Vegan diets cause far less climate pollution, study shows | Hacker News Reader

Vegan diets cause far less climate pollution, study shows

wpln.org

21 pointsmyshpa27 comments

Actual paper, open-access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w. Figures 2 and 3 are what you're after

Here's links to the figures that also should work:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w/figures/2

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00795-w/figures/3

Seems like a pretty stark difference, but even if someone doesn't want to be a vegan or vegetarian, then simply consuming less meat seems like a pretty sane course of action.

Reminds me of the very simple advice (apparently by Michael Pollan): Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That's more or less what I'm doing, getting a varied diet with lots of nutrients, but also exploring all sorts of plant options and dishes.

The previous discussion was flagged and dead. It's a paper in Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals, how does one justify flagging it?

Worth watching gamechangers

spam

Why?

Being dead causes even less climate pollution. But that's not the point of living.

How is this relevant?

What about just boring old vegetarian diets. (:

Here's a joke. How do you know if someone is a vegan? They'll tell you.

It's a step in the right direction, but the dairy industry takes a huge toll on the environment all on its own.

ok we believe you

I know it does (having grown up around the industry), but I don't think we need to go to such extremes. Lots of things have environmental tolls that don't receive anything like a tenth of this sort of absolutism.

I've heard that "joke" more times than I've ever heard vegans announce they're vegan.

How do you know someone is insecure about their diet? They'll tell you a joke about vegans.

It's not a sufficient reason to go vegan. There is no impact an individual can have that would make a different - we need to legislate and mandate that industries change their behavior to reduce climate change.

Not to mention vegan ideology is generally flawed in my experience. They tend to use a strange in-group definition of sentient that implicitly grants personhood to anything with any kind of sense organ.

So you don't vote either?

I'd argue reducing meat intake is like voting. It's impact on the environment individually is tiny. But it also impacts the market and other eaters (voters).

> So you don't vote either?

Actually, no. I'm in NYC so there's no point unless NY even begins to approach becoming purple, at least as long as the EC remains in place.

> It's impact on the environment individually is tiny. But it also impacts the market and other eaters (voters).

People are not going to go vegan though. Even if they were to consider it, it still wouldn't overall make a big difference unless industries changed.

The EC is a stupid thing indeed, but since the ticket also includes local elections it probably should matter (e.g. I don't know if he's in your district but didn't George Santos come from NY?). But assuming normal elections, would you vote?

I'm not vegan. But my spouse is. As a result, I effectively hardly eat any meat at all. This impacted friends and family and created a cascading effect. It also impacted other people as she's relatively well known in our community and quite a few people changed their eating habits as a result.

Maybe it's from where I stand, but I see a lot more vegan eateries around these parts (not an American) and a lot more enthusiasm about it. I think this will cross a chasm at some point and even a little bit helps in that regard.

> But assuming normal elections, would you vote?

Maybe. I have a pretty dim view of democracy as a form of government, so probably not.

> This impacted friends and family and created a cascading effect. It also impacted other people as she's relatively well known in our community and quite a few people changed their eating habits as a result.

In my experience, it's a fad. Plenty of people experiment but don't end up staying vegan.

> Maybe it's from where I stand, but I see a lot more vegan eateries around these parts (not an American) and a lot more enthusiasm about it. I think this will cross a chasm at some point and even a little bit helps in that regard.

I think there will be a continued interest in plant based foods and cooking, but I don't think that's the same as going vegan. Kind of like many people might try a beyond burger at Burger King while also ordering some actual chicken nuggets on the side.

> Maybe. I have a pretty dim view of democracy as a form of government, so probably not.

As a person living in a shaky democracy this is pretty triggering. Your democracy is very flawed and I'm very aware of its problems, but the alternative is so much worse.

> In my experience, it's a fad.

It's trending up. So it might be a fad but that's how changes start.

People don't need to go vegan, that's the point. Reduction and moderate change will be a tremendous impact.

> but the alternative is so much worse.

I think there are better alternatives than democracy. It's something I hope to publish something on.

It astounds me that we have so much more knowledge and modeling capacity these days, but this 'problem' of optimal form of government has not seen any progress being made - everyone just stopped at 'democracy'.

> It's trending up.

There are conflicting reports on that, so I don't think you can say that with confidence. A lot of sites also are unreliable, correlating an increase in plant based foods with growth of veganism, for example.

> Reduction and moderate change will be a tremendous impact.

It really won't. Companies are the problem. People will never have more than a minimal impact.

> Companies are the problem.

Companies sell to people. If the people reject certain types of products en masse, the company has to change its behavior or it will die.

Not all companies sell to people, some sell to other companies. Like oil companies. Or wholesale manufacturers of plastic goods.

Veganism is actually a spectrum, as one can always find some connection to animals and their suffering. And you don't need to buy into it, you can go with your own definition.

To me it sounds you have just a bunch of excuses to avoid actually doing anything.

No excuses, just my true feelings and opinions.

Veganism being a 'spectrum' seems like a pretty useless way of looking at it. Most in the vegan community at least on reddit) would not agree.

I disagree. I have one vegan friend. When we go out to eat in a group, we prioritize restaurants with good vegan options, and we often end up at a place that specializes in vegan food and the whole group ends up eating meatless meals. So just by her action, a group of four people consumes noticeably less meat over the course of a year. Is this a massive impact in and of itself? Maybe not, but it’s certainly not zero impact. And the idea that this story, played out thousands of times over across the world, has had zero impact on the corporations that grow, process, and sell meat is odd. Corporations have to sell their products to consumers; when consumer tastes change significantly, the corporations have to change their behavior as well.

Most people are not willing to pander to a vegan like the group you describe though. Vegan communities are full of stories about how hard it is to try and find something on a menu they can eat when going out with friends.

And even though the people in the group you mention eat vegan food when out with a vegan, it doesn't make them vegan.

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