Meat contributes literally zero to global CO2 emissions. After all, it's recycled grass.
Maybe meat faming methods contribute CO2 emissions, but that's a reason to stop those farming methods, not stop eating meat.
Similar to people who hate aircon, people who argue that we should stop eating meat simply reveal themselves as regressives (hating advanced human civilisation, wanting a decrease in energy usage of humanity, which necessarily implies regression and mass death).
(Some people argue that beef contribute methane emissions, which is true however methane is a cycle and contributes nothing to the long-term anthropogenic carbon emissions, the entirety of which is coming from fossil fuels; yet still, the correct response is improving agricultural practices, not banning meat.)
Btw I fully support a carbon tax, as long as it's non-discriminatory (i.e. taxes all fossil fuel usage equally, not meat and/or other "sinful" activities more).
If you keep emitting that methane, then it continues to persist and leads to problems with climate change. Unfortunately this can only reduced a bit with changes to farming practices in the meat industry
> people that argue that we should stop eating meat simply reveal themselves as regressives (hating advanced human civilisation, wanting a decrease in energy usage of humanity, which necessarily implies regression and mass death).
How does saying the meat industry is a problem "hating human civilization"? It certainly does not mean regression and mass death as it would decrease the amount of land, cropland, and resources to grow food since we wouldn't need to grow so much feed nor clear so much land for pastures
"If we would shift towards a more plant-based diet we don’t only need less agricultural land overall, we also need less cropland"
I agree that there's potential for sustainable husbandry in grasslands you cannot use otherwise. But it's very small and could not sustain today's mean consumption at all. Meat production relies heavily on farmed feed, with very low efficiency (25kg of feed for 1kg of beef). For growing that feed you need a lot of farmland which is a driving factor for the destruction of carbon sinks like the rain forest. Here in Europe for instance we are not able to produce enough feed for our animals, so we heavily import from the Americas.
Also your argument against methane emissions is not very well thought through. You could argue the same against any CO2 emissions, by arguing that at some point they will be stored by CCS again.
I haven't read the article yet (and I will), but it would be a great gift to the future of humanity if we could develop sustenance that was devoid of suffering and murder.
I am no partisan for the cause (and will order anything from a menu that strikes my fancy), but there is a certain mark of savagery in what and who we eat that (I feel) it is our destiny to overcome.
For us to solve as many problems as we can now will give our progeny more focus on what they are tasked to do, and they will thank us for it.
Vegans are implicitly promoting genocide of cows, chicken and pigs. There's no chance these animals can survive in nature, they're so numerous exclusively because they're bred by humans for food. Is one-time genocide better or worse than continuous perpetual murder? This essay argues that it's worse.
Additionally, the only way to lower emissions from animals is to genocide them. It's not just that they are likely to die if left to their own devices, leaving them to roam freely in nature results in them emitting the exact same amount of carbon as when they were farmed for meat (which is net zero, but that's besides the point).
> Meat contributes literally zero to global CO2 emissions. After all, it's recycled grass.
Do you genuinely not understand that these animals are bred for humans consumption? They wouldn't exist otherwise.
If you can nurture a human with X amount of plant food, but instead use X+Y amount of plant food (and extra water, fertilizer, fossils fuels etc.) to raise cattle to nurture the same amount of humans, you've absolutely increased carbon emissions as compared to the first option.
I sincerely do not get how one can miss this point??
> If you can nurture a human with X amount of plant food, but instead use X+Y amount of plant food (and extra water, fertilizer, fossils fuels etc.) to raise cattle to nurture the same amount of humans
The key points you're missing are that the plants that cows eat aren't suitable for human consumption, and the land that said plants grow on isn't suitable for growing any plants that are suitable for human consumption.
The vast majority of cow's feed is grain & soy, both of which humans can eat directly. Current levels of meat consumption both in value and cost wouldn't even be remotely sustainable if everyone only ate pasture raised, grass fed cows.
Not to mention that existing biotopes are being destroyed in order to create more pasture; it's very much a self-made problem.
Assuming that 25 kg of grain/soy is needed to make 1kg of meat (just picked a number from a poster here), are you really sure that 25 kg of grain/soy is better nutritionally than 1 kg meat ?
Isn't grass still a big part of what cows eat? As for grain and soy, I thought the parts of them we fed to cows were what was left over after we harvested the parts that we can eat.
Independence from fossil fuel use is far from the only factor determining sustainability of our agriculture, though, sadly.
Land use is a huge concern, given we already use half of the world’s habitable land for our agriculture [1], putting immense pressure on ecosystems and biodiversity due to this habitat loss.
Organic agriculture is less intensive, meaning for the same total food production, it must be more extensive — it requires more land [2].
That’s not to say there aren’t very good reasons to shift to organic agriculture. Fertilizer runoff leads to vast ocean dead zones, such as that in the Gulf of Mexico [3]. Further, we have an estimated 60 years of farming left if soil depletion continues at its current pace [4].
If we are to both curtail our land use and switch to regenerative farming methods, we must curtail meat production.
It takes around 100 times as much land to produce 1 calorie of beef or lamb versus plant-based alternatives (similar for the same quantity of protein) [5], such that we could reduce our land use for farming from 4 billion to 1 billion hectares and still feed the whole world on plant-based diets.
I’m not sure if I’ve connected the dots here especially well, but I hope I’ve at least conveyed that sustainability is multi-dimensional, and goes far beyond just getting off fossil fuels — even though that is a vital step.
> Do you genuinely not understand that these animals are bred for humans consumption? They wouldn't exist otherwise.
In the United States we actually destroyed an equivalent biomass of Bison and replaced them with cattle. Though perhaps you celebrate the Bison eradication, too.
I can directly influence what I buy in the supermarket. I have very little influence on what methods a farmer on the other side of earth uses, whether he lets his cows graze on land that used to be rain forest, or just uses many times more fuel to produce the crop needed to feed his pigs than would be required to produce the same amount of calories as vegan food. So for now, I’m very selective in any meat I buy, and most often abstain.
And methane stays in the atmosphere only a decade or so, so the day we stop release huge amount of it the effect will disappear much faster. But as long as we continue to let methane out in the atmosphere, it will have disproportionate effect on the climate disaster. Which happens right now! Not in some unspecified remote future.
Meat contributes zero new CO2 IF the crops they are eating weren't grown with fertilizer ultimately made from natural gas. Do you know a country where this is true?
Yeh sure, matter is neither created nor destroyed. The problem here is that massive amounts of carbon sequestered over millions of years, is being released, just to create the feed for these livestock. This isn't like a small group of cattle, grazing on natural prairies.
There's plenty of reasons to at least reduce meat consumption. Should we ban it globally? Of course not. However, it should be more of a special occasion, as it has been historically. Eating red meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner isn't doing anyone any favors. Except maybe healthcare companies.
The only carbon tax that makes sense would be one that targets fossil fuel production. Extracting oil from the ground? Hella taxed. Extracting natural gas? Super taxed.
If people can find a good way to create fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2 then they shouldn't have any fossil fuel punishments in their way.
Maybe meat faming methods contribute CO2 emissions, but that's a reason to stop those farming methods, not stop eating meat.
Similar to people who hate aircon, people who argue that we should stop eating meat simply reveal themselves as regressives (hating advanced human civilisation, wanting a decrease in energy usage of humanity, which necessarily implies regression and mass death).
(Some people argue that beef contribute methane emissions, which is true however methane is a cycle and contributes nothing to the long-term anthropogenic carbon emissions, the entirety of which is coming from fossil fuels; yet still, the correct response is improving agricultural practices, not banning meat.)
Btw I fully support a carbon tax, as long as it's non-discriminatory (i.e. taxes all fossil fuel usage equally, not meat and/or other "sinful" activities more).