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Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It
(sentientmedia.org)
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Ok I'll humour you: what are vegans wrong about?
Land usage?
water usage?
Fertiliser usage?
That animal farms are hubs of disease outbreaks?
Thermodynamics?
Where the Amazon is going?
That killing/branding/doing surgery/forced impregnation etc when you don't have to is wrong?
My one rule on this topic is never getting into a gishgallop. Vegan advocates love to play the roulette of swapping topics every time they lose ground on one, until they manage to win the argument having lost every piece of it by just tiring the other side out. You pick one of those topics, and I will field that topic only with you. It might surprise you, I will agree with you on some of them (like saving the Amazon).
But if you make me choose, I will choose land use because it's a slam-dunk. 2/3 of agriculture uses marginal land that cannot (and I believe should not) be made arable. If resources were spent changing that instead of vegans fighting with farmers, that number could approach 100%. There's important asterisks about that (both crops and livestock become more environmentally friendly if done close to each other due to their symbiotic relationship) that need to be kept up. But reducing livestock population directly WRT marginal land is wasteful.
If you want to discuss this you're going to have to get more specific. What agriculture, where in the world, are feedlots used etc You're obviously excluding aquaculture, and non grazing animals like pigs, I suspect you're also excluding egg production since that is almost monolithically cage farming.
Like you can't really say "oh these pigs are on non arable land" if that merely refers to their physical location and not where their food is grown.
So could you please drill down a bit? what specifically are you referencing?
Which part of this? Marginal land? That's a very specific topic. Why should we bring in 100 different variables unless you can show those variables matter to marginal land.
Or are you sayign there's some prima facie point I'm missing where "nothing but wild animals on marginal land" will produce more sustainable food than "cattle on marginal land"?
Or are you just trying to get me to provide enough information to overspecialize my rebuttal so that your side need only say "ok, everything but that"?
Relax I want to talk this out.
I just need to know where you're pulling that from and how it was calculated. Otherwise we're just going "tis!" "tisn't!" till one of us gets bored.
Like are you referring to cattle farming in Botswana? global stats? all animal ag including fishing in Japan?
I can't discuss a magic number, I have to know how it was derived and under what assumptions. Then we can examine the assumptions and methods of derivation and determine whether or not we agree it to be true and why or why not.
My argument on marginal land is prima facie so far. I picked it because it seems obviously true on the surface, so I can let you provide your points to try to blow it up. I'm referring to the land use problem, which is the often-cited vegan argument that livestock land could be instead used as forests or croplands to sequester carbon.
If you want to contest the 2/3 marginal land number, I'll cite a few references, but it seems an odd number to consider "magic"
A magic number is just slang for a number which has no obvious reason for its value.
I literally can't discuss this because I have no idea what it's saying. It seems obviously false to me when we factor in the land used for their food production. In the heaviest meat eating/producing countries only a minority of calories produced are from pastured animals. Most cattle are from factory farms involving feed lots, pigs/chickens/fish are fed crops grown on arable land.
Like ~75% of the world's soy is grown for animal feed https://ourworldindata.org/soy and soy is a massive crop so it's hard to imagine where all this saved land comes from. What are you comparing against?
Which number is a magic number to you? I thought I was clear in asking that question.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Cattle and most livestock can graze on marginal land. What land would be used for food production? Here's the land-use breakdown.
That's not an accurate statement to the reference. 75% of soy crop is fed to animals. That's a very different reality. It still jives with the 86% of feed that is human inedible. How? Because a high percent of the soybean crop is inedible to humans, and there's been a huge influx (your link agrees) in demand for soy products in general. That soy waste a cheap option for feed. The alternative is burning..... but we cannot continue down this line without dropping the land use topic. 100% of the marginal use livestock diet COULD come from the marginal land. If we didn't need to get rid of this other stuff anyway.
I feel like you're doing the thing you premptively accused me of wanting to do.
You've put forward an arbitrary unsourced number asserting that 2/3 of the land used for animal agriculture is otherwise useless for food production, with the implication that we would need to use more high quality land to meet human food needs. Thus losing out on any benefits we might get from freeing up this marginal land.
That number is undiscussable until you can actually demonstrate to me how you're arriving at it. We can't have a discussion if you're asking me to work out the specifics of your claim and then disprove them, you have to actually make a specific claim.
Getting into the weeds on the details of soy and hashing over the whole by/co product and economics of various crops with and without animal ag is pointless until we know what it is you're actually claiming.
So please, make that claim. If it is trivial to prove that animal ag uses less land than plant agriculture then do so.
I disagree. You're bringing up those same other issues "in the context of land use" and I'm trying to respond as best I can while sticking to land use.
Are you saying you contest the 2/3 number straight out? Because your previous reply seemed to be trying to gather ammo to object to it with supplemental data.
I actually didn't make that implication. As "it's ok to keep eating meat" is the defacto winner, I'm simply pointing out that anti-meat advocacy has not resolved the marginal land issue with their land use objections.
Alright. So is your position that there is no such thing as marginal use land, or that there exist no cows on it? If we "undiscuss" that number for a moment, are you willing to concede the only point I made - that livestock on marginal use land is perfectly fine from an environmental point of view?
My claim is that the vegan argument on marginal land hasn't defended their claim. I have argued that claim, and you're harping on a number you both believe enough to try to argue around and disbelieve enough to pretend it's impossible to discuss marginal land use without me somehow proving the number is exactly correct.
Does the 2/3 number matter to you, or doesn't it? Do you believe it, or don't you? If the former, maybe we can have a discussion on exactly how we can determine how much livestock is on marginal land. If the latter, perhaps we can focus on whether livestock on marginal land is horrible for the environment or not.
I really didn't. You made the claim that soy represents secondary land use, one I took seriously enough to reply while pointing out how the reply can lead to tangents, so we can stick to the argument. ANOTHER person, in response to me (and maybe you) provided far more tangential, but effective, an argument against you, but I am not that person.
Which claim are you asking me to make now? Can we finish the claim "vegans haven't proven that livestock on marginal land is terrible for the environment" first?
I think the whole issue is that this is more complex than any discrete set of metrics because so many industries are interconnected. in a world without any animal agriculture, how much corn and soy would we raise? it is just unknowable.
I'm out doing grocery shopping so replies are flakey. I want to avoid confusion between inexact and unknowable.
We can establish the difference between plausible and implausible thing, and rule out the impossible.
We know that historically and contemporarily crops are favoured over animal ag (with the exception of a few things like chickens widely, and sometimes cows/goats/or camels in particular niches) by subsistence farmers and poor urban workers. That meat is expensive, and only recent developments (and subsidies) have really changed that in the global north/west/rich mc exploity whitey land whatever you want to call it.
So while it's not impossible that modern developments have somehow dramatically changed things in terms of efficiency, or that poor people are idiots and don't know what to grow to survive (highly unlikely, subsistence farming kills the idle or wrong), or that in some weird niche in Shenzhen farming the Peruvian fluffy marmoset is particularly efficient: there's probably some sensible conclusions we can draw about what an optimally land efficient agriculture could and could not look like and it seems unlikely to be animal ag centric or even particularly heavy.
>75% of soy crop is fed to animals.
85% of the global soy crop is pressed for oil. the vast majority of soy fed to livestock is a byproduct of that process
Thank you :)
I always like fact backup in response to zealous vegan nonsense. I wonder if any of them will notice/read since you replied to me. I thikn they're tunnel-vision on me at this point.
Though, you might or might not have realized that in your reply to me, you quoted things I had previously quoted from another person. You're on my side (and I'm cool with that).
... I replied to the wrong person. oh well. anyone reading should be able to figure out what's happening.
I think you overestimate many of the people fighting on the vegan side of arguments these days ;)
And I mean that only half tongue-in-cheek. Too often, people who should be smart enough to know better put on blinders because "I love animals and don't want you eating them" mashes up with "what's actually good or bad for the environment and climate"
We absolutely should be making improvements to farming to continue to scale. Unlimited amounts of chicken or pork are indefinitely sustainable at the low-low price of perhaps making animal treatment vs climate decisions that might be difficult for some. I swear they hold on to the whole vegan thing because sometimes the most climate-friendly choice is a little less humane-seeming to some people.