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> Yet even in those rich countries in which the consumption of meat has reached new heights [...] it has led to no demonstrable ill effects on health The artic

> Yet even in those rich countries in which the consumption of meat has reached new heights [...] it has led to no demonstrable ill effects on health The article doesn't mention environmental pressures: as we grapple with climate change, we'll necessarily have to reduce CO2 emissions, and meat is a huge contributor to global CO2 emissions. The health consequences of meat are hard to argue with certainty, we really have only a rudimentary understanding of health science. We have a far better understanding of global warming, and we can say with certainty that eating less meat will reduce global CO2 emission. Whether that means the price of meat goes up over time (i.e. due to a carbon tax), or laws curb it, that's a factor which may overwhelm the article's thesis that "more global wealth = more meat eaten"

kvgr 4y ago
It is not, it is only recycling plants into methane that changed to co2 and that is then captured by plants again. Ffs
greatpostman 4y ago
Dude India and China are the biggest contributors. I’ll take these comments seriously when people start pointing at real root causes
- nicbou 4y ago
  The most populous countries which are also the world's factory? Yes. But if you look at emissions per capita, it's not China we should look at. It's a country that outsources most of its manufacturing and still manages to top the chart. I feel like people say "but China" to avoid taking any responsibility.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    It would only make sense to look at emissions per capita if emissions were driven by individuals rather than by industry.
    - naruvimama 4y ago
    - nicbou 4y ago
      You can't have that argument both ways. China is building the world's crap, and still has less emissions per capita than the US with its service industry.
      - josephcsible 4y ago
        That's because China doesn't care about the environment when they make things. If the US and China made the same quantity of the same good, I expect China would produce a lot more emissions in the process.
        nicbou 4y ago
        China manufactures a hell of a lot more than the US
tomp 4y ago
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).
- chasil 4y ago
  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.
  - tomp 4y ago
    Every coin has two sides. 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. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-n...
    - quantumwannabe 4y ago
      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).
ravenstine 4y ago
There is not one shed of science that can suggest with any amount of confidence that eliminating livestock will make a difference with global warming meaningful enough to justify not being able to eat the food that we developed to subsist on. I don't think anyone is suggesting that meat production at present doesn't add something to the system, but CO2 and methane emitted by the process isn't exactly new. Whether it's corn or grass that's being fed on, the carbon being belched out by cows comes from the carbon the plants captured from the atmosphere before being eaten. While inevitably some carbon is going to be consumed from the ground, it is minuscule compared to all the other minerals that the plants need to consume. Why would they need to get carbon from the ground when photosynthesis already necessitates using atmospheric carbon? And yes, methane eventually degrades into carbon over around a decade or so. Also, there were far more large grass eating ruminants on planes like the North American continent, before humans killed the vast majority of them, than there are cows being raised as livestock now. We don't even have more cows being raised than a decade ago. So trying to reduce meat consumption is not only fighting against the atmosphere's own carbon cycle, but the same cycle that was occurring in nature at a greater abundance before man showed up. We're better off just not releasing carbon that's trapped in the earth's crust, which is what we're doing when we're burning fossil fuels, because that wouldn't really be happening at such a rapid rate in nature. But no one wants to talk about that. We have nuclear, but the hand waving never stops. I don't really know what to tell people who think that we need to stop eating meat because of global warming when they refuse to advocate for nuclear energy.
- danielbln 4y ago
  We are omnivores, we can subsist on many things, meat being one of them. If you enjoy meat that's one thing, but the "we evolved to eat meat, now give me my steak" mindset is a strange one.
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    If you put eat in front of a cow, they'll eat it if they're even modestly hungry. Does that mean that they evolved to eat meat? Of course not. Mad cow disease wouldn't be a thing if this wasn't true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat... https://farmhouseguide.com/do-cows-eat-meat/ https://farmhouseguide.com/do-cows-eat-meat/ > If you enjoy meat that's one thing, but the "we evolved to eat meat, now give me my steak" mindset is a strange one. It's only strange to for those who are unaware of the evidence. On the other side of the coin from cows, just because we can eat plants, pass undigested cellulose in our stool, and survive does not mean that we either developed to eat plants, need plants, or operate optimally on plants. The fact that our ancestors ate mostly meat is not controversial and is even backed up by stable isotope testing. The fact that we lack aspects of an herbivorous digestive system is not controversial. Go look for what's called a cecum. By name, we humans have a "cecum" but in name only since that word means "dead end". Our cecum looks nothing like that of any animal that is herbivorous or obligatively omnivorous. That's just one example. At a higher level, we suck at digesting cellulose, and most available plants before agriculture were very fibrous and lacked the flesh of fruits and vegetables you find at a grocery store. Moreover, meat contains everything we need to survive and function properly to the exclusion of any plant material at all. If you're wondering about things like Vitamin C, well, I don't really want to spend all day going into such specifics, but long story short there's no need for an abundance of Vitamin C on a diet primarily composed of meat and lacking carbohydrates. So no, it's not just about making excuses to eat tasty meat. You might find that eating meat and not confounding such a diet with carbohydrates and plant material has real benefits. EDIT: To further address your point about our supposed omnivorism, we are only as omnivorous as we have to scavenge. As I already mentioned, the kinds of edible plants available to most humans before agriculture were not very digestible or energy dense at all, meaning that to eat plants required a significant energy investment given that we didn't always cook our vegetables. Not only was eating plants not nearly as energy efficient as allowing larger animals to digest those plants first, but most plants in nature arguably aren't that tasty. I'm a forager and have been doing so for well over a decade (long before it was cool), and I have to be honest in that most wild plants don't compare to meat in terms of taste and satiety. The plants that are tasty are usually only around for a short period of the year.
dan-robertson 4y ago
I think the claim is more that raising cattle leads to higher methane levels and methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. There are other environmental or social issues with raising animals for meat however (eg inefficient land use, animal welfare, deforestation, zoonotic diseases, etc). I don’t buy your argument because I think people are just not going to significantly change their behaviours because they are scared by some predicted global warming apocalypse, and carbon taxes seem unlikely to be supported in democracies for the same reason. It seems to me that the only way we will significantly curb CO2 emissions is by the environmentally better option being cheaper than keeping the worse option, possibly with some subsidies to help. It seems this is happening with electricity generation now in the US, which is good. Personally, I find environmental arguments to be stronger but I expect any declining meat consumption to be driven by animal welfare concerns, cultural changes, availability of alternatives, and possibly vegetarian/vegan food becoming cheaper or meat becoming more expensive (though that feels a bit unlikely currently).
lumost 4y ago
Are there any references covering how much CO2 is generated by a realistic vegan/vegetarian diet? It would be easy to identify a theoretically low CO2 diet of rice and beans which does not require refrigeration, can be dehydrated for transport, grown easily and dense in calories. However this is not the diet that I generally see vegetarians/vegans eating - or the diet I go for when I eat vegetarian. I’m suspicious that we look at extremely high quality vegetarian foods when we want to claim health benefits, and then low quality foods when we want to claim environmental efficiency.
pkphilip 4y ago
I suggest that those who are campaigning for livestock reduction should first ask for the complete reduction of household pets as they also emit methane and perform less of a productive function in society than livestock which produces meat, eggs, milk and a host of other products.

kvgr 4y ago

It is not, it is only recycling plants into methane that changed to co2 and that is then captured by plants again. Ffs

greatpostman 4y ago

Dude India and China are the biggest contributors. I’ll take these comments seriously when people start pointing at real root causes

nicbou 4y ago
The most populous countries which are also the world's factory? Yes. But if you look at emissions per capita, it's not China we should look at. It's a country that outsources most of its manufacturing and still manages to top the chart. I feel like people say "but China" to avoid taking any responsibility.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  It would only make sense to look at emissions per capita if emissions were driven by individuals rather than by industry.
  - naruvimama 4y ago
  - nicbou 4y ago
    You can't have that argument both ways. China is building the world's crap, and still has less emissions per capita than the US with its service industry.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      That's because China doesn't care about the environment when they make things. If the US and China made the same quantity of the same good, I expect China would produce a lot more emissions in the process.
      - nicbou 4y ago
        China manufactures a hell of a lot more than the US

tomp 4y ago

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).

chasil 4y ago
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.
- tomp 4y ago
  Every coin has two sides. 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. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-n...
  - quantumwannabe 4y ago
    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).

ravenstine 4y ago

There is not one shed of science that can suggest with any amount of confidence that eliminating livestock will make a difference with global warming meaningful enough to justify not being able to eat the food that we developed to subsist on. I don't think anyone is suggesting that meat production at present doesn't add something to the system, but CO2 and methane emitted by the process isn't exactly new. Whether it's corn or grass that's being fed on, the carbon being belched out by cows comes from the carbon the plants captured from the atmosphere before being eaten. While inevitably some carbon is going to be consumed from the ground, it is minuscule compared to all the other minerals that the plants need to consume. Why would they need to get carbon from the ground when photosynthesis already necessitates using atmospheric carbon? And yes, methane eventually degrades into carbon over around a decade or so. Also, there were far more large grass eating ruminants on planes like the North American continent, before humans killed the vast majority of them, than there are cows being raised as livestock now. We don't even have more cows being raised than a decade ago. So trying to reduce meat consumption is not only fighting against the atmosphere's own carbon cycle, but the same cycle that was occurring in nature at a greater abundance before man showed up. We're better off just not releasing carbon that's trapped in the earth's crust, which is what we're doing when we're burning fossil fuels, because that wouldn't really be happening at such a rapid rate in nature. But no one wants to talk about that. We have nuclear, but the hand waving never stops. I don't really know what to tell people who think that we need to stop eating meat because of global warming when they refuse to advocate for nuclear energy.

danielbln 4y ago
We are omnivores, we can subsist on many things, meat being one of them. If you enjoy meat that's one thing, but the "we evolved to eat meat, now give me my steak" mindset is a strange one.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  If you put eat in front of a cow, they'll eat it if they're even modestly hungry. Does that mean that they evolved to eat meat? Of course not. Mad cow disease wouldn't be a thing if this wasn't true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat... https://farmhouseguide.com/do-cows-eat-meat/ https://farmhouseguide.com/do-cows-eat-meat/ > If you enjoy meat that's one thing, but the "we evolved to eat meat, now give me my steak" mindset is a strange one. It's only strange to for those who are unaware of the evidence. On the other side of the coin from cows, just because we can eat plants, pass undigested cellulose in our stool, and survive does not mean that we either developed to eat plants, need plants, or operate optimally on plants. The fact that our ancestors ate mostly meat is not controversial and is even backed up by stable isotope testing. The fact that we lack aspects of an herbivorous digestive system is not controversial. Go look for what's called a cecum. By name, we humans have a "cecum" but in name only since that word means "dead end". Our cecum looks nothing like that of any animal that is herbivorous or obligatively omnivorous. That's just one example. At a higher level, we suck at digesting cellulose, and most available plants before agriculture were very fibrous and lacked the flesh of fruits and vegetables you find at a grocery store. Moreover, meat contains everything we need to survive and function properly to the exclusion of any plant material at all. If you're wondering about things like Vitamin C, well, I don't really want to spend all day going into such specifics, but long story short there's no need for an abundance of Vitamin C on a diet primarily composed of meat and lacking carbohydrates. So no, it's not just about making excuses to eat tasty meat. You might find that eating meat and not confounding such a diet with carbohydrates and plant material has real benefits. EDIT: To further address your point about our supposed omnivorism, we are only as omnivorous as we have to scavenge. As I already mentioned, the kinds of edible plants available to most humans before agriculture were not very digestible or energy dense at all, meaning that to eat plants required a significant energy investment given that we didn't always cook our vegetables. Not only was eating plants not nearly as energy efficient as allowing larger animals to digest those plants first, but most plants in nature arguably aren't that tasty. I'm a forager and have been doing so for well over a decade (long before it was cool), and I have to be honest in that most wild plants don't compare to meat in terms of taste and satiety. The plants that are tasty are usually only around for a short period of the year.

dan-robertson 4y ago

I think the claim is more that raising cattle leads to higher methane levels and methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. There are other environmental or social issues with raising animals for meat however (eg inefficient land use, animal welfare, deforestation, zoonotic diseases, etc). I don’t buy your argument because I think people are just not going to significantly change their behaviours because they are scared by some predicted global warming apocalypse, and carbon taxes seem unlikely to be supported in democracies for the same reason. It seems to me that the only way we will significantly curb CO2 emissions is by the environmentally better option being cheaper than keeping the worse option, possibly with some subsidies to help. It seems this is happening with electricity generation now in the US, which is good. Personally, I find environmental arguments to be stronger but I expect any declining meat consumption to be driven by animal welfare concerns, cultural changes, availability of alternatives, and possibly vegetarian/vegan food becoming cheaper or meat becoming more expensive (though that feels a bit unlikely currently).

lumost 4y ago

Are there any references covering how much CO2 is generated by a realistic vegan/vegetarian diet? It would be easy to identify a theoretically low CO2 diet of rice and beans which does not require refrigeration, can be dehydrated for transport, grown easily and dense in calories. However this is not the diet that I generally see vegetarians/vegans eating - or the diet I go for when I eat vegetarian. I’m suspicious that we look at extremely high quality vegetarian foods when we want to claim health benefits, and then low quality foods when we want to claim environmental efficiency.

pkphilip 4y ago

I suggest that those who are campaigning for livestock reduction should first ask for the complete reduction of household pets as they also emit methane and perform less of a productive function in society than livestock which produces meat, eggs, milk and a host of other products.