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I tend to agree, in that it would be wonderful if, say, food packaging had resource usage and emissions printed on the label. In lieu of that, despite variance
by colordrops 3y ago
I tend to agree, in that it would be wonderful if, say, food packaging had resource usage and emissions printed on the label.
In lieu of that, despite variance in environmental impact across foods, on the whole, the average vegan diet is almost certainly going to be far better for the environment than a non-vegan diet.
And this is not even getting into other positive elements such as health and animal welfare, but those are unrelated topics likely to spark additional argument, so I won't go further.
- belorn 3y agoThe average right now is terrible for pretty much everything in the world. Fishermen in Greenland can send their fish to china to have it gutted, then sent to Norway to have it packaged, and then sent to USA to be sold. An avocado can have a piece of rain forest burned up, grown using fertilizers produced in Germany, which in turn is using natural gas mined in Russia. The avocado then get shipped to be packaged in the Netherlands, and then shipped again to be consumed in Norway. Emissions are not a significant consideration in this global economy. The key factor that everyone cares about is cost.
- colordrops 3y agoI understand your point, but animal agriculture alone accounts for more emissions than all transport combined. https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2022/03/15/it-may-be-uncomfortable-we-need-talk-about-it-animal-agriculture-industry-and-zero-waste https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2022/03/15/it-may-be-uncomf...
- belorn 3y agoDifferent time scale, and different form of emissions. Most of animal agriculture consider methane that are produced by cows eating grass that has grown by taking out co2 from the air. They are just as green as biofuel is green. Climate change is primary caused by humans burning fossil fuels, and humans extracting fossil fuels to be used in chemical processes like artificial fertilizers. In the short term it might be beneficial to reduce the number of animals that eat plants that has sequestrate carbon from the air, but in every case it would be worse if we humans use fossil fuel to burn the same plants. Some people has argued that in the very short term, reducing methane while increasing emissions of fossil fuel emissions could beneficial be a better strategy if we can know for sure that carbon capture will save us in the future. I am doubtful to that strategy. It should be noted that methane leaks from fossil fuel industry is larger than that from cows. A primary source of those methane leaks are the production of artificial fertilizers, but of course all steps between extracting natural gas to producing the fertilizers has large amount of emissions and leaks.