9 ms·

Going Vegan Won’t Save the Planet

59 points by mancerayder 7y ago

Djvacto 7y ago
The article title is obviously click-bait-y. I don't disagree with any of the technological solutions discussed: I think vertical farming seems neat, and hopefully promising, and I believe local farming with special care given to rotating crops and maintaining soil health is also important. Given that I personally eat eggs and honey on a semi-regular basis, and am not fully vegan like my wife, I also agree with the idea of buying local eggs. But the article's actual contents do very little to support the title, since everyone knows no one thing is going to save the planet. TL;DR Not just one change is going to magically save the planet, but let me take this technicality as a chance to call out veganism for more clicks.
vfc1 7y ago
> farms growing crops have been just as destructive as those raising animals This comparison does not make sense. What this reporter and the public, in general, fail to realize still in 2019, is that most of the farms producing crops are doing so to produce cattle feed. The majority of agricultural fields are planted to feed livestock, not humans. Only a relatively small amount of crops goes directly to humans. This is why eating plants directly is much less wasteful and more resource-efficient. If more people eat plant-based, much less land will be needed for crops, that's the point.
- Aunche 7y ago
  It's a lot less efficient to grow almonds than livestock-grade soybeans, so perhaps almond milk is worse for the environment than cow's milk? The article doesn't really go into that sort of analysis though, and it's difficult to imagine that the average vegan has a bigger ecological impact.
  - vfc1 7y ago
    Soy crops are a good example, the majority of them are to feed livestock but they are a great crop to feed humans instead, and without all the waste involved in having to feed a cow first and then eat parts of it. You can make plant milk with soy too, its a very versatile crop. With it, you can feed the same amount of people with a fraction of the land, water, and pollution.
    - jakemoshenko 7y ago
      You didn't address, and I don't know: what is the relative environmental impact of growing human-grade soy vs. livestock-grade soy? Is there even necessarily a distinction?
      - vfc1 7y ago
        As far as I know it's all just beans, they are all eatable by humans. The difference between resource consumption of different types of soy crops, if any, is not comparable to the difference between eating the soy directly or feeding it first to an animal, the second is a much more wasteful and environmentally impactful as you can imagine.
      - zpallin 7y ago
        You won't need to grow livestock-grade soy if you don't have livestock to feed. But we will always have humans to feed (because we're humans).
      - wtmt 7y ago
        AFAIK there is no human-grade soy vs. livestock-grade soy. But the soy grown for livestock can usually be fed in the ratio of <soy for one animal>:<soy for many humans> (this ratio varies based on which animal and farming practice you consider).
    - bryanlarsen 7y ago
      Barley crops are a good counter-example. There are three main purposes: malting, milling & animal feed. A good chunk of the feed barley on the market is barley grown for malting or milling but wasn't good enough for those purposes and is fed to chickens. The alternative to feeding it to chickens is to throw it away. That's hardly environmentally friendly. Some barley is purposefully grown for feed rather than aiming for the higher price that malting or milling will get. Yields on such variants can be as much as 3 times that of a nice malting or milling variant. Given that a chicken can convert 1.5 grams of barley protein into 1 gram of meat protein, you can see how it be more environmentally efficient to "eat" barley by running it through a chicken first.
  - cpk5 7y ago
    Sure, that's true from a purely ecological perspective, but your argument does not capture the general inhumane practices that go on within the diary industry (e.g., caging, keeping cows perpetually pregnant, separating mother / calve at birth, etc.). All of these combined create a life of significant distress for all the animals involved and should be captured as an "environmental cost" in your equation above.
  - ainiriand 7y ago
    You are making the mistake of assuming that just by growing livestock-grade soybeans you magically have milk. You still have to make this animal drink about 3 gallons per 100pounds, per day. https://beef.unl.edu/water-requirements-for-beef-cattle https://beef.unl.edu/water-requirements-for-beef-cattle
    - vfc1 7y ago
      You're right the water consumption of livestock raising is very important too, besides the huge amount of excrement produced.
  - vfc1 7y ago
    To answer your question, it takes a lot more soy beans to feed a cow, that then will digest them and use only part of them, produce waste, consume water. The cow will be slaughtered and only part of the body will be consumed (gut, head, for example, make for a huge part and are not usually eaten), some of the eatable parts will be wasted in the food chain. If you count for everything, the amount of land and resources used to produce a gallon of cow's milk is always going to be much higher than anything done with a crop directly, because you cut out the middleman, the animal. For the specific case of almonds, why not use soy milk instead for a better comparison. I'm sure you will agree that you can produce a lot more soy milk by using the soy directly then by feeding to a cow, impregnate it, shooting the calf on birth if its male, etc. the whole process. Not to mention the copious amount of cow excrement produced and the impact on global warming due to methane emissions of the cows intestines.
  - thrownblown 7y ago
    cows dont eat soy, too much fat, it makes them sick
- roel_v 7y ago
  You can grow (maize and grass for) cattle in places where you can't grow crops.
  - vfc1 7y ago
    Yes like in the Amazon where the forest is taken down for soy crops and for grazing mostly. A lot of the grazing land we have was created through human burning and deforestation in the first place. And yet, in reality, the vast majority of meat comes from factory farms fed with corn and soy. Even technically called free-range meat gets fattened up in the last portion of their lives in factory farms to get the slaughter weight so they also get fed corn and soy just less.
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  Farms grow crops that you can't eat, to feed to animals that you can. Name the protein and fat sources that will replace meat. Tofu? We already grow soy for animal feed as a cash crop and it's pesticide and fertilizer intensive, and if people eat it directly instead of as an animal feed additive its production will grow at the expense of forests and soil health. Nuts? I'm all for perennial woody agriculture, but the calorie/acre ratio is not great, and they are labour intensive for picking, netting, processing. I say this as a person who has an orchard of my own with hazelnuts and chestnuts in it. The reality is that should meat be gone, we'd have to replace it with other foods, grown on a mass scale on agricultural lands. Animals can graze on products (grass, hay, soy, dent corn) that are marginal or useless for human consumption, and turn it into high protein, high fat calorie rich food. There are populations that eat primarily vegetarian, but mostly they are also heavy on the dairy. But the moment you bring dairy into the equation you're also bringing in non-productive male calves -- in other words, veal. Similar story for eggs. What we need to be doing -- along with reducing meat consumption some -- is coming up with more ecological ways to raise meats, and diversifying our meat products. Raising insects as feed stock for chickens, for example. Increasing perennial woody agriculture instead of cash crops, with small scale grazing of meat and dairy animals inbetween rows. Cutting animals out entirely actually leads to a nutrient deficiency. The classic pre-green revolution family farm forms a kind of nutritive circle with manure, grazing, and rooting being an important part of soil health and maintenance. That didn't scale out in the last 100 years, but it's a model we need to look at. EDIT: wow, the downvotes. Go vegans go!
  - Someone 7y ago
    ”We already grow soy for animal feed as a cash crop and it's pesticide and fertilizer intensive, and if people eat it directly instead of as an animal feed additive its production will grow” Only if farmers keep feeding soy to cows that nobody will buy anymore.
  - jetpackjoe 7y ago
    As long as you are eating a variety of plants and getting enough calories it is practically impossible to be protein deficient.
- jakewins 7y ago
  Some plants have exceptional environmental properties; things like soy, oats (0.1g CO2e/kcal!!) and potatoes. Others are worse than eating meat; if you get your calories from fresh tomatoes (12.22g CO2e/kcal, heated greenhouse) you have an order-of-magnitude higher impact than if you get it from chicken (~1.58g CO2e/kcal, depending on part). The food system is not easily grouped into "climate-conscious" and "bad"; a vegan diet is better than a western one in every study I've seen, but we could do much, much better. I highly recommend this study as a starting point, though you need to convert the unit they use, kg CO2e / kg, to the unit we eat in, kcal: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652616303584 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261... And, shameless self-promotion: I maintain a food blog that attempts to build an evidence-based low carbon collection of recipes at https://www.carboncook.com https://www.carboncook.com
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    Nobody really eats tomatoes for the calories though. People (with meat-based or plant-based diets) use tomatoes for flavour and other nutrients.
    - jakewins 7y ago
      Tomato pastas like pomodoro and putanesca were my go-to lunches before I learned about this, and tomato soups remain super popular, so I disagree that they are simply a condiment. Still, perhaps they are a bad general example. Perhaps a better one would be rice (~2g CO2e/kcal). There the problem is the massive methane emissions produced from the cultivation approach. Point being: There are huge differences between different foods, and they are non-obvious.
      - vfc1 7y ago
        It's precisely because feeding humans is so environmentally impactful that we should not be feeding mostly animals, only to eat them. The CO2 impact of rice and grains in general can't be compared the impact of animal products, here is a graph - https://i0.wp.com/shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/foodkCal1.gif?resize=540%2C405 https://i0.wp.com/shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads...
- odiroot 7y ago
  Let us stop consuming ruminants meat first then. Beef and lamb are not even that good but require so much resources.
tekstar 7y ago
Okay article, terrible headline. No single action in isolation will save the world from climate collapse. The problem stems from countless actions taking place today that do not pay for the external cost of emitting carbon into the atmosphere. The defeatist attitude that something should not be done because it doesn't solve the entire problem need to stop in order for us to begin to make progress.
kmnns 7y ago
> Undoing this damage [...] includes less meat, less intensive and more intelligent farming, and the application of new technologies, including ways to produce high volumes of food for cities. So “going vegan won’t save the planet” by itself, but it plays a major role in doing so. Makes sense, especially if one considers that the production of meat presupposes the production of plant-based fodder worth about 10 times the energy. The title is misleading, or simply clickbait. Then again, it helps tricking your meat-loving friends into clicking on it...
- wtmt 7y ago
  > The title is misleading, or simply clickbait. Then again, it helps tricking your meat-loving friends into clicking on it... I’d rephrase the latter part as “it helps tricking your meat-loving friends into sharing it without reading or analyzing what’s true”. Most other places on the web don’t get into value or fact based arguments.
wysifnwyg 7y ago
Electricity, transportation, and manufacturing add up to about 80% of all GHG emissions. If you want your diet choice to have the biggest impact purchase locally produced and unprocessed foods.
- NickBusey 7y ago
  I don't doubt this is true in the least, but do you have a source I could provide to others?
  - wysifnwyg 7y ago
    https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
    - NickBusey 7y ago
      Hmm interesting, thanks. That is all GHG emissions though. I wonder if there are numbers around buying produce or meat at the store, how much of the GHG emissions tied to that product are agricultural vs the packaging, transportation, etc. In other words, how big of a difference does 'buying local' have when buying food? Just wondering aloud, not necessarily asking anyone in particular.
      - wysifnwyg 7y ago
        I use to have the sources somewhere but I'm not finding them at the moment. So let's just do this as a mind exercise. Take into consideration that while ships are tremendously more efficient, they travel significantly more miles. When comparing a single shipping container, a cargo ship burns 0.3 gallons of bunker fuel per hour and a semi truck burns 10 gallons of diesel. If you add distance into the calculation, a cargo ship from Brazil to NYC takes 122 gallons of bunker fuel while something produced locally takes 1/12 of that in diesel. Further more, bunker fuel exceptionally worse than diesel when comparing emissions. This is just for the transport side of things too. The electricity production in many other countries produce an increased amount of green house gasses compared to the United States.
reureu 7y ago
Obviously one solution isn't going to solve the problem, but we'd get a lot further if the single solution people adopted was eating less/no meat instead of (say) not using plastic straws.
corliss78 7y ago
Going vegan is missing the point. There are too many people on this planet, period. Im not going to eat an unhealthy diet just so we can squeeze 3 billion more consumers into the economy. We need reproductive freedom and education in any countries that are above replacement rate.
- ainiriand 7y ago
  Please, educate yourself before coming here to say things like that. Do yourself this favour.
- ben_w 7y ago
  The UK currently produces about 60% of its own food requirements (60% of 66 million ≈ 40 million), however I’ve seen it reported that switching everyone in the UK to a vegan diet would increase that to supporting about 200 million people. That doesn’t mean it would be easy — I am a motivated to become vegan and still failing. If I extrapolate that to the rest of the planet, the world should be able to support around 38.5 billion.
ma2rten 7y ago
I am wondering if there will really be a clever technical solution to climate change. Maybe we just need to come to terms with the fact that we have been living drastically above our means and we need to adjust our standard of living accordingly.
- spodek 7y ago
  Having written patents and helped build a satellite now in orbit, I wondered about clever technical solutions until I finally concluded what many had long before me: the belief and hope for and implementations of clever technical solutions cause our environmental problems. Take electric cars. If their greater efficiency makes them a green solution then the Watt steam engine's greater efficiency should have made it one of the greatest sustainability solutions of all time. On the contrary, it's the poster child of the industrial revolution. Each use used less coal, but overall coal use went up. Increasing efficiency is orthogonal to lowering total waste. Making a polluting system more efficient pollutes more efficiently. Everyone who isn't an economist can see the results of our world: more efficient than ever and creating more total waste than ever. Changing a system's goals, say from growth to enjoying what we have and from externalizing costs to stewardship, will change its outcomes.
- makerofspoons 7y ago
  I think you're right- the solution is going to be a combination of carbon capture, agricultural technology, energy storage, and some degree of energy austerity enforced with carbon taxes. How much austerity depends on how soon we begin addressing the problem.
falcolas 7y ago
I'm going to say something very unpopular: If your plan to save the world includes requiring all 9 billion people to fundamentally change their lives (especially if its perceived as a degradation of their current quality of life), it's never going to work. Now I'll speak for myself. I will not go vegan, given the current offering of vegan foodstuffs. It just doesn't taste as good. I know it may be better for me than my current diet, and I know it could help decrease my overall carbon footprint. I still have no plans to do it. Perhaps it makes me greedy. Perhaps it makes me an asshole in the eyes of the next 20 or so generations. But I look at it in the larger context - the ship has sailed, our course towards permanent (on a human scale) climate change was set by the industrial revolution and the speed set to flank by global increases to our quality of life. So yeah, I frankly refuse to permanently sacrifice my quality of life to have no effect on the future.
- ainiriand 7y ago
  Interesting, I've never felt any quality of life loss when going vegan. Just the opposite. I feel much better and food is delicious now that I have discovered a whole new range of food that I never considered before.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    I'm glad you feel that way. I've looked at the array of foods I'd have to give up, and it's not worth it. > now that I have discovered a whole new range of food that I never considered before. Here's the awesome thing from my point of view: I can eat vegan foods and hamburgers. :) Nothing about eating meat prevents me from also eating vegan dishes.
    - seba_dos1 7y ago
      I can do so too. However, I would never really discover all those great options if I haven't seriously tried to limit my meat consumption in past few years. I do eat meat, but these days ~90% of my diet is vegetarian. My favorite burger place around is... a vegan one. I never tried it before, now it's my number one when I crave for a burger. Go figure. Some people go vegan because they care about morality and "purity", but the fact is - if everyone really tried to consider alternatives to meat and eat it only occasionally, even without taking any moral stance about it, the environmental impact of meat production would look completely different than it does now (and would actually be less problematic morally as well).
663e1b 7y ago
>Undoing this damage, while also managing to feed the nearly 10 billion people expected to populate the earth by 2050, is going to require lots of ideas integrated together. Back of the envelope calculation: The global cattle population is around 1.5 billion. A cow eats between 8 and 16 Mcals per day, which is roughly 4-8 times what is recommended for an average adult (2 Mcals). If we diverted all those calories to humans we could feed 6-12 billion of them (neglecting protein, vitamin and mineral content).
- eppp 7y ago
  This seems to ignore that cows eat calories that humans cannot.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  Those calories are the way the world handles crop failures. Let's assume that normally 2/3 of the grain calories are fed to livestock. Then we get a massive crop failure and global yields are 1/3 of expected. Price of grain goes up, farmers can't afford to feed their cattle so slaughter their breeding stock and the price of meat goes down. In the short term meat consumption goes up to counter-act the loss of grain calories due to the failure. In the medium term the smaller amount of livestock eating grain means humans eat a higher percentage of the grain grown. In the long term it's a new harvest and cycles repeat...
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bjourne 7y ago
IIUC, someone who flies to far away vacation destinations, drives a car and eats meat will reduce their carbon footprint the most by becoming a vegetarian. Myself I'd like to become a vegetarian because I eat too much meat and it's something I feel a little guilty about. But it's hard. And I'm lazy.
chukione 7y ago
obviously no. i hate the people, i dont want to save the world. i only love my cat, and because this, i stop eating meat. i dont want to know some animals are suffering because of me.
chukione 7y ago
obvioulsy no. i hate the people, i dont want to save the world. i only love my cat, and because this, i stop eating meat. i dont want to know there are other lives with feelings suffering because of me.
kgraves 7y ago
Can't we just eat both? I eat vegan, vegetarian and meat dishes in moderation, and my health has never been better.
JoshMnem 7y ago
Going vegan isn't the only option. Humans need to give more consideration to edible insects. (seriously) See the history of eating lobsters for an example of how attitudes can change.
- biztos 7y ago
  > See the history of eating lobsters[0] Also, see lobsters themselves and ask why we are so freaked out about eating bugs. Of course some people will refuse to eat both bugs and lobsters for the same religious reasons.[1] [0]: https://oceanpointinn.com/blog/?p=74 https://oceanpointinn.com/blog/?p=74 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Islamic_and_Jewish_dietary_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Islamic_and_Jewi...
- JoshMnem 7y ago
  By coincidence, this newsletter just arrived: https://angel.co/newsletters/youll-be-eating-crickets-soon-177 https://angel.co/newsletters/youll-be-eating-crickets-soon-1...
etxm 7y ago
Honest question: of all of the things people can do to make the world greener, why is it mostly (a subset) of vegans that look down their nose at other people? You don’t see people driving electric cars pulling up at red lighted and giving people shit for driving an SUV People in middle America don’t come into your city and shit on you for how far food has to drive to get to your ass. People that grow their own food aren’t protesting your grocery stores. Chill out.
gaara87 7y ago
I'm very curious about lab grown meat how it'll change the balance of the arguments posed here. Any chance, any of the readers here are researching on it actively?

59 points by mancerayder 7y ago

The article title is obviously click-bait-y. I don't disagree with any of the technological solutions discussed: I think vertical farming seems neat, and hopefully promising, and I believe local farming with special care given to rotating crops and maintaining soil health is also important. Given that I personally eat eggs and honey on a semi-regular basis, and am not fully vegan like my wife, I also agree with the idea of buying local eggs. But the article's actual contents do very little to support the title, since everyone knows no one thing is going to save the planet. TL;DR Not just one change is going to magically save the planet, but let me take this technicality as a chance to call out veganism for more clicks.

vfc1 7y ago

> farms growing crops have been just as destructive as those raising animals This comparison does not make sense. What this reporter and the public, in general, fail to realize still in 2019, is that most of the farms producing crops are doing so to produce cattle feed. The majority of agricultural fields are planted to feed livestock, not humans. Only a relatively small amount of crops goes directly to humans. This is why eating plants directly is much less wasteful and more resource-efficient. If more people eat plant-based, much less land will be needed for crops, that's the point.

Aunche 7y ago
It's a lot less efficient to grow almonds than livestock-grade soybeans, so perhaps almond milk is worse for the environment than cow's milk? The article doesn't really go into that sort of analysis though, and it's difficult to imagine that the average vegan has a bigger ecological impact.
- vfc1 7y ago
  Soy crops are a good example, the majority of them are to feed livestock but they are a great crop to feed humans instead, and without all the waste involved in having to feed a cow first and then eat parts of it. You can make plant milk with soy too, its a very versatile crop. With it, you can feed the same amount of people with a fraction of the land, water, and pollution.
  - jakemoshenko 7y ago
    You didn't address, and I don't know: what is the relative environmental impact of growing human-grade soy vs. livestock-grade soy? Is there even necessarily a distinction?
    - vfc1 7y ago
      As far as I know it's all just beans, they are all eatable by humans. The difference between resource consumption of different types of soy crops, if any, is not comparable to the difference between eating the soy directly or feeding it first to an animal, the second is a much more wasteful and environmentally impactful as you can imagine.
    - zpallin 7y ago
      You won't need to grow livestock-grade soy if you don't have livestock to feed. But we will always have humans to feed (because we're humans).
    - wtmt 7y ago
      AFAIK there is no human-grade soy vs. livestock-grade soy. But the soy grown for livestock can usually be fed in the ratio of <soy for one animal>:<soy for many humans> (this ratio varies based on which animal and farming practice you consider).
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    Barley crops are a good counter-example. There are three main purposes: malting, milling & animal feed. A good chunk of the feed barley on the market is barley grown for malting or milling but wasn't good enough for those purposes and is fed to chickens. The alternative to feeding it to chickens is to throw it away. That's hardly environmentally friendly. Some barley is purposefully grown for feed rather than aiming for the higher price that malting or milling will get. Yields on such variants can be as much as 3 times that of a nice malting or milling variant. Given that a chicken can convert 1.5 grams of barley protein into 1 gram of meat protein, you can see how it be more environmentally efficient to "eat" barley by running it through a chicken first.
- cpk5 7y ago
  Sure, that's true from a purely ecological perspective, but your argument does not capture the general inhumane practices that go on within the diary industry (e.g., caging, keeping cows perpetually pregnant, separating mother / calve at birth, etc.). All of these combined create a life of significant distress for all the animals involved and should be captured as an "environmental cost" in your equation above.
- ainiriand 7y ago
  You are making the mistake of assuming that just by growing livestock-grade soybeans you magically have milk. You still have to make this animal drink about 3 gallons per 100pounds, per day. https://beef.unl.edu/water-requirements-for-beef-cattle https://beef.unl.edu/water-requirements-for-beef-cattle
  - vfc1 7y ago
    You're right the water consumption of livestock raising is very important too, besides the huge amount of excrement produced.
- vfc1 7y ago
  To answer your question, it takes a lot more soy beans to feed a cow, that then will digest them and use only part of them, produce waste, consume water. The cow will be slaughtered and only part of the body will be consumed (gut, head, for example, make for a huge part and are not usually eaten), some of the eatable parts will be wasted in the food chain. If you count for everything, the amount of land and resources used to produce a gallon of cow's milk is always going to be much higher than anything done with a crop directly, because you cut out the middleman, the animal. For the specific case of almonds, why not use soy milk instead for a better comparison. I'm sure you will agree that you can produce a lot more soy milk by using the soy directly then by feeding to a cow, impregnate it, shooting the calf on birth if its male, etc. the whole process. Not to mention the copious amount of cow excrement produced and the impact on global warming due to methane emissions of the cows intestines.
- thrownblown 7y ago
  cows dont eat soy, too much fat, it makes them sick
roel_v 7y ago
You can grow (maize and grass for) cattle in places where you can't grow crops.
- vfc1 7y ago
  Yes like in the Amazon where the forest is taken down for soy crops and for grazing mostly. A lot of the grazing land we have was created through human burning and deforestation in the first place. And yet, in reality, the vast majority of meat comes from factory farms fed with corn and soy. Even technically called free-range meat gets fattened up in the last portion of their lives in factory farms to get the slaughter weight so they also get fed corn and soy just less.
cmrdporcupine 7y ago
Farms grow crops that you can't eat, to feed to animals that you can. Name the protein and fat sources that will replace meat. Tofu? We already grow soy for animal feed as a cash crop and it's pesticide and fertilizer intensive, and if people eat it directly instead of as an animal feed additive its production will grow at the expense of forests and soil health. Nuts? I'm all for perennial woody agriculture, but the calorie/acre ratio is not great, and they are labour intensive for picking, netting, processing. I say this as a person who has an orchard of my own with hazelnuts and chestnuts in it. The reality is that should meat be gone, we'd have to replace it with other foods, grown on a mass scale on agricultural lands. Animals can graze on products (grass, hay, soy, dent corn) that are marginal or useless for human consumption, and turn it into high protein, high fat calorie rich food. There are populations that eat primarily vegetarian, but mostly they are also heavy on the dairy. But the moment you bring dairy into the equation you're also bringing in non-productive male calves -- in other words, veal. Similar story for eggs. What we need to be doing -- along with reducing meat consumption some -- is coming up with more ecological ways to raise meats, and diversifying our meat products. Raising insects as feed stock for chickens, for example. Increasing perennial woody agriculture instead of cash crops, with small scale grazing of meat and dairy animals inbetween rows. Cutting animals out entirely actually leads to a nutrient deficiency. The classic pre-green revolution family farm forms a kind of nutritive circle with manure, grazing, and rooting being an important part of soil health and maintenance. That didn't scale out in the last 100 years, but it's a model we need to look at. EDIT: wow, the downvotes. Go vegans go!
- Someone 7y ago
  ”We already grow soy for animal feed as a cash crop and it's pesticide and fertilizer intensive, and if people eat it directly instead of as an animal feed additive its production will grow” Only if farmers keep feeding soy to cows that nobody will buy anymore.
- jetpackjoe 7y ago
  As long as you are eating a variety of plants and getting enough calories it is practically impossible to be protein deficient.
jakewins 7y ago
Some plants have exceptional environmental properties; things like soy, oats (0.1g CO2e/kcal!!) and potatoes. Others are worse than eating meat; if you get your calories from fresh tomatoes (12.22g CO2e/kcal, heated greenhouse) you have an order-of-magnitude higher impact than if you get it from chicken (~1.58g CO2e/kcal, depending on part). The food system is not easily grouped into "climate-conscious" and "bad"; a vegan diet is better than a western one in every study I've seen, but we could do much, much better. I highly recommend this study as a starting point, though you need to convert the unit they use, kg CO2e / kg, to the unit we eat in, kcal: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652616303584 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261... And, shameless self-promotion: I maintain a food blog that attempts to build an evidence-based low carbon collection of recipes at https://www.carboncook.com https://www.carboncook.com
- nicoburns 7y ago
  Nobody really eats tomatoes for the calories though. People (with meat-based or plant-based diets) use tomatoes for flavour and other nutrients.
  - jakewins 7y ago
    Tomato pastas like pomodoro and putanesca were my go-to lunches before I learned about this, and tomato soups remain super popular, so I disagree that they are simply a condiment. Still, perhaps they are a bad general example. Perhaps a better one would be rice (~2g CO2e/kcal). There the problem is the massive methane emissions produced from the cultivation approach. Point being: There are huge differences between different foods, and they are non-obvious.
    - vfc1 7y ago
      It's precisely because feeding humans is so environmentally impactful that we should not be feeding mostly animals, only to eat them. The CO2 impact of rice and grains in general can't be compared the impact of animal products, here is a graph - https://i0.wp.com/shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/foodkCal1.gif?resize=540%2C405 https://i0.wp.com/shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads...
odiroot 7y ago
Let us stop consuming ruminants meat first then. Beef and lamb are not even that good but require so much resources.

tekstar 7y ago

Okay article, terrible headline. No single action in isolation will save the world from climate collapse. The problem stems from countless actions taking place today that do not pay for the external cost of emitting carbon into the atmosphere. The defeatist attitude that something should not be done because it doesn't solve the entire problem need to stop in order for us to begin to make progress.

kmnns 7y ago

> Undoing this damage [...] includes less meat, less intensive and more intelligent farming, and the application of new technologies, including ways to produce high volumes of food for cities. So “going vegan won’t save the planet” by itself, but it plays a major role in doing so. Makes sense, especially if one considers that the production of meat presupposes the production of plant-based fodder worth about 10 times the energy. The title is misleading, or simply clickbait. Then again, it helps tricking your meat-loving friends into clicking on it...

wtmt 7y ago
> The title is misleading, or simply clickbait. Then again, it helps tricking your meat-loving friends into clicking on it... I’d rephrase the latter part as “it helps tricking your meat-loving friends into sharing it without reading or analyzing what’s true”. Most other places on the web don’t get into value or fact based arguments.

wysifnwyg 7y ago

Electricity, transportation, and manufacturing add up to about 80% of all GHG emissions. If you want your diet choice to have the biggest impact purchase locally produced and unprocessed foods.

NickBusey 7y ago
I don't doubt this is true in the least, but do you have a source I could provide to others?
- wysifnwyg 7y ago
  https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
  - NickBusey 7y ago
    Hmm interesting, thanks. That is all GHG emissions though. I wonder if there are numbers around buying produce or meat at the store, how much of the GHG emissions tied to that product are agricultural vs the packaging, transportation, etc. In other words, how big of a difference does 'buying local' have when buying food? Just wondering aloud, not necessarily asking anyone in particular.
    - wysifnwyg 7y ago
      I use to have the sources somewhere but I'm not finding them at the moment. So let's just do this as a mind exercise. Take into consideration that while ships are tremendously more efficient, they travel significantly more miles. When comparing a single shipping container, a cargo ship burns 0.3 gallons of bunker fuel per hour and a semi truck burns 10 gallons of diesel. If you add distance into the calculation, a cargo ship from Brazil to NYC takes 122 gallons of bunker fuel while something produced locally takes 1/12 of that in diesel. Further more, bunker fuel exceptionally worse than diesel when comparing emissions. This is just for the transport side of things too. The electricity production in many other countries produce an increased amount of green house gasses compared to the United States.

reureu 7y ago

Obviously one solution isn't going to solve the problem, but we'd get a lot further if the single solution people adopted was eating less/no meat instead of (say) not using plastic straws.

corliss78 7y ago

Going vegan is missing the point. There are too many people on this planet, period. Im not going to eat an unhealthy diet just so we can squeeze 3 billion more consumers into the economy. We need reproductive freedom and education in any countries that are above replacement rate.

ainiriand 7y ago
Please, educate yourself before coming here to say things like that. Do yourself this favour.
ben_w 7y ago
The UK currently produces about 60% of its own food requirements (60% of 66 million ≈ 40 million), however I’ve seen it reported that switching everyone in the UK to a vegan diet would increase that to supporting about 200 million people. That doesn’t mean it would be easy — I am a motivated to become vegan and still failing. If I extrapolate that to the rest of the planet, the world should be able to support around 38.5 billion.

ma2rten 7y ago

I am wondering if there will really be a clever technical solution to climate change. Maybe we just need to come to terms with the fact that we have been living drastically above our means and we need to adjust our standard of living accordingly.

spodek 7y ago
Having written patents and helped build a satellite now in orbit, I wondered about clever technical solutions until I finally concluded what many had long before me: the belief and hope for and implementations of clever technical solutions cause our environmental problems. Take electric cars. If their greater efficiency makes them a green solution then the Watt steam engine's greater efficiency should have made it one of the greatest sustainability solutions of all time. On the contrary, it's the poster child of the industrial revolution. Each use used less coal, but overall coal use went up. Increasing efficiency is orthogonal to lowering total waste. Making a polluting system more efficient pollutes more efficiently. Everyone who isn't an economist can see the results of our world: more efficient than ever and creating more total waste than ever. Changing a system's goals, say from growth to enjoying what we have and from externalizing costs to stewardship, will change its outcomes.
makerofspoons 7y ago
I think you're right- the solution is going to be a combination of carbon capture, agricultural technology, energy storage, and some degree of energy austerity enforced with carbon taxes. How much austerity depends on how soon we begin addressing the problem.

falcolas 7y ago

I'm going to say something very unpopular: If your plan to save the world includes requiring all 9 billion people to fundamentally change their lives (especially if its perceived as a degradation of their current quality of life), it's never going to work. Now I'll speak for myself. I will not go vegan, given the current offering of vegan foodstuffs. It just doesn't taste as good. I know it may be better for me than my current diet, and I know it could help decrease my overall carbon footprint. I still have no plans to do it. Perhaps it makes me greedy. Perhaps it makes me an asshole in the eyes of the next 20 or so generations. But I look at it in the larger context - the ship has sailed, our course towards permanent (on a human scale) climate change was set by the industrial revolution and the speed set to flank by global increases to our quality of life. So yeah, I frankly refuse to permanently sacrifice my quality of life to have no effect on the future.

ainiriand 7y ago
Interesting, I've never felt any quality of life loss when going vegan. Just the opposite. I feel much better and food is delicious now that I have discovered a whole new range of food that I never considered before.
- falcolas 7y ago
  I'm glad you feel that way. I've looked at the array of foods I'd have to give up, and it's not worth it. > now that I have discovered a whole new range of food that I never considered before. Here's the awesome thing from my point of view: I can eat vegan foods and hamburgers. :) Nothing about eating meat prevents me from also eating vegan dishes.
  - seba_dos1 7y ago
    I can do so too. However, I would never really discover all those great options if I haven't seriously tried to limit my meat consumption in past few years. I do eat meat, but these days ~90% of my diet is vegetarian. My favorite burger place around is... a vegan one. I never tried it before, now it's my number one when I crave for a burger. Go figure. Some people go vegan because they care about morality and "purity", but the fact is - if everyone really tried to consider alternatives to meat and eat it only occasionally, even without taking any moral stance about it, the environmental impact of meat production would look completely different than it does now (and would actually be less problematic morally as well).

663e1b 7y ago

>Undoing this damage, while also managing to feed the nearly 10 billion people expected to populate the earth by 2050, is going to require lots of ideas integrated together. Back of the envelope calculation: The global cattle population is around 1.5 billion. A cow eats between 8 and 16 Mcals per day, which is roughly 4-8 times what is recommended for an average adult (2 Mcals). If we diverted all those calories to humans we could feed 6-12 billion of them (neglecting protein, vitamin and mineral content).

eppp 7y ago
This seems to ignore that cows eat calories that humans cannot.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
Those calories are the way the world handles crop failures. Let's assume that normally 2/3 of the grain calories are fed to livestock. Then we get a massive crop failure and global yields are 1/3 of expected. Price of grain goes up, farmers can't afford to feed their cattle so slaughter their breeding stock and the price of meat goes down. In the short term meat consumption goes up to counter-act the loss of grain calories due to the failure. In the medium term the smaller amount of livestock eating grain means humans eat a higher percentage of the grain grown. In the long term it's a new harvest and cycles repeat...

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bjourne 7y ago

IIUC, someone who flies to far away vacation destinations, drives a car and eats meat will reduce their carbon footprint the most by becoming a vegetarian. Myself I'd like to become a vegetarian because I eat too much meat and it's something I feel a little guilty about. But it's hard. And I'm lazy.

chukione 7y ago

obviously no. i hate the people, i dont want to save the world. i only love my cat, and because this, i stop eating meat. i dont want to know some animals are suffering because of me.

chukione 7y ago

obvioulsy no. i hate the people, i dont want to save the world. i only love my cat, and because this, i stop eating meat. i dont want to know there are other lives with feelings suffering because of me.

kgraves 7y ago

Can't we just eat both? I eat vegan, vegetarian and meat dishes in moderation, and my health has never been better.

JoshMnem 7y ago

Going vegan isn't the only option. Humans need to give more consideration to edible insects. (seriously) See the history of eating lobsters for an example of how attitudes can change.

biztos 7y ago
> See the history of eating lobsters[0] Also, see lobsters themselves and ask why we are so freaked out about eating bugs. Of course some people will refuse to eat both bugs and lobsters for the same religious reasons.[1] [0]: https://oceanpointinn.com/blog/?p=74 https://oceanpointinn.com/blog/?p=74 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Islamic_and_Jewish_dietary_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Islamic_and_Jewi...
JoshMnem 7y ago
By coincidence, this newsletter just arrived: https://angel.co/newsletters/youll-be-eating-crickets-soon-177 https://angel.co/newsletters/youll-be-eating-crickets-soon-1...

etxm 7y ago

Honest question: of all of the things people can do to make the world greener, why is it mostly (a subset) of vegans that look down their nose at other people? You don’t see people driving electric cars pulling up at red lighted and giving people shit for driving an SUV People in middle America don’t come into your city and shit on you for how far food has to drive to get to your ass. People that grow their own food aren’t protesting your grocery stores. Chill out.

gaara87 7y ago

I'm very curious about lab grown meat how it'll change the balance of the arguments posed here. Any chance, any of the readers here are researching on it actively?