[chunkyslink]

It's old news but

Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...

If we all did it today we would make a huge difference to a collpasing system.

https://josephpoore.com/Science%20360%206392%20987%20-%20Acc...

[jwr]

Yeah, but… We won't all do it today.

And this is really just blame-shifting and conscience-cleaning: we'll kind-of try to reduce our impact on Earth, feel better about ourselves, but the total impact will be minimal.

Also, if you look closely at meat production, by far the biggest problem is methane, and that's a problem that's been pretty much solved (seaweeds added to diet), except there is no incentive to implement the solution on an industrial scale. Instead of avoiding meat, we should make sure that the solution is actually used.

I believe the first step towards actually dealing with the problem is putting a significant price on carbon emissions (CO2 and CH4) and sticking to it worldwide. The current attempts, unfortunately, are half-assed. It should be really expensive to emit CO2, so expensive that everybody would immediately start looking for mitigations. Unfortunately, I also believe that humanity is too stupid and disorganized to do it, what with the local politicians pulling this and that way.

Personally, apart from trying not to do stupid things myself (e.g. avoid buying an SUV, ride an E-bike around the city, etc), there isn't much I can do. If I were young, I would look to join one of the companies trying to implement carbon capture, because that's the only thing that can save us.

[tchvil]

An animal hate about 5 times, if I remember well, the quantity of food you will get by eating its meat.

Add then the energy to grow it and its food, shelter, kill, transport, and cool the meat to preserve it. Add then quantities of single use plastic for some of these steps.

I eat less meat than before more because of this than CH4 emissions.

[Isinlor]

You should read about "cap and trade system" implemented by European Union. The idea is to cap emissions according to the Paris Climate agreement and auction resulting remaining emissions.

https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emissions_Tradi...

[gdubs]

This cultural meme of the past several years that people shouldn’t make what changes they can because no one else will change is pretty awful. There’s a good argument to be made that by building a critical mass among some percentage of the population, we can actually lead to a change.

And methane is the one solvable problem with meat production. Far worse is the land use change. We’ve destroyed natural forests to grow soy beans that go primarily to feeding animals. Crops grown with a fertilizer heavy, petrochemical driven process. This food is shipped all over the planet. Even if we switched entirely to regenerative pastures, we would come up short — unless we magically solve carbon capture engineering, natural forests remain our only serious method for re-sequestering carbon and slowly undoing the damage we’ve done, for future generations.

[brandmeyer]

I hear this meme all the time, and its absolute garbage.

The entire agriculture sector of the US economy produced 8.6% of US carbon emissions in 2016. About half of that is from fertilizer (soil management). Even if you impute the entire carbon footprint of us ag to beef production, combustion for transport beats it by 3.5x. Combustion for electricity also exceeds it by 3.5x.

Meat is a tiny slice of your CO2 footprint.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2018-01/documents/20...

[hypertele-Xii]

Reminder that the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed, in Brazil, as we speak, to grow more beef. Let that sink in.

[uxcolumbo]

Meme?

That research was done by Oxford University over a 5 year period.

It's not a meme - it's scientific research.

But I get it, it's easier to label it a meme, so we can continue our destructive lifestyle.

And it's not just about GHG, it's also about biodiversity and habitat loss caused by the large scale animal agriculture industry.

But hey, burgers first, right?

And screw future humans having to live on a more hostile planet.

[gdubs]

The EPA graphs on Agriculture emissions are misleading. They don’t include things like the petrochemical production that goes primarily to creating fertilizer, the transportation costs that are baked into the global food production system, and they don’t adequately account for land use change related to agriculture. On land use alone, if we ignore the fact that natural forests have been destroyed for mono crop animal feed production, we’re missing a huge carbon sink. That land wasn’t always farm land.

[fallingfrog]

I echo this- went vegan last year. It’s not as scary as you think. There are lots of sources of good vegetable protein (tofu, peas, beans) and you can have one of those impossible burgers if you’re craving meat on a particular day.

[bwindels]

or if you're not up for going cold turkey, just drastically reduce your intake. If you eat meat only once a week rather than every day, this already reduces your footprint massively.

[uxcolumbo]

Thanks for making the effort.

Why folks are down voting your post, especially here on HN - a group apparently made up of rational and logical thinking folks - beats me.

Feeding the world with animal meat is not sustainable, it requires more energy and resources.

I guess it's called meat addiction for a reason.

[joelbluminator]

Jeez people downvoting this comment maybe we deserve to all collapse