5 ms·

If you live in the US, your order is wrong. 1. Walk or bike. 1a. If you can't do the above, use public transport. 1b. If you can't do that, consider moving t

If you live in the US, your order is wrong. 1. Walk or bike. 1a. If you can't do the above, use public transport. 1b. If you can't do that, consider moving to a city where you can do all of the above (if you can afford it). If you're rural, seek a land trust or farmer to buy your land when you do. 2. Insulate your house. 3. Get solar if you can afford it. 3a. Replace all gas appliances with electric (Heat pump, electric water heater, ec) 4. Don't fly. 5. Dietary changes, but remember to include ecosystem services and impact in your analysis. A little carbon is worth it if it means more land stays free of pesticides and continues to provide for the ecosystem. At least, this is the best I've been able to make of it after a decade of study using open sources. Agriculture is important, but whenever I've actually dug into the referenced data I always find they're optimizing for the wrong things, leaving out important variables, or just all around cherry picking data with an end goal in mind.

jshen 4y ago
Dramatically reducing meat consumption is the single best thing the average westerner could do to limit their environmental impact. Why did you remove it?
- dbingham 4y ago
  a) Because that's not true. The numbers don't actually work out that way. Transportation and heating are most American's biggest carbon contribution. Agriculture is down a ways. b) Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It allows the land to function as native prairie or savanna. There is also evidence that this sort of grazing can substantially reduce carbon emissions. Meanwhile monocultured grain, beans, and veggies - especially conventional with heavy pesticide* (edit: originally wrote fertilizer, meant pesticide) use - are devastating to ecosystems. They're essentially turning large swaths of land into killing fields, taking the bottom right out of ecosystem and contributing to the massive drop in insect populations (which form the foundation of the food web) we've seen across the developed world. In short - the agricultural analysis is really fucking complex, multivariate, and grey. She links a literature analysis that claims to contradict much of this, but I've read literature analyses making these sorts of claims before that just ignore most of the alternative systems, gloss over a lot of nuance, or downplay the harm of convention systems in major ways. I need to read the one she linked, but experience has taught me to treat it skeptically.
  - jrajav 4y ago
    I'm a meat eater and also very invested in reducing my environmental impact despite that, and I'm very interested in learning more about this. Can you point me to your original sources?
    - jshen 4y ago
      No the person you were asking, but this is one of the better views of data on this topic. https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
  - aradox66 4y ago
    The vast majority of monocultured grains are used to feed livestock. Plant based diet, even if you ate soy and wheat and corn and nothing else, has an order of magnitude smaller impact than eating meat.
  - dqv 4y ago
    >Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It allows the land to function as native prairie or savanna. >Meanwhile monocultured grain, beans, and veggies - especially conventional with heavy fertilizer use - are devastating to ecosystems. You're suggesting, in a very roundabout way, that we drastically reduce meat consumption. None of these things you describe can be done sustainably without a drastic reduction of livestock.
    - dbingham 4y ago
      Yea, I do agree that we need to reduce meat consumption and focus on sustainably grazed operations for the meat that is consumed. But that's not the same as putting it on top of the list. Ever since Cowspiracy came out (which has been roundly debunked) there's been this segment of the environmental movement that wants to put beef on the top of the list of carbon problems. It just doesn't belong there and there are so many issues with putting it there - not least of which is the individual responsibility trap. Climate cannot be solved by individual action alone. Individual action is necessary, but not sufficient. And since people have limited capacity to make lifestyle changes, we need them to focus that capacity where it will do the most good. Meat just isn't it - transporation, housing, energy - those are where it belongs. We should be encouraging people to eat less meat, yes, and to eat sustainably pastured an grazed meat. But we shouldn't be telling people to go vegan as their primary lifestyle change.
jeffbee 4y ago
Burning 1 gallon of motor gasoline emits the same carbon as producing 1.3lb of finished beef. Flying once from U.S. to Europe has the same GHG impact as producing 80 pounds of beef. For a typical U.S. household, transportation is a bigger source of greenhouse gas emissions than food.
- dbingham 4y ago
  Source please. There's currently a propaganda war between multiple powerful lobbies - the animal rights lobby, the meat producers, conventional ag producers, and more - which means there is a ton of misinformation flying around about the actual environmental impacts of eating meat. Really, of all things dietary. Meanwhile there are a bunch of people exploring alternate agriculture systems through agroecological approaches that show a lot of promise, but haven't been studied enough to really make claims about either way. Further, you cannot just say "x amount of finished beef produces y emissions" because there are so many factors that go into it. Feedlot vs traditional range vs intensive rotational vs silvopasture are all different with completely different environmental impacts - of which carbon is only one.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/food-footprints https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/food-footprints
    - dbingham 4y ago
      Again, that is a chart based on a single source. Which may or may not be open access and I've been through enough of these tonight, but look at my other comments on similar sources to see my problems with them. All too often they are based on "accepted dataset" which are full of all kinds of faulty assumptions and modeling. Meanwhile, there are people going out and actually measuring agroecology systems and finding a totally different result.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X18305675#t0015 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X1...

jshen 4y ago

Dramatically reducing meat consumption is the single best thing the average westerner could do to limit their environmental impact. Why did you remove it?

dbingham 4y ago
a) Because that's not true. The numbers don't actually work out that way. Transportation and heating are most American's biggest carbon contribution. Agriculture is down a ways. b) Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It allows the land to function as native prairie or savanna. There is also evidence that this sort of grazing can substantially reduce carbon emissions. Meanwhile monocultured grain, beans, and veggies - especially conventional with heavy pesticide* (edit: originally wrote fertilizer, meant pesticide) use - are devastating to ecosystems. They're essentially turning large swaths of land into killing fields, taking the bottom right out of ecosystem and contributing to the massive drop in insect populations (which form the foundation of the food web) we've seen across the developed world. In short - the agricultural analysis is really fucking complex, multivariate, and grey. She links a literature analysis that claims to contradict much of this, but I've read literature analyses making these sorts of claims before that just ignore most of the alternative systems, gloss over a lot of nuance, or downplay the harm of convention systems in major ways. I need to read the one she linked, but experience has taught me to treat it skeptically.
- jrajav 4y ago
  I'm a meat eater and also very invested in reducing my environmental impact despite that, and I'm very interested in learning more about this. Can you point me to your original sources?
  - jshen 4y ago
    No the person you were asking, but this is one of the better views of data on this topic. https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
- aradox66 4y ago
  The vast majority of monocultured grains are used to feed livestock. Plant based diet, even if you ate soy and wheat and corn and nothing else, has an order of magnitude smaller impact than eating meat.
- dqv 4y ago
  >Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It allows the land to function as native prairie or savanna. >Meanwhile monocultured grain, beans, and veggies - especially conventional with heavy fertilizer use - are devastating to ecosystems. You're suggesting, in a very roundabout way, that we drastically reduce meat consumption. None of these things you describe can be done sustainably without a drastic reduction of livestock.
  - dbingham 4y ago
    Yea, I do agree that we need to reduce meat consumption and focus on sustainably grazed operations for the meat that is consumed. But that's not the same as putting it on top of the list. Ever since Cowspiracy came out (which has been roundly debunked) there's been this segment of the environmental movement that wants to put beef on the top of the list of carbon problems. It just doesn't belong there and there are so many issues with putting it there - not least of which is the individual responsibility trap. Climate cannot be solved by individual action alone. Individual action is necessary, but not sufficient. And since people have limited capacity to make lifestyle changes, we need them to focus that capacity where it will do the most good. Meat just isn't it - transporation, housing, energy - those are where it belongs. We should be encouraging people to eat less meat, yes, and to eat sustainably pastured an grazed meat. But we shouldn't be telling people to go vegan as their primary lifestyle change.

jeffbee 4y ago

Burning 1 gallon of motor gasoline emits the same carbon as producing 1.3lb of finished beef. Flying once from U.S. to Europe has the same GHG impact as producing 80 pounds of beef. For a typical U.S. household, transportation is a bigger source of greenhouse gas emissions than food.

dbingham 4y ago
Source please. There's currently a propaganda war between multiple powerful lobbies - the animal rights lobby, the meat producers, conventional ag producers, and more - which means there is a ton of misinformation flying around about the actual environmental impacts of eating meat. Really, of all things dietary. Meanwhile there are a bunch of people exploring alternate agriculture systems through agroecological approaches that show a lot of promise, but haven't been studied enough to really make claims about either way. Further, you cannot just say "x amount of finished beef produces y emissions" because there are so many factors that go into it. Feedlot vs traditional range vs intensive rotational vs silvopasture are all different with completely different environmental impacts - of which carbon is only one.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/food-footprints https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/food-footprints
  - dbingham 4y ago
    Again, that is a chart based on a single source. Which may or may not be open access and I've been through enough of these tonight, but look at my other comments on similar sources to see my problems with them. All too often they are based on "accepted dataset" which are full of all kinds of faulty assumptions and modeling. Meanwhile, there are people going out and actually measuring agroecology systems and finding a totally different result.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X18305675#t0015 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X1...