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Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than being vegan, landmark study finds
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Every time I read about meat and greenhouse gases I feel the need to explain the natural carbon circle. A cow does not produce carbon. It takes carbon from plants and releases it to the atmosphere. Then plants retake that carbon.
Humans are adding carbon to the atmosphere by digging out stored carbon from the ground and bring it to the atmosphere.
So we have to fix the part where we bring additional carbon to the atmosphere. But yes, there are other environmental issues with cattle if you read the op's article.
The Biogenic Carbon Cycle and Cattle: https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/biogenic-carbon-cycle-and-cattle
A cow also produces a lot of methane, a much worse greenhouse gas.
Besides, the problem isn't the grass from cows grazing, it's the rainforests that go down all around the world to convert to farmland to produce animal feed.
It's much more efficient to use that farmland to feed humans than to feed cows and then feed humans (1kg of meat needs 25kg of feed)
Disclaimer - I'm not vegan but I try to reduce my meat consumption overall, especially red meats.
Methane is broken down within 10 years which is pretty short. Yes, the other environmental issues are real. BTW, I am eating less and less meat. I just see a lot of false assumptions regarding carbon in the atmosphere.
You know that the problem with ruminants is that they produce methane and not CO2 which is 25 times worse? A cow takes carbon from the ground and the bacteria creates a 25 times more potent GHG. But you are right that creating new fields and tiling the soil is a huge factor.
IPCC on methan
I feel that anyone who advocates to stop eating meat for methane reasons is a vegetarian in disguise who latched onto global climate change to push their own agenda, having failed to dissuade meat eaters on animal rights grounds. They are doing the fight against climate change a disservice by muddying the waters. If they were serious about methane specifically (which anyone concerned about GHG should be, to within (x*25)% of its contribution), they would be dedicating 10 times more of their time in researching some kind of pill to give the cows to stop them from making methane - a much more feasible outcome. But doing so does not synergize with their animal welfare goals.
funny, I feel that anyone who complains about being told eating beef is bad for the environment is just two kids in a raincoat. Good luck proving me wrong!
Dedicating time researching a magic pill isn't actually solving the problem today, while stopping animal consumption does. People who really only care about the climate and not the animals should go vegan today and then dedicate their time researching a pill, such that afterwards they can resume consuming animal products.
Full disclosure: I care about the animals and the climate. Nevertheless I belief there are no gaps in my logic.
Dedicating time researching magic pills solves all kinds of problems. Saved several billion lives just a couple of years ago, did you forget?
Dude, read my comment in full. Emphasis on the word today. I am not saying researching pills is pointless. I am saying that if you really care about the climate, you should refrain from animal consumption until that magic pill has been invented that makes animal consumption okay again in terms of the climate.
For sure, if you care about climate change you can reduce your personal GHG emissions right now by going vegan! But how are you going to dedicate the rest of your time? I fear that someone to whom veganism is more important would never spend any time researching such a pill. They would rather spend the next 100 years arguing with the 90% of the population who have already heard the ethical argument for veganism but were not convinced by it. The existence of a pill would remove the only leverage they have left - the threat of literal burnination. If anything, vegans have an incentive to sabotage any mitigation research efforts if possible (for example by lobbying).
I don't know where you are getting these stereotypes, but there are nearly a 100 million vegans nowadays and they come in all shapes and sizes.
I'm personally connected to a group of vegan activists here in Amsterdam and they are very hard to stereotype. One is in fact a researcher who is currently working on organs on chips so as to provide an alternative to animal studies, another regularly goes undercover to film what goes on within factory farms and slaughterhouses, yet another is a columnist for one of our well known newspapers and often writes about the situation with animals, we've got a politician who is in fact lobbying for cutting meat subsidies (good friend of mine), we've got a neuroscientist, another is working in the field of artificial intelligence (myself), we've got a lawyer who works with a group of animal rights lawyers, etc. Yes, there are some that aren't too smart as well and will just spent their time arguing with people, but to think that vegans in general are too dumb to understand that arguing is not the only and not always the most effective way to affect change just goes to show that you know very little about vegans in general.
Look, veganism just makes logical sense from an ethical (if you care about animals) and climate perspective. That's it. People of all ages are coming to this conclusion. How they spent the rest of their time is as diverse as humanity is. Some will not shut up about it, others won't tell a soul and just move on with the rest of their lives (quite a few actually, but they are always overlooked by the stereotypers for obvious reasons).
@TauZero @Vegoon "if you are not leading an advanced bio-chemstery research team you are not a real vegan" is certainly the dumbest argument I ever read. Thanks for lowering the bar.
Good thing then that the argument I made is the exact opposite of that one!
The other thing is that cattle needs much more space. From all the fields that we could use to grow food, a large part ends up as cattle fodder.
That's about efficient use of land space, not related to GHG specifically other than tangentially regarding deforestation. Also elsewhere in this thread cattle was accused of being inefficient precisely because they sit in warehouses and eat cereals instead of grass. If cattle can roam pastures and eat grass, that's an equivalent amount of cereals that did not need to be grown, farm machinery that did not need to run (on fossil fuels) to grow them, and a good amount of land possibly too hilly and rugged for any use otherwise put to productive human use through grazing.
Too bad that's not how it works. Because beef is profitable, ranchers have all the incentive slashing and burning rainforest to make more money.
You subsidize this process every time you spend money on beef.
Never mind the fact cows release methane which is 25 times more warming than CO².
I'm not really sure the point your trying to make here.
Ok, but you can not eat beef and still not be a vegetarian
Eh, cows are the biggest contributor but all ruminants are applicable as another poster highlighted.
Also the study does include fish eaters too, as a separate dietary category.
Yeah, the main focus of greenhouse gasses in the literature is from land use. The amount of land used for rumanents and their feedstock could plant forests the world over. And don't get me started, noone is farming on the sides of mountains
This sounds like a balance. Is that balance still intact? Doesn't the combined effect of unprecedented scale of animal consumption and existing global warming necessitate a compensatory and proportional reduction of GHG?
I like eating meat, but I feel like this is not the complete picture.
1000 year graph for methane
One great option instead of going cold turkey is just to drastically reduce your meat intake. Eating red meat from cows and white meat for pigs also has a disproportionately large environmental footprint compared to say chickens or turkey. Chickens and turkeys are also fairly stupid and undeveloped from me consciousness perspective if that is your reasoning for going vegan, so one could argue that it is objectively less bad to eat a stupid bird/decendant from a dinosaur (they had their day) Rather than our mammalian cousins who may actually deserve to roam the earth unfettered aside from the occasional lion or hyena attack.
I digress.
That being said, humans have evolved over this millennia to occasionally or more often feed on the flesh of air vegetarian cousins. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, as many species that have existed and exist today are in fact carnivorous. It is of course the rapacious nature of mankind and its insatiable appetite for consuming as many resources possible that is the biggest problem, aside from our over abundant numbers that are largely responsible for wholesale destruction of the natural environment on our planet.
I have opted to reduce my meat intake by about 75% or so and to limit my red meat intake and mostly eat chicken and eggs which are interestingly don't directly cause the death of the chicken. You could opt to follow this strategy to help mitigate your environmental impact, or you can take it a step further and support your local small family farm by doing a direct purchase of meat from your local farmer of choice. That way you can have your meat pie and eat it too by subsidizing local Farmers over the giant agribusinesses that are really responsible for fucking over our planet.
If you have read this far thank you very much, I appreciate your interest in the subject. I grew up on a small family farm where we raised approximately 60 sheep every year and even though it was very sad to have them slaughtered, they were all grass-fed locally raised animals that never saw anything close to a feedlot. Well killing animals is never pretty, killing has been a core part of humanity since its inception including our ancestors like the chimpanzee.
One other thing, vegan meat substitute like impossible Burger is actually a really good option for burgers. Almost nobody in my family and friends who I've had tried them can even tell that they aren't really meat.
These are appeal to nature fallacies. Whether something is good or bad has nothing to do with what other species do, what happens in nature and what we've done in the past. The choice has to be made today in 2023 within your context (income, society, social circles, location, education level, etc.).
There is a huge difference between a Maasai tribe member in northern Kenia killing a cow for his family and a German dentist going to the supermarket and choosing to buy a killed cow instead of one of the other gazillion healthy, affordable, plant based options he has available to him at the store.
Good that you've reduced your intake by 75%, but how do you justify that 25% in your context?
Methane isn't a closed CO2 cycle
Land cleared to feed cattle that could feed 4x as many people directly isn't a closed CO2 cycle.
CO2 from fertiliser production isn't a closed CO2 cycle.
NOx from said fertiliser isn't a closed CO2 cycle.
Smugly being a fucking idiot doesn't make you smarter than the people who are correct, but you are condescendingly talking down to.