Modelled dietary scenarios often fail to reflect true dietary practice and do not account for variation in the environmental burden of food due to sourcing and production methods.
Here we link dietary data from a sample of 55,504 vegans, vegetarians, fish-eaters and meat-eaters with food-level data on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, eutrophication risk and potential biodiversity loss from a review of 570 life-cycle assessments covering more than 38,000 farms in 119 countries.
Dietary impacts of vegans were 25.1% of high meat-eaters (≥100 g total meat consumed per day) for greenhouse gas emissions, 25.1% for land use, 46.4% for water use, 27.0% for eutrophication and 34.3% for biodiversity.
The article is about the UK, but the HN headline has chopped that part out.
In the US, your car is a far bigger impact than your diet. We need to enable ways to live without a car, like legalizing corner stores, legalizing the housing density that allows for good transit, etc.
In the US, people who are trying to avoid climate action focus on diet rather than our true sources of emissions. And the US has the most action to take since we are such ridiculously high emitters.
If you want to change your diet, that's fantastic. But if you are in the US, you have far far bigger concerns to address first.
This is interesting, do you know where I can look at the numbers for this?
My gut feeling was that the realistic way to handle car emissions will be to migrate the global car pool to electrical, but I don't have any hard number to back this gut feeling with.
> In the US, people who are trying to avoid climate action focus on diet rather than our true sources of emissions.
This is a surprising claim that requires evidence. I am very involved in climate action in the US and I've never seen this attitude from anyone. And of course, diet is a "true" source of emissions. There's an interesting study you could read if you're curious how that could be.
no I won't eat less meat. another classic case of shifting the blame onto the individual instead of the hugely inefficient and wasteful processes and industries; its just carbon footprint BS 2.0. shaming people into believing their habits are causing apparently world-ending apocalyptic events isn't a good way to get people on your side, nor is it a good way to actually try and solve issues. it just makes people feel worse like the world is ending (it really isnt). doomerism is a disease.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 30.2 ms ] threadHere we link dietary data from a sample of 55,504 vegans, vegetarians, fish-eaters and meat-eaters with food-level data on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, eutrophication risk and potential biodiversity loss from a review of 570 life-cycle assessments covering more than 38,000 farms in 119 countries.
Dietary impacts of vegans were 25.1% of high meat-eaters (≥100 g total meat consumed per day) for greenhouse gas emissions, 25.1% for land use, 46.4% for water use, 27.0% for eutrophication and 34.3% for biodiversity.
In the US, your car is a far bigger impact than your diet. We need to enable ways to live without a car, like legalizing corner stores, legalizing the housing density that allows for good transit, etc.
In the US, people who are trying to avoid climate action focus on diet rather than our true sources of emissions. And the US has the most action to take since we are such ridiculously high emitters.
If you want to change your diet, that's fantastic. But if you are in the US, you have far far bigger concerns to address first.
My gut feeling was that the realistic way to handle car emissions will be to migrate the global car pool to electrical, but I don't have any hard number to back this gut feeling with.
This is a surprising claim that requires evidence. I am very involved in climate action in the US and I've never seen this attitude from anyone. And of course, diet is a "true" source of emissions. There's an interesting study you could read if you're curious how that could be.
The real title is:
> Vegans, vegetarians, fish-eaters and meat-eaters in the UK show discrepant environmental impacts