Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The bulk of the reduction can definitely come from rich, affluent nations and have the biggest impact.
Articles like this seem important. Hiding the fact that meat/dairy production is such a huge factor in climate change hurts people more than it helps. When we all start to wonder why it isn't getting any better we need to know that there are ways we can do our part. Even if they're small things!
"Doing your part" and "doing small things" will not have any impact on climate change. It ignores the enormous gap between where our emissions need to be and where they are now. If you could convince everyone in America to become a vegan tomorrow, that would cut global CO2 emissions by about a gigaton. That is how much CO2 emissions went up last year alone, mostly due to China and India. Think about that: the effect of every American undertaking an unprecedented lifestyle change all at the same time would be totally wiped out by a single year's growth globally.
We lefties are frequently criticized, for better or worse, for hypocrisy. Maybe personal pro forma efforts will remove that rhetorical angle of attack.
Also, there's got to be some priming benefits, an opportunity to educate about the larger issues. However, my faith in this strategy has been rocked by failures (betrayal) of the whole recycling charade, which has served to alienate people and likely reduced future engagement.
I wish I knew what is best. Right now, I don't even have an opinion, just more questions.
"No silver bullet," is something I've said elsewhere. I don't think this article nor I have implied that if everyone went vegan then the climate crisis could be averted. I think it's a good article because it doesn't try to frame our dietary choices as a solution. It informs us of the impact of our choices and makes sure people realize that eating some meat is okay. But if you want to do more, you can, and it will have an impact -- however small -- and that's a good thing in my books.
It really wouldn't. You totally underestimate the "role model" influence the US has on the rest of the world. If the dynamics of the US market would change, all other markets would race to follow in the same direction. This would also be both supported and driven by the individuals across the globe, doing what is "fashionable." Humans are slaves of fashions, even when when is appears improbable.
Use of land per unit of output (or vice versa) is not the only important metric though, not by a long chalk. A more holistic approach is needed [1], otherwise it is back to the same as the issues that the OP attempts to address.
[1] An approach that considers equally important things like effects of pesticides, other negative effects of non-organic farming (there are other important ones, and more).
It's a deep topic and there are no simple answers, thanks for pointing that out!
Here is the current breakdown of the world's emissions as of 2018:
1. heavy industry (29 percent)
2. buildings (18 percent)
3. transport (15 percent)
4. land-use change (15 percent)
5. the energy needed to supply energy (13 percent).
Livestock is responsible for 5.5 percent, mostly methane rather than CO2, and aviation for 1.5 percent.
Here is the estimated sacrifice needed to bring carbon emissions down by half and then to zero:
It would require forgoing electricity, heating, cement, steel, paper, travel, and affordable food and clothing.
Both of these are taken from Enlightenment Now by Pinker, and I have not seen the numbers or his conclusions refuted. I'm open to someone trying to change my mind, but with these numbers, I do not see how that is possible.
On top of that it’s just cruel and unnecessary to go on eating so much meat.
I don't know if this is actually true, but anecdotally at least it seems to be. The people around me who seem to be most active when it comes to the topic of climate change also tend to be vegetarians or vegans. And many of them started down this path by changing their diets, sometimes even for reasons that weren't ideological.
What do these people do? Unless they're working on renewables technology or carbon-capture technology, they're not doing anything useful. That's just how the math shakes out. The climate problem is so huge that only engineers and scientists can help us now. Everything else is just putting on one of those "raising awareness of breast cancer" ribbons.
I imagine some of them could be working on the things you mention, but most of them don't. But that's particular to my current network.
But some of them do have strong relationships with people who play some meaningful role in the whole climate issue. At least two of these 'people around me' have siblings that occupy high-level engineering/management roles in some of the most impactful (and worst) companies.
It's not much, maybe, but perhaps it's not meaningless.
Which makes it even worse, by my understanding.
And that is only a secondary critique. Why should changing diets be mutually exclusive to other approaches? That seems like a false choice.
Nothing is wrong with that. But he is just not a primary source on this data. So there is no refutation to be made in this context. Go to the bibliography, find the citation for the statistics that he used, and those can be discussed. I don't have the book and can't quickly obtain it, so I cannot provide that information.
Pointing out that Pinker isn't a primary source isn't ad hominem. Bringing up that he's a psychologist and popular writer, repeatedly, is very much ad hominem. It's trying to discredit the messenger in order to dismiss the message. Don't do that, it's bad rhetoric.
Popular science writers serve an important role in disseminating ideas. As long as they're not misquoting sources, making up facts, or applying radical interpretations, there's nothing wrong with them. I don't see Pinker doing any of those things (if you disagree, be sure to source that!). And although Pinker may not be a climate scientist, he is a scientist of considerable credentials. He has taught at MIT, Stanford, and is a full professor at Harvard. In my mind, that brings a great deal of credibility to what he has to say on other scientific subjects, at least when quoting numbers.
So your arguments, as presented, provide approximately zero reason to doubt the numbers presented by the OP.
I think there's a substantial difference in value between citing primary sources to refute a secondary source, versus dismissing a secondary source out of hand because it's not a primary source.
(This is actually familiar ground to me; my spouse has been teaching popularized dance history lately, and I've been encouraging her to write a book on the subject, because her interpretation challenges some conventional wisdom. She doesn't want to write a book because she's too reliant on secondary sources and too lazy to go read through more of the primary source material.)
I think this is where you would get the most disagreement. That is, people are focused on transforming all those listed rather than forgoing them, which is a non-starter. Transformation to emission-reduced or emission-free processes.
All of this stuff about "reducing your carbon footprint" is just such a mind-boggling waste of time. To keep the temperature increase to 2C we have to cut CO2 emissions worldwide by 19 gigatons in the next decade. Instead, China added 10 gigatons in the last decade. The U.S. and EU28 together emit just 9 gigatons. In the face of those numbers, all this "turn the lights off when you leave the room" and "try to eat less meat" stuff is pissing in the ocean.
If I were a more careless person, I would have half a mind to increase my waste in response -- something I may as well advocate for anyway, because so long as society is not going to stop (or even measure) my wastefulness, then who can say it is wrong? Only 'feeble hypocrites' who don't care enough to actually do anything about it. You can blame me for destroying the world, but if you won't lift a finger to stop me, then you're intentionally conceding your moral responsibilities to permit outright evil. Our ship isn't strong simply because it refuses to go into rough waters.
I was shocked when I read how much cows contribute to warming, and I have mostly stopped eating beef. "Don't eat beef, eat less dairy" and you're good when it comes to diet. That said, there are far more important factors contributing to your carbon footprint. This Ars Technica article from 2017 sums things up well: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/emissions-eschmissio...
And we have been in a global warming trend for thousands of years. Most of north america ( including NYC ) was under a sheet of ice, in some places sheet of ice 2 miles high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
It's disappointing to me that the nytimes would use climate change as a tool to push a highly environmentally and biologically destructive lifestyle like veganism. I wonder how many of the authors of the article has even farmed a day in their lives.
And the article reeks of ideology rather than news. Where is the news in the article? It's just pushing vegan propaganda which harms more young people everyday than nonsense like anti-vax movement. Vegans have starved their babies to death thinking that veganism is a healthy human diet. But I doubt they'd get as much backlash as the netflix '13 steps' producers did. The most environmentally and biologically friendly human diet is the omnivore diet. It has been since humans began and it will be while humans exist.
Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is a well established idea. I wish journalists would simply report news rather than pushing destructive ideologies, especially since they haven't a clue what they are talking about most of the time. They aren't an expert in almost anything they write about. So why not stick to reporting? Why give "advice"?
Isn't that a rather strange measure to pull out.
Also every source I've seen puts aviation much higher than 1.5%.
This was the clincher for me. I listened to the audiobook "How Not to Die" by Dr. Greger and was convinced of the common sense that eating plant based whole foods is the way to be healthier. The lowered cost and lowered impact on the environment are just icing on the cake. If eating meat was better for me, I'd still do it. The science done so far seems to suggest that a whole food plant based diet is the healthiest diet.
Simply preparing food at home with fresher ingredients and being conscious of what you're taking in can account for much of the gains they experienced.
The vast majority of people on the planet don't eat 90% meat diets, but if we did it would be a disaster! I'm not saying it isn't the case with you, but anyone who experienced amazing gains shifting their diet to mostly meat should consider survivorship bias, and that the benefits are from cutting other things out, not adding tons of animal protein in.
Ultimately there is no birthright to eating meat every day, there are no health benefits or other benefits of doing so, contrary it;s actually bad for health and our planet and therefore there is nothing classist about taxing beef so high that the average person shouldn't be able to afford it more than a handful of times per month.
We need bold politicians in this world to look at the cost of these things and implement a tax system which incentivise a more balanced lifestyle and also account for the cost/damage that a high consumption of meat causes to society.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
I'm sorry but no. Your diet is a personal choice and no amount of shaming is going to change that.
Do you travel internationally? Own a car? Do any other of a million things that have an impact on the climate but also constitute living your life?
It's great to put this information out there but telling people that your choices are "simply the right thing to do at this point" is incredibly condescending and will likely have the opposite impact you want it to have since no one likes to be preached at.
Unless you're suggesting forcing people by law to be vegan, then it most definitely is a personal choice.
> I realize this is a message people don't want to hear, but I believe they need to hear it.
It's precisely that attitude that ensures no one will ever listen to what you have to say.
Was it your personal choice to cut down rain forest to raise beef cattle, or palm oil? What about air freighting in fruit and veg that common sense says comes on a ship? No?
Your diet is small part personal choice, within the far larger part played by cultural mores and market-led financial choices imposed by producers and supermarkets. You can't escape the part played by billions on advertising, and the choices of restaurants and supermarkets that led to your "personal choice".
"The market" is not going to phase out ecologically reckless methods unless people stop buying. Yet how can they when that detail, very intentionally, never appears on the label, and 365 day availability ensures almost no one remembers when things are in season any more?
So much for personal choice.
Reduce, reuse, recycle - if you do it, good! If you don't, bad! Travel less, don't own anything.
How can we frame these sorts of ideals so that people don't feel attacked?
There _is_ a climate crisis. At least some level of that crisis is driven by consumer demands. We should be able to advocate a change without people feeling like they're being shamed.
Precisely. As another example, when people claim that progress pics are "fatshaming", it's pretty obvious that the problem isn't with the information or how it's presented, it's with the person feeling ashamed, which they rightfully are. These people should self-reflect upon why they feel ashamed instead of throwing a tantrum and playing the victim.
Not any more
> and no amount of shaming is going to change that.
It did change it for me. I haven’t gone vegan all the way but I did change my diet
> Do you travel internationally?
Less and less and preferably by train
> Own a car?
Yes, and I stopped driving it.
> since no one likes to be preached at.
I must be an exception then.
You seem more concerned about not being condescended to; for such an individual, what language would you find cogent?
With that said, I'm curious why you don't want anyone trying to convince you to change your mind?
I don't want to eat meat, and I don't plan to, but if someone had some reasoned arguments as to why I should, I'd listen and decide for myself. I'm not you though, but I am curious what reason(s) you have for not being open to discussing it. I'm also curious why you phrased it as someone telling you to do it, rather than discussing it.
Think of it like pushy religious advocates. If they come to your door once and knock and you tell them to go way, that's mildly annoying but understandable. If they keep coming back every day saying that you "must" debate them, then that starts to get really annoying, really fast.
If public shaming and social clout isn't involved, no one will.
Climate change is already displacing tens of thousands of people every year to floods, forest fires, and arid land. It's going to get worse before anything we do today to survive has an effect.
I think the thousands of scientists studying this phenomenon already understand the impact of human civilization on Earth rather well.
There's "climate is changing" and massive population migration, uninhabitable areas, unreliable food and water supply, sea level threatening entire cities and probably more.
The fact that "literally everything we do" impact the environment isn't a valid argument. It does seem daunting, but by looking at each cause individually and acting on it, it looks less discouraging.
I'm far from perfect, I'm not even vegan and I still fly quite a bit, I just came to understand I had to make progressive changes to my behaviour or the human existence we currently have is severely threatened,
Gw is unsolvable without better technology, or facism.
I guess that depends on how you define personal choice. Climate change has certain changed the calculus, but diet was never merely a personal choice when it required the death of other individuals.
As for the shaming, I'm not in favor of that because it does not seem to be an effective way of bringing about change. But simply having these kinds of discussions cannot fairly be called shaming. That's a cop-out to avoid meaningful discourse.
Various diets are worth trying -- you never know until you try, and you learn a lot by trying. So for readers out there, try being vegan for a month: you'll learn a lot about what you eat and how to cook and you can observe how you feel.
Also worth noting: many traditional cultures embedded food restrictions into calendars and/or religious rules. Being vegan for a while before Easter is more or less a thing in some Christian groups; Ramadan involves fasting as a practice. These cultural practices, combined with the seasons in nature, make me wonder if we were built to be cyclically vegan/omnivore/berry-eater. This may be more sustainable for many.
My belief is that our biology is complex and specific to each individual to the point where we can't all share the same diet and expect the same effects on our bodies.
There can be a problem with reducing fat and protein significantly while using carbs for the majority of caloric intake. This can lead to diabetes. But you can do this on an omnivore diet as well.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
It's not the largest contributor, for sure. But it's sizable.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-06466-8
Reducing meat intake _does_ sizably reduce overall emissions.
Honestly the links between diet and health are always thin at best, but I don't know of any that strongly link a well-balanced vegan diet with reduced health. Usually, the opposite.
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/89/5/1627S/4596952
> "In general, vegetarians typically enjoy a lower risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD), obesity, type 2 diabetes, and some cancers [...]"
For now, it’s hard to say with confidence that grass-fed beef is consistently more climate-friendly than conventional beef."
The co2 emissions from cows aren't the problem. Factory farming yes is a problem, but if cows are put on grass that grass is a co2 sink and gives off far less.
If you grow an acre of soy it's just as bad as it isn't sustainable.
Also the fact that being vegan has serious health consequences and animals provide far more nutrition.
The answer isn't going vegan at all but to have sustainable farming practices where animals and plants are grown together in a regenerative process.
Grass is one of the best crops to grow. It's a great carbon sink, and takes away methane. Builds its own fertility so no need for artificial fertilizers. No management, machines, pesticides etc. Grows everywhere. We just can't eat it. But ruminants (like cows/sheep/etc) can. They have a digestive system for it. They turn grass into meat and milk. Meat and milk that don't need storage until you need to harvest it. It also tastes better.
We used to have far loads more bison roaming the earth. But they didn't cause climate change because they ate grass. When you factor in the grass it's a net positive and not a negative like the article claims.
These studies like to look at things in a bubble, but the problem is far more complex than that.
Converting pasture to arable land to grow more plant based food will make the climate situation worse. You will reduce these carbon/methane sinks. You will need to fertilize and harvest the soil. Fetalization itself reduces the carbon/methane sink capabilities.
Eating beef can actually be a very sustainable option. In many cases, pasture-reared beef actually shows a carbon-equivalent net gain when carbon sequestration is taken into account.
Edit: Perhaps a comment or 2 would be nice on why people don't agree or why I might be wrong. Happy to read up and learn
Follow the links, Monsanto has deep connection to the University of Oxford, at least £50 million pounds. UO professors routinely get consulting fees from Monsanto. They even have a Monsanto Senior Research Fellowship position.
There is a massive conflict of interest with Monsanto and the University of Oxford. You find this with most food and nutrition science. Since the funding for such sciences comes from the industry, any science that is critical of it's paymasters soon gets silenced.
This article outlines a bit more https://medium.com/@johnroulac/oxford-study-attacks-regenera...
Then it won't have been futile.
We're pretty much screwed (but not extinct) at this point no matter what, but going vegan doesn't matter nearly as much as living in a smaller house (i.e. less concrete), or driving and flying less.
I mostly avoid beef and dairy, which are the main diet-based causes of global warming, but beyond that it's a rounding error.
* The vast agricultural monocultures of the US have changed our climate on their own. Our fields of soy, wheat, and corn have decimated local ecosystems, led to high nitrate levels in the water, changed air temperature and humidity on their own, and encouraged a US diet that is high in processed food, leading to its own set of health problems.
* Yes, these vast monocultures are in a feedback loop with raising animals for meat. Corn-fed cattle and pigs and chickens are part of the reason Iowa is what it is today.
* If we all switch to tofu and tortillas with a side of Coke made with corn syrup, we overall preserve the agricultural status quo in the US. Is that really that big a win? Curious.
* Vegetables seem to be lacking in the standard American diet, and they're not subsidized by the federal government the way grains/corn/soybeans are, and they're also something a lot of us buy from far away. How can we change all that?
* Many people will still want meat products, some for health reasons -- it can be hard for some folks to be vegetarian or vegan healthfully (I had trouble with fatigue and anemia for instance, and yes I understand that maybe I could have tried harder/eaten more supplements/etc). How can we encourage the shift to animal production on 'waste' land, and decrease the incentives to ship beef from Brazil and Bolivia? Can we make goat meat cool again, for instance? or rabbit?
The alternatives I'm personally more interested in: shifting transportation patterns for US adults (biking and transit). Increasing green space. Re-encouraging locally grown food, where by local I mean the back yard. Rediscovering the foods you never knew you could eat but your great-grandparents did: nettles, dandelions, Virginia waterleaf, garlic mustard, purslane, daylilies, hostas. Many of you could get a whole week's worth of greens, even in May in colder climes, by walking outside -- and how many of us know it? Right now I'm motivated to rediscover these local foods for myself for health reasons, but it helps that they're $0 to grow and $0 to transport, and thus add 0 to my carbon emissions.
(edit for formatting)
It takes a lot less corn and soy to feed people directly than it does to feed a bunch of cattle. You get a lot of efficiency by skipping the intermediary trophic level.
keep in mind though managing your carbon budget is like managing any other budget, which in turn is like optimizing any other queue. meaning: don't over-optimize the 5th most important thing when you're ignoring the top 2 - 3 most important things.
by which I mean: #1 flying, #2 driving, #3 heating and #4 cooling.
just to put a sortof min-max on it: if you eat vegan but fly to a conference once a quarter and drive to work every day your emissions will be greater than if you eat cheeseburgers for lunch every day but take the subway to work and rarely fly.
which is why imho you should go for the 50 - 80% win (80+% reduction in red meat) in this category (food) instead of going all the way to vegetarian/vegan.
or put another way, being pro video-conference has a better GHG reduction return than being vegan :)
At least in the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change's Global Calculator[1] the food lever appears to have the greatest impact on greenhouse gas emissions, even more than heating or transport.
They are three hours each and I promise you will learn many things that give perspective on the repeat arguments and confusion about the climate. There are many other podcasts with these gentlemen, but here are three to start with.
Joe Rogan and Randall Carlson #606 (3 hours) [1]
Joe Rogan, Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson #725 [2]
Joe Rogan, Randall Carlson #1284 [3]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Cp7DrvNLQ
[0]https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDAARS/bulletins/2...
[1]https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1058333491623067648
This would be like asking "but how does all this new molecular biology work showing how smoking causes mutations that drive lung cancer square with Ronald Fisher's analysis showing that smoking is just correlated with lung cancer?" It just doesn't matter, because we need to realize when people are using statistics and analysis to push particular agendas, rather than using it to answer questions about the world.
And no, it is nothing like Fisher's contrarianism to the smoking issue. Both links acknowledged that the current global diet has an impact on CI, but tries to find the most likely size of the effect.
I ask because the science and evidence behind this stuff is complicated, and much of what is being said has a huge element of alarmism. I don't doubt that our current diets have impacts on CI, but I would like to see thoughtful analysis determining the effects. I'm sincerely asking this in good faith
Could you kindly provide any evidence for this sort of claim?
And could you provide any sort of evidence that we should even use effort to examine Lomborg's claims, much less try to use it as what we compare the USDA to? He has a history of being wrong, and ignoring that history in order to "stop alarmism" seems like an equal sin to any potential alarmism.
Outlier analyses that have a history of producing incorrect analyses should not be taken as a gold standard of anything.
"He has a history of being wrong" - if he does, I have not seen it. and I am open to changing my mind if there is evidence to the contrary - which I have asked you in good faith to provide.
Interestingly, rice agriculture generates about as much methane as livestock, and burning biomass (wood) and landfills each generate about half as much methane as livestock.
So what this article is saying is that I should consider going vegan or reducing the (already meager) amount of meat in my diet so that fossil fuel companies can keep burning fossil fuels and don't have to get off their butt to develop greener alternatives, and so that industry can continue producing useless capitalist crap that nobody needs.
To take it even further, this article is suggesting I restrict my options so that others can continue profiting from the destruction of the environment.
Personally I don't drive and I don't fly. I don't even own a car. I go everywhere by train or bus and on foot. I contribute to greenhouse gasses much less than many vegans. And I'm very tired of hearing people saying I should reduce the amount of meat I eat because it's destroying the environment. Food is necessary- driving cars is not.
___________
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#/media/File:Gre...
Oh really? Keep America Beautiful was conceived, paid for and started by: Philip Morris, Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi, and Coca-Cola and others. Then they started shifting blame onto the individual.
That was in reaction to Vermont proposing to require deposit and return bottles for drinks, after a surge in single-use packaging litter.
Phillip Morris and the beverage makers you mention were fighting against the threat of regulations that would prevent them from continuing to pump out non-biodegradable filter cigarettes and single-serve drink containers.
We could have had filterless cigarettes and returnable glass-bottle Coke. Instead, Keep America Beautiful was their brilliant idea to redirect the focus onto consumers, away from manufacturers.
Did you misunderstand me?
I'd call what happened corporate propaganda, "propaganda from the multinationals", or perhaps the first example of greenwashing. I suspect that may explain why you picked up a few downvotes. It certainly distracted me from the real message you were trying to convey.
From your second comment, it's clear we are of similar mindset, and your point very valid. The current popular "theme of the moment" around veganism in the media does seem to have the same smell of someone trying to move the gaze away from the places that would move the dial fastest. Which in this case, of course, is constraining the global food players.
---
Life is experiencing an abrupt, widespread global species extinction event. Humans are destroying intricate webs of animals, plants, and microorganisms. These networks supply our food chain and sustain life on Earth; their annihilation from rapid deforestation and climate change is causing grave consequences: droughts, increased heat waves and wildfires, more frequent severe weather events, coastal flooding, food shortages, and water wars.
Earth’s atmosphere was once mostly carbon dioxide. Once life took hold, simple organisms (such as bacteria, algae, and plants) converted atmospheric carbon dioxide into oxygen by way of photosynthesis. When those organisms died, natural processes spanning eons changed their remains into carbon-bearing fossil fuels: coal, petroleum, and natural gas.
Burning fossil fuels recombines carbon with oxygen to make carbon dioxide (CO2). Since the mid-1800s humans have released a stupendous amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. In the following graph, average annual atmospheric CO2 measurements in parts per million (PPM) are plotted alongside averaged global ocean and surface temperature readings in degrees Celsius (°C), relative to 1881-1910:
https://i.imgur.com/zNuwtnP.png
Both atmospheric CO2 and temperature are increasing at an exponential rate, in lock-step.
Bubbles in ice cores drilled from polar glaciers trap historic atmospheric gas ratios. Long-term observations reveal an increasing average warming trend that is distinct from natural short-term fluctuations. Temperatures are climbing in proportion to the total amount of atmospheric CO2 added since the Industrial Revolution.
Choices
Our past choices have put life on Earth in peril; our children face an immense CO2 cleanup, devastating climate changes, or both. We can curtail the most severe catastrophic outcomes, though time to do so grows alarmingly thin.
If we choose air conditioner and refrigerator coolants based on hydrocarbon refrigerants; if we urge politicians to invest in on-shore wind turbines; if we reduce food waste; if we eat less meat; and if we support restoration of tropical forests. If we choose these, there is hope.
---
See also:
* https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/04/specials/climate-cha...
* https://www.drawdown.org/about
* https://igg.me/at/impacts (plug, plug; scroll down for previews)
The hard sci-fi novel currently includes some diagrams and illustrations, too.
I also don't share your view on the ethics of eating other intelligent beings (from different species). Many other animals eat other animals, and for this they have to kill them and cause them pain. The pain comes from the fact that animals do not easily die, and our death is almost always painful and horrifying.
But- why shoud humans be any different than other animals, when it comes to the ethics of killing other animals and causing them pain in order to feed on their meat? Other animals don't have any compunctions about doing the same to humans. Why are humans so special that it is immoral for us to eat meat?
Also, other animals kill out of necessity. We don’t need to kill to survive at all so why are we justified to do so?
Other animals don't necessarily kill out of necessity. For example, many animals perform surplus killing [1] - I personally know of two dogs who, together, entered a coop and killed about 40 chiken without eating any. In the same farm, dogs have often killed chickens and goats, which they just eviscerate without eating them.
Then of course there's the killing of young animals by older males- like male cats sometimes kill kittens, etc.
Besides, why is "need" to kill the only justification to kill? For example, if it's very difficult to survive without killing an animal, say because you're putting your health and that of your children at risk with a diet poor in animal protein- then why are you not justified to do it?
______________
I guess for me it just comes from a desire to respect and value all life. It’s in our power to create a world full of unnecessary death and cruelty or without it. Why would we choose the former? I found I became a much kinder and more empathic person when I stopped eating animals. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
All life? I think you mean all animal life.
At least in more “primitive” societies they would often acknowledge that the animal had given its life and thank it and treat the act of eating an animal with some solemnity. We instead do our best to forget that what we are eating was ever alive.
And yeah I do notice and appreciate plants a lot more since I became vegan.
This talk does a good job of addressing the common objections to veganism, including all those you have raised:
I do value and respect all life, but I don't think that means I shouldn't eat it. Your comment was the one that made that point.
Rather than watching a video I can't converse with I would prefer it if you explained to me yourself why it's OK to eat one kind of life one respects and values, i.e. plants, but not another, i.e. animals.
I mean, I would welcome an explanation.
If you think otherwise you are an idiot. There is zero scientific evidence that shows a link between farm animals and climate change. Zero!!!
All this reminds me of a great Winston Churchhill quote...
"The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is."
"Does what I eat have an effect on climate change? Yes. The world’s food system is responsible for about one-quarter of the planet-warming"
What you personally eat will make a tiny percentage of a fraction of 7 billionth difference.
Let's not just wash our hands of the issue and say "it's not my fault" - let's focus on encouraging action at the national and global level.
On the very top you got meat produced that actively helps the environment. Highland cattle that keeps national reservations open comes to mind. There is also overpopulated and invasive species. At the bottom you got cattle who live their whole life inside a barn and get feed from deforested jungle farms, using unimaginable amount of pesticide and antibiotics.
It is also important to remember that diet is far from the most effective personal choice to make when it come to climate change (https://phys.org/news/2017-07-effective-individual-tackle-cl...). It is ranked 6th. Driving to buy produce at a farmer several miles out of town is likely to produce more C02 than biking down to eat a burger. An electric car might help, through it depend if the electricity is made from coal or wind.
The article gives some averages and for people who don't want to think about the climate and want a simple guide the article provides. However if you care about the topic and can spend the energy to go deeper and consider all facets then it is much better to make informed decision by digging deeper.
Where it does matter is when you choose not to eat meat. Less demand for beef means less beef raised, but which cattle are they going to stop raising -- the low carbon or the high carbon ones? My guess is that the high carbon beef is the marginal beef. When you stop eating beef you cause the price to drop, so the ranchers with the highest costs are going to be the first to go out of business. And carbon is one of the main costs of ranching, so I would predict that stopping eating beef would have a greater than average impact on carbon emissions.
The high carbon beef is basically all import here in Sweden, and there is no deforestation issue from farming. From a environmental perspective we actually need more open fields to maintain bio diversity.
When climate aware people stop buying beef the ratio of imported beef increase. In last few years we have actually seen an decrease in imported beef, which has been attributed to more awareness of low carbon beef vs high carbon beef. People buy more local and significant less imported. Locally produced beef cost between 2-4 times as much as imported, which naturally impact how much people buy.
But it is more complex than that. We don't have deforestation issue from farming. Fields, even those that is just for hay are important for bio diversity and it is generally soils where other crops won't grow. We don't burn down old jungle forest to grow corn in order to feed cows that then get transported through half the globe. It is fields that if they get overgrown would remove the biotope that many species here depend on.
Highland cattle is the extreme end where they can basically live outside the whole year, and they do the job that people and motorized machines otherwise would need to do in order to maintain national reservations. I would be much interested in reading a study that compared the environmental effect of using forest machines vs letting cows keeping overgrowth down.