And the headline suggests this applies to biodiversity damage too.
Probably applies for health benefits too.
This being a forum of mostly tech workers, many of us can afford to choose more sustainable animal products and support agriculture that promotes biodiversity and carbon sequestration too. If you don't want to give animal products up, then look for sources that engage in regenerative agriculture practices. They tend to be the most humane ways to raise animals as well.
In the end, demand for meat, eggs, and dairy is never going to disappear. Maybe someday lab grown alternatives can be molecularly and structurally equivalent. But until then the most effective change we can make collectively is to change government incentives to farmers so they choose better practices.
Your primary point still stands -- eating tofu likely has a lower ecological impact than eating beef, but the trade-off isn't obvious, and second order effects can be significant.
If you stop grazing cattle on land, the owner of that land is going to find another use for the land to profit from it. Some of those uses are going to be better for bio-diversity, some are going to be worse. It's highly unlikely to become parkland.
So will going vegan reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase bio-diversity? Probably, but not certainly. This uncertainty shouldn't dissuade people from acting on "probably" though.
According to a Swedish study publish a few years ago (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541), going vegan is mid-tier in combating global warming. Who you buy your electric from has a larger impact on the environment than going Vegan, as does if/what car you own and naturally what kind of trips and vacations you do. A single trip with an airplane can have a bigger impact on global warming than all the meat they eat through their whole life.
You asked for evidence that a plant-based diet is one of the most effective ways. You found it.
Also I already don't own a car at all and I haven't taken a plane in a little over a decade.
The study gives everyone a 2.1T emission budget per year in order to achieve the 2 °C climate target. A single trip by plane can produce more than that, as can buying the wrong kind of energy. A EV car alone produce around 1T per year. A meat-based diet can coexist within that budget, same as the EV car. The average win for switching your utility purchase to a emission free source is 1.6T, while switching to a vegan diet is 0.8T. That illustrate the effectiveness between different kind of strategies to stay within that 2.1T emission budget.
A plant-based diet is one of their high-impact lifestyle choices.
The problem is systemic and blaming other people for their lifestyle choices is neither effective nor helpful and just leads to further division. It's exactly this sort of division that helps fossil companies to destroy the planet and keep making money.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-warming-by-gas-and...
https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
More than 70% of CO2 from energy, less than 6% from ALL livestock.
If your arguments aren't believable, I'm buying extra steak this evening.
If we care about deforestation then we definitive should also not use ethanol as a replacement fuel, since ethanol uses the exact same farming and plants as the one used for feeds. Animal feed and bio fuel farming are usually combined. The other main source of bio fuel is from the lumber industry.
I do want to mention that you do also have to look out to get enough of : Omega 3, Calcium, Iodine, Iron, Selenium, Protein.
Takes a bit of work at the start to adapt but it's very doable, and it's not like Omnivores don't have comparable deficiencies from not eating enough plants and fruit. Not to mention other problems that come with eating animal products...
I only supplement with Omega 3, Vitamin D, B12, Iodine (although sometimes I go for wakame). Have been on a plant-based diet for around 4 years now, feeling healthy.
Vegans generally have broad deficiencies in key macro and micro nutrients.
EPA and DHA, long chain essential omega-3s. You need to eat some fatty fish for this. Algae oil is not the same.
You don't get to enjoy the marrow the collagen the joints full of glucosamine and chondroitin but you can buy supplements for all that.
Are supplements as good as getting it from a healthy food source? Absolutely not.
I think you can play God with your body and see how that fucking around will guarantee you're going to find out.
Algae oil is the source of fish oil. Eat want you want, but don't be mad some fellows fetch their nutrients from the raw source instead of multi-staged passage within various other animals.
> [EPA and DHA] are originally synthesized by microalgae at the base of the marine food chain, not by the fish. As microalgae move up the food chain, fish acquire the omega-3s and accumulate them in their tissues [note from me: along nasty substances]
https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Omega3FattyAcids-HealthPro...
You do realize those soybean plantations are not for human consumption, right? And that that's what is factored into the quoted loss of biodiversity?
There are also environmentally beneficial meats. So much so that when rewilding we sometimes need to add the same animals back (as is happening in Scotland - rewilders are breeding cattle that look like wild ones to make it "natural"). In the UK you can buy venison from wild animals that need to be culled to to preserve the environment.
Fake meat is just tofu with preparation.
They eat fake fairy instead.
> Fake meat is just tofu with preparation.
Its made from a variety of things, and the the health and environmental effects will vary a lot.
I often see these vegan meat substitute products as an on-ramp and people who are vegan for longer tend to use other things in their staple dishes.
> Based on a comparative assessment of the current Beyond Burger production system with the 2017 beef LCA by Thoma et al, the Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less energy, has >99% less impact on water scarcity and 93% less impact on land use than a ¼ pound of U.S. beef.
https://css.umich.edu/publications/research-publications/bey...
And if you're not willing to do your part, that just means the rest of us have to pull double duty.