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Comment by vegannet | Hacker News Reader

Marginally? Beef, for example, takes many times the amount of energy and water to produce equivalent calories to vegan foods. Based on any measure, beef is significantly more expensive than vegan food sources, “marginally” is far from an accurate comparison.

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You need to be more specific. Beef is more expensive to produce than grains. But leafy greens are way more expensive to produce than beef. Non-meat food has a 50x range in cost to produce a calorie. You have to be specific about which non-meat foods you’re replacing meat consumption with. If you’re eating a bunch of kale and avocado instead of meat, then your change probably has no net environmental benefit. If you switch to mostly grains and legumes, then that’s a different story.

I think the point is that while giving up meat might have a significant effect on your carbon footprint from food consumption, it will have a small effect on your overall carbon footprint. A carnivore who never take an airplane and bikes everywhere is going to have a smaller carbon footprint than a vegan who drives an SUV to work every day and jet sets around the world.

That being said, none of this is a good argument for not giving up meat.

Then there's transportation, refrigeration, distribution, point of sales... all with their cost. Are we still so sure the 'savings' is significant?

The cost of transporting a hundred thousand burgers is dwarfed by the cost of creating a hundred thousand burgers. The primary costs associated with meat are in the production, not the transport: compared to, say, Beyond Meat, a single beef burger is 15x more ecologically expensive _before_ transport -- which is the same, and inconsequential in comparison.

How about cooking them? Refrigerating them? Selling them?

I see the idea of marginal cost is getting through. But consider all the costs to get a real sense of how the origination marginal cost contributes.

And don't dismiss transportation. It has to get home from the grocery store, in that 10-burger one-person vehicular trip through city traffic. That's a marginal cost too.

You can make the same point repeatedly if you like but, as I've explained, the costs you're referring to are a very small part of the total cost and certainly do not come close to offsetting the gains made by cutting out livestock from the equation.

Citation? I suspect you made that up, to score imaginary internet points.

Here's some data I just Googled:

  Car trips:  0.34 metric tonnes of CO2 / 1000 miles

  Burgers:    0.5 metric tonnes / year of burgers (150)

Producing meat is very-much commensurate with other marginal activities associated with procuring meat, like trips to the grocery store.

I'm done here.

Ok, but considering that you very likely would continue to eat in the absence of meat, the replacement foods usually need cooking, refrigeration, and distribution. These things are not particular to meat and shouldn't factor into a comparison.

That's the opposite of the correct conclusion. Because the meat ecological component is dwarfed by the other activities, it becomes (ecologically) insignificant to stop eating meat.

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