Skip Navigation

Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It

sentientmedia.org Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It

As negotiations get underway at COP28, we compiled a list of the leading research documenting the connection between meat and greenhouse gas emissions.

Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It
402

You're viewing part of a thread.

Show Context
402 comments
  • Relax I want to talk this out.

    I just need to know where you're pulling that from and how it was calculated. Otherwise we're just going "tis!" "tisn't!" till one of us gets bored.

    Like are you referring to cattle farming in Botswana? global stats? all animal ag including fishing in Japan?

    I can't discuss a magic number, I have to know how it was derived and under what assumptions. Then we can examine the assumptions and methods of derivation and determine whether or not we agree it to be true and why or why not.

    • My argument on marginal land is prima facie so far. I picked it because it seems obviously true on the surface, so I can let you provide your points to try to blow it up. I'm referring to the land use problem, which is the often-cited vegan argument that livestock land could be instead used as forests or croplands to sequester carbon.

      If you want to contest the 2/3 marginal land number, I'll cite a few references, but it seems an odd number to consider "magic"

      • A magic number is just slang for a number which has no obvious reason for its value.

        I literally can't discuss this because I have no idea what it's saying. It seems obviously false to me when we factor in the land used for their food production. In the heaviest meat eating/producing countries only a minority of calories produced are from pastured animals. Most cattle are from factory farms involving feed lots, pigs/chickens/fish are fed crops grown on arable land.

        Like ~75% of the world's soy is grown for animal feed https://ourworldindata.org/soy and soy is a massive crop so it's hard to imagine where all this saved land comes from. What are you comparing against?

        • A magic number is just slang for a number which has no obvious reason for its value.

          Which number is a magic number to you? I thought I was clear in asking that question.

          It seems obviously false to me when we factor in the land used for their food production

          I'm not sure what you're saying here. Cattle and most livestock can graze on marginal land. What land would be used for food production? Here's the land-use breakdown.

          Like ~75% of the world’s soy is grown for animal feed https://ourworldindata.org/soy

          That's not an accurate statement to the reference. 75% of soy crop is fed to animals. That's a very different reality. It still jives with the 86% of feed that is human inedible. How? Because a high percent of the soybean crop is inedible to humans, and there's been a huge influx (your link agrees) in demand for soy products in general. That soy waste a cheap option for feed. The alternative is burning..... but we cannot continue down this line without dropping the land use topic. 100% of the marginal use livestock diet COULD come from the marginal land. If we didn't need to get rid of this other stuff anyway.

          • I feel like you're doing the thing you premptively accused me of wanting to do.

            You've put forward an arbitrary unsourced number asserting that 2/3 of the land used for animal agriculture is otherwise useless for food production, with the implication that we would need to use more high quality land to meet human food needs. Thus losing out on any benefits we might get from freeing up this marginal land.

            That number is undiscussable until you can actually demonstrate to me how you're arriving at it. We can't have a discussion if you're asking me to work out the specifics of your claim and then disprove them, you have to actually make a specific claim.

            Getting into the weeds on the details of soy and hashing over the whole by/co product and economics of various crops with and without animal ag is pointless until we know what it is you're actually claiming.

            So please, make that claim. If it is trivial to prove that animal ag uses less land than plant agriculture then do so.

            • I feel like you’re doing the thing you premptively accused me of wanting to do.

              I disagree. You're bringing up those same other issues "in the context of land use" and I'm trying to respond as best I can while sticking to land use.

              You’ve put forward an arbitrary unsourced number asserting that 2/3 of the land used for animal agriculture is otherwise useless for food production

              Are you saying you contest the 2/3 number straight out? Because your previous reply seemed to be trying to gather ammo to object to it with supplemental data.

              with the implication that we would need to use more high quality land to meet human food needs

              I actually didn't make that implication. As "it's ok to keep eating meat" is the defacto winner, I'm simply pointing out that anti-meat advocacy has not resolved the marginal land issue with their land use objections.

              That number is undiscussable until you can actually demonstrate to me how you’re arriving at it

              Alright. So is your position that there is no such thing as marginal use land, or that there exist no cows on it? If we "undiscuss" that number for a moment, are you willing to concede the only point I made - that livestock on marginal use land is perfectly fine from an environmental point of view?

              We can’t have a discussion if you’re asking me to work out the specifics of your claim and then disprove them, you have to actually make a specific claim.

              My claim is that the vegan argument on marginal land hasn't defended their claim. I have argued that claim, and you're harping on a number you both believe enough to try to argue around and disbelieve enough to pretend it's impossible to discuss marginal land use without me somehow proving the number is exactly correct.

              Does the 2/3 number matter to you, or doesn't it? Do you believe it, or don't you? If the former, maybe we can have a discussion on exactly how we can determine how much livestock is on marginal land. If the latter, perhaps we can focus on whether livestock on marginal land is horrible for the environment or not.

              Getting into the weeds on the details of soy and hashing over the whole by/co product

              I really didn't. You made the claim that soy represents secondary land use, one I took seriously enough to reply while pointing out how the reply can lead to tangents, so we can stick to the argument. ANOTHER person, in response to me (and maybe you) provided far more tangential, but effective, an argument against you, but I am not that person.

              So please, make that claim

              Which claim are you asking me to make now? Can we finish the claim "vegans haven't proven that livestock on marginal land is terrible for the environment" first?

            • I think the whole issue is that this is more complex than any discrete set of metrics because so many industries are interconnected. in a world without any animal agriculture, how much corn and soy would we raise? it is just unknowable.

              • I'm out doing grocery shopping so replies are flakey. I want to avoid confusion between inexact and unknowable.

                We can establish the difference between plausible and implausible thing, and rule out the impossible.

                We know that historically and contemporarily crops are favoured over animal ag (with the exception of a few things like chickens widely, and sometimes cows/goats/or camels in particular niches) by subsistence farmers and poor urban workers. That meat is expensive, and only recent developments (and subsidies) have really changed that in the global north/west/rich mc exploity whitey land whatever you want to call it.

                So while it's not impossible that modern developments have somehow dramatically changed things in terms of efficiency, or that poor people are idiots and don't know what to grow to survive (highly unlikely, subsistence farming kills the idle or wrong), or that in some weird niche in Shenzhen farming the Peruvian fluffy marmoset is particularly efficient: there's probably some sensible conclusions we can draw about what an optimally land efficient agriculture could and could not look like and it seems unlikely to be animal ag centric or even particularly heavy.

          • >75% of soy crop is fed to animals. 

            85% of the global soy crop is pressed for oil. the vast majority of soy fed to livestock is a byproduct of that process

You've viewed 402 comments.