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.
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.
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).
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.
Yes and doing regenerative practices all the way to the end would naturally force this reduction in consumption. It would be really good, because the land used to grow feed could be redirected to other more efficient uses.
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.
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).
> As omnivores above the poverty line, we can all make conscious and conscientious choices about what we eat.
This being a forum of mostly tech workers, many of us can afford to choose more sustainable animal products and support agriculture that promotes biodiversity and carbon sequestration too. If you don't want to give animal products up, then look for sources that engage in regenerative agriculture practices. They tend to be the most humane ways to raise animals as well.
In the end, demand for meat, eggs, and dairy is never going to disappear. Maybe someday lab grown alternatives can be molecularly and structurally equivalent. But until then the most effective change we can make collectively is to change government incentives to farmers so they choose better practices.
A lot of vegans eat fake meat and dairy which shares many of the environmental problems of meat, such as needing a lot of inputs so a lot of plant material relative to the final product.. It also adds energy use, transport, packaging etc.
There are also environmentally beneficial meats. So much so that when rewilding we sometimes need to add the same animals back (as is happening in Scotland - rewilders are breeding cattle that look like wild ones to make it "natural"). In the UK you can buy venison from wild animals that need to be culled to to preserve the environment.
Please provide the research that say that going vegan is one of the most effective ways to combat global warming.
According to a Swedish study publish a few years ago (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541), going vegan is mid-tier in combating global warming. Who you buy your electric from has a larger impact on the environment than going Vegan, as does if/what car you own and naturally what kind of trips and vacations you do. A single trip with an airplane can have a bigger impact on global warming than all the meat they eat through their whole life.
Plowing pasture-land to grow soybeans is likely to reduce bio-diversity even more than running cattle on that land. A lot of pasture land is marginal land where a plow is very destructive, and is often a lot closer to the pre-human ecology where the land was grazed by large mammals.
Your primary point still stands -- eating tofu likely has a lower ecological impact than eating beef, but the trade-off isn't obvious, and second order effects can be significant.
If you stop grazing cattle on land, the owner of that land is going to find another use for the land to profit from it. Some of those uses are going to be better for bio-diversity, some are going to be worse. It's highly unlikely to become parkland.
So will going vegan reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase bio-diversity? Probably, but not certainly. This uncertainty shouldn't dissuade people from acting on "probably" though.
I started out doing a "meatless Monday," and have now been vegetarian for 7 or 8 years. For someone who grew up in rural Iowa, always had a freezer full of steak and ground beef from the cows my father raised and butchered, and avoided most vegetables, it was a lot easier than I thought it would be.
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”
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.
We have around 27 million cattle (in the US) today. There were something like 30-50 million bison in the US before we almost eradicated them. Were the bison equally bad? Or is the problem that we’re feeding these ruminants unnatural diets?
Incidentally, I’d love to see the Great Plains return to huge roaming ruminant populations, and find a way to build our meat industry around that.
The ecology of it, including emissions, isn't really that bad if you're American. We're very efficient at beef production. It's really the global south that's most of the novel emissions, and that's mostly from counting land-use changes.
One of the biggest biodiversity-related threats - as in able to trigger cataclysmic-level event - is IMO commercial honey production.
Farm honeybees are essentially one breed, which is in itself a huge problem as a single pathogen/parasite can quickly wipe them out globally. On top of that, honey farmers move their hives all over the place, effectively displacing any wild pollinators present in vast areas.
Commercial honey is farmed in the most ecologically risky way.
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 44.0 ms ] threadYep, is the miracle of literature. An hectare of cattle allows more biodiversity than the same hectare of lettuce.
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.
This being a forum of mostly tech workers, many of us can afford to choose more sustainable animal products and support agriculture that promotes biodiversity and carbon sequestration too. If you don't want to give animal products up, then look for sources that engage in regenerative agriculture practices. They tend to be the most humane ways to raise animals as well.
In the end, demand for meat, eggs, and dairy is never going to disappear. Maybe someday lab grown alternatives can be molecularly and structurally equivalent. But until then the most effective change we can make collectively is to change government incentives to farmers so they choose better practices.
There are also environmentally beneficial meats. So much so that when rewilding we sometimes need to add the same animals back (as is happening in Scotland - rewilders are breeding cattle that look like wild ones to make it "natural"). In the UK you can buy venison from wild animals that need to be culled to to preserve the environment.
According to a Swedish study publish a few years ago (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541), going vegan is mid-tier in combating global warming. Who you buy your electric from has a larger impact on the environment than going Vegan, as does if/what car you own and naturally what kind of trips and vacations you do. A single trip with an airplane can have a bigger impact on global warming than all the meat they eat through their whole life.
Your primary point still stands -- eating tofu likely has a lower ecological impact than eating beef, but the trade-off isn't obvious, and second order effects can be significant.
If you stop grazing cattle on land, the owner of that land is going to find another use for the land to profit from it. Some of those uses are going to be better for bio-diversity, some are going to be worse. It's highly unlikely to become parkland.
So will going vegan reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase bio-diversity? Probably, but not certainly. This uncertainty shouldn't dissuade people from acting on "probably" though.
"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.
Incidentally, I’d love to see the Great Plains return to huge roaming ruminant populations, and find a way to build our meat industry around that.
The ecology of it, including emissions, isn't really that bad if you're American. We're very efficient at beef production. It's really the global south that's most of the novel emissions, and that's mostly from counting land-use changes.
And maximize how they're fed in the last months of their lives in feedlots.
They were certainly not killing 30 million bison each year.
The only answer here is less meat production, especially feedlot-finished, no matter how people try to twist it.
Farm honeybees are essentially one breed, which is in itself a huge problem as a single pathogen/parasite can quickly wipe them out globally. On top of that, honey farmers move their hives all over the place, effectively displacing any wild pollinators present in vast areas.
Commercial honey is farmed in the most ecologically risky way.