“I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid that computation is too carbon intensive”

Iron, for one. Beans contain iron but so little of it that you’d have to consume 1.2kg to get your recommended daily intake. Similarly for a lot of other essential minerals.

Beans have a very imbalanced amino acid profile. Protein is a category, not something specific. You need enough of every amino acid. Beef already has the correct ratio of for you. Beans do not, and also have worse absorption of what amino acids they do have. So you need to eat much, much more of them to get the same nutrition you get with some lean meat, which can also often lead to weight gain due to excess carbohydrate absorption.

The only way to get a balance on a vegetable only diet involves mixing different veggies and supplements in order to try to level the ratio of amino acids and vitamins you get. It's very complicated and honestly is difficult to get right consistently even if you know what you're doing, the average person will not be able to do this right and will get sick.

If everyone is pushed onto that kind of diet most people will do it wrong, and a lot of people will get sick as is already very common in people who try veganism. I would argue you need to have significantly above average intelligence to do it right. So at the moment a healthy large population requires a lot of meat.

I didn't say "disease" i said class of diseases, there are a lot. lysine deficiency, osteoporosis, some kinds of arthritis on the amino acid end. And then there's the vitamins that beef always has, which wipes out a huge class of vitamin deficiencies... it's hard to understate how important meat is... reducing meat consumption is a very, very bad idea for public health.

In terms of health, the biggest focus should be on reducing calorie intake and increasing saturation levels. It is listed as the #1 priority of the World Health Organization, and there is an argument to be made that its even mentioned three times in their top 5 recommendations.

Eat less. Eat less fat. Eat less sugars. The remaining recommendations are to eat enough vitamins/fibers, and to eat less salt.

From an environmental standpoint we should focus on bio diversity and sustainability which sadly very few of current food cultures fulfill. Increased use of shell fish and seaweed. Increase use of bio diverse farming. Reduced use of artificial fertilizers and chemical pesticides. Reduced use of fresh water. Increased hunting of invasive species. Increased use of grazing animals in nature reserves and area needing clearing (power lines and so on). Increased use of small scale farming and food waste management. Meat definitively has a role here but not in the mono-culture way that current industry meat production do it.

Even the vegans and vegetarians I know acknowledge how hard it is to eat "clean" in a balanced way, especially out side of major urban areas.

> Essentially it amounts to "we shouldn't do anything about climate change because someone somewhere is worse than I am"

I did not read it that way.

I read it as: The entrenched political/upper classes who push policies like banning plastic straws are content to push feel-good policies when they affect the "regular" people but are unwilling to be inconvenienced themselves. Taylor Swift's 30-minute private jet ride is just a recent high-profile example.

We're all supposed to make sacrifices, right? I'm not an expert but it seems to me that in a world where things are so bad that we've needed to ban the use of plastic straws it's fair game to point out that the entrenched political/upper classes has a habit of spewing more carbon into the atmosphere in a single day than most people will their entire lifetimes, for the sake of _convenience_ (private jets). It's not like Swift was hand delivering heart and kidneys to someone who needed a transplant or anything.

If the only way for [insert person] to get to [insert event] is to hop on a private jet then maybe that person should take long look at whether or not they could attend remotely or watch the event on TV. We're all in this together, right?

> it is unfair because someone somewhere does something more polluting than using a plastic straw

It's unfair because I don't prescribe to a world view where plastic straws are a sin.

I hate that the people that hold these views are making business decisions that impact the quality of life for people who don't hold these as virtues. At least make it a choice!

I'm mildly OCD about dish cleanliness, and paper straws are an assault on hydration, to phrase it charitably.

> we shouldn't do anything about climate change

To what degree do straws actually impact climate?

More like the rich won't do anything about climate change because they can do whatever they want and the poor will be made to do pointless things that don't really impact anything. As long as it seems like 'something is being done' it'll 'feel' like something is being done. If we really gave a shit, cargo ships with massive house sized oil burning engines would be first to go and we would move to nuclear power. We would also start producing products locally instead of shipping them halfway across the globe because people have less labor laws across the pond. Instead the government and corporations make it the middle class' problem and the best part is environmentalists actually buy this horseshit wholesale. It'd be funny if it didn't make me sad.

Ah I see, thank you. One of the others was a graphic of all the jets leaving after the match, just to explain my association.

Do you mean the "Mongee" banana?

It is wrapped in a plastic bag, but the peel is actually edible.

https://www.newsweek.com/you-eat-these-newly-engineered-bana...

> Their competitors - which like the US military will be state-controlled entities - for burning the most fossil fuels aren't exactly known for their transparency. They're generally going to be in China.

China has orders of magnitude less logistics to accomplish. They only run three small overseas military sites, in contrast to the (at least) 1.000 sites the US operates.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_oversea...