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Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than being vegan, landmark study finds
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Meat production causes 25% of all GHGs in our atmosphere. Personal consumption, on this matter, is 100% the cause. No one is forcing anyone to eat meat on the staggering level North Americans do. If we as North Americans didn't demand so much cheap plastic shit to buy as part of our lifestyle, there would be less of it made, less of it shipped, fewer cargo ships, less GHG. Your beef isn't with people telling you that we consume too much, your beef is with the insurmountable prospect of convincing billions of people to cool it.
Aaaaand we're getting into the US defaultism again
This increases food insecurity. There is absolutely no way you remove a major source of food production without more people going hungry. I don't think I need to belabor this aspect further.
Not to mention, the logic of your argument also shifts the blame of fossil fuel emissions from corporation to consumer. No one is forcing us to use gasoline or plastic on the staggering level that North Americans do. If we simply cut back, then there'd be fewer emissions. For that matter in fact, this very discussion we're having is possible because of electrical power, which more than likely produced GHG as well. Should we hold the blame for this as our consumption, and let dirty coal plants get a pass?
Finally, these researchers have a major hole in their research. They haven't even looked at what emissions and resource usage we'd have if we scaled up vegan food production to replace current meat consumption. And I suspect we'd find one major health problem -- there are some amino acids we only get from meat. To prevent health deterioration, we'd need massive production of vitamin supplements that are mandatory for everyone to consume for their health. Even if we somehow manage this in a vegan friendly process, it will use an extortionate amount of energy, resources, and freshwater. Enough that I can't say definitively it would be less than meat consumption.
The difference between the calories an animal consumes vs the amount that animal provides to us is huge. If we converted the animal feed to direct food production we would not have 'food insecurity'.
https://awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/ has sources, if you actually care to learn rather than talking from your armchair.
And yes consumers absolutely should have some blame in climate change. Corporations don't pollute for fun, they do it for profit. It's way easier for us to point fingers and continue to do fuck all while the planet burns.
There is plenty looking at how it scales up and they account for nutrition
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
This is because it takes a lot of human-edible feed to produce animal products
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
Before anyone mentions something like grass-fed production let's note that grass-fed production very much doesn't scale and has enormous land use giving high pressure for deforestation as well
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
Damn an extortionate amount of energy, resources, and freshwater? Good thing all those cows and chickens don't need any of those to put them through an entire life cycle before we eat them.