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Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

> Yet even in those rich countries in which the consumption of meat has reached new heights [...] it has led to no demonstrable ill effects on health

The article doesn't mention environmental pressures: as we grapple with climate change, we'll necessarily have to reduce CO2 emissions, and meat is a huge contributor to global CO2 emissions. The health consequences of meat are hard to argue with certainty, we really have only a rudimentary understanding of health science.

We have a far better understanding of global warming, and we can say with certainty that eating less meat will reduce global CO2 emission. Whether that means the price of meat goes up over time (i.e. due to a carbon tax), or laws curb it, that's a factor which may overwhelm the article's thesis that "more global wealth = more meat eaten"

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There is not one shed of science that can suggest with any amount of confidence that eliminating livestock will make a difference with global warming meaningful enough to justify not being able to eat the food that we developed to subsist on.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that meat production at present doesn't add something to the system, but CO2 and methane emitted by the process isn't exactly new. Whether it's corn or grass that's being fed on, the carbon being belched out by cows comes from the carbon the plants captured from the atmosphere before being eaten. While inevitably some carbon is going to be consumed from the ground, it is minuscule compared to all the other minerals that the plants need to consume. Why would they need to get carbon from the ground when photosynthesis already necessitates using atmospheric carbon? And yes, methane eventually degrades into carbon over around a decade or so.

Also, there were far more large grass eating ruminants on planes like the North American continent, before humans killed the vast majority of them, than there are cows being raised as livestock now. We don't even have more cows being raised than a decade ago. So trying to reduce meat consumption is not only fighting against the atmosphere's own carbon cycle, but the same cycle that was occurring in nature at a greater abundance before man showed up.

We're better off just not releasing carbon that's trapped in the earth's crust, which is what we're doing when we're burning fossil fuels, because that wouldn't really be happening at such a rapid rate in nature. But no one wants to talk about that. We have nuclear, but the hand waving never stops. I don't really know what to tell people who think that we need to stop eating meat because of global warming when they refuse to advocate for nuclear energy.

We are omnivores, we can subsist on many things, meat being one of them. If you enjoy meat that's one thing, but the "we evolved to eat meat, now give me my steak" mindset is a strange one.

If you put eat in front of a cow, they'll eat it if they're even modestly hungry. Does that mean that they evolved to eat meat? Of course not.

Mad cow disease wouldn't be a thing if this wasn't true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...

https://farmhouseguide.com/do-cows-eat-meat/

> If you enjoy meat that's one thing, but the "we evolved to eat meat, now give me my steak" mindset is a strange one.

It's only strange to for those who are unaware of the evidence.

On the other side of the coin from cows, just because we can eat plants, pass undigested cellulose in our stool, and survive does not mean that we either developed to eat plants, need plants, or operate optimally on plants.

The fact that our ancestors ate mostly meat is not controversial and is even backed up by stable isotope testing. The fact that we lack aspects of an herbivorous digestive system is not controversial. Go look for what's called a cecum. By name, we humans have a "cecum" but in name only since that word means "dead end". Our cecum looks nothing like that of any animal that is herbivorous or obligatively omnivorous. That's just one example. At a higher level, we suck at digesting cellulose, and most available plants before agriculture were very fibrous and lacked the flesh of fruits and vegetables you find at a grocery store.

Moreover, meat contains everything we need to survive and function properly to the exclusion of any plant material at all. If you're wondering about things like Vitamin C, well, I don't really want to spend all day going into such specifics, but long story short there's no need for an abundance of Vitamin C on a diet primarily composed of meat and lacking carbohydrates.

So no, it's not just about making excuses to eat tasty meat. You might find that eating meat and not confounding such a diet with carbohydrates and plant material has real benefits.

EDIT: To further address your point about our supposed omnivorism, we are only as omnivorous as we have to scavenge. As I already mentioned, the kinds of edible plants available to most humans before agriculture were not very digestible or energy dense at all, meaning that to eat plants required a significant energy investment given that we didn't always cook our vegetables. Not only was eating plants not nearly as energy efficient as allowing larger animals to digest those plants first, but most plants in nature arguably aren't that tasty.

I'm a forager and have been doing so for well over a decade (long before it was cool), and I have to be honest in that most wild plants don't compare to meat in terms of taste and satiety. The plants that are tasty are usually only around for a short period of the year.

There are a few points to unpack here.

1. Cows are herbivores. They will eat meat in certain situations if you put it in front of them, but it's not good for them. We are not herbivores, we are specifically omnivores.

2. Our ancestors were hunter gatherers, and their diet was by no means mostly meat. In fact, it was only meat when available, which was every few days to weeks.

3. There is evidence that humans are omnivores from both an anatomical and physiological perspective. For example, our teeth are suited for both grinding plant matter and tearing meat, and our intestines are relatively long, which is necessary for digesting plant-based food.

4. Humans can not digest cellulose, this is true. However, heating plant matter breaks down cellulose, so at the very least, ever since we started using fire on food, cellulose is not an issue. Technically, you could even heat grass and eat it, but it wouldn't be very tasty or nutritious.

5. While a diet purely on meat is possible, it's not the best thing for your health. A diet that is high in fat and protein and low in carbohydrates can lead to health problems over time, such as heart disease, stroke, and cancer.

6. Meat is calorically dense, so for hunter gatherers it made a lot of sense to seek this type of food out. In a modern world, this isn't really an issue, we have an absolute overabundance of all types of foodstuff.

> A diet that is high in fat and protein and low in carbohydrates can lead to health problems over time, such as heart disease, stroke, and cancer.

I'm going to need a source for the claim that a diet low in carbohydrates leads to health problems. I'm getting serious correlation/causation vibes from this.

> We are omnivores, we can subsist on many things, meat being one of them.

True, but I personally find it interesting that we have the smallest cecum and shortest digestive tract of the apes. Both of these are more indicative of a carnivorous diet than a herbivorous one.

There is no agreed upon definition of "cecum." The cecum is a pouch-like structure in the lower intestine where the large intestine begins. It is thought to aid in the digestion of plant material, but its exact function is not fully understood. Humans do have a relatively small cecum compared to other apes, but it is not clear if this is due to our diet or our evolutionary history.

There are several possible explanations for why humans might have a relatively small cecum. One possibility is that our diet does not require a large cecum to aid in digestion. Another possibility is that the cecum has shrunk over the course of human evolution as we have adapted to a diet that is less reliant on plant material. Finally, it is also possible that the small size of the human cecum is simply a result of our anatomy and is not related to diet or evolution.

One thing we’re ignoring here is all the fertilizer used to grow animal feed, which is generated from fossil fuels. So it’s not quite all fresh carbon.

> There is not one shed of science that can suggest with any amount of confidence that eliminating livestock will make a difference with global warming meaningful enough to justify not being able to eat the food that we developed to subsist on.

As long as that gas continues to go into the atmosphere, it's going to keep causing problems for climate change. It accounts for 14.5% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions[1] and a phase out presents a massive opportunity to sequester carbon.

> We show that, even in the absence of any other emission reductions, persistent drops in atmospheric methane and nitrous oxide levels, and slower carbon dioxide accumulation, following a phaseout of livestock production would, through the end of the century, have the same cumulative effect on the warming potential of the atmosphere as a 25 gigaton per year reduction in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, providing half of the net emission reductions necessary to limit warming to 2°C. The magnitude and rapidity of these potential effects should place the reduction or elimination of animal agriculture at the forefront of strategies for averting disastrous climate change.

https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/07/20-meat-...

Again cows don't emit completely new gas into the atmosphere; all gas they emit originally came from the atmosphere. So their emissions are not in anyway a problem, as it's really just recycled atmosphere.

You'd might argue that they change the composition (eg changing it to methane gas), but methane also breaks down in the stratosphere. Sure it takes like 100+ years to happen, but it's temporary. You can set a population of cows, and keep it steady, and the amount of methane and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere attributed to the cows won't change after some period of time. Now, growing the population of cows will grow this temporary store of gas, but cows bodies also are carbon sinks themselves which offsets it somewhat. And likewise, as you cite, reducing the population of cows and livestock would decrease their temporary contribution of gas. But this temporary store of methane isn't the root of our problems.

The real problem, is taking carbon from underground, and burning it. For nature to naturally reverse this process, takes millions of years. The only real solution is to stop burning fossil fuels, and/or to reverse the natural process faster somehow (like by repeatedly burying trees and growing new ones).

As long as the methane stays in the atmosphere it does warming. Taking 100+ year to reach equilibrium concentrations still means having massive amounts of methane in the atmosphere doing warming, just at an equilibrium.

Because it breaks faster than CO2 is why we should really reduce the emissions today because it presents us a great opportunity to save more warming effect in the future

> Nevertheless, while methane may have a short atmospheric lifetime, its effects are not ephemeral provided the source of the methane continues to exist. For as long as livestock continue to be farmed, methane continues to exert a warming effect upon the climate.

> As such the argument that since methane’s impacts are temporary, they do not matter, is wrong. Its effects will in practice be permanent, unless ruminant production is halted.

> Methane emissions also increase the risk of us ‘overshooting’ the 1.5°C/2°C target, potentially tipping us into unknown climatic territory, with possibly devastating effects on agriculture, wildlife’s ability to adapt, heat stress in humans and animals, and more

https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/reports/fcrn_gnc...

> Whether it's corn or grass that's being fed on, the carbon being belched out by cows comes from the carbon the plants captured from the atmosphere before being eaten.

I think the main problem is that said plants are grown using fossil fuel-derived fertilizers.

Why they don't use cow dungs to fertilize said plants, I don't know. Maybe a farming specialist can enlighten me why chemical fertilizers are so much more abundanly used than animal waste fertilizers.

Another problem is local buildup of carbon or nitrogen. The Netherlands suffers from a nitrogen crisis: an EU court has ruled that the Netherlands' nitrogen emissions are higher than allowed by treaties, and so we must cut emissions. Emissions are caused for a large part by farming activities. These emissions are a problem because the nitrogen in farm waste products originate from a non-local source. So the nitrogen builds up locally and harms nature.

The Dutch government ordered farmers to cut back on their stock. Now farmers are protesting, blocking roads and setting hay balls on fire.

I'm not sure how you can say there's no science to back this up. Livestock are accounted for as contributing nearly 15% of greenhouse gas emissions. And since so much pasture is cleared by razing old growth forest the cost may be even higher. And aside from their primary contribution, livestock place a lot of strain on water resources which are dwindling due to climate change. I'm not anyone has bothered computing the result of a world without livestock because it's so improbable but it would certainly be very significant.

Besides fossil fuel derived fertilizers used for feed, as sibling commenters have mentioned, you’re neglecting the impact animal agriculture has on forests.

2.1 million hectares (5.2 million acres) of tropical forest is destroyed every year to make way for beef herds [1]. That’s 41% of all tropical deforestation (which is where 95% of the deforestation occurs).

This is a disaster both in terms of the vast stores of carbon being released, and the destruction of habitat in the world’s most precious and biodiverse ecosystems.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-drivers-deforestation

As if said impacts are not shared by plant agriculture? Where do you think your vegetables come from? They need vast amount of space to grow, they need to kill animals that would otherwise inhabit the space, they need to spray large quantities of pesticide from above, fertilizer is necessary and fossil fuels are burned in that process, and fossil fuels need to transport the crops.

> 2.1 million hectares (5.2 million acres) of tropical forest is destroyed every year to make way for beef herds [1]. That’s 41% of all tropical deforestation (which is where 95% of the deforestation occurs).

What are the economic incentives to destroy tropical forest? Meat is by no means the only thing that land can be used for, first of all, but there is no requirement that cows be raised on land that was previously tropical forest. Go check out the Great Plains where most of the United States' cows are raised, because you won't find a tropical forest, deforested or not, for thousands of miles. And yet, somehow, meat continues to be produced.

No, I don't want forests to be destroyed, but it's a separate issue. Forests have been destroyed for countless reasons that have nothing to do with meat. Deforestation sucks, but that really isn't a the best reason to conclude that there's a problem with eating meat when deforestation isn't an issue. That is unless you have a problem with the non-forested land that cattle farms occupy, and most people don't because tropical forests are more interesting.

As I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, if we clean up where we get our energy, these arguments mostly disappear because, regardless of the end product, fossil fuels are currently still being burned. Doesn't matter if you're eating beef or soy.

> As if said impacts are not shared by plant agriculture

Absolutely, and use of pesticides and fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers in crop production and horticulture is also a huge problem.

Fact is though, the same quantities of calories or protein as beef or lamb require vastly more land and energy to produce than plant-based alternatives: roughly 100 times as much [1]. That’s owing both to pastureland and to the fact that half of all the world’s cereal crops are fed to animals.

Granted, livestock raised purely on marginal (i.e. non-arable) pastureland is relatively low impact in terms of carbon emissions. There’s still the factor that carbon dioxide is converted to methane, which in the short-term (that we actually care about) is much more potent in its warming effect.

That model does not represent most animal agriculture, however.

As for tropical deforestation, the United States is one of the chief importers of Brazilian beef [2], so as a country is absolutely implicated in the practice.

You’re right that clearing land for grazing is not the only economic incentive to destroy forest, but equally it cannot be discounted in its contribution to the trend.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

[2]: https://eu.wisfarmer.com/story/news/2022/01/05/brazil-ranks-...

I think the claim is more that raising cattle leads to higher methane levels and methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. There are other environmental or social issues with raising animals for meat however (eg inefficient land use, animal welfare, deforestation, zoonotic diseases, etc).

I don’t buy your argument because I think people are just not going to significantly change their behaviours because they are scared by some predicted global warming apocalypse, and carbon taxes seem unlikely to be supported in democracies for the same reason. It seems to me that the only way we will significantly curb CO2 emissions is by the environmentally better option being cheaper than keeping the worse option, possibly with some subsidies to help. It seems this is happening with electricity generation now in the US, which is good.

Personally, I find environmental arguments to be stronger but I expect any declining meat consumption to be driven by animal welfare concerns, cultural changes, availability of alternatives, and possibly vegetarian/vegan food becoming cheaper or meat becoming more expensive (though that feels a bit unlikely currently).

Are there any references covering how much CO2 is generated by a realistic vegan/vegetarian diet?

It would be easy to identify a theoretically low CO2 diet of rice and beans which does not require refrigeration, can be dehydrated for transport, grown easily and dense in calories. However this is not the diet that I generally see vegetarians/vegans eating - or the diet I go for when I eat vegetarian.

I’m suspicious that we look at extremely high quality vegetarian foods when we want to claim health benefits, and then low quality foods when we want to claim environmental efficiency.

It is not, it is only recycling plants into methane that changed to co2 and that is then captured by plants again. Ffs

I suggest that those who are campaigning for livestock reduction should first ask for the complete reduction of household pets as they also emit methane and perform less of a productive function in society than livestock which produces meat, eggs, milk and a host of other products.

Dude India and China are the biggest contributors. I’ll take these comments seriously when people start pointing at real root causes

The most populous countries which are also the world's factory? Yes.

But if you look at emissions per capita, it's not China we should look at. It's a country that outsources most of its manufacturing and still manages to top the chart.

I feel like people say "but China" to avoid taking any responsibility.

It would only make sense to look at emissions per capita if emissions were driven by individuals rather than by industry.

You can't have that argument both ways. China is building the world's crap, and still has less emissions per capita than the US with its service industry.

That's because China doesn't care about the environment when they make things. If the US and China made the same quantity of the same good, I expect China would produce a lot more emissions in the process.

China manufactures a hell of a lot more than the US

Meat contributes literally zero to global CO2 emissions. After all, it's recycled grass.

Maybe meat faming methods contribute CO2 emissions, but that's a reason to stop those farming methods, not stop eating meat.

Similar to people who hate aircon, people who argue that we should stop eating meat simply reveal themselves as regressives (hating advanced human civilisation, wanting a decrease in energy usage of humanity, which necessarily implies regression and mass death).

(Some people argue that beef contribute methane emissions, which is true however methane is a cycle and contributes nothing to the long-term anthropogenic carbon emissions, the entirety of which is coming from fossil fuels; yet still, the correct response is improving agricultural practices, not banning meat.)

Btw I fully support a carbon tax, as long as it's non-discriminatory (i.e. taxes all fossil fuel usage equally, not meat and/or other "sinful" activities more).

I haven't read the article yet (and I will), but it would be a great gift to the future of humanity if we could develop sustenance that was devoid of suffering and murder.

I am no partisan for the cause (and will order anything from a menu that strikes my fancy), but there is a certain mark of savagery in what and who we eat that (I feel) it is our destiny to overcome.

For us to solve as many problems as we can now will give our progeny more focus on what they are tasked to do, and they will thank us for it.

Every coin has two sides.

Vegans are implicitly promoting genocide of cows, chicken and pigs. There's no chance these animals can survive in nature, they're so numerous exclusively because they're bred by humans for food. Is one-time genocide better or worse than continuous perpetual murder? This essay argues that it's worse.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-n...

Additionally, the only way to lower emissions from animals is to genocide them. It's not just that they are likely to die if left to their own devices, leaving them to roam freely in nature results in them emitting the exact same amount of carbon as when they were farmed for meat (which is net zero, but that's besides the point).

> Vegans are implicitly promoting genocide of cows, chicken and pigs.

Nonsense.

> Is one-time genocide better or worse than continuous perpetual murder?

1) False dichotomy, nobody is asking for "genocide".

2) Even if, the answer is absolutely yes.

What a disingenuous and ridiculous stance.

If you keep emitting that methane, then it continues to persist and leads to problems with climate change. Unfortunately this can only reduced a bit with changes to farming practices in the meat industry

> people that argue that we should stop eating meat simply reveal themselves as regressives (hating advanced human civilisation, wanting a decrease in energy usage of humanity, which necessarily implies regression and mass death).

How does saying the meat industry is a problem "hating human civilization"? It certainly does not mean regression and mass death as it would decrease the amount of land, cropland, and resources to grow food since we wouldn't need to grow so much feed nor clear so much land for pastures

"If we would shift towards a more plant-based diet we don’t only need less agricultural land overall, we also need less cropland"

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

> that's a reason to stop those farming methods, not stop eating meat.

Presumably it would also be a reason to stop eating meat grown using those farming methods. Which would be the majority of meat consumed as it stands.

Meat contributes zero new CO2 IF the crops they are eating weren't grown with fertilizer ultimately made from natural gas. Do you know a country where this is true?

I can directly influence what I buy in the supermarket. I have very little influence on what methods a farmer on the other side of earth uses, whether he lets his cows graze on land that used to be rain forest, or just uses many times more fuel to produce the crop needed to feed his pigs than would be required to produce the same amount of calories as vegan food. So for now, I’m very selective in any meat I buy, and most often abstain.

And methane stays in the atmosphere only a decade or so, so the day we stop release huge amount of it the effect will disappear much faster. But as long as we continue to let methane out in the atmosphere, it will have disproportionate effect on the climate disaster. Which happens right now! Not in some unspecified remote future.

The only carbon tax that makes sense would be one that targets fossil fuel production. Extracting oil from the ground? Hella taxed. Extracting natural gas? Super taxed.

If people can find a good way to create fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2 then they shouldn't have any fossil fuel punishments in their way.

Yeh sure, matter is neither created nor destroyed. The problem here is that massive amounts of carbon sequestered over millions of years, is being released, just to create the feed for these livestock. This isn't like a small group of cattle, grazing on natural prairies.

Sure, let's stop making fertilizer out of fossil fuels. That doesn't require us to stop eating meat.

There's plenty of reasons to at least reduce meat consumption. Should we ban it globally? Of course not. However, it should be more of a special occasion, as it has been historically. Eating red meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner isn't doing anyone any favors. Except maybe healthcare companies.

> Meat contributes literally zero to global CO2 emissions. After all, it's recycled grass.

Do you genuinely not understand that these animals are bred for humans consumption? They wouldn't exist otherwise.

If you can nurture a human with X amount of plant food, but instead use X+Y amount of plant food (and extra water, fertilizer, fossils fuels etc.) to raise cattle to nurture the same amount of humans, you've absolutely increased carbon emissions as compared to the first option.

I sincerely do not get how one can miss this point??

Of course the long term answer is to stop having so many damn babies!

People in the developed world are having too few babies.

Water is a cycle and isn't actually consumed. Fertilizer requires energy, as does transport.

If we make plant agriculture "sustainable" (i.e. independent of fossil fuels) then we will also make meat agriculture sustainable.

Independence from fossil fuel use is far from the only factor determining sustainability of our agriculture, though, sadly.

Land use is a huge concern, given we already use half of the world’s habitable land for our agriculture [1], putting immense pressure on ecosystems and biodiversity due to this habitat loss.

Organic agriculture is less intensive, meaning for the same total food production, it must be more extensive — it requires more land [2].

That’s not to say there aren’t very good reasons to shift to organic agriculture. Fertilizer runoff leads to vast ocean dead zones, such as that in the Gulf of Mexico [3]. Further, we have an estimated 60 years of farming left if soil depletion continues at its current pace [4].

If we are to both curtail our land use and switch to regenerative farming methods, we must curtail meat production.

It takes around 100 times as much land to produce 1 calorie of beef or lamb versus plant-based alternatives (similar for the same quantity of protein) [5], such that we could reduce our land use for farming from 4 billion to 1 billion hectares and still feed the whole world on plant-based diets.

I’m not sure if I’ve connected the dots here especially well, but I hope I’ve at least conveyed that sustainability is multi-dimensional, and goes far beyond just getting off fossil fuels — even though that is a vital step.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

[2]: https://ourworldindata.org/is-organic-agriculture-better-for...

[3]: https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/deadzonegulf-2021/welcome.html

[4]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...

[5]: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

> If you can nurture a human with X amount of plant food, but instead use X+Y amount of plant food (and extra water, fertilizer, fossils fuels etc.) to raise cattle to nurture the same amount of humans

The key points you're missing are that the plants that cows eat aren't suitable for human consumption, and the land that said plants grow on isn't suitable for growing any plants that are suitable for human consumption.

The vast majority of cow's feed is grain & soy, both of which humans can eat directly. Current levels of meat consumption both in value and cost wouldn't even be remotely sustainable if everyone only ate pasture raised, grass fed cows.

Not to mention that existing biotopes are being destroyed in order to create more pasture; it's very much a self-made problem.

Isn't grass still a big part of what cows eat? As for grain and soy, I thought the parts of them we fed to cows were what was left over after we harvested the parts that we can eat.

Assuming that 25 kg of grain/soy is needed to make 1kg of meat (just picked a number from a poster here), are you really sure that 25 kg of grain/soy is better nutritionally than 1 kg meat ?

> Do you genuinely not understand that these animals are bred for humans consumption? They wouldn't exist otherwise.

In the United States we actually destroyed an equivalent biomass of Bison and replaced them with cattle. Though perhaps you celebrate the Bison eradication, too.

I agree that there's potential for sustainable husbandry in grasslands you cannot use otherwise. But it's very small and could not sustain today's mean consumption at all. Meat production relies heavily on farmed feed, with very low efficiency (25kg of feed for 1kg of beef). For growing that feed you need a lot of farmland which is a driving factor for the destruction of carbon sinks like the rain forest. Here in Europe for instance we are not able to produce enough feed for our animals, so we heavily import from the Americas.

Also your argument against methane emissions is not very well thought through. You could argue the same against any CO2 emissions, by arguing that at some point they will be stored by CCS again.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/feed-required-to-produce-...

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