Veganism is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce our environmental impact, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Veganism is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce our environmental impact, study finds

independent.co.uk

40 pointsgbenga4real52 comments

Without comment on the merits, this is how you kill public consensus on climate issues before you even start. If I were a McKinsey consultant for Shell or Exxon right now, I'd be advising them to bet everything on "climate concern is for vegans".

The only way to solve major political problems is to build consensus; not create contentious divisions that kill your own "side".

If you solve a political problem by building consensus on the wrong thing(s), then you've made the world a worse place than had you done nothing at all.

Bjorn Lomberg and others have done a good job rating strategies to improve human flourishing relative to cost. That's the kind of discussion we should be having. Instead many treat climate problems and solutions like a religion.

This is a very fair point. While it should be messaged as a major change that can be made it also has to be in the context of not the ONLY change to be made.

- "should be messaged"

Why? It's purely counterproductive. Framing a political issue as "this is a moral failing by you, personally; and you must suffer and live ascetically to improve yourself in order to" whatever is a surefire way to get utterly rejected.

> you must suffer and live ascetically

What do you think veganism is?

As I said and meant: asceticism, in service of a religious or moral principle. I respect what it is, but that *is* fundamentally what it is: people rejecting pleasurable things.

Sorry "should" was a very blunt word to use there. But if one is to project the message about reduced consumption, it shouldn't just be framed in a narrow aspect of a single action.

Also, while this is political it is also about the actions of a individuals.

The rain drop doesn't blame itself for the flood, but the flood is made of rain drops.

I was skeptical, but this is compelling, if true:

“If everyone stopped eating these foods, they found that global farmland use could be reduced by 75 per cent, an area equivalent to the size of the US, China, Australia and the EU combined.

Not only would this result in a significant drop in greenhouse gas emissions, it would also free up wild land lost to agriculture, one of the primary causes for mass wildlife extinction.”

It's very dubious to be putting our efforts advocating this as the "single biggest way", certainly it's terrible marketing if you want to really convince people.

According to the IPCC: https://ahdb.org.uk/carbon

Agriculture makes up 8.5% of global emissions - knock 75% of that off if we somehow convinced the *entire planet* to go vegan, add a bit back for the extra veg we need to grow and other unknown inefficiencies and we're talking a relatively small shift in GHG emissions compared to other areas. We need to cut 50% total, not 5%!

Yes, every little bit helps... but as I emphasised above, you need the ENTIRE PLANET to switch to veganism in the next 5-10 years and it's still not enough. The serious danger of the rhetoric put out by vegan activists in regards climate change is that people will think they've "done their bit", when in reality it's peanuts and completely disregards the biggest factors in climate change.

The single biggest way to reduce our environmental burden isn't eating more veg/less meat, it's voting for green causes - both politically and with your wallets (investments, pensions, local goods, etc). By all means go veggie on top, but please don't do just that!

How do agriculture logistics emissions get counted though? As agriculture? Or something else?

Yes, they're in the 8.5%. I think something like 4% is direct agriculture in terms of fertiliser, methane, etc. The rest is transport, energy consumption, etc.

There is a further 10-15% of land-use degradation (eg. Amazon rainforest destruction), but this is dubious to include in the calcs and has a big variance depending on which study you look at. For example: My beef comes from just up the road and is grass fed, going vegan has zero impact on that land-use degradation figure. It's a convenient luxury in a developed economy to go vegan, but good luck convincing developing nations to forgo the luxuries we've enjoyed for centuries because we screwed up the climate!

In my opinion, even if you started today it's not like the rainforests are going to be all replanted in a decade, nor are they going to grow to full rejuvenating capacity anytime in the next 50 years. People need to focus on the big things! More wind, more solar, more battery, less oil, more efficient industry, more eco-friendly concrete, reduce shipping, produce locally/consume locally, etc.

It's not true, so not compelling. 73.2% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions are produced by energy production, agriculture is a drop in the bucket. Going vegan isn't going to change how you charge your iPhone.

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

Depending on your definition of "significant" one can argue about the emission part, but the interesting part of the cited claim surly is the landuse portion.

Without access to the actual publication, it's hard to tell, but reducing grazing land almost certainly doesn't make a difference towards those goals, and I think it's pretty likely that grazing land is a large part of the land reduction.

The national forest will still be the national forest if you stop allowing ranchers in with their cows

More than depopulation?

I don't particularly like the ideology that underpins it, but I don't see how veganism is going to outclass that one in terms of environmental impact. I'm getting a familiar whiff of "results were decided ahead of time".

The line of what is an acceptable solution was arbitrarily drawn right above (below?) veganism. If our environmental issues are caused due to humans, then removing all (or many) humans would solve the issue better than veganism.

Or a more "realistic" single biggest way: No more fossil fuels. At all. That's technically a single change. I think that would have a larger environmental impact.

Bill Burr's final solution?

That one's not going to solve anything at this point either.

Honestly, just cutting back to one meal per day or one day per week would be huge. And we would eliminate a lot of unnecessary suffering for animals AND humans.

Also this preliminary finding:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36993403/

Do people really eat meat three meals a day on average in the United States?

That is wild for someone who's from elsewhere.

I don't. I fast most of the day and eat a rather large meal around 1600 that has most of the nutrients I need. I also take vitamins to supplement. My partner is vegan and needs to eat much more frequently than I do.

I have a friend who is a body builder who eats several times a day (more than three) and with specific proportions. I think there's a vast array of experiences in the US with respect to nutrition.

I don't know how people eat so much, but, a sample american advertised meal:

Bacon/eggs/whatever for breakfast

A ham sandwich for lunch

Leftover roast beef for dinner

Yes. Generally speaking, I have some amount of meat with every meal.

In European. Yes.

One of the best decisions I ever made. It wasn't any one reason that convinced me but several. Like a braid. Not an easy decision nor without consequences, but hard to imagine life before or that it could be any other way. For me, it's part of the life examined. If you're curious at all, try it out. Don't worry about purity or get stuck in binary thinking. Just listen to your intuition.

>Just listen to your intuition.

My intuition tells me that humans evolved as omnivores, and eating a vegan diet causes health problems because of nutrient deficiency. Unless you heavily supplement, which sort of defeats the purpose of "reducing your carbon footprint by not eating meat".

While we are omnivores, I think the role people place on meat is greatly over stated. We where primarily plant eaters with the occasional meat as it was available. Yes there always exceptions to this rule, especially in fishing societies. Even as little as 100 years ago you can see just how little meat was in most peoples diets, it was there but not very often.

As for the nutrients, the big one is the B vitamins which is funnily enough a result of us cleaning the food system too much! Most vegetables used to still have a bit of soil left on them and that was were the B vitamins come from, now everything is so clean we have stripped away that.

My solution is Nooch and a bit more Vegemite than usual. ;) have no issues so far.

It varies by location -- eg. the Inuit weren't eating much plants most of the time

Animals in the animal agriculture space are fed supplements (commonly B12, and some others too). In many places they may also be fed antibiotics to boost growth. So the carbon footprint of supplements is higher there because of efficiency and losses in the chain.

I've been doing every-other-day-vegan for over a year. It was a good compromise for me, as a once meat obsessed person. It's actually a great system, I never eat the same thing two days in a row!

More than getting rid of your car and walking & biking & taking transit? I highly doubt it.

The average American eats 57 pounds of beef and 51 pounds of pork. A single hog yields about 150 pounds of pork.

The average person isn't even eating one pig per year.

No way all the space your car takes up, all the resources that go into it, all the infrastructure that needs maintained, and all the oil you're burning is worse for the environment than 2/3rds of one pig...

It is also all the inputs for agriculture that goes into that pig. The plants > pig > food system is a wildly inefficient way to distribute calories.

But also, if you can, try to not use the car as much or just get rid of it altogether. ;)

This was something I kind of figured out years ago. If you eat what the food eats then you can greatly reduce the needs and complexity of the food system. That is a big win right there. I see the arguments against this position and always just seems like post-hoc rationalization. It is trying to fit cherry picked facts to fit their lifestyles rather than letting the facts being something to consider in their lifestyle. I mean, I get it, but don't try to BS people with this stuff just to justify how you live. If you are going to eat meat and dairy and you just don't care about the environmental factors of ethics - just say that! Don't try to be holier than thou via manipulated stats.

As an side, about the only complex food stuff I use nowadays is Nooch but that just because it is basically just a savory bomb that makes all my cooking taste so much better!

I can use chicken droppings as fertilizer. I am unwilling to do that with my own waste. I get an incredibly useful by product by including them in my food system.

That is fair. The idea of Humanure is pretty cool but if done wrong can be very nasty. Done right, it can close the system pretty tightly.

Perhaps it's more realistic to focus on more realistic solutions like lab-grown meat[1].

1. I know it has its issues, but it seems more realistic than "make everyone vegan".

Disclaimer: Now omnivore, was vegan for 10 years.

I have looked into lab grown meat and have come away very skeptical that we will ever get there. It isn't impossible but there is a LONG way to go. Until we can reproduce an immune system in a vat, it is always going to be to cost prohibitive to do.

That said, the stuff we have today, personally, is already good enough. Yeah I get the whole emotional attachment to meat but it also isn't as sticky a drive as some may think.

Fasting is as good, it seems.

One thing that I'm skeptic on these articles is the numbers on how plants are grown is not clear. You don't have division between corn or soy vs hydroponic. Is quite concerning that the affirmation of changing diets and consumer behavior will be the only thing.

There is impact on growing plants with lack of healthier pollination, or simply not destroying the ground to avoid a huge amount of CO2 to the air, or even further assuming there is a zero impact of fertilizer on Greenhouse gases in general.

I think the general idea is that instead of grow plants > Feed animals > feed People. It should be grow plants > Feed People.

It doesn't make modern agricultural practices any better but does reduce their scale dramatically.

The repugnant conclusion:

  “For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living”

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

lacto-ovo vegetarianism .. no need for extremes. So many foods in modern times have added vitamins (check the label). A non-meat diet these days is not at all the same as it was, long ago

Or at least just tell the truth about fad paleo diets that eat 20 meals of meat per week

More like 13. Even two meals a day feels like a lot on meat; for me the second meal is often almost a snack. As a raw vegan I grazed all day long, making it hard to count meals.

Only one problem with this: How do you convert 8 billion people to become vegans. There seems as of yet no practical/workable solution solution for this.

Nonsense. In fact „Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says“

https://amp.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

Forcing these companies to reduce their emissions would do much more for our planet.

If everyone is so determined, perhaps we can start by halting all meat exports and sanctions on countries that import meat.

Nobody dare talk about the oil companies.

Why don't we switch to hemp instead of plastic to begin with?

I think paper straws are a more effective way to save the planet.

Starving most of the population on the way to the bright future. The research team reinvented communism and USSR.

I'm pretty sure not having kids would have a far larger impact.

The environmental impact of having children is mostly attributed to the children, though. You don’t reduce your own impact much by not having children, by that measure. You do reduce overall impact in the short term, naturally.

A child does not decide to be born, the parents do that (with outside pressure from society as a whole, either for or against depending).

A couple that has 10 children obviously has a enormously higher environmental impact than a couple that has two. Which brings to my original point: It doesn't matter if the whole world goes vegan if the population raises to compensate for the "vegan savings", thus population control is by far more important than veganism.

You can have X number carnivores live in world responsibly or Y > X number of vegans, but if you don't limit the population of either to the responsible carrying capacity of the world, you haven't really achieved anything.

Also, vegetarians capture the majority of the ecological benefits of the lower environmental impact of nutritional lifestyles and framing it as vegan or not is probably not helpful.

No argument here. I was only stating how attribution occurs when reading studies.

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