The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet | Hacker News Reader

The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

qz.com

168 pointskitkat_new222 comments

No matter where you stand (some meat eaters tend to become extremely emotional on this):

The fact that the scientific results and recommendations get utterly censored like this before publication makes me really angry.

It’s somewhat fine for me if people/governments choose to ignore or argue against these results after publication, but this is just absurd… and is then used from people all over the world to point to „see, even scientists say it’s fine!“!

We must find a way to eliminate this lobbying/corruption, rather soon! Meanwhile, of course a vegan diet is better for the environment and renewables/green energy should be a top priority, and yes every bit counts, and if everyone would agree and do this instead of arguing we would have solved the issue already.

> We must find a way to eliminate this lobbying/corruption, rather soon!

Who is the person who is caving to pressure or accepting bribes and making changes to scientific results? We could start by finding names and calling for them to become unemployable anywhere they could cause further damage.

"calling for them to become unemployable "

Good luck with that. One common form of corruption is companies hiring public officials who helped them out.

How bout punishing those handing out the bribes? Oh noes they are rich, powerful, well connected and have an army of lawyers. Let's rather fry the small fish. No snark intended.

I agree, we should go after them too, but right now it's not usually illegal to bribe people, and where companies and industries can't do it directly and openly they'll do it indirectly and quietly to get around the law.

We can try to increase regulations and enforcement, but as long as people don't face any consequence for accepting bribes, I don't like our odds getting those changes pushed through. Without the power of the law on our side, we're better off putting pressure on the small fish since it's hard to put real social pressure on corporations and industries that make more money in a year than the collective wealth of entire nations.

The UN is literally an international political organisation. The shocking truth here is that all the work they do is political.

Whether they are helping or hindering is only a question of what your political leanings are.

Those in power both in government and in the private sector seem to have completely lost interest in the bigger picture and are optimising for short-term personal wealth at pretty much any cost. Perhaps a benevolent AI is the only way forward.

Eating a plant based diet seems more straightforward to me.

just look even at the comments here on HN (not specifically in this thread): so many people are defending viewpoints that somewhat A is not as bad as B if only C would happen, or pulling up weird conspiracy stuff or whatever only to be able to deny what needs to be done.

We have the knowledge, the tech, the wealth, and everything possibly needed lined up to tackle the problem. But then people get somehow catched by wird arguments and turn against each other instead of simply doing what needs to be done together.

The problem here is, that the giant corporations can pollute the environment (eg. coca cola in a plastic bottle, with a plastic cap, with a plastic label, wrapped in a plastic 6-pack, with a plastic handle, on a plastic pallet wrapped in plastic foil), and rich environmentalists then fly their private jets to some 'green' conference and tell an 'average joe' that he shouldn't drive his car and eat meat, and should pay for plastic bags.

the point is it doesn't matter that you are right - all involved parties have to do their part. rich guys point at average Joes and vice versa, and both don't take action because "but the others".

So, how about we ban private jets, both for rich guys and average Joes?

why not? its clearly an inefficient way of travelling, probably MUCH worse than even ordinary flights, which already is a problem. Every bit counts, so lets start with that. (I'd allow some solar powered ultra-light jets (the emission-free thingys), though.)

Once enough people are making sacrifices on their own, the tolerance of assholes polluting freely should finally become less and less, this can get the ball rolling.

But we didn't.

We're pushing down on average working class of people while the rich can do whatever they want. Average joe can't get a plastic bag anymore and has to pay more for even worse alternatives (thick plasic bags need MANY reuses compared to thin plastic bags, plus joe now needs to buy plastic bin liners [0])... but coca cola (company) can still sell sugary water in ten layers of plastic, because reusable glass bottles would cut into their profits.

People are getting more and more fed up with this already.. luckily for some, there are bigger things happening, and people protest for those, but it's a mark of a wider trend happening all over the western world, where there are a set of rules for rich and influential and another for 'normal people'.

[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220329142327.h...

The average joe can think about all the unnecessary suffering caused by animal agriculture. Entities do not have empathy, but humans do.

The trope of the rich environmentalist flying their private jet, is just that. I’m sure that some exist, but the vast majority take far more care of the environment than that.

https://www.businessinsider.in/sustainability/news/cop27-att...

I'm not sure about that.

I mean.. even if you look at the cars they're driving (again, those are rich people, they can easily afford anything electric):

https://www.schwarzeneggerclimateinitiative.com/

And then he drivers an SUV even larger than him:

https://www.tmz.com/2022/01/21/arnold-schwarzenegger-car-acc...

Ursula:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/11/02/revealed-a...

etc.

While I think it’s a positive thing for people in positions of power to speak up for the environment, I do not personally consider any of these people environmentalists. I think there is a huge difference between supporting a cause and living it.

Nevertheless, after rereading your original comment, I fully agree with you. These world leaders should be leading. It is disgusting and hypocritical that they flew 400 private jets to the COP conference.

It's not as though everyone going to the COP conference wants to lead on the environment, many of them are going for things like... preventing the recommendation of a plant based diet.

"Vast majority" is not even an applicable term here. It is specifically about green gurus with jets (which is not a myth, but observable political phenomenon), and if you're not rich enough, not politically influential, and don't fly own jet - its not about you, or anyone you know.

I don’t think it’s about green gurus. It’s about politicians. They know how big the problems are, but like most people, they don’t want to change their behaviour or privileges.

A trope means a common theme. I agree that it’s a trope because it occurs frequently (look at every climate change conference).

I think maybe you meant to say misconception or something like that where the reality is different than understanding. In this case reality is the same as understanding.

That's true, but I don't really see how the existence of assholes should give me a free pass for being an asshole myself.

Are you really an ashole if you want to eat a steak every now and then? Compared to people who use a private jet to fly 31 miles[0]?

If you want a cleaner planet, start with those who pollute the most, and then go down towards stuff normal people do and use.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/11/02/revealed-a...

Nice strawman. You're not an asshole if you eat a steak every now and then. You're an asshole if you don't look at alternatives even though they're available to you and you can afford them just because you love your steaks too much - regardless of what "those who pollute the most" do.

We would already be much further ahead if everyone could and would eat meat only "every now and then".

The fact that I can see greater assholes than I could ever manage to be whenever I turn on the TV does not mean I get a ticket to be a tiny asshole. It doesn't matter what others do when we're evaluating your behaviour.

I can't influence "those who pollute the most" alone, and a society full of people who don't care themselves won't have a tiniest chance of influencing them either.

> You're an asshole if you don't look at alternatives even though they're available to you and you can afford them just because you love your steaks too much

TIL I’m an asshole because I love and eat steak even though I can afford plant based alternatives that I have zero desire to eat because of how processed they are.

Glad you realized that, it's the necessary first step towards positive change. /s

See, that's a good example of why simply getting angry at the hypocritical richest will lead nowhere, as long as what they do is still socially acceptable at smaller scales. People who would do the exact same thing at their place won't succeed in fighting them.

I just don’t think it’s a binary equation because there is simply not a steak substitute that is fully natural in origin. I won’t eat plant based alternatives to meat because I would rather have a natural foodstuff then an unnatural one and frankly every one I have tried that was touted to be great…sucked.

That said, I’d consider the criticism valid if there was a fully natural product that was a reasonable substitute for a steak that had a better ratio for our planet’s stewardship. Say the discovery of some fungus that on its own and with similar preparation that can act as a steak alternative. If I was opting for steak over that with taste and price being equal, sure criticize away.

> I just don’t think it’s a binary equation

Who does? It's obviously non-binary. What matters is how selfish your choices end up being.

At decision making level, there's little difference between "I'm eating loads of meat cause plant-based steaks are too processed" and "I'm traveling by private jet cause other forms of transportation make me lose too much time". There's no alternative way to travel this fast and convenient.

There is a major difference—I am not trying to justify hypocrisy. I am not going around creating public policy and commanding and preaching to others not to eat steak while eating it myself. If anything, I encourage people to eat steak.

If that still makes me an asshole…so be it. “Asshole” is always arbitrary, hypocrisy is always evident.

These actions are harmful regardless of whether you're being a hypocrite about them or not.

In fact, from an utilitarian point of view, being a hypocrite may actually be less harmful, since you may still influence others to do better. I'm not exactly an utilitarian myself, but that's one possible way to judge.

> but that's one possible way to judge

Sure, as is one possible way for me to judge that judgement is that folks will excuse and explain away all sorts of bad behaviors of the people that they identify as allies to a specific cause they support. Doesn’t make them right, it just makes them assholes…at least from my POV.

Just because they're hypocrites doesn't mean they're wrong. Carpooling or using public transportation and reducing meat intake (especially beef) are empirically direct actions that reduce emissions. There's obviously a lot more power structures could do like stop using taxpayer money to subsidize oil and meat company profits, but that won't stop me from doing what I can with my own two hands.

Refusing to engage in good action because you don't like the messenger is teenage angst behavior, not rational decision making.

But the environmental factor of one Joe Average carpooling with a Bob Average is a lot lower than if Sir Rich Guy uses a Tesla instead of his private jet.

This is like a burning tire yard owner telling people to stop smoking cigarettes to keep the air cleaner.

Being around smokers in public places is still awful regardless of whether there are burning tire yard owners or not. These things are orthogonal to each other and both need to be tackled.

Most people who complain about rich environmentalists flying on private planes seem to be on the right. I don't quite get this: you aren't opposed to the existence of millionaires, are you?

You already accept that some people, through their hard work or inheritance or whatever, are entitled to a larger share of material goods. Why shouldn't they also be entitled to a larger share of the total emissions we decide we can handle? As long as they compensate the rest of us for the privilege, maybe - though people on the right tend not to be too excited over severance taxes either.

Assuming they're OK with great material inequality, which sadly they usually are, a rich environmentalist is not especially hypocritical for talking a bigger share of what nature can bear.

If you fly on a private jet, you atleast shouldn't come on a climate conference and tell poor people not to eat meat and drive their car.

There's really not as much of a logical connection between the two as you think. Replace "fly on a private jet" with any other rich person activity and your sentence still works. So it's not really about flying on a jet.

Did you hear what I said at all? Yes, if you are a capitalist who believes in capitalism, you aren't hypocritical for doing that. It's not a position I agree with, but it's a consistent position, as far as it goes. As long as you pay for your emissions / compensate the rest of the world in the ways we have agreed to, you're in the clear. Someone will take up the slack for you, in return for payment.

(Those ways of compensation may objectively be pathetically inadequate, but so what? It was "voluntary" so it's good enough. That's how it works for everything else things in capitalism, so of course that's how it's going to be that way for emissions as well.)

Yes it would be terrible if IPCC reports were somehow to be censored or politically biased!

https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Im...

Climatologist: "We have to get rid of the medieval warm period"

https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/climat...

Climategate emails (IPCC):

"It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by a select core group.

Is it true that only climate sceptics have political interests and are potentially biased? If not, how can we deal with this? How should we deal with flaws inside the climate community? I think, that "our" reaction on the errors found in Mike Mann's work were not especially honest.

All these decisions about IPCC chairs and co-chairs are deeply political

I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !

IPCC report:

https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/pdf/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf

"Equity remains a central element in the UN climate regime ... Prioritising equity, climate justice, social justice, inclusion and just transition processes can enable adaptation and ambitious mitigation actions and climate resilient development ... cash transfers and public works programs [are] highly feasible and increase resilience to climate change"

IPCC press release:

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2023/03/IPCC_AR6_SYR...

"these choices need to be rooted in our diverse values, worldviews and knowledges, including scientific knowledge, Indigenous Knowledge and local knowledge"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/01/leaked-e...

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones's collaborator, Wei-Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had "screwed up".

The apparent attempts to cover up problems with temperature data from the Chinese weather stations provide the first link between the email scandal and the UN's embattled climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a paper based on the measurements was used to bolster IPCC statements about rapid global warming in recent decades.

Now try the real climate science.

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/07/24/climate-epochs-....

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...

But exactly? Your first link is supporting my points and the second isn't related to it, are you aware of that or is this a sort of knee jerk reaction based on keyword matching?

The first article is about how the Medieval Warm Period did indeed happen. That isn't a rebuttal, it's support for the fact that Michael Mann's "getting rid of it" from the IPCC reports was biased censorship of scientific results, the thing the OP was complaining about. The IPCC has a long and terrible track record of blocking results that don't support the worst case scenarios (i.e. which would make their research less important to fund).

The point their article makes is only that the MWP didn't happen everywhere, so it wasn't global warming. But so what? Modern "global" warming isn't global either. Temperature changes differ in different parts of the world.

Your second article has nothing to do with the IPCC, and isn't actually meaningful anyway. Go read about the details. Exxon were using the same approaches as in academia, just reproducing their models, and concluded correctly that this sort of modelling was probably unreliable and at any rate couldn't be evaluated at the time. That's being presented as that they "knew" and "hid" the results. But the models weren't right despite claims to the contrary, so their assessment was reasonable.

i don't think you need a model to look at temperature records and see they have been increasing without a natural climate explanation. Unless there is some large igneous province spewing carbon into the atmosphere that you are aware of that the rest of us is not.

I don't quite follow, is that a reference to Exxon? They started looking at those claims in 1977 but temperatures had been falling (by the records of the time) from 1940 to 1975ish, so that would have been a big problem for concluding that fossil fuels = warming. It still is, which is why one of the things the IPCC did in its reports was start truncating its graphs and changing temperature data to try and erase the fact that climatology was once predicting a new ice age.

"they have been increasing without a natural climate explanation"

There are natural explanations, that's what the whole debate is about: how much temperature/sea level/etc change is natural vs man made. IPCC modelling starts from the assumption that the climate would be entirely stable if not for human activity which is why they were so keen on erasing the MWP.

what is the natural explanation that you are providing for the increase in global mean temperatures since industrialisation?

seems pretty obvious to me that a large igneous province is a comparable example to anthropogenic climate change (e.g., https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12957-1). more carbon, higher temperatures. This has happened in the past literally every time a large igneous province has emerged. the big difference between today and the past is that the carbon being produced currently isn't from a large igneous province, it's from burning carbon fuels, making concrete, etc.

if you don't believe it, then feel free to download the data from wherever it is collected (see examples below) and prove me wrong.

https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/global-land-p...

https://climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org/country/china/c...

https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/10154823

>> what is the natural explanation that you are providing for the increase in global mean temperatures since industrialisation?

Since industrialization i.e. the 20th century? It's quite possible that there actually hasn't been any increase if you look at the original thermometer readings and take the trend over the period since the start of industrialization. That's why the record is full of cases where climatologists went back and revised old thermometer readings (by several degrees in some cases!), to make it seem like there has been. This shows up in old documents as references to various "pauses", "plateaus", "blips" and the "global cooling" period between 1945 and 1975 that can no longer be seen in current temperature databases.

Back in 1999 NASA was complaining that there'd been no warming in America in the 20th century:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090404150607/http://www.giss.n...

How can the absence of clear climate change in the United States be reconciled with continued reports of record global temperature? Part of the "answer" is that U.S. climate has been following a different course than global climate, at least so far. Figure 1 compares the temperature history in the U.S. and the world for the past 120 years. The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934.

If you compare modern temperature graphs of the USA in the 20th century to the one they present there, you won't be able to understand what they're talking about because since then climatologists rewrote the temperature databases to create large amounts of 20th century warming in the USA. NASA has totally changed their claims about the past.

When they did that it was controversial. They justified it by saying the source data from the weather stations must be corrupted (because it didn't match their theory). A new weather station network was built in 2005 to address this concern. It also shows no warming since the day it opened. It's entirely possible the trend line for temperatures in the USA is zero since the start of industrialization.

What about elsewhere? Hard to say because long term data is sparse, often corrupted by urban development and also gets modified all the time. The NASA slider graph in your third link hides the fact that most of the temperature data they show for the globe over the 20th century is interpolated or modelled, not recorded with actual thermometers. Satellites? The show a bit of warming but also show long plateau periods where temperature doesn't move, and the data doesn't go back far enough to draw conclusions.

A trend line of zero since the start of industrialization doesn't mean temperatures don't sometimes go up. If you look at the 'real' data then you see a sine-wave like shape in the long term and a series of step changes in the short term, the so-called multidecadal oscillation and El Nino/La Nina factors. What causes it? Nobody really knows, maybe a combination of things, but there's no explanation for how human activity can cause this shape and plenty of evidence that climate has always been changing.

if you don't believe temperature data go look at pictures of glaciers that go back 100+ years https://nsidc.org/data/glacier_photo/

what makes them melt? must be photoshop of the pictures by climatologists right?

so maybe it's photoshop, but then where does all the sea ice go? probably climatologists lying about it right? are the satellites even in space? maybe they are a lie just like the moon landing.

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/snow-and-ice-ext...

you linked to an article by james hansen then said you can't find what he is talking about because climatologists covered it up. james hansen is one of the most famous climate scientists ever having originally presented this to congress as a world crisis during his tenure at NASA.

i gave you links to temperature data collected in the usa, the soviet union, and china. yet you come back with no physical explanations and hint at vague conspiracies? Then you tell me to "look at the real data" when I gave you data collected by governments who have no desire to agree with each other in some global conspiracy.

so like, whatever man.

"you linked to an article by james hansen then said you can't find what he is talking about because climatologists covered it up. james hansen is one of the most famous climate scientists ever having originally presented this to congress as a world crisis during his tenure at NASA."

I know, the article I linked to is on the NASA website. That's exactly what I'm saying - guys like Hansen were distressed by the lack of warming despite their predictions to the contrary and then changed the data to create it, mostly by cooling the past. It's visible when comparing graphs of the same time period from older and newer documents. That one is an older document. You seem to think there's a contradiction here but I don't see it.

Glaciers, how do they work? Dunno, let's ask the archaeologists who know that in the past it was massively warmer where glaciers are found today:

http://www.museumgolling.at/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/9_Sch...

Oaks (Quercus) at an altitude of 1,450 metres around 2,000 years ago also indicate a climate approximately 4 to 7 °C warmer than today.

But that was in the Roman era so it can't have been CO2 making that warmth. Also very important: 4-7 degrees hotter but no runaway climate self-destruction.

Then you go off on some jibber-jabber about conspiracy theories. That's what always happens when people can't accept the truth on this topic, they try to shoot the messenger. All you need for this outcome to occur is the mundane reality that without predictions of doom nobody would care about climatology. It doesn't matter if the researchers are American or European or Chinese. Their income and prestige depends on claiming that they (a) understand the climate and (b) know how to explain all changes and (c) that those changes are controllable with sufficiently big actions. Unfortunately none of that seems to be correct.

I asked you repeatedly to provide a physical explanation for any observation such as global surface temperatures, glacier time series photos, sea ice reduction, etc. So far you provide none.

And I'm not attacking the messenger because you seem to have no message. You are only being a contrarian claiming the data doesn't exist to begin with.

So yeah, whatever man.

Non-human physical explanations for climate change can include sunspot activity, the AMO, El Nino/La Nina events, volcanic activity, internal interactions and probably many others. Some are known but most aren't. That's why I've not been giving you a comprehensive list: the climate isn't fully understood.

> the climate isn't fully understood

I give you this one. There is no absolute _proof_, we only have scientific consensus of the overwhelming majority. Granted, they all can be wrong, thats the good thing about science.

Having said that, just out of curiosity watching you discuss:

Would you agree that _just in case_ all these dudes are roughly right, we all should make at least good faith attempts to stop whatever we're doing currently or change it so that it doesn't make the situation worse?

Best case, all the scientists were wrong and we made the world a cleaner place with less pollution and sustainable tech instead of using up limited resources wherever possible. Worst case: they were not only right and even underestimated the pace (happened multiple times already), but we took measures just in time and can solve the problems just-in-time.

I mean, we could expand the problem easily to not only include warming and its effects, we do have straight pollution problems right in front of us. Toxic substances sifting into nature, rivers dying, agricultural wastes poisoning the seas, piles of garbage in poorer countries where new smallpox variants can emerge, hostile bacterias that are immune to the last antibiotics we have against superimmune things, ... .

I think even if the whole global warming story would be some super world conspiracy or mathematical error at the end, many measures to reduce that thing would also help against very obvious problems we also have (or start to have).

I think you just encountered a real "climate skeptic" in the wild. A once abundant species, but a rare sighting in 2023.

Yeah I guess I was bored while waiting on my code to finish running. Oh well. My gf would say, "why are you talking to people on the internet?"

> My gf would say, "why are you talking to people on the internet?"

I love these flashes from the old internet. Does your girlfriend live in Canada?

No she lives in The Netherlands.

If you check the polls you'll find we're pretty abundant (~30%+) and the numbers have been rising in recent years.

Well, speaking on the report, you'll find that all these bodies and their reports are written by committees of special interests in their entirety. There wasn't some report of substance here that was muddied and made less truthful by the meat industry. It had always been this way, even the UN Declaration of Human Rights was written so as to ensure membership in the UN by the big states of the time, and not principled based on some understanding of human rights. Theyre always statements and decisions of convenience for the interests of the attendant parties.

No matter where you stand, these type naive recommandations are responsible for some of the greatest enviornmental dissasters of the last century. "Bio"-Fuels being one of the main culprits of deforestation that has created way bigger problems than the ones they were trying to fix. In this case a Plant based Diet would require much more agricultural land for the same calorie intake than a balanced meat and plant one. And guess where that land will come from? guess how much more automation will be needed to take care of that extra agriculture, so more machinery, more pesticides, more transport etc. There is nothing scientific about a recomandation. it's a hypotesis that until gets implemented can not be called scientific. Like the the implementation of BioFules showed, that recommandation was not scentific at all. And by definition can not be scientific.

There's an inflation of the word "scientific" nowadays that is beinng used for any study that makes it almost a religion. the core concept of Scientific it is always to question and especially can not be applied to new un-tested procedures that however rigorous they might have been on planning phase, can not by definition account for all variables. Something that is un-tested by definition can not be scientific.

so you say that the amount of land and water needed to grow a cow that ultimately I can eat is LESS than if I would use that land to grow food to eat directly? thats pretty wild, I'd think. Not even thinking about the methane issues with cows and other things they add ontop of land use.

BioFuels are a joke, though, a result of lobbyism, fully agree. Individually owned ICEs on a large scale are the problem here, that BioFuel shit is just deflecting blame.

Yes I am saying that to get the same Nutritional value that you would get from a cow you would need much more amound of land to grow the plants that would subtitute it. Plants that would require a lot more care and a lot more automation/pesticides that the plants cows are eating. Even the volume of the needed transport/storage/refiregeration would be way bigger. Ask anyone living in a rural area, what amount of land/effort would be the equivalent of a cow. Hopefully everyone agrees now that BioFueld are a joke but this same discussion was held some 25 years ago and BioFuels became a reality because everyone opposing them then was beaten down with the "scientific" stick. Because we are using "scientific" to camuflage the fact that we are acting out of fear and we don't really know what to do. That would be the first step. IPCC raccomends a plant-free diet MIGHT help the enviornment? Good as long as it is clear that is a Test and we need to evaluate maybe on a smaller scale first, and not the God-given truth that allows us to stone everyone who thinks eitherwise. If the IPCC says This not Might but this WILL, that I'm gonna file it together with the Biofuels and for once be glad that some lobies, for their own interests are doing us all a favour.

are you aware that stuff like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods is a thing now? not in the "we made it work in a lab" but in "there are factories now" meaning? Also never asked yourself how iE the Dutch can be a world leader/exporter of plants/foods despite having a tiny amount of land compared to many other countries?

Just asking questions here, because it seems that your anger over the BioFuel disaster (and granted, it literally is!) seems to overshadow a bit of rationality needed here to see how stuff is going here-and-now.

The Netherland Case is specifically what I am referring to with the need for huge automatization. It's a very high tech solution, a very good one but can it be effectivly replicated world-wide without a concentrated effort? I would be enthustiacly supporting a big push toward this direction and if this result in less need for meat product, it's very welcome. But in the absence of a big Investment push what will problably happen in reality is that Brazil,Argentina etc will not push for this kind of agriculture because it is cheaper and faster to just cut some hectars of the Amazon Forest and use traditional agriculture. That is what I am afraid of, unintended consenguences that come naturally from simple raccomandation like "use a plant-based diet" withough going through the steps of making it actually sustainable.

> In this case a Plant based Diet would require much more agricultural land for the same calorie intake than a balanced meat and plant one.

Where do you think the calories in meat ultimately comes from?

That is an absurd question and may I bring the absurdity to it's final form? where do the calories in the plant then come from? Is the next raccomandation to eat CO2 and Sun Rays?

I'm pointing out that you don't seem to realise how insanely resource inefficient meat is:

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/feed-required-to-produce-... [2] https://cbey.yale.edu/our-stories/disrupting-meat

Napkin maths from the first source suggests 5kg of feed to produce a 200g steak. All while losing all but 4% of the original calories. This is of course ignoring the vast water consumption and emissions (and of course ethical problems) which are issues worth talking about in themselves.

Conclusion is quite the opposite of your original comment, it seems we could feed the world MANY times over using less land on a 'plant based' diet.

Of course it's more complicated than just naming numbers.

Why is water consumption an issue perse? What did the 5kg of food consist of? Is that 5kg we humans could've ate? I doubt it. Throughout time we've given our animals scraps which we think is beneath us.

Take for example a cow in England eating grass and drinking water which directly came from the rain. What is inherently bad about that?

Don't get me wrong, I think that the bio industry has taken things to the extreme, but simply saying meat is inefficient and naming some numbers is not giving us a proper basis for discussion to really address how we can make things durable.

It was a specific rebuttal to the parent comment which seemed to not understand the reality of resources in vs resources out of animal agriculture. Of course you can caveat a lot about my comment, beef for instance is arguably the most inefficient example of meat you could cite (amongst slightly less inefficient alternatives) but illustrates the problem well. That is the nature of compressing such a complex issue into a small HN comment.

> Why is water consumption an issue perse? What did the 5kg of food consist of? Is that 5kg we humans could've ate? I doubt it. Throughout time we've given our animals scraps which we think is beneath us.

Right - the discussion is about land use. We don't typically eat animal feed but allocate an enormous sq footage that could have been used to grow something we would might like to consume directly.

> Take for example a cow in England eating grass and drinking water which directly came from the rain. What is inherently bad about that?

Agree, we have plentiful access to drinking water in the UK and so have enough to allocate to irrigation and all the other water intensive activities involved to do this. Unfortunately on this particular point, the majority of the beef you eat does not come from here. This issue becomes much more pertinent if you live in say California or Spain.

That is the natural Conservation of Energy into play. Noone is saying that you get more calories than you put in. But the form of those calories is more useful for our consuption.

I'll take your example: While it takes 25KG of grass/other plant to get 1KG of meat The human body get's much more value from precessing that 1KG of meat than processing 25KG of grass. You can not just eat 25KG of corn plant and expect it to be the same as 1KG of meat.

This is not even a question. The need for Animal Proteins in our body is well documented and although many plants contain various forms of proteins they can not eliminate the need for Animal Proteins. There are various products that try to supplement this need artifically for those who oppose the consuption of animals on Moral grounds but that is another issue because there are also those who have a moral issue with consuming Plants; Why should one have more weight than the other? And this is also Why I am very sceptical of this issue because people try to push other moral views and conflate them into one.

All I care in this context is the enviormental impact. I can say with a clear conscience that I dont care about your other moral dilemas in this case because the issue is much larger than some people needs to self congratulate on their choices and their need to recruit more people into those choice to validate themselves.

Comparing the weight of animal feed and consumable meat isn’t very useful because almost 100% of animal feed isn’t edible by humans. It’s not like that 5kg of feed is going to be eaten by people instead of going the animals.

There are lots of inefficiencies that are perfectly normal. Compare the amount of sunlight needed to produce a single gram of plants. Why does that ratio matter?

It’s not valuable to compare even beans to steak as they are completely different nutrients. 100g of steak has 271 calories with 19g fat and 25g protein [0]. 100g of cooked black beans has 132 calories with 24g carb, 9g protein, and 1g fat [1].

You don’t compare these foods by weight if you’re talking about human diet.

Animals consuming massive amounts of stuff people can’t eat is a feature, not a bug. That’s the point of cows, that they graze on grass and build up nutrients for people to eat.

Now the issue of factory farming having cows in a pen being force fed is a separate problem. But meat itself is useful for feeding people.

[0] steak nutrition https://g.co/kgs/wFer2d [1] https://www.yazio.com/en/foods/black-beans-cooked.html

Hi.

Sorry a bit late to the party but IIRC certain high yield crops like dent corn are not really palatable for humans but can make up 2/3rds of the diet of a chicken.

Also low quality bushels of other cereals, legumes and even cotton seed can be turned into feed.

Edit: Although we eat too much meat now I believe the appropriate amount of meat consumption is well above 0

This was an ideological recommendation, not a scientific one. It's fine for scientists to also engage in political advocacy but we should be clear about which role they're playing at the time.

> Meanwhile, of course a vegan diet is better for the environment

This is not a matter of course. Humans are part of the environment, and it is not a matter of course that a vegan diet is healthy for humans. The idea (I don't want to say fact, but I believe it) that meat and dairy consumption/industry are currently happening at a scale that is harmful does not mean that meat and dairy are bad for the environment.

I don't understand the structure of your argument. What do you mean by "not a matter of course"? There is plenty of evidence that 1) vegan diets are associated with improved health outcomes, broadly speaking and 2) animal consumption has a disproportionate environmental impact for the nutrients obtained (which is unsurprising from a physics perspective, since the animals eat plants that humans could eat directly).

Perhaps these things are not "inherently" true in that one can easily come up with edge-case counterexamples, but they are true on the whole.

You say "of course" when something is a matter of course. It is similar to begging the question.

1. Compared to what?

2. Animal consumption or current patterns of animal consumption?

Note too that I do not claim that meat and dairy are proven more healthy, or better at any scale. Just that we must be careful not to let greenwashing make us think they're evil and gross as a kneejerk reaction.

> Meanwhile, of course a vegan diet is better for the environment

Doesn't agriculture cause deforestation? That said what is better for environment?

With meat there is more demand on agriculture

It really does feel like we’re living in bizzaro world. If you want to make recommendations based on evidence, make sure it doesn’t impact the profits of powerful groups.

Many negative things we see in public policy stem from this fact. Lack of right to repair, lack of broadband in America, lack of cyber security in corporations, US tax law.

Maybe you like your meat. That’s fine. You can make decisions for your self, but we should at least be able to acknowledge the impacts of those decisions.

I think the solution is to blanket ban corporate speech. It really is different than individuals speaking and we need to acknowledge that.

"I think the solution is to blanket ban corporate speech."

How will you ban corporate shills?

It shouldn't be all that hard, really. We ban prostitution (whether we should or not is another question). It's the same principle: you can do the thing as much as you like, but you can't pay people for it.

It doesn't have to be strict. It doesn't have to be two sided. For simplicity, maybe you want to only ban the paying side. Say there can't be a post in your budget that says "influence politicians for favourable legislation" if you're an LLC. How limited liability corporations spend money is already pretty monitored, for obvious reasons, so it wouldn't be that hard.

Prostitution is an example of a ban that's almost totally ineffective, but your points about LLCs seem reasonable to this non expert.

It’s effective at its purpose, its purpose just isn’t stopping the conduct banned.

What is the purpose, then?

Marginalizing sex workers.

There's no actual benefit to that, so I'm not sure it's the reason.

There are people who benefit from it; there’s no (or negative) net social benefit, but that’s true of lots of the things that motivate laws.

Who benefits from sex workers being marginalized?

People who exploit sex workers.

"I think the solution is to blanket ban corporate speech. It really is different than individuals speaking"

Does that apply to universities, government employees and claims about the "consensus" too? Or are they all individuals?

You know, I'm also fine with people eating meat. I just would like them to pay for the damage they cause, and would not like to subsidise their consumption with my tax money.

The discussion around plants, meat and dairy need to become much more nuanced.

Let's take dairy as an example - has a great effect in boosting mTORC1 activity which causes better growth in children. Now, a non-insignificant set of people who have bought into zealous veganry are raising children who will be physically more fragile just because they've been marketed with the idea that dairy == bad.

On the other hand, overactivation of mTORC1 is a driver of "growth-related diseases" like cancer, which suggests you should limit it post-adolescence.

In conclusion, I think it is right for us not to listen to political panels who are sticking their finger up in the air to measure what is the politically correct thing to say today and prescribe policies based on that. People should have the freedom to research and choose.

I am a layman on this topic; feel free to correct any errors in my claims.

> I am a layman on this topic; feel free to correct any errors in my claims.

This isn't how this works. You should back up your own claims with sources.

mTOR makes children grow faster, but everything I've heard suggests that it doesn't make them any taller as adults. Meanwhile, obesity rates in children keep growing, and atherogenesis doesn't wait until adulthood.

Heart disease and cancer are still the leading causes of death in America. COVID's taken the #3 spot, which affected those with obesity and diabetes much more than those without, but I don't expect it to stick around on this list. Somehow, frailty due to not eating meat didn't make the top 10.

If we want kids to be strong and healthy, get them outside and get them moving. No diet will see them healthy if they're sedentary.

indeed, that is a good addition / counterpoint.

You should note that large parts of the world's population have never consumed dairy throughout their history (except as infants, of course), and are still doing very well today (China being the largest such group). I don't think this is a good line of argument.

But they certainly are not vegan.

But GP was making a claim specifically about dairy.

You concede being a layman yet lay out a conclusion as though you are not. Was there any real point to your comment beyond taking a stab at 'zealous vegans'?

The point was that black-and-white thinking / reducing decisions to be made over single variables leads to suboptimal outcomes. Please try a bit harder to be generous with your reading interpretation.

Your comment does not show that there is any "black-and-white thinking" is taking place here, or if it is, that it is unfounded. Even with a generous interpretation, there's no relevancy to be found.

Sure it is, it's saying that a diet which is "good"* for the planet at 10 billion people automatically translates to the optimal diet for one person. It's a completely different scale and matter.

* (without considering any emissions or other negatives caused by shipping perishable vegetables halfway across the planet)

It doesn't deserve a generous interpretation; it began with a generalisation about a group of people and an unfounded assertion.

Ah, you're a troll, never mind.

I have looked extensively for this and there is no study that shows that vegan children will be more fragile. Often they boast healthier cholesterol levels and body fat and better nutrient levels. And then, if that were true, is it better to be bigger? Dairy and meat increase the risk of developing cancers and cardiovascular diseases. Is it worth it?

The brain contains approximately 20% of whole body cholesterol, you can't get away with not eating fats. Your brain needs fats.

Who says fats are only in meat and dairy? They are in many plant based sources that contain large amounts of fats. Just to name a couple: Nuts, seeds, fruits(avocado, olives, coconut)

all ecologically incredibly viable to be produced and transported across the world in gigantic container ships

I have no idea what mTORC1, but this post is in bad faith.

> Now, a non-insignificant set of people who have bought into zealous veganry are raising children who will be physically more fragile just because they've been marketed with the idea that dairy == bad.

> It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19562864/

There's plenty of sources saying a properly planned vegan diet is fine. Lots of vegans take supplements, and lots of food is fortified.

> feel free to correct any errors in my claims

What you say about mTORC1 is not supported by the leading academic researcher organizations in the field of nutrition.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/ "It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes."

If you think you have greater scientific expertize about this then I urge you to pursue a career in the related fields, publish your scientific evidence in the top journals and eventually change the recommendations. Until you accomplish that me and everyone else reading this should rely on the position cited above.

> political panels who are sticking their finger up in the air ...

That is not the situation here. The climate policy recommendations on eating are based on the best current scientific evidence. See https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/

How many people have great scientific expertize to appropriately plan their diets if half of them believe in geocentrism?

Your linked paper doesn't reference mTORC1 a single time. Moreover, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has faced numerous criticisms about it's close ties to corporate groups such as McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Mars, and others.* It is fully within their interest to state "vegans need reliable sources of vitamin B-12, such as fortified foods or supplements" (a direct quote from your linked paper) as it supports the business models of their corporate partners.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_of_Nutrition_and_Diete...

Interests aside, it is very important that everyone has B12 in their diet. Most people get it from animal products, so vegans need to be sure they're getting it from somewhere. Without B12, all of the health benefits of lower BMI, higher dietary fiber, and lower saturated fat and dietary cholesterol will be offset by higher stroke risk.

Your quote doesn’t dispute that dairy is good for promoting growth in adolescents.

It just says that vegan diets are appropriate. If one is concerned with optimization then you would want to consider diets that are superior, not just adequate.

Not taking a side, I just get frustrated when people present material to refute that doesn’t actually refute. For example a paper saying “daily is not superior to non-dairy diets in adolescents” would be a good refutation.

You always have to be careful for averages kgCO2/unit of some product where there are multiple ways to produce the stuff.

To take beef for example (since it usually tops the kgCO2/unit food charts) if we just replaced the millions of bisons exterminated in the USA:

https://theconversation.com/historical-photo-of-mountain-of-...

(30-60 millions bisons to ... about 500).

By cattle, on the same grass lands (no land use change - important), the impact on climate change would be exactly zero vs pre industrial levels.

We could probable have some quantity of near CO2 neutral meat if we wanted to.

When I want beef I buy from a local farmer (grass fed 10km from my home), I don't think removing it would really help the climate vs things I've done like insulating my house, switching to heat pump, remote work, and switching to EV.

If they really read both pieces of papers, they'd read the footnote 53 in the final draft, detailing what the IPCC is calling a "sustainable healthy diet".

"53 ‘Sustainable healthy diets’ promote all dimensions of individuals’ health and well-being; have low environmental pressure and impact; are accessible, affordable, safe and equitable; and are culturally acceptable, as described in FAO and WHO. The related concept of ‘balanced diets’ refers to diets that feature plant-based foods, such as those based on coarse grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and animal-sourced food produced in resilient, sustainable and low-GHG emission systems, as described in SRCCL"

Is Scientist Rebellion a lobby ? Who's pushing an agenda here ?

I'm actually surprised how much dairy products contribute to global warming. It's only veganism that really cuts down on carbon emissions.

Not really. I looked at the different scenarios and we would probably do fine on chicken and cheese in terms of water consumption, CO2 and land use.

Pork is where it starts being risky.

Beef, lamb etc. are the most problematic parts.

This. There needs to be a pyramid in top of the food pyramid. Beef is not bad per se, it just shouldn't be your weekly meat.

I’m not sure if you responded to the wrong comment or what because the parent is referencing environment impact but you’re referencing health impacts.

From an environmental point of view, there’s a linear relationship between your consumption of beef and environmental impact. There is no amount of beef that is good for the environment.

From a health point of view, it’s debated, however there are more studies that show red/processed meats having negative health effects than neutral or positive effects. Of course, you can cherry pick the studies that align with your beliefs, but the prevailing data, evidence, and research show beef actually _is_ bad per se.

Note: there is no nutrient (that we know of) that you can only get from beef and no other food source. So it isn’t necessary to include it in your diet.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-bee...

> There is no amount of beef that is good for the environment.

That's a tautology. In that strict sense, there's no amount of you that's good for the environment, either. Unless we all commit suicide, we have to accept the fact that our behavior changes the environment. So, yes, quantities matter a lot.

If you define “sustainable” in the sense of “enabling human life on earth”, you should be fine.

Dairy from cows grazing on marginal land that is not otherwise suitable / efficient for other cultures is very competitive as far as producing proteins is concerned. Proteins are a necessary nutrient.

Industrial cattle fed corn is an entirely different story and should almost certainly be counted as a different category as far as climate impact is concerned.

No. Those cows live longer and therefor produce more methane. They are worse in terms of ghg.

The bovid methane drumbeat is bandied by people who conveniently fail to account for the millions of missing American bison that used to produce comparable output.

Did they? Did anyone measure that? Or is that simply an assumption? Relatively small dietary changes can greatly reduce the amount of methane produced by cows (I believe you add something like 15% seaweed to the feed), so it's not at all clear that a free range bison would be similar.

Wild Bison aren't eating seaweed in the great plains. Cows in the plains spend their majority of their life eating the same grasses that the bison ate, then they spend a few months on a corn diet.

Do you have a reference for this that tries to quantify the CO2/CH4 emissions per kg beef? For chicken, I've seen estimates of 3.3 kg CO2/kg of industrial chicken meat compared to 5.3 kg CO2/kg of organic chicken meat. Of course, from an animal welfare point of view, organic chicken is a lot better.

Carbon emissions from cattle comes from their feed. They're not fed petroleum. There is some incidental fossil fuel consumption involved particularly in producing industrial feed (corn), but that doesn't really apply for pasture-fed cattle. All that carbon was just captured by the grass or otherwise corn used to feed them.

CH4 is another issue, but again, unless I'm missing something, total CH4 from cattle in the atmosphere should be proportional to the average number of heads alive. If we don't increase herd size, it won't go up — unlike CO2 from fossil fuel use.

Plant based is superior to all the common animal based foods, from grazing as well as factory farms. https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/

> There is no amount of beef that is good for the environment.

With a low enough amount of cows bred in more traditional ways, there would be a cycle where an equivalent amount of carbon would be captured by plants vs what is excreted by the cow. That's why animal farming has not been a source of net CO2 for the thousands of years that we have been doing it before industrial times.

However, going back to historic sustainable levels means a drastic reduction in consumption of meat and dairy - probably a few times per year or something like that. Putting all livestock together, it would mean people could eat meat maybe once a month. Eggs and dairy may be a little more common, as those are collected throughout the life of the animal.

Isn't beef bad because cows release methane, but feeding cows seaweed can mitigate that?

It's largely (heh) about their size and that they're not really as optimized for meat as e.g. pigs. They breed comparatively slowly and take longer to grow.

Moreover the weight of a cow carcass is no higher than 60% that of the animal, while for pigs the lower bound is ~78%. Poultry is also very efficient in this regard, especially turkey yielding 80%+.

Where I'm from domestically consumed beef comes mostly from dairy cows so it's not particularly good, but it appears to be the more environmentally sound choice than growing them just for the meat(not that this was the aim - it's just cheaper).

The sooner we can get lab grown beef the better. I don't care if it's more expensive or even if it isn't as efficient in terms of energy input as growing, raising, and slaughtering actual cows. It'd still come with tons of benefits like reducing antibiotic use, taking up less land, causing less suffering, eliminating illnesses, etc.

We're not about to run out of land. My recommendation is to use nuclear power to desalinate seawater and turn the Sahara Desert into a vast grassland on which we can raise a couple of billion cattle in order to feed the world. I think the same should be done in the Australian Desert.

> We're not about to run out of land

We already did, in the sense that we'd need more earths to let everyone on earth eat the kind of diets prevalent in rich countries today. https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

Current enourmous land use by meat industries has many negative effects. We should individually switch to plant based (if you haven't already) and in public policy rapidly remove all subsidies from meat and animal industries and fully price in all negative externalities (GHG, antibiotics risks, pandemic risks, air and water pollution). At the same time subsidize plant based alternatives. As a result plant based alternatives would be several times lower in cost than the meat versions, which in turn would drive consumption changes.

Or just give up beef and mutton - it's responsible for most of the problem.

No need to get all radical - you won't gain much support for such ideas. Beef consumption already peaked in rich countries anyway.

The problem with only reducing meat from cows and sheep is that other meat sources are still worse than plant based with regard to climate change and we're at a juncture where climate policy need to shift into full gear on all fronts. Not a time for half measures. Meat from chicken is also likely even worse than beef in terms of pandemic risk and perhaps also antibiotics resistance risk. In addition to that chicken meat industries cause much more animal suffering than all other land based animal meat industries combined which I think is a very strong argument to phase out chicken meat production - that industry wouldn't last a week if the type of animal protection regulation people in general think already exists for it would in fact be enacted, applied and enforced.

The idea that negative externalities should be priced in is the standard view in economics. I think most people, if provided the reasoning for it, would accept such pricing in when it comes to such serious global problems as climate change, antibiotics resistance, pandemic risk and air and water pollution.

> Not a time for half measures.

Now is exactly the time for half measures - radical options proposed in the past largely failed due to their simplistic view of human nature.

We're actually getting there with electricity. Renewables - the very definition of a half-measure - are being deployed at a much higher rate than nuclear, which on the face of it is the ideal solution - but only in a world where megaprojects are delivered on time and within budget. Ironically China and Russia are doing great here - I suppose the secret ingredient is totalitarianism.

> I think most people, if provided the reasoning for it, would accept such pricing in when it comes to such serious global problems as climate change

That's a very charitable assumption.

There are many people who can't even begin to imagine, much less understand the issue at hand.

Going vegan because climate change and animal suffering is going to be a hard sell.

> Now is exactly the time for half measures - radical options proposed in the past largely failed due to their simplistic view of human nature.

Not sure I understand. What are some examples of "radical options" in policy you think have been attempted and failed? What are examples of "non-radical" options you think there's evidence would yield better outcomes?

With "not the time for half measures" I meant that if only half measures are deployed now then it seems likely millions of humans, many from regions least responsible for climate change, will be harmed, killed or displaced.

The idea of pricing in costs is already very familiar to people in their everyday lives. There are social norms like "you break it, you pay" and various regulations that price in costs.

> Going vegan because climate change and animal suffering is going to be a hard sell.

Keep in mind the distinction between policy level and individual level. The policy suggestion was remove meat industry subsidies, price in externalities, subsidize plant based foods. On the individual level the best outreach approach varies case by case depending on where the recipient is at. Are you already vegan or in the process of switching to vegan? If not then feel free to lift any individual level objections or obstacles you personally have and we can discuss them.

> With "not the time for half measures" I meant that if only half measures are deployed now then it seems likely millions of humans, many from regions least responsible for climate change, will be harmed, killed or displaced.

Half measures is what's feasible. The measures you're proposing are not.

> Keep in mind the distinction between policy level and individual level. The policy suggestion was remove meat industry subsidies, price in externalities, subsidize plant based foods.

You're mistaken in the assumption that the majority will be willing to vote for this. Every point of yours is politically unpalatable.

Maybe beef is bad largely due to their sheer volume (c.f. China's per capita emission is much lower than North America or Europe, but their aggregate impact is still enormous due to their large population).

There was this eye opening old XKCD that showed that by aggregate weight cattle dwarf every other land mammal: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1338:_Land_Mammal...

(Not a subject expert, do your own research, check the sources, etc.)

I find the methane issue quite dubious: as it gets oxidized over time, the quantity of methane from cattle in the atmosphere is more or less proportional to the number of heads. The problem with CO2 otoh is that it keeps increasing because we create it from fossil sources.

There are two problems with methane: for one, while it is "sitting" in the atmosphere, its greenhouse effect is much stronger than CO2's. After that somewhat short-lived period, it oxidizes to CO2 and water, so it still at best ends up as bad as CO2.

So even if we stopped producing CO2 from fossil fuels today, we would still be increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere though breeding cows and other livestock, moving through a CH4 phase that does even more harm. Livestock are releasing the C trapped in plant bodies.

But the C trapped in plant bodies comes from sequestered atmospheric CO2, no? It's not possible to permanently increase atmospheric CO2 purely through livestock, only "temporarily" increase methane (permanently, if we keep the livestock industry running forever).

There is only one place that actual surplus carbon comes from, and that is fossil fuels. Everything else is part of the closed-loop carbon cycle.

That carbon in cow farts & burps was grass yesterday, which was atmospheric CO2 last week. Cows are not fed petroleum products, though some petroleum may be used in the production of industrial feed (but not or much less for pasture feeding).

Atmospheric CH4 does not "do harm" as such, it's indeed a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming in proportion to its prevalence. Said prevalence, as I'm trying to point out, is proportional to the number of heads of cattle. As such, if we don't increase the number of heads significantly, the impact will be constant.

Contrast with fossil fuels for, say, transportation: their impact on greenhouse effect is constantly increasing at a rate proportional to the number of cars/planes/trips.

Or put another way: we have to stop using ICE cars and planes altogether to stop increasing greenhouse effect; we only have to keep eating the same amount of beef and cheese to stop their impact.

Seaweed, garlic, etc. has shown to reduce methane. Yet at the same time creates uncertainty around more nitrous oxide, which might makes it even worse.

There's also what they're being fed, which apparently is mostly soy and corn... and require a lot of land, water (and chemicals) at this scale. As far as I understand, it'd be much more efficient to grow calories and proteins that we can directly consume instead.

The seaweed/algea story is pushed strongly by meat industry greenwashing efforts. It isn't large scale deployed anywhere and the potential benefits are overblows.

https://www.wired.com/story/carbon-neutral-cows-algae/ "What’s more, feeding cattle algae is really only practical where it’s least needed: on feedlots. This is where most cattle are crowded in the final months of their 1.5- to 2-year lives to rapidly put on weight before slaughter. There, algae feed additives can be churned into the cows’ grain and soy feed. But on feedlots, cattle already belch less methane—only 11 percent of their lifetime output. ... This means that even if algae diets on feedlots worked perfectly, it wouldn’t help with the 89 percent of cows’ belches that occur earlier in their lives."

The water use claim regarding beef has been debunked, it was based on the weird accounting trick where you count rainfall on pasture as wasted water for some reason.

Also speaking of pasture, afaik the equation for cattle is completely different whether they're fed corn vs grazing on marginal land as they're supposed to.

> they're fed corn

and where does the corn grow ?

What's your point?

What?

The problem is that cattle consumes orders of magnitude more water compared to plants, on top of the fact that they also eat plants, of which they convert a small portion of into (edible) mass.

Their urine, en masse, is highly toxic to the local environment as it kills plants (high salt content, fertilizer burn) and pollutes rivers (pH, over-fertilization, algae blooming).

That water claim was based on a flawed accounting that's been repeated over and over so much without source. The debunking was posted right here on HN a few years back, don't have time to find it for now, maybe later.

Other than that, what you describe only applies to industrial farming, not grazing cattle. Cows graze pasture, they shit and piss in pasture, it's almost a closed cycle except for the added salt the herder usualy gives them.

> That water claim

What water claim? That cows consume water and excrete concentrated urine? I don't know what you're debunking without a source, but appears to be a straw man.

> industrial farming, not grazing cattle

Grazing requires orders of magnitude more land compared to cramming cows into small cages, which decreases the amount of food you can derive from this already (very) expensive food source.

I love beef, but that doesn't change the fact that it's an incredibly wasteful source of food and it ultimately unsustainable compared to plants, fish, eggs etc.

I'd like to know if you think any of the claims on this page are incorrect and if so what evidence you have against them https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

I live in a very small island where the main industry has been cattle (meat and milk production) for several decades. If the urine of the cows was toxic, the island would have been deserted a long time ago. It is as green as it has ever been, just lookup the Azores for some pictures.

It is true that lot feeds and industrialized cattle production create massive amounts of pollution but so does industrialized agriculture. The problem is on the how and not on the what (see Joel Salatin for a good example).

thats... not how toxicity is working in this sense and your anecdote doesnt disprove what he is saying. Another anecdote - I went surfing at the end of last summer and was advised not to go into the sea as there had been heavy rains up the valley which had washed refuse off the fields and into the estuary. Lots of people who ignored the advice got sick that day as it turns out the runoff is toxic.

At least I have an anecdote that produces a large percentage of the beef and dairy consumed in Portugal. I fail to see proper data from anyone else showing the contrary elsewhere.

Cheers; you're right. 'En masse' wasn't sufficient in communicating what I wanted, which was to say "in large, repeated and undiluted amounts".

> The problem is on the how and not on the what

If we could realistically supply the entire demand for beef with cows grazing on fields on the same amount of land, without raising the price directly or by subsidizing the cost, I'd be all in. This is literally impossible as industrialized cattle production is that much more efficient, no matter how revoltingly disgusting it is.

Pretty much all the beef production is done in grazing fields as it is cheaper and less work. It is only the bulk up that is done in feed lots (1-3 months before going to the abbatoir). There is even pasture finished beef production where cows stay in the fields without feed until the end.

Is there any data on that?

I meet quite a bit of animal-activist types (by association) that 'expose' parts of the meat industry by taking jobs and secretly filming (as it's often illegal to do).

Most of the extreme horrors they've recorded are in slaughterhouses, but I have vivid memories of seeing cattle confined in small cages which fecal infected infections. Perhaps that's dairy production, as it doesn't affect the outcome (as much)?

Most of the water input for beef comes from growing the crops to feed the cows.

Sure, there's rain and you can grow corn without irrigation, but the yields will never be as high as with it.

If you have evidence then please provide it. I'd be happy if you could point out any incorrect claims on this and related Our World In Data pages that cover climate and environmental impacts from beef and the meat industry more generally https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

I often wonder, how much double counting goes into these stats. Of course, dairy currently relies on fossile energy often. But how much of it is attributed elsewhere as well? Diesel, for instance, is often also attributed to big oil companies like shell. Cows are slaughtered and sold as meat at some point - is the dairy CO2 emission subtracted here? I don't think so.

Since you often wonder, I suggest you spend some time reading some relevant papers and their methodology. You won't have to guess and assume if you do that.

I'm not too surprised, in some ways Dairy is the meat industry by proxy. All dairy cattle end up in the same abattoirs.

On top of that they have one of the most miserable life we could imagine. Birthing babies and getting them taken away ASAP to give milk to a machine and getting slaughtered when you are less productive... It's hard to describe our lack of empathy to create and accept such systems.

Oh yeah... don't worry I know all the gruesome details. I have changed my ways accordingly.

This is a why I say the meat industry is more honest than the Dairy industry. The Dairy folks are all about cows in green fields in the sun - ignoring the 4-5 years of psychological and physical torture only to end the exact same way.

At least the meat industry just says - it's for meat!

One of the major issue's isn't just the calorific inefficiencies in the fodder->dairy process, but the simple act of creating pastures for animals. About 85% of deforestation world-wide is being driven by animal agriculture; of which dairy makes up a huge part of that. We could use less land to produce food if we ate less dairy, by a huge margin.

I suppose theoretically optimal diet would have to be some flavour of vegan, plus maybe some fish if available. In practice, a major reduction of meat and dairy would probably be enough to make a difference.

I find it bad that scientific results get censored, and I am also wondering if there is proof that a plant-based diet is more healthy. My suspicion is it might be for the average American, but it is based on gut feeling (pun intended).

I remember margarine (plant-based) was all the rage too and IIRC it was much less healthy than butter (animal-based).

My guess is it depends on the specific meals.

Margarine is a synthetic product, with the oil created in complex refineries then hydrogenated. You can't compare this to something like lentil stew or a salad.

If the recommendation is that eating anything you want as long as the origin can be traced back to plants, then I agree, plant based diets aren't necessarily healthier. A WFPB (whole foods plant based) diet is undeniably healthy though.

The problem with margarine is orthogonal - it's due to processing. Processing has been shown to be very unhealthy whether with plant based products like margarine, or animal based products like hot dogs.

In any case the IPCC's recommendation is about the environment, and there is no doubt that animal foods are far worse for the environment.

Those are very good points. I agree on animal foods being worse for the environment too. Cheers.

The idea that "processed food" is bad annoys me, because it's so impossibly broad. Milling, roasting, fermenting, freezing, drying, smoking, chopping, soaking, skimming, distilling, salting, curing, pickling, sieving, threshing, squeezing, and yes, hydrogenation - Anything we do to food is processing, and a lot of food is not safe to eat without processing. Veganism is one thing, but the "raw food" diet is damn near impossible to make work, so much that the alternative people who embrace every other fad like that warn against it.

It is specific forms of processing which are bad, in specific circumstances. Smoking is, sadly, bad because the substances which preserve the food are carcinogenic. Partial hydrogenation of oils is bad because half of the partially hydrogenated products will be trans fats which the body really isn't good at handling.

Many concerns are a matter of degree and involve complex fuzzy boundaries. It's difficult to find hard and fast rules when it comes to processed foods. When talking about processing, you need to do research to determine which sorts of processing are harmful and why. There is a lot of information available. This means understanding what you are putting into your body and what happens inside your body when you take in various food products. How deep you take this is also a choice. It doesn't matter what diet you choose.

There’s pretty good evidence that an unprocessed plant-based diet is the healthiest option.

This is a good place to start: https://nutritionfacts.org/

For the benefit of other readers, the closest I could find in there to answer my question was:

> Only one diet has ever been proven to reverse the progression of heart disease, our number one killer, and be effective in treating, arresting, and even reversing other deadly diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. And, that same diet—a whole food, plant-based diet—appears to be the most effective diet for healthy weight loss.

Most of the content is in video form, and meat is often dealt with more directly on older videos, which are catalogued thus: * https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/meat/page/3/ * https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/meat/page/4/

e.g. How Much Does Meat Affect Longevity? - https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-much-does-meat-affect-l... The Health Risks vs. Benefits of Meat Consumption - https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-health-risks-vs-benefit...

That is factually incorrect. Actual clinical research had shown that other diets can also be effective in reversing type-2 diabetes. That disease is primarily a matter of insulin resistance so the key point is to reduce carbohydrates. Whether the remaining nutrients come from plant or animal sources is largely irrelevant.

https://www.virtahealth.com/reversediabetes

Diets based on animal products have also been proven effective for weight loss. And the goal for most people isn't just to lose weight but rather to lose adipose tissue while retaining lean muscle; diets high in animal proteins tend to be a little more effective on that score.

https://doi.org/10.1186%2F1743-7075-4-23

The Eat Lancet report covers this from health, carbon and pollution angles:

https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/

The results are pretty much what you'd think.

Thanks. To spare a click to others. The part I found relevant to my question: Animal-based being healthier or not, independently of the environment in general.

> Current overconsumption of meat in Western diets is a significant contributor to poor health and increases a person’s risk of becoming overweight, obese or developing certain noncommunicable diseases. Projections show that a global adoption of a Western diet high in meat intake matched with global population and economic growth will drive significant health burdens and push food systems well beyond environmental limits – multiple studies make the same predictions.

> Avoiding these risks calls for a significant reduction of unhealthy food consumption – particularly poorly produced meat – in high- income countries, in addition to avoiding increasing consumption trends in middle-income countries. At the same time, it is critical that the food system ensures sufficient access to healthy levels of protein that are sustainably produced where hunger and malnutrition persist.

It seems overconsumption of meat and poorly produced meat are the health problems, according to this report (with respect to individual health, environment concerns aside). I wonder how overconsumption is defined. Will try to dig in later.

That's such a bizarre and unscientific statement. People become obese and insulin resistant primarily from excessive consumption of carbohydrates, not from meat. Most people who try a carnivore diet actually lose weight. (I am not recommending that diet, but it is a fairly effective means of weight loss.)

It is well known that the anti-meat and anti-animal-fat propaganda was funded by the sugar industry in the 1960s. Although I'm currently on a carnivore diet and finally seeing some health benefits after a long time experimenting and battling with debilitating health issues, I would not promote it either. The bottom line is that with the intense lobbying from both sides of the discourse, we've drifted really far from the original intention of nutritional science – to understand how our body processes foods and what nutrition will lead to best health outcomes. Fundamentally, I just want to do the best for my body and will gladly switch my diet at any point given enough data and consensus.

This is tough to do when certain groups are directly benefiting from you not being in an optimal health. At this point I've resorted to experimenting on myself and trusting my gut, body and instincts when it comes to food. Also, reading smaller, hopefully-independent studies looking at certain micronutrients and their utilization – it's quite interesting to look at Vitamin A vs beta-carotene, ALA to DHA and EPA conversion, anti-nutrients and many more.

A carnivore diet isn't relevant. The point is that excessive consumption of meat is a relevant part of many people's unhealthy diet, which ALSO includes excessive sugar and flour. It's not attributing the health harm solely to meat, but saying that it IS a relevant part of it.

How is it relevant? Meat consumption forms part of the energy balance, but in most cases reducing meat consumption isn't likely to make people less obese. In practice the reverse seems to happen due to differences in satiety and hormonal effects.

I ate first keto and then carniveore years ago - did put on weight actually. yes, including organs and looked for supplements when needed. Now that I am pescetarian (mostly veggies, though) and the weight slowly comes off while I feel noticeably better than before and health markers finally go into the right direction.

Just a data point with N=1.

Were these the same people who told us the glaciers would be melted and the Maldives under water by 2000?

How narcissistic do you have to be to believe the world is going to end in your little eye blink of a lifetime?

Look, the West can go carbon negative, but it makes no difference at all if China and India just use the West's carbon virtue to increase their own carbon consumption (that the West isn't using).

We really should be thinking about next generation nuclear and mitigation as first tier strategies and not attempting to remake human nature in a few generations time.

> We really should be thinking about next generation nuclear and mitigation as first tier strategies and not attempting to remake human nature in a few generations time.

It's funny, because a lot of "greens" are asking for less carbon-* or carbon neutral stuff, but are immediately against anything nuclear, even though it's the only option we have, to generate enough power, even on windless nights.

There are even comics made about this: https://i.redd.it/x1saxijbtj7a1.png

Because the "greens" of the cold war are the same people today. Totally yes that must entirely be it!

I think greens are not alone in this - our whole culture has been part of demonizing nuclear power. Non-activist people accepted avoiding nuclear as a good compromise since it was a touchy subject. The luxury of considering no externalities (i.e allowing fossil fuel emissions) enabled this.

I take your point, but this isn't a zero-sum game, as has been shown by the plummeting cost of solar energy. If enough countries move towards renewable enegy (and in the mid-term nuclear, agreed) it will become cheap enough that other will adopt it for purely economic reasons.

This is pure FUD.

> Were these the same people who told us the glaciers would be melted and the Maldives under water by 2000?

Were they? Please tell us.

> How narcissistic do you have to be to believe the world is going to end in your little eye blink of a lifetime?

Who says that? Where in the article have you read something like that?

> Look, the West can go carbon negative, but it makes no difference at all if China and India just use the West's carbon virtue to increase their own carbon consumption (that the West isn't using).

India emissions per capita are very low. China emissions per capita (7.61T) are lower than average of developed nations (US is almost two times bigger - 14.6T).

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?contextu...

The FUD is spread by climate activists so often that nobody takes them seriously anymore. Look, this [0] is the latest example - I've heard about it from my friends. They were mocking the poster child of climate change activists and her doom-and-gloom prophecies that she promptly deleted once it became clear that the permanent ice is still there, and that humanity is not, in fact, extinct. Of course now it's an "imprecise paraphrase" and not meant to be taken at face value, because even to a layman the FUD is clearly visible.

All this screaming, kicking and general attentionwhoring did nothing positive to the climate change topic. My friends are not conspiracy nuts or some low-life crazies, they're normal people with uni degrees working tech jobs and living middle-class lives. They have heard so much about their carbon footprint, about the inevitable climate catastrophe the upcoming years that is getting postponed every time, that they are just tired of that. There is no constructive solution from our elected leaders, just endless fear-mongering, finger-pointing and uncertain predictions.

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/greta-thunberg-deleted-201...

I completely agree that some climate activists are spreading FUD (for some time I was a climate denialist because of that), but it cannot be used as an argument against sensible climate policies. Here we are not even talking about policy - it is just a recommendation that was blocked by lobbying group.

Even just a recommendation cannot pass and people are defending this by bringing up some ignorant climate activists or using manipulation tactics (like in fwungy post).

Did you actually read the article you linked? I ask because it was quite informative, and doesn't support what you're saying.

I don't really have the time to argue about it with you unfortunately, but if anybody else reads the above comment: yes, you can safely ignore it like the rest of the denialist comments that come from a place of ignorance. If you'd like to know why the commenter is speaking out of ignorance, the linked article is a great place to start, or look up tipping points.

"You are wrong. I don't have time to explain how exactly you are wrong, but you are wrong. Everybody who reads this know - he is wrong! Wroooong!"

I am not denying climate change. I look out of my window on Christmas and see rain, I look at my thermometer in August and see record-high temperatures. I read the news about a catastrophic heat wave killing senior all over Europe, year after year. Yet again I have to say that climate activists, and that includes people like you, do nothing, nothing good for the movement.

Look at the article I've linked - it's rated as "mixed" (lol), since the tweet itself wasn't factual. It wasn't some nobody who tweeted that, it was the very poster child of the activist movement. If we can't trust the activists that are very public and very visible, who do we trust? Paraphrased scientists?

Look at your comment - you are so full of yourself, so righteous that you won't even step down to a level of mere mortals to explain how exactly I'm wrong. Do you think someone will read your text tantrum and become convinced that climate change is real and they need to act? Or is the purpose of this comment just to stir up emotions and label someone a "denialist"?

The populations are huge and their consumption is going up. If fossil fuels get cheaper because the West isn't buying them the East will happily consume them.

> Were these the same people who ...

No. The article reports on scientific evidence. Are you a scientist doing scientific work on the climate impact of the meat industry or a scientist studying meat industry lobbying? If no then on what evidence do you base your scepticism about what the linked article says?

According to the bar chart in the article, chocolate and coffee are also big factors. Why are these not talked about more?

I'm guessing their impact is mostly from deforestation. Does somebody know more?

Do official recommendations like this really influence people's food choices? There have been calls for plant based diets for a long time and yet meat eating has been increasing.

Well no report by itself has a big impact. It is a matter of incremental change over time. Like with anything some people are early and they've already switched to plant based eating. Others move later. Like with any commercial sector with interest misaligned with the needed climate policy there is a lot of lobbying and greenwashing going on. This piece covers that well https://newrepublic.com/article/168766/meat-industry-lobbyin...

I want to eat meat. I think it's better for me. Not only my health, but specific goals I have.

I will do what is necessary in order to do so.

This is generally how I operate. I also want to drive a car, own a house (not an apartment), have children, etcetera.

It strictly benefits me to recommend that you (as a stranger) don't do any of this. I'd rather have less competition.

That's all this stuff comes down to, to me. Convince everyone else to reduce their standard of living.

I'm just not going to eat the bugs, sorry. Try as hard as you like.

Interestingly, if you eat a diet of ONLY beef, as I do, then you will find that your health and fitness improve dramatically and that you spend dramatically less time preparing, cooking, and eating food.

Also, if you eat only beef then you completely stop farting (and the volume of your poop falls by 80%).

I've often wondered why "cow farts" are considered such a terrible climate change concern but "human farts" aren't.

Wow pork emits less than chess and farmed fish! Very interesting!

Why bother? Hardly anything the IPCC says seems to translate into policy.

> Hardly anything the IPCC says seems to translate into policy.

Following their reports multiple countries have adopted measures directly citing those reports, with targets based on those reports. E.g. to maintain warming below X C, we'll have to reduce by Y our annual CO2 emissions, so we'll ban new internal combustion engine cars sales starting 20ZZ, while also doing this and that.

Seen across the EU and the US btw.

These are the same people who fly on commercial planes to beautiful destinations to then lecture me about the food I eat and the cars I drive. I guarantee none of the people authoring the IPCC report are eating bugs or lab grown meat steaks at these fancy conferences.

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