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Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than being vegan, landmark study finds
(www.independent.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Every time I read about meat and greenhouse gases I feel the need to explain the natural carbon circle. A cow does not produce carbon. It takes carbon from plants and releases it to the atmosphere. Then plants retake that carbon.
Humans are adding carbon to the atmosphere by digging out stored carbon from the ground and bring it to the atmosphere.
So we have to fix the part where we bring additional carbon to the atmosphere. But yes, there are other environmental issues with cattle if you read the op's article.
The Biogenic Carbon Cycle and Cattle: https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/biogenic-carbon-cycle-and-cattle
You know that the problem with ruminants is that they produce methane and not CO2 which is 25 times worse? A cow takes carbon from the ground and the bacteria creates a 25 times more potent GHG. But you are right that creating new fields and tiling the soil is a huge factor.
IPCC on methan
I feel that anyone who advocates to stop eating meat for methane reasons is a vegetarian in disguise who latched onto global climate change to push their own agenda, having failed to dissuade meat eaters on animal rights grounds. They are doing the fight against climate change a disservice by muddying the waters. If they were serious about methane specifically (which anyone concerned about GHG should be, to within (x*25)% of its contribution), they would be dedicating 10 times more of their time in researching some kind of pill to give the cows to stop them from making methane - a much more feasible outcome. But doing so does not synergize with their animal welfare goals.
Dedicating time researching a magic pill isn't actually solving the problem today, while stopping animal consumption does. People who really only care about the climate and not the animals should go vegan today and then dedicate their time researching a pill, such that afterwards they can resume consuming animal products.
Full disclosure: I care about the animals and the climate. Nevertheless I belief there are no gaps in my logic.
Dedicating time researching magic pills solves all kinds of problems. Saved several billion lives just a couple of years ago, did you forget?
Dude, read my comment in full. Emphasis on the word today. I am not saying researching pills is pointless. I am saying that if you really care about the climate, you should refrain from animal consumption until that magic pill has been invented that makes animal consumption okay again in terms of the climate.
For sure, if you care about climate change you can reduce your personal GHG emissions right now by going vegan! But how are you going to dedicate the rest of your time? I fear that someone to whom veganism is more important would never spend any time researching such a pill. They would rather spend the next 100 years arguing with the 90% of the population who have already heard the ethical argument for veganism but were not convinced by it. The existence of a pill would remove the only leverage they have left - the threat of literal burnination. If anything, vegans have an incentive to sabotage any mitigation research efforts if possible (for example by lobbying).
I don't know where you are getting these stereotypes, but there are nearly a 100 million vegans nowadays and they come in all shapes and sizes.
I'm personally connected to a group of vegan activists here in Amsterdam and they are very hard to stereotype. One is in fact a researcher who is currently working on organs on chips so as to provide an alternative to animal studies, another regularly goes undercover to film what goes on within factory farms and slaughterhouses, yet another is a columnist for one of our well known newspapers and often writes about the situation with animals, we've got a politician who is in fact lobbying for cutting meat subsidies (good friend of mine), we've got a neuroscientist, another is working in the field of artificial intelligence (myself), we've got a lawyer who works with a group of animal rights lawyers, etc. Yes, there are some that aren't too smart as well and will just spent their time arguing with people, but to think that vegans in general are too dumb to understand that arguing is not the only and not always the most effective way to affect change just goes to show that you know very little about vegans in general.
Look, veganism just makes logical sense from an ethical (if you care about animals) and climate perspective. That's it. People of all ages are coming to this conclusion. How they spent the rest of their time is as diverse as humanity is. Some will not shut up about it, others won't tell a soul and just move on with the rest of their lives (quite a few actually, but they are always overlooked by the stereotypers for obvious reasons).
funny, I feel that anyone who complains about being told eating beef is bad for the environment is just two kids in a raincoat. Good luck proving me wrong!
@TauZero @Vegoon "if you are not leading an advanced bio-chemstery research team you are not a real vegan" is certainly the dumbest argument I ever read. Thanks for lowering the bar.
Good thing then that the argument I made is the exact opposite of that one!
The other thing is that cattle needs much more space. From all the fields that we could use to grow food, a large part ends up as cattle fodder.
That's about efficient use of land space, not related to GHG specifically other than tangentially regarding deforestation. Also elsewhere in this thread cattle was accused of being inefficient precisely because they sit in warehouses and eat cereals instead of grass. If cattle can roam pastures and eat grass, that's an equivalent amount of cereals that did not need to be grown, farm machinery that did not need to run (on fossil fuels) to grow them, and a good amount of land possibly too hilly and rugged for any use otherwise put to productive human use through grazing.