in the US have stopped far far worse activities
Why does it need to be one or the other? It's definitely true that the US has higher greenhouse gas emissions per person than most other places. Shouldn't we focus on reducing emissions anywhere we can?
I've spoken to lots of Americans who are under the false impression that food miles are the most important factor when it comes to sustainable food, this article makes the case that it's actually meat.
I think it's reasonable to say people should eat less meat (especially in the US) and we should also reduce emissions from transportation and energy.
If somebody is looking to take personal action, sure go right ahead!
But for systematic change, and systematic change is what's needed, there are sever political consequences for focusing on hugely unpopular actions that have little effect. Attacks on meat have empowered those who oppose climate action, which is just below 50% of the population in the US. Focusing climate action on meat consumption has been counterproductive, just as doomerism about climate action is used to make people feel helpless and then abandon taking any action at all.
We have very little time to make massive climate strides, and anything that slows down the fastest action in the US, like prioritizing meat consumption and not placing it in the proper context, causes great harm to the cause. Just as focusing of food miles by hapless media has caused great harm for climate action.
Beef CO2 emissions is more than cows breathing. Theres a lot of fuel burned when moving them around, making feed for them etc. I can't quite remember, but for every 100 calories of food eaten by cows, you end up with 3 calories worth of beef.
So right there off the bat, beef CO2 / calorie is 30x higher than the plants they eat (or whatever the multiplier was).
Any data to support it? I've heard cows emit methane, way more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. And there are a lot of cows, especially in India. But I don't know the numbers.
There are two types of climate inventories that account for emissions either at time of production or time of consumption. Production-based inventories are easier to measure, but consumption-based inventories can be more informative for individual consumers.
I'm mostly familiar with California-centric inventories because I want to influence state and local policies.
There used to be really great consumption-based maps at this site, but I'm not finding them at the moment. Instead here is a per-city breakdown of estimates: https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/inventory
One thing that takes a very long time to change is transportation. City planning is pretty ossified. Cars have multi-decade lifespans. So starting the change for transportation is a very very urgent need. Diet is far more flexible, and there are innovations such as specific types of algae added to cows' diets that drastically reduce methane emissions. Changing the diet of cows is a far faster change than replacing every consumer's vehicle with a clean one.
The history of environmental action shows that it's very easy to regulate and bring business in line. It when it comes to consumers, it's far far trickier. Tackling meat, which is a quarter of the emissions of the diet of folks, may need to happen eventually but it will have far less impact than legalizing apartments in dense urban cores and allowing people to live without cars.
less cancer in current situation where US has 30% of people drinking water with lead pipes / lead solder in waterworks ? Or google what everything was dumped nilly willy into EPA Superfunds, or atomic tests in nevada with fallout on most of US citizens.. lesss cancer is nonsense. you get cancer from everything you touch these days, what you eat is no issue, because that is one thing which is actually tested...
less heart disease - you drink carrot shakes while you exercise vs you eat steaks while you sit behind table...
Plants are almost always more sustainable because they cut out the middle man in calorie production. It takes less land to grow food for a human than to grow enough food for enough pigs for a human.
There are exceptions to this. Marginal land can't be used for crops but can support cattle, the permaculture people use animals for various purposes that help them grow plants more efficiently, pigs have traditionally been fed waste that would go to compost today (and are thus somewhat more efficient than just feeding the pig something you grew), diverting existing waste products like whey or mechanically reclaimed meat can be more efficient than growing new plants, etc.
Carbon was chosen as indicator of energy use. Rightly so. If you give it superpowers it is on you. So use it as just indicator of energy use and you will have less problems with it.
No carbon is not everything.
For example who cares about carbon when you can grow all food with same energetic and nutritional value on 3-10 times less area. that means less labor, less machinery, less storage, less fertilizers, less processing....
You can even grow additional plants to act as "fertilizer" for next crop... and still use less land than land needed to feed cows to feed you.
Just how many people are employed in extremely low wage jobs like processing, sorting, butchering poultry. or look up on youtube how involved is to cut beef into final products, people have their bones in their hands crooked from all the work, not even talking about work injuries, they can not work until pension/retirement in that industry. so why not use them in better jobs instead from start, for whole of their career.
Meat markets were suspected with helping the transfer of disease from one type of animal to another species... There is 10s - 100s of MILLIONS of poultry dispatched because of avian flu in europe every year, for last 20 + years. China alone experienced the culling or death of around 225 million pigs due to ASF from 2018-19. foot-and-mouth back in europe this year too, etc, etc.
Taste, convenience, or tradition? Am I missing any other reasons? Either way, I think those aren’t great reasons for a lot of people, especially the general user of this site.
I’m actually very interested in this if you have any research to link. I have close friends who went vegan for years and tell me their body seemed to need meat so strongly they went back to it, but obviously many people can be vegan for long periods just fine. So I have become curious what scientific research about the former type of person reveals.
How many years? It’s habits. Ask someone who stop eating meat after ~20: they usually kept the « good » taste of meat in their memory. Doesn’t mean they want to eat meat because they have found reasons not to do so. That explains why plant based processed food find a consumer segment.
Ask lifelong vegetarians if they crave for meat, they don’t, and often are repulsed by the taste. source: multiple vegetarian I know that switch while being teenagers. We’re 1/1 on anecdotal sourcing I guess (not sarcastic)
> Several of the genes associated with vegetarianism, including TMEM241, NPC1, and RMC1, have important functions in lipid metabolism and brain function, raising the possibility that differences in lipid metabolism and their effects on the brain may underlie the ability to subsist on a vegetarian diet.
Vegan 25 years. If you "crave" animal products, it's simply that you have a nutrient you need that your body only associates with an animal product. But you can just figure out what it actually is you need and then add that in other ways.
I don't think anyone needs to eat animal products to be at optimum health, I've just never seen it.
Also, the idea veganism is extreme is wild. Eating plants and fruit vs. paying someone to essentially torture animals that you'd keep as pets and love in a different context... that is extreme.
Animals don't synthesise B12, bacteria does. Animals cumulate it from eating food grown in soil. Industrial farming often require B12 to be added to animal feed as a supplement as they don't graze (as much).
Give this a second thought: humans don't synthesise B12 either.
> Animals cumulate it from eating food grown in soil.
No.
Animals provide a hospitable environment (gut) for said bacteria to exist and synthesize. So while technically the animal's cells are not the ones directly synthesizing B12, the bacteria and animal gut are working in harmony to do so.
These facts are tangential to my point. The commenter I responded to said that people don't need to eat animal products to live at optimal health, which is laughable, and this is an incredibly clear example of why. A quick google search will illuminate the dangers of B12 deficiency.
And one more thing to consider, if humans coevolved with the animals they eat, how can we be so certain that simply supplementing a few vitamins found in animal products is a sufficient replacement? We hardly understand human metabolism at its most basic level, it's quite a stretch to think that we've cracked the code on the "essential" nutrients we would have received from consuming animals.
> The commenter I responded to said that people don't need to eat animal products to live at optimal health, which is laughable
That is still technically incorrect and is refuted by observing healthy old vegans that consume supplements from cultivated-bacteria only for decades.
Those bacteria also develop in some animals digestive system as you already know, and eating those animals has been for a long time our main source of b12. The other (minor but non trivial) one has been non-washed fruits and plants human consumed during millennia, and that’s still how grazing animals ingest a bit everyday. The non grazing animals are widely supplemented with cultivated-b12. We’re producing around 80T/year for that which isn’t much we animals only need around 10mg/year.
> we've cracked the code on the "essential" nutrients
The land cattle is often raised on is unsuitable for anything else. Poor soil, unpredictable rainfall that can fluctuate between drought and flooding.
Some Australian outback cattle stations may cover millions of hectares, but you're not going to be able to grow anything else out there: too hot and little water and unlike cattle you can't move your pea farm to where the water is.
I would agree that land-clearing (cutting down forests) to raise cattle is unacceptable, as are the use of feed-lots, but I would disagree that we need to eat less meat, and I would personally never give up my grass-fed organic beef.
The usual counter is that even then, afforestation is better than grazing lands. And that's a CO2 sink. I don't know specifically about the land down under.
Less meat means less sentient beings suffering.
[dead]
For people in the US, food emissions are almost a rounding error compared to other categories, such as transportation.
Both cars and meat are huge cultural lighting rods, and focusing on them for climate action has high risk, but focusing on meat as climate action is high risk with very few climate gains.
Beef alone accounts for 6% of greenhouse gas emissions with livestock in total accounting for 14.5%. That is not a rounding error by any means:
https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/492...
You linked to a global analysis, not one for the US, as I was talking about. I live in the US and am interested in tackling the massive massive amount of emissions from the US. People in the US emit far far more carbon than nearly anywhere else. Solving that huge problem means tackling transportation.
People in the US sometimes focus on global action, but as a US resident it seems completely inappropriate to be telling people who emit far far less carbon that they need to stop eating beef, before people in the US have stopped far far worse activities.
>as a US resident it seems completely inappropriate to be telling people who emit far far less carbon that they need to stop eating beef, before people in the US have stopped far far worse activities
Why does it need to be one or the other? It's definitely true that the US has higher greenhouse gas emissions per person than most other places. Shouldn't we focus on reducing emissions anywhere we can?
I've spoken to lots of Americans who are under the false impression that food miles are the most important factor when it comes to sustainable food, this article makes the case that it's actually meat.
I think it's reasonable to say people should eat less meat (especially in the US) and we should also reduce emissions from transportation and energy.
If somebody is looking to take personal action, sure go right ahead!
But for systematic change, and systematic change is what's needed, there are sever political consequences for focusing on hugely unpopular actions that have little effect. Attacks on meat have empowered those who oppose climate action, which is just below 50% of the population in the US. Focusing climate action on meat consumption has been counterproductive, just as doomerism about climate action is used to make people feel helpless and then abandon taking any action at all.
We have very little time to make massive climate strides, and anything that slows down the fastest action in the US, like prioritizing meat consumption and not placing it in the proper context, causes great harm to the cause. Just as focusing of food miles by hapless media has caused great harm for climate action.
The population of bison in the US before Europeans was similar to the current population of cows.
Animals rights activists often hide this type of information to tie themselves to climate activism.
Beef CO2 emissions is more than cows breathing. Theres a lot of fuel burned when moving them around, making feed for them etc. I can't quite remember, but for every 100 calories of food eaten by cows, you end up with 3 calories worth of beef.
So right there off the bat, beef CO2 / calorie is 30x higher than the plants they eat (or whatever the multiplier was).
We didn't do any of these for the bison.
Not interested pal, my family is going to eat meat. I'll be reasonable about other topics but this one's a non starter.
Some people have such strong emotional connections to meat eating that no rational argument is going to penetrate through and make a difference.
[flagged]
Please avoid personal swipes like this. This is covered in the HN guidelines:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Any data to support it? I've heard cows emit methane, way more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. And there are a lot of cows, especially in India. But I don't know the numbers.
There are two types of climate inventories that account for emissions either at time of production or time of consumption. Production-based inventories are easier to measure, but consumption-based inventories can be more informative for individual consumers.
I'm mostly familiar with California-centric inventories because I want to influence state and local policies.
California State's inventory: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/ghg-inventory-data
There used to be really great consumption-based maps at this site, but I'm not finding them at the moment. Instead here is a per-city breakdown of estimates: https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/inventory
One thing that takes a very long time to change is transportation. City planning is pretty ossified. Cars have multi-decade lifespans. So starting the change for transportation is a very very urgent need. Diet is far more flexible, and there are innovations such as specific types of algae added to cows' diets that drastically reduce methane emissions. Changing the diet of cows is a far faster change than replacing every consumer's vehicle with a clean one.
The history of environmental action shows that it's very easy to regulate and bring business in line. It when it comes to consumers, it's far far trickier. Tackling meat, which is a quarter of the emissions of the diet of folks, may need to happen eventually but it will have far less impact than legalizing apartments in dense urban cores and allowing people to live without cars.
[dead]
[flagged]
Incorrect. Less cancer and heart disease when eating plant based diets. But the marketing is powerful!
less cancer in current situation where US has 30% of people drinking water with lead pipes / lead solder in waterworks ? Or google what everything was dumped nilly willy into EPA Superfunds, or atomic tests in nevada with fallout on most of US citizens.. lesss cancer is nonsense. you get cancer from everything you touch these days, what you eat is no issue, because that is one thing which is actually tested...
less heart disease - you drink carrot shakes while you exercise vs you eat steaks while you sit behind table...
[dead]
[flagged]
Better from the perspective of carbon emissions, but that isn't everything.
Plants are almost always more sustainable because they cut out the middle man in calorie production. It takes less land to grow food for a human than to grow enough food for enough pigs for a human.
There are exceptions to this. Marginal land can't be used for crops but can support cattle, the permaculture people use animals for various purposes that help them grow plants more efficiently, pigs have traditionally been fed waste that would go to compost today (and are thus somewhat more efficient than just feeding the pig something you grew), diverting existing waste products like whey or mechanically reclaimed meat can be more efficient than growing new plants, etc.
This assumes the same bioavailability with plants and micro/macro nutrient parity between plants and meat products which is not true.
You would need exogenous supplementation for parity.
Carbon was chosen as indicator of energy use. Rightly so. If you give it superpowers it is on you. So use it as just indicator of energy use and you will have less problems with it.
No carbon is not everything.
For example who cares about carbon when you can grow all food with same energetic and nutritional value on 3-10 times less area. that means less labor, less machinery, less storage, less fertilizers, less processing....
You can even grow additional plants to act as "fertilizer" for next crop... and still use less land than land needed to feed cows to feed you.
Just how many people are employed in extremely low wage jobs like processing, sorting, butchering poultry. or look up on youtube how involved is to cut beef into final products, people have their bones in their hands crooked from all the work, not even talking about work injuries, they can not work until pension/retirement in that industry. so why not use them in better jobs instead from start, for whole of their career.
Meat markets were suspected with helping the transfer of disease from one type of animal to another species... There is 10s - 100s of MILLIONS of poultry dispatched because of avian flu in europe every year, for last 20 + years. China alone experienced the culling or death of around 225 million pigs due to ASF from 2018-19. foot-and-mouth back in europe this year too, etc, etc.
yes carbon is not everything.
Taste, convenience, or tradition? Am I missing any other reasons? Either way, I think those aren’t great reasons for a lot of people, especially the general user of this site.
Why wouldn't they be? Quite a claim.
Have you considered health? Pseudovegetarianism is not amenable to all phenotypes.
I’m actually very interested in this if you have any research to link. I have close friends who went vegan for years and tell me their body seemed to need meat so strongly they went back to it, but obviously many people can be vegan for long periods just fine. So I have become curious what scientific research about the former type of person reveals.
How many years? It’s habits. Ask someone who stop eating meat after ~20: they usually kept the « good » taste of meat in their memory. Doesn’t mean they want to eat meat because they have found reasons not to do so. That explains why plant based processed food find a consumer segment.
Ask lifelong vegetarians if they crave for meat, they don’t, and often are repulsed by the taste. source: multiple vegetarian I know that switch while being teenagers. We’re 1/1 on anecdotal sourcing I guess (not sarcastic)
Holy selection bias Batman
> Several of the genes associated with vegetarianism, including TMEM241, NPC1, and RMC1, have important functions in lipid metabolism and brain function, raising the possibility that differences in lipid metabolism and their effects on the brain may underlie the ability to subsist on a vegetarian diet.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Vegan 25 years. If you "crave" animal products, it's simply that you have a nutrient you need that your body only associates with an animal product. But you can just figure out what it actually is you need and then add that in other ways.
I don't think anyone needs to eat animal products to be at optimum health, I've just never seen it.
Also, the idea veganism is extreme is wild. Eating plants and fruit vs. paying someone to essentially torture animals that you'd keep as pets and love in a different context... that is extreme.
Vitamin B12 being synthesized exclusively by animals should be an indication that
> I don't think anyone needs to eat animal products to be at optimum health
might not be the most accurate position to hold.
Animals don't synthesise B12, bacteria does. Animals cumulate it from eating food grown in soil. Industrial farming often require B12 to be added to animal feed as a supplement as they don't graze (as much).
Give this a second thought: humans don't synthesise B12 either.
> Animals don't synthesise B12, bacteria does.
Yes, that's technically correct.
> Animals cumulate it from eating food grown in soil.
No.
Animals provide a hospitable environment (gut) for said bacteria to exist and synthesize. So while technically the animal's cells are not the ones directly synthesizing B12, the bacteria and animal gut are working in harmony to do so.
These facts are tangential to my point. The commenter I responded to said that people don't need to eat animal products to live at optimal health, which is laughable, and this is an incredibly clear example of why. A quick google search will illuminate the dangers of B12 deficiency.
And one more thing to consider, if humans coevolved with the animals they eat, how can we be so certain that simply supplementing a few vitamins found in animal products is a sufficient replacement? We hardly understand human metabolism at its most basic level, it's quite a stretch to think that we've cracked the code on the "essential" nutrients we would have received from consuming animals.
> The commenter I responded to said that people don't need to eat animal products to live at optimal health, which is laughable
That is still technically incorrect and is refuted by observing healthy old vegans that consume supplements from cultivated-bacteria only for decades.
Those bacteria also develop in some animals digestive system as you already know, and eating those animals has been for a long time our main source of b12. The other (minor but non trivial) one has been non-washed fruits and plants human consumed during millennia, and that’s still how grazing animals ingest a bit everyday. The non grazing animals are widely supplemented with cultivated-b12. We’re producing around 80T/year for that which isn’t much we animals only need around 10mg/year.
> we've cracked the code on the "essential" nutrients
Yes we did, and the last of that nutrient has precisely been vitamin b12 which led to two Nobel prizes : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23183296/
25% of people are anaemic
The land cattle is often raised on is unsuitable for anything else. Poor soil, unpredictable rainfall that can fluctuate between drought and flooding.
Some Australian outback cattle stations may cover millions of hectares, but you're not going to be able to grow anything else out there: too hot and little water and unlike cattle you can't move your pea farm to where the water is.
I would agree that land-clearing (cutting down forests) to raise cattle is unacceptable, as are the use of feed-lots, but I would disagree that we need to eat less meat, and I would personally never give up my grass-fed organic beef.
The usual counter is that even then, afforestation is better than grazing lands. And that's a CO2 sink. I don't know specifically about the land down under.