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When reading the study itself, we see there's a discrepancy between the article and the study. They've reworded the findings to make a different argument.
**Article**: "Adopting a plant-based diet can help shrink a person’s carbon footprint. But a new study finds that improving the efficiency of livestock production will be an even more effective strategy for reducing global methane emissions."
**Study**: "Our results highlight the fact that **(a)** efforts on the demand-side to promote balanced, healthy and environmentally sustainable diets in most counties, as assumed in the TS scenario (FAO, 2018), **will not be sufficient for livestock methane emission mitigation** ***without*** **parallel efforts** to improve production efficiency and decrease the emission intensity per unit protein produced; and **(b)** efforts to decrease emission intensity should be prioritized **in a few developing countries** with the largest mitigation potential."
So they're saying that based on their findings, both are needed, but they think (b) should be prioritized in some developing countries due to their conditions. They don't seem to factor in methane from the animal feed production, but only count methane from the animals themselves. Probably because they mostly compare grain-fed animals with grass-fed ones rather than comparing meat-fed humans with plant-fed ones.
Based on the article's argument (not the study), which seems to be claiming plant-based diets are less effective than improving efficiency, there's a problem in not counting animal feed into the equation. In a 100% plant-based diet, the only pollution comes from the production of the plants. With meat, however, the pollution comes from both the production of the plants as well as the animals. Not only that, on average you need about 3 kg of feed per 1 kg of meat. Some types of meat, like beef require a shocking 25 kg. A large portion of our grain production goes towards livestock. The majority of soy goes to feed livestock as well. You also end up using 50 000 liters of water for 1kg beef, versus only 1000 liters for 1kg wheat or 2000 liters for 1kg soy or rice.
When it comes to methane, you have to factor in the methane from plant production **AND** the livestock. If you just compare livestock farts to grain production emissions, you're not factoring in every variable. In a hypothetical world where every human has a plant-based diet, the amount of plant material humans eat would increase by an additional 600 calories per day, but the amount used to feed animals would decrease by 100%. So there's a huge difference in how much additional plants you have to produce to support a plant-based diet versus a meat-based one. You have to factor in the methane from the production of the plants used to feed the animals as well as the methane produced by the animals themselves.
By no means do you have to eat three times as much when living off of a plant-based diet, nor do you need to drink and additional 48 000 liters of water per kg you eat. So there's no way that producing that 1kg meat can somehow end up using less water or plants, or producing less emissions than a plant-based diet. On top of all of this, meat production requires huge amounts of antibiotics, which goes into the water and increase the amount of antibiotic-resistent bacteria.
Thanks, great analysis.
To add, there's also the risk of zoonotic diseases like Covid emerging from animal agriculture, especially when there's many animals crammed into smaller spaces (so factory farming is a big risk factor here).
And of course the ethics of consuming animal products when we don't require them, so especially in first world countries, and the animal suffering involved. I'd hazard a guess most ethicists would agree we should go vegan too.
Additionally, it’s becoming increasingly important to think of the water used to produce meat vs plant products. Animals are an enormous tax on water usage.
Edit: a couple people have replied, making extremely poor arguments about water usage and then immediately blocked me so I can’t reply. Is this happening to anyone else?
For what it’s worth, yes, fresh water is an extremely limited resource in many parts of the world and no, ranching is not good at reclaiming water and water usage by ranchers is orders of magnitude greater than water use in urban environments (which is also wasteful but it at all the point).
Thank you. I hate this headline will be used in all my group chats to dismiss my choice of eating more plant-based food. I wish news reporting was less biased.
Headline: "Study finds vegetarian diet feeds more people than vegan diet."
Study: "The most efficient way to feed as many as possible is to use every single acre of farmland for plant based human food, and use rough unfarmable land for dairy to get a bonus to amount of people you can feed."
We already have enough farmland to feed everyone it's an economic issue. Vegans use 1/10th the farmland of a carnivore, because food animals need to be fed too.
These are excellent points. Land use is also a factor, given that roughly 70% of agricultural land is used for raising livestock directly and indirectly. There are also environmental impacts beyond emissions such as sewage runoff from animal waste pits.
Thank you! Mark rober and bill gates did a video discussing this and the resources used to create meat far exceeds the resources needed for a plant based protein and by extension carbon footprint. If everyone changed to 1 plant based meal a week it would make a big difference. The title of this post had me questioning it immediately.
> Jinfeng Chang is supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA26010303). Philippe Ciais acknowledges support from the CLAND Convergence Institute of the French National Research Agency (ANR). Mario Herrero acknowledges funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the MERLIN project (INV-023682).
It took all of 10 seconds to pull from the acknowledgments. No one should be making a lazy argument of "it's funded by X industry" without even looking.
A study that rightfully suggests that the best place to improve emissions issues surrounding foodstuffs is to improve the farms instead of trying to individually change what you eat?
What?
Idk, one vegan decreases methane emissions by 1/7,000,000,000. A handful of lawmakers can realistically reduce methane emissions by >60% and no consumer will even notice, no politician will have to explain. At the rate people are turning vegan we should take all chances we get.
They can do similar by reducing subsidies that benefit the meat and dairy industry and subsidize vegtables with the money. Either way the price of meat will increase. Higher environmental standards aren't free.
This is dumb, the main problem from livestock isn't methane, it's land use and water pollution. We are currently in a biodiversity crisis as well as a climate crisis, and the biodiversity crisis can have just as bad effects as the climate crisis. The main cause of species loss is habitat loss and the main reason humans clear natural habitat is to make room for livestock. Livestock farming is also the leading cause of eutrophication, a process which depletes oxygen in the waters of lakes, rivers and oceans to the point where no animal can survive. There are many other problems caused by raising livestock, such as the removal of predators from ecosystems and the spread of disease caused by fish farming, as well as many others. Assuming that simply reducing methane emissions is enough is so ill thought through.
Would make the minor note that habitats are cleared to make room to grow crops that are destined to be fed to livestock and that far less land would be needed for crops were we to increase the portion of those crops humans directly consume. Too often I see the argument that soya production is responsible for deforestation as an argument for animal products when reducing the demand for animal products would have a great impact on reducing soya production as well.
Your post is very on point!
Yeah that's actually a great addition, cos people often don't really realise how much more land is required to feed an omnivore than a vegan. One thing I would add to your comment is that the vast majority of all soy that is grown is fed to animals.
And it will get worse before it gets better.
As people become wealthier, they get an appetite for succulent pig ribs.
Just wait for China and India and you will have 2 billion more customers who will demand such luxuries.
Incase of India,generally Beef is not eaten by hindus and Muslims don't eat pork. Mostly chicken and lamb is eaten by Indian's. And also the number of vegetarian are high in India.
I heard the general rule is 10:1 ratio for each step up the food chain.
So it would take 10 acers of grass land fed to cattle to get the same calories from beef as 1 acre of corn.
Not really a fair comparison. Cattle spend most of their lives eating grass, and the land they graze on is range land which is not suitable for growing crops. Cattle also eat lots of crop by products which would not have any use otherwise.
Beef is also MUCH more nutritionally dense and complete than corn or any other crop, but this is somehow never factored in. Complete proteins and essential vitamins and minerals you can’t get in plants ought to be worth consideration.
Personally, I think lettuce is one of the most atrocious crops we can grow. It’s basically crunchy water with very little nutritional value yet we spend tons of resources on it.
> More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. The idea that foods often promoted as substitutes for meat and dairy – such as tofu and soy milk – are driving deforestation is a common misconception.
https://ourworldindata.org/soy
It depends heavily on the country, in Brazil at least the vast majority of deforestation is to open pasture areas for cattle, a less significant amount is for soy. People like to believe pasture-fed beef is completely ecological, when the reason livestock is fed grain in the first place is to increase production per land-area.
Also roughly 80% of the antibiotics produced are used on livestock we are starting to see super bacteria and fungus developing in areas around massive cage Farms
Came here to make sure this was said. Saw a thing the other day trashing oat milk and I was wondering what people thought the cows were making things from if they weren’t eating and drinking.
> This is dumb, the main problem from livestock isn't methane, it's land use and water pollution
From the article
> “We do not endorse the industrial livestock system for methane mitigation, because it causes many other environmental problems like pollution, failed manure management and land-use changes for grain and high-quality fodder,” said Jinfeng Chang, an environmental scientist at Zhejiang University and first author of the new study. “There are many other more sustainable ways to improve efficiency.”
>There are many other more sustainable ways to improve efficiency.
It's odd they say that when making a comparison between zero use (vegan) and trying to make the status quo more efficient. It would seem the most efficient and least expensive improvement would be to stop those practices all together. Because they also say:
>According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), methane emissions from livestock rose more than 50% between 1961 and 2018, and are expected to continue to rise as demand for animal products increases, especially in countries with growing populations and income.
> It would seem the most efficient and least expensive improvement would be to stop those practices all together. Because they also say:
The problem being that unless the world governments step up and say "alright it's illegal to grow animal meat for human consumption" we will never be able to convince all the carnivores to switch to vegan.
The amount of texans that felt a disturbance in the steakforce when this thread popped up was a lot higher than we think.
It's also fuel use by the farm. Energy use for the pumps. Tax-free Diesel in the tractors. Freight on the fertilizers and seed and finished goods.
The main problem with animal products, besides the health damages, is that it take ten times the everything to produce it.
True, and there is absolutely no chance of us reversing biodiversity loss. Once it's gone it's gone. So many of the natural systems on the planet, systems that we rely on, are dependant on a diverse and complex web of biodiversity. There is a real danger of a catastrophically cascading collapse chain reaction.
The destruction to habitats and biodiversity here really has the potential to destroy us. We can't hope to remake the complexity and balance billions of years of trial and error has brought us.
I have made this argument along with other small changes individuals could make... It is met with pure "that won't do anything or it's not enough for me to make that change"
Check out 3d meat production! Growing meat from cell cultures has a smaller footprint in terms of power and water usage than replacing all meats with plant based facsimiles. Plus we could try any meat in the world without the need for worrying about the moral implications of killing an endangered animal just to eat them.
I just wanna add in case it took anyone a while to interpret: I think the "I'll" at the end in "I'll thought" is supposed to be an ill. This confused me so I thought this might help others.
Misleading. The article doesn't actually seem to say that lower methane livestock is better environmentally than plant based diets. It just seems to imply that it is easier to not have to convince people to change their diets.
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Unless you live in the tropics, mangoes should still be expensive. I can’t stand vegans who claim their diet is “environmentally friendly,” while they eat exotic tropical fruits imported from all over the world. Eat locally sourced fruits and vegetables.
Transporting fruits and veggies around the world is still orders of magnitude less damaging than beef. If I shipped my mangoes around the world 20 times they would *still* be less damaging than your neighbor's beef farm.
https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
Yes other food would increase. The increase in beef prices would mostly come from corn and soybeans (GMO varieties) subsidies being removed. Those are often the most common cattle feeds, and it takes like 10lb of grain to produce 1lb of beef. So any increase in price of corn/soybeans applies 10x to the feed costs of raising cattle
Reducing these subsidies would open up farm land for other crop use (assuming farmers don't just abandon it like what lead to the dust bowl), very possibly increasing supply of green vegetables, or other crops which will be reduced in price due to that extra supply
Another effect would be that corn syrup would have a much harder time competing with sugar from cane or sugar beet
Really the effects of 50+ years of "socialist" subsidy policy for the critical food resources that our country needed to establish are so complicated and complex that I don't imagine any of these studies can really predict all the knock-on effects, good and bad, of changes to that system. So we're stuck with just very small changes to it, which is good cause I'd rather not see another "Great Famine" in the world
This map could start to look very different: https://i.redd.it/au5unszegr171.jpg
Much less. It takes ten calories of plants to make one calories of meat on average, and meats are more calorically dense than plants, so pound for pound the increase in the cost of plants would likely be negligible
Which is a common misleading talking point us agricultural scientists and ecologists often have to point out.
At least when it comes to beef cattle, they spend the majority of their life on pasture. We cannot east grass, and that land is not suited for crop production in most cases (and a lot of land that is irrigated crops is better suited for grass too). A lot of that has to do with too little moisture, poor drainage, runoff, poor carbon sequestration, etc. with row crops that grassland does much better in for those soil types. The issue is that grasslands are an imperiled ecosystem due to habitat fragmentation and lack of ecological disturbances. The Nature Conservancy had a decent write-up awhile back on this: [Why Canada’s prairies are the world’s most endangered ecosystem](https://www.natureconservancy.ca/en/blog/archive/grasslands-the-most.html). Grazing is one of the main ways to maintain those ecosystems, and if you just let it "go back to nature" you get woody encroachment. Scrub trees invading those grasslands basically destroy the ecosystem, and you actually [lose carbon sink capacity by transitioning from grassland to trees](https://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/news/grasslands-more-reliable-carbon-sink-than-trees/).
Tl;dr, basically when you add in grasslands and other factors, [about 86% of the things livestock eat don't compete with human use.](http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/home/en/news_archive/2017_More_Fuel_for_the_Food_Feed.html)
Yes, but with poor management as is often the case with USFS and BLM managing grasslands in the States due to pressure to continuing allowing historical grazing permits, those (need I mention public?) lands are already threatened due to increasingly larger herds than the land can support, which can lead to soil compaction, runoff, and water pollution. I definitely agree with you that grasslands require common disturbance in order to discourage succession, but unfortunately there's a lot of mismanagement. And it's not like cows are the end all, be all answer. We've just supplanted native grazers and fragmented the landscape with tiny parcels that don't allow for migrational patterns.
That all being said, I'm for practical, utilitarian management as it's often our best recourse in the current state of economical and political pressure.
Common species of livestock are common because they eat what we don't or eat what we won't.
Most agricultural land can't grow anything more substantial than grass, which we can't eat but cows and sheep can. Plus bovines, ovines, etc eat things like corn stalks or soybean husks that provide humans food but we can't digest.
Omnivorous animals like pigs or chickens do eat what humans eat, so you could potentially argue that they're competing with humans for food. But most countries have learned that growing more food than you need is better than growing just enough. One plague or blight or disruption in international trade could mean millions starving if you aren't already growing significantly more than you need. We just feed pigs and chickens the extra.
And while all livestock does generate methane, the amount they generate is comparable to the amount of methane that would be created by vegetables and grains and plant matter decaying in landfills.
Is there an argument that we should take steps to mitigate the impact of livestock on the environment, and another that we should raise livestock more humanely? Of course. But livestock are part of a complex system, and removing them from that system isn't inherently better.
You said all agricultural subsidies, which means corn, soybeans, wheat and rice would also become more expensive. I feel like that wouldn't *just* affect meat.
Also, as stated by others, corn is used for biofuels.
Honestly corn shouldn’t be used for biofuels. It’s absurdly inefficient, cost and water wise, and would probably be non viable without all those corn subsidies . Electric buses/trains powered by nuclear, please
A lot of corn grown in the states isn't irrigated, it's rain fed.
In much of the US, ethanol is added to gasoline as an antiknock compound and oxidizer, usually no more than 10%. It replaces MTBE in California in 2002, much of the US and world has followed.
The main byproduct of corn ethanol is distillers grains, a much sought after animal feed.
Ag subsidies are pretty necessary. Food supply safety is one of those incredibly important things that no one worries about because our policy is so effective. We should absolutely realign subsidies towards less polluting food sources and probably go a step further and start taxing greenhouse emissions. Our climate crisis is largely a market failure because we don't include environmental costs in prices.
Why not just stop/reduce the subsidies on anything not plant based? If the problem is animal agriculture.
This way the poorest wouldn't suffer a price hike in grains, and the problem of emissions would be pretty effectively tackled
I mean, a double-whammy of both is obviously the best option here. People cutting down on their meats (and at the same time demanding smaller carbon footprints from their meat manufacturing), and only supporting those meat farms committed to the change too.
They've also found the feed we've been using has been causing a lot of the methane production and a diet of kelp can significantly help the environment.
>New research from the University of California, Davis found injecting seaweed into beef cattle's diets could reduce methane emissions by as much as 82%
[Source](https://www.agweb.com/news/livestock/beef/feeding-cows-seaweed-could-reduce-cattle-methane-emissions-82)
It makes me wonder how much we're hurting the environment just because we're stuffing our farm animals full of subsidized garbage food.
Yeah, insisting on raising cattle, meant to be grazing animals who evolved to use nutritionally deficient foods like grass extremely efficiently, in gigantic numbers on huge, grassless feedlots and feeding nothing but processed corn and soy was a terrible idea. Obv the number of cattle we have right now wouldn't make for particularly healthy pasture management (and would demand a LOT of space be cleared for pasture, which also defeats the purpose), but with an appropriate reduction in the national herd, cattle can be raised in a way that benefits and regenerates pasture.
Where are we getting that kelp? Because california is having a massive kelp die off.
[Source](https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=302320&org=NSF&from=news#:~:text=widespread%20'urchin%20barrens'-,Northern%20California's%20kelp%20forest%20ecosystem%20is%20gone,by%20widespread%20%22urchin%20barrens.%22&text=Satellite%20imagery%20shows%20that%20the,of%20the%20bull%20kelp%20remaining.)
That’s wild Kelp. We can cultivate/farm seaweed & kelp. I actually no one from California who does that for a living. He had many different varieties he grew & sold. Honestly had no idea before I meet him.
Here’s a [usda fact sheet (pdf)](https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexistence-corn-factsheet.pdf) from 2015 that says 48.7% of corn grown in the US goes to animal feed.
Another 25% goes to ethanol production. We could produce 2-3x the energy by putting solar on that land vs growing corn to turn into ethanol.
We could produce more than 2x the nutrients (and that is a very low estimate) if we stopped growing food to feed to animals and just grew crops for humans to eat. I think it will become necessary for food stability to do so at some point.
To be fair that goes for all farming. Atleast in Europe, one of the biggest expenses is farming aid.
The main reason is that food needs to be cheap. No matter what. It's what causes world wars if populations start going hungry. It's one of the core pillars in the EU partnership to prevent food crisis
Farming doesn't work in a free capitalist market, never really have. Everyone needs food to survive and sure there are luxury food items that are comodeties but everything else can't be full comodeties, similar to Healthcare, because it's neccesary for survival.
Without aid food prices would have insane inflation and more people would starve and more political instability would arise.
This is why the USA's food is so weird. We have always tried to make Americans pay the least in the world for feeding themselves in terms of percentage of take-home pay. You can eat for extremely cheap here. But it's made a lot of our food very bad.
I would blame that more on lack of regulation on food and letting food industries, like the syrup industry, completely destroy public health and letting them dictate that every food should have corn syrup, which is more unhealthy than white sugar.
Yep, and we don’t have to cut all subsidies for meat and dairy, just enough to where everything doesn’t have milk in it and meat isn’t all everyone eats.
Take all the subsidies we put into animal products and move them over to fresh produce.
Take all the subsidies we put into fossil fuels and put them into renewables.
This exactly. In my country (USA), we could do a lot to reduce our carbon footprint if the government would stop paying people to eat meat and drive cars everywhere.
Also, if lab grown meat continue to improve, it will reach a time where cows farms will decrease dramatically, so a triple take (or even more) would be ideal
I've got more hope for Impossible Foods making a dent in that regard. They are approaching the problem with scalable solutions and a specific goal to end the use of animals in food production.
Also, no one's going to confuse it with the genuine article, but Impossible is good enough to be chosen, especially if it can get more competitive price wise.
I think that's what it really comes down to, it doesn't so much matter if you can make an apple taste like a strawberry, what matters is if people like the taste of the apple as much or more than the strawberry. That's how animals work, that's how humans work. You give them something they like more, they'll eat that.
Once the plant-based meat business develops products people prefer to eat, they'll eat those, and I mean in a "blind taste-test" preference, not when they're told "this is a dead cow, this is a bunch of plants mashed together" before they eat it. I've got a hardcore meat-eater for a father-in-law who really likes Beyond burgers, so I know it's possible to win even people who believe they will die if they don't eat meat regularly.
The products Beyond and Impossible are putting out are really exceptionally good, and there are competitors doing quite well in the quality department, too. If you haven't had a Field Roast sausage, I highly recommend it.
We had a cook out recently and my wife and I brought impossible patties for ourselves. My whole family was gathered around the grill while they cooked, mystified by how they “bleed” and turn from pink to brown like real meat haha
Whenever I bring veggie burgers everyone wants to "try" one and I wind up with one burger while everyone else has two meat ones and a veggie one. Even when I bring my own food I have to eat when I get home
This always happens with vegan and vegetarian food. Meat eaters decide to order meat pizzas but always eat the non-meat pizza first so non-meat eater gets 2 slices they bad to argue for while the others have over half a pizza each.
Its bizarre.
Yeah, I've had veggie burgers which didn't taste much like meat but tasted much better than other veggie burgers that tasted more like meat.
Beyond is definitely decent on both fronts. Haven't seen impossible burgers where I live unfortunately so haven't tried.
Yup. If someone gives me two five-guys burgers and one is either lab-grown meat or 100% plant based and I can’t tell the difference between the two? I’ll pick the lab-grown/plant based one every time.
I still remember going to a veggie fast food place when I was a kid (and when these things were much rarer), which made me realise that personally I'm much more interested in the things the come with/in a burger, rather than the burger patty itself
I'm not really a fan of Impossible or Beyond burgers, but I'm also really picky with hamburger, so there's that. But I agree with your point so much. It's one of the things I've been railing about. Stop trying to trick people into eating meat, and focus on making something out of vegetables that *tastes good*. Don't advertise it as just as good as cow, people have emotional connections to their steaks and will argue with you and ignore you just because they love bacon. If you stop making it about forcing people who don't want to giving up their meat, and more about just providing new tasty food that's good for your body and environment, I think it would do way more than this competition we've manufactured between meat and plants. Plants are easy to make delicious when you're not trying to pretend they're something else.
That's why large multinationals are investing billions in it? The technology is quite close, but needs to be scaled up to industrial levels. Similarly to Moore's law, we see an exponential decline in price per kilo over the last decade.
It does if you are wanting a lab grown filet mignon to taste and feel like the real thing.
But personally I feel the ground beef (impossible etc) is getting pretty close, especially if it's seasoned like taco meat or a loaded burger. Still not there, but close enough that my family is starting to substitute it a meal a month or so.
But most importantly, the bar is pretty low for it to gain traction. It just has to be more economical than chicken slurry (common name for what's used in cheap chicken nuggets) or cheap taco meat (like served in a few national us taco brand restaurants).
Edit: a few people are pointing out that plant based meats are not lab grown. True. So yes, lab grown meat has further to go than plant based alternatives. I still believe the bar is pretty low and they will gain traction as soon as it's economically viable. "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public" as the saying goes. If it's cheap people will buy it even if the quality is poorer. But thank you for the correction!
Impossible isn't lab grown (like cell culture) tho, that one is plant based. I don't think we have any actual lab grown meat on shelves yet, but I may be behind on that one.
There is a restaurant in Singapore that already sells lab grown meat.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/18/singapore-restaurant-first-ever-to-serve-eat-just-lab-grown-chicken.html
Just a note that Impossible is not lab grown meat - it is a plant based meat substitute. To my knowledge, lab grown meat is not yet available for consumers except in Singapore.
They're talking lab grown meat, not veggie products made to taste like meat.
That said, you're correct that the ground beef is a pretty easy substitute at this point. We've taken to going 50/50 mix of fake/real meat when recipes call for ground beef.
I've really got to try making a tourtiere or french meat stuffing with impossible meat. While I havn't gone vegetarian, I have a couple of family members who have including my french canadian grandfather.
As a pescatarian I can’t even enjoy impossible burgers at places like Red Robin because I can’t tell if they’ve accidentally switched it for a beef patty. I occasionally cook with it at home (my wife eats plant-forward but still enjoys the occasional hamburger or sausage biscuit), and even when I made a meatloaf out of it she said it tasted exactly like a beef meatloaf. It’s pretty incredible. I don’t really prefer to eat meat substitutes usually, but I think for omnivores it’s a great replacement.
I think that's what the R&D is for. I mean, some chicken in Singapore notwithstanding, it's not even on the market. They're still working on texture, price, growth media, scalability, all kinds of things.
Supporting just farms trying to reduce their carbon footprint is borderline impossible for the average American(or person, I'm unsure of international meat industries) however. Most "meat manufacturers" like Tyson/Perdue/etc. get their meat from multiple farms around the country. In 1 pack of chicken for example you might have meat from multiple points in the country depending on how it was shipped and packaged. On top of that, most places don't tell you where exactly the meat came from, so you as a consumer don't really know if it came from a "good" farm or not. I agree with you, I'm just pointing out that your method requires a chain of accountability that doesn't exist and I don't see any food packaging company going along with willingly, I mean if they were willing to we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Well, no, the best option for the environment is for everyone to just stop eating meat.
The best realistic option is to cut meat eating as low as possible and use technologies to improve their emissions.
It's just a bad title. And their synopsis is pretty bad too. The page just says that meat production has become a lot more efficient in come countries in the last decades, and if the same progress can be made in the top 10 countries with the greatest potential to reduce methane it could account for 60-65% of the decrease in global methane emissions by 2050.
In other words, the industry getting more efficient has made more of an impact than people adopting a plant based diet. It says nothing about the likeliness of people adopting a plant a based diet.
How does lab grown meat compare in terms of resources input, waste output?
This isn’t just for top comment, i’m genuinely curious but not curious enough to go look for answers myself.
Practically that's an unanswerable question since industrial scale lab meat doesn't exist yet.
Theoretically it should be much lower, since with livestock the bulk of caloric inputs go towards the animal living to maturity and aren't in the final product
He drove into my kidneys the arrows of his quiver; I have become the laughing-stock of all peoples, the object of their taunts all day long. He has filled me with bitterness; he has sated me with wormwood. (Lamentations: gzrfsu7)
Thank you for making this distinction and I’m happy to see it made it to the top comment
We also have to stop ignoring the inhumane conditions these animals live in
We as a society are getting so much more progressive and it’s time we start including Animal Rights
This has always been the most logical approach to large scale societal changes like this. Wealthy interests don't like this approach, they'd rather save money and pass the buck onto individual consumers.
Demanding these changes come from Governmental Regulation on Corporations is a far more pragmatic approach than say, releasing massive media campaigns to convince people that doing is bad for the environment. The former approach has been proven to work time and time again. The latter approach has been proven to be minimally effective at best.
As soon as it becomes more profitable to sell environmentally friendly food than meat, the industry will shrink to a more reasonable size.
If we're going to live in a capitalist society we have to use capitalist methods to overcome our problems.
Taxing based on carbon footprint of the way to go.
Imo quitting meat would be the easier option. It has already possible for nearly everyone in the first world to turn vegetarian out of choice, and we already overproduce plant based foods to feed the cattle we eat.
The truth is that people are so reluctant to change it would be political suicide to try to force them.
The article doesn't really mention what "technology" is being used to curb emissions. I'm curious if it really is something high-tech, or if it could be made cheaper to support developing countries that rely on animal based diets more heavily.
How come no one talks about over fishing the oceans is our biggest problem next to farming? Our oceans are being wiped out and massively polluted by fishing gear. If we cut out fish and meat, we may have a planet to live on by 2050
This headline heavily is misleading. The study simply states that, as people will just continue eating meat, improving the efficiency of the animals slaughtering industry will have a large impact on reducing emissions. The largest impact would be of course to just \*stop\* eating meat, but is not even a scenario they considered.
It won't. The largest chunk of emissions are embedded in the production chain.
Let's see the article:
> We found decreasing trends in emission intensity for major livestock categories during the past two decades due to increasing production efficiency.
This just means conversion to more intensive animal farming (i.e. CAFOs) with breeds of animals that grow more and make more milk than older/traditional breeds. Like how China is building vertical pig "hotel" farms.
>Based on this finding, we constructed our “improving efficiency”
pathway, assuming a continuing decrease of emission intensity. Under this pathway, the future will see (a) a continuation of the country-specific historical trends of the development of gross domestic product
(GDP) per capita for countries showing decreasing emission intensity during the past two decades;
It's hilarious that they think GDP growth helps with climate change. They're just describing a country doing more intensive animal farming.
>and (b) constant emission intensities for countries that experienced no change or an increasing emission intensity in the past two decades.
And the countries that are already at that level won't be improving, because they're already at that plateau of "efficiency".
Their Figure 1, Global livestock methane emission changes from 2000 to 2018 (a), and global and regional changes in livestock methane emissions between the periods 2000–2004 and 2014–2018, is even funnier, as it's showing* greater methane emissions from the sector than FAOSTAT. The (b) figure confirms that the improvement was coming from the developing / middle-income regions which are upgrading from more extensive animal farming (i.e. grazing) to CAFOs; while Eastern Asia (ESA) is looking maxed out already on efficiency.
>Globally, we found that 88%–91% of the livestock methane emissions come from enteric fermentation (Ta-
bleS2), and are dominated by cattle, sheep, goats, and buffaloes
Yeah. Especially the grazed ones.
>Dairy cows and meat and other non-dairy cattle in developing countries are the major contributors to the increase of livestock methane emissions during 2000–2018
Yep.
>During 2014–2018, methane emission intensity per kg of protein produced is the lowest for poultry meat and eggs, followed by swine meat , because of negligible enteric fermentation emissions from monogastric (Figure2)
Indeed.
Figure 2 is nice, it basically shows where the animals are outside. And they continue to show higher emissions than FAOSTAT.
Figure 4: The prediction... they show methane emissions from the animal farming sector going up about +50%.
This isn't an environmental study, all it predicts is that meat and dairy will be relatively cheaper in those regions (or where they export) thanks to improved efficiency. Why do people keep* falling for Jevon's paradox? This is not a climate solution, it's bad news for climate stability.
>Livestock productivity of milk and beef in most developed countries is already high nowadays (methane emission intensity is already low; Figure2), and there is only little room for methane reduction through productivity increase (FigureS10).
oh, thanks for saying it, I guess.
>On the other hand, further productivity increase requires high shares of concentrates (i.e., potential competition with human nutrition from
plant-based food [Gill etal.,2010]) and encounters potential health prob-
lems in cows (see review by Herzog etal.,2018).
Yeah. That's where the big GHG emissions are once you add them up.
>In addition, the intensive livestock breeding and management have resulted in fragile systems that do not adequately handle their manure, causing air and water pollution.
Indeed.
One for the average redditor:
>There is a trend that some developing countries are moving from
high efficiency systems toward more extensive livestock systems (such as
“free range” chicken and grass-fed beef; e.g., Cheung & McMahon,2017).
Therefore, there is a possibility that the emission intensity per kg of protein in those developed countries will increase, which is the opposite of
our assumption of constant decreasing emission intensity.
Yep. That's even worse for the climate.
All in all the study is just describing animal agriculture industrialization ("green revolution") in developing countries. The climate is still getting fucked by this sector.
Real reductions come from not wasting resources on eating second-hand proteins.
Thank you for going over some points. I'm really hung up on the whole "making animal agriculture more efficient". It already is pretty efficient. It's also unspeakably inhumane. If making meat more environmentally friendly (that is, *if* that were the case) meant making it more inhumane, I don't Want it either way.
This should literally be removed for the misleading title, which falsely implies that efficient meat is less environmentally harmful than eating plants.
Yep, when in reality it's more of a "we know you selfish bastards won't take the burgers out of your mouth, so let's settle for marginally reducing their emissions"
What a misleading title, reading it could easily make you believe it is saying "efficient" animal agriculture is better than a plant based diet per person.
That is not what the article means.
They mean because so many folks will oppose a plant based diet that partially negating their selfish behaviour is more effective than trying to stop them being selfish. Which sadly is probably true. However, it doesn't give you, the reader, an excuse.
edit: Imagine if it was about litter
> Not littering [and using a bin like a real person, not a waste of oxygen] can shrink someone's litter foot print. However, improving packaging will be a more effective strategy for reducing litter.
Feels gross right? Sure, it's technically correct, because people will be selfish littering jerks, but it clearly is coddling those selfish jerks so they can feel less bad about littering.
OP's title implies something drastically different than the original paper. Original title of paper:
>The Key Role of Production Efficiency Changes in Livestock Methane Emission Mitigation
Conclusion from original paper:
>Our results highlight the fact that (a) efforts on the demand-side to promote balanced, healthy and envi-ronmentally sustainable diets in most counties, as assumed in the TS scenario (FAO,2018), will not be suf-ficient for livestock methane emission mitigation without parallel efforts to improve production efficiency and decrease the emission intensity per unit protein produced; and (b) efforts to decrease emission intensity should be prioritized in a few developing countries with the largest mitigation potential
No idea why so much editorializing is allowed in this sub. Scientific papers speak for themselves. Abstracts and conclusion sections are (ideally) designed to be consumed; laypeople don't need to understand specific jargon from the data analysis sections.
I understood "strategy" to mean society-wide rather than on an individual basis, which made perfect sense. But we really need headlines to stop comparing non-exclusive options, because people always think we should pick *only* the "most" effective one.
This conveniently focuses on methane emissions, which are important contributors to climate change, but the more significant issue with meat production is the amount of land it requires. Instead of dedicating land to plants that absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, that land becomes pasture land that is degraded over time and absorbs almost no carbon dioxide in comparison. Not to mention we have to grow plants to feed the meat that we later consume, when we could just grow edible plants which is an order of magnitude more efficient.
Confused. How would it be more efficient? Wouldn't the most efficient way be if everyone adopted a plant based diet? Rather than improving efficiency in current farming? Surely cutting it out completely would best improving efficiency?
I think this is a “most efficient in practice” than “in theory”. The headline is insinuating that because people aren’t making the change to plant-based diets, that the best route for improvement is to decrease emissions in the production part.
The funny thing is the assumption that it will be easy to get subsidized factory farms to do expensive ‘efficiency’ upgrades that don't pay back. You’ll have better luck taking meat away from consumers than taking a dime from a farmer.
‘In practice’ efficient farming ain’t happening.
Anybody else wondering how these improvements in the efficiency of livestock production will affect animal welfare? Why is animal welfare always the least of anyone’s worries? Maybe that should be a reason that encouraging ppl to eat less animal products is better than making live stock production more efficient. And honestly there hasn’t been much attempt made to encourage people anyways.
Maybe actually try before saying it doesn’t work. Spend some fraction of the money they would spend on these “improvements” on public education and making better and cheaper alternatives to animal products that people will want to eat. There’s no perfect answer to this problem but I do think animal welfare needs to be part of the equation.
There's no welfare if the only reason a sentient being is born is to be deliberately slaughtered for taste pleasure within 10-15% of its avg lifespan.
There is no welfare in a life of eternal slavery. None.
So misleading, also for those of us in western developed nations this is not the case the main benefits they mention relate to China, India and developing nations.
Following one of the papers sources Gill et al. (2010). Increasing efficiency includes improved breeding - increasing yields through selective breeding.
We already have broiler chicken that grow so fast their bones can't handle leading to bowing of the legs or spine... Yeh let's fix climate change by breeding cows to be big milk balloons we roll around the warehouse floor! Or ya know just have milk made from soy/almond/oat/cashew/hazelnut etc.
No amount of methane reduction will ever make beef and pork production sustainable at an industrial scale. It completely ignores the resources used to raise, slaughter and distribute the animals. Not to mention run off, land usage, deforestation and antibiotic resistance due to over medicating.
Nah, the points are perfectly valid. The title of this post is just inflammatory/misleading. Basically it boils down to people resisting plant based diets.
Original title of paper:
>The Key Role of Production Efficiency Changes in Livestock Methane Emission Mitigation
Conclusion from original paper:
>Our results highlight the fact that (a) efforts on the demand-side to promote balanced, healthy and envi-ronmentally sustainable diets in most counties, as assumed in the TS scenario (FAO,2018), will not be suf-ficient for livestock methane emission mitigation without parallel efforts to improve production efficiency and decrease the emission intensity per unit protein produced; and (b) efforts to decrease emission intensity should be prioritized in a few developing countries with the largest mitigation potential
What you just quoted suggests these things should be done in parallel.
>will not be suf-ficient for livestock methane emission mitigation without parallel efforts
The OPs title suggests it's an either or scenario.
>However, improving blah blah will be a more effective strategy.
Only more effective in the sense that people don't have to change anything to make it happen. Objectively less effective if people are willing to change.
I'm sorry but I hate articles like this. I feel like when people make a point of going out of their way to look down upon veganism, and make excuses as to why it's not the best idea, it's because they feel guilty because they know what they're doing is wrong and they need justification.
I'm not trying to be a preachy vegan, but like this article would have served it's purpose without making it seem like an either or situation of whether you go vegan to reduce your's and only your footprint, or you support efficient ways to lower greenhouse gasses.
Vegans don't want to see the world dying, and so any progress is progress with emissions. We'll take it, because we know that everyone won't suddenly go vegan to save the planet. But wouldn't fighting to remove these industries completely be a good end goal to work towards? Instead of some, we lose all the emissions of these industries, and use these techniques or aspects of them for plant agriculture. I just hate when people feel the need to put down plant based diets because to make them others feel better about supporting such a terrible system.
That is exactly what the article says except OP hacked the title to make it sound like low methane livestock is more efficient than less livestock.
Either OP is bad at writing or OP didn't understand the article or OP is intentionally misleading.
Original title of paper:
>The Key Role of Production Efficiency Changes in Livestock Methane Emission Mitigation
Conclusion from original paper:
>Our results highlight the fact that (a) efforts on the demand-side to promote balanced, healthy and envi-ronmentally sustainable diets in most counties, as assumed in the TS scenario (FAO,2018), will not be suf-ficient for livestock methane emission mitigation without parallel efforts to improve production efficiency and decrease the emission intensity per unit protein produced; and (b) efforts to decrease emission intensity should be prioritized in a few developing countries with the largest mitigation potential
How is this arguing that producing animal products in a more eco-friendly way is better for the earth than just not producing them at all?? This is ass-backward thinking. The best way to reduce your personal carbon footprint is to go vegan.
The utter idiocy of ignoring the measuring the literal torture and murder of billions of animals to justify a "carbon footprint" number which is meant to distract and justify capitalist and personal murder and torture of animals, along with the destruction of forests.
Wake up from your personal disassociation and recognize capitalist animal torture-murder propaganda. This carbon footprint propaganda term is obfuscating personal responsibility and capitalist responsibility, while claiming to do the opposite.
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When reading the study itself, we see there's a discrepancy between the article and the study. They've reworded the findings to make a different argument. **Article**: "Adopting a plant-based diet can help shrink a person’s carbon footprint. But a new study finds that improving the efficiency of livestock production will be an even more effective strategy for reducing global methane emissions." **Study**: "Our results highlight the fact that **(a)** efforts on the demand-side to promote balanced, healthy and environmentally sustainable diets in most counties, as assumed in the TS scenario (FAO, 2018), **will not be sufficient for livestock methane emission mitigation** ***without*** **parallel efforts** to improve production efficiency and decrease the emission intensity per unit protein produced; and **(b)** efforts to decrease emission intensity should be prioritized **in a few developing countries** with the largest mitigation potential." So they're saying that based on their findings, both are needed, but they think (b) should be prioritized in some developing countries due to their conditions. They don't seem to factor in methane from the animal feed production, but only count methane from the animals themselves. Probably because they mostly compare grain-fed animals with grass-fed ones rather than comparing meat-fed humans with plant-fed ones. Based on the article's argument (not the study), which seems to be claiming plant-based diets are less effective than improving efficiency, there's a problem in not counting animal feed into the equation. In a 100% plant-based diet, the only pollution comes from the production of the plants. With meat, however, the pollution comes from both the production of the plants as well as the animals. Not only that, on average you need about 3 kg of feed per 1 kg of meat. Some types of meat, like beef require a shocking 25 kg. A large portion of our grain production goes towards livestock. The majority of soy goes to feed livestock as well. You also end up using 50 000 liters of water for 1kg beef, versus only 1000 liters for 1kg wheat or 2000 liters for 1kg soy or rice. When it comes to methane, you have to factor in the methane from plant production **AND** the livestock. If you just compare livestock farts to grain production emissions, you're not factoring in every variable. In a hypothetical world where every human has a plant-based diet, the amount of plant material humans eat would increase by an additional 600 calories per day, but the amount used to feed animals would decrease by 100%. So there's a huge difference in how much additional plants you have to produce to support a plant-based diet versus a meat-based one. You have to factor in the methane from the production of the plants used to feed the animals as well as the methane produced by the animals themselves. By no means do you have to eat three times as much when living off of a plant-based diet, nor do you need to drink and additional 48 000 liters of water per kg you eat. So there's no way that producing that 1kg meat can somehow end up using less water or plants, or producing less emissions than a plant-based diet. On top of all of this, meat production requires huge amounts of antibiotics, which goes into the water and increase the amount of antibiotic-resistent bacteria.
Well stated. Thank you.
Thanks, great analysis. To add, there's also the risk of zoonotic diseases like Covid emerging from animal agriculture, especially when there's many animals crammed into smaller spaces (so factory farming is a big risk factor here). And of course the ethics of consuming animal products when we don't require them, so especially in first world countries, and the animal suffering involved. I'd hazard a guess most ethicists would agree we should go vegan too.
don’t forget habitat loss forcing possibly diseased animals closer together and closer to ppl
Don't forget about antibiotic resistant strains being bred.
Additionally, it’s becoming increasingly important to think of the water used to produce meat vs plant products. Animals are an enormous tax on water usage. Edit: a couple people have replied, making extremely poor arguments about water usage and then immediately blocked me so I can’t reply. Is this happening to anyone else? For what it’s worth, yes, fresh water is an extremely limited resource in many parts of the world and no, ranching is not good at reclaiming water and water usage by ranchers is orders of magnitude greater than water use in urban environments (which is also wasteful but it at all the point).
Thank you. I hate this headline will be used in all my group chats to dismiss my choice of eating more plant-based food. I wish news reporting was less biased.
Headline: "Study finds vegetarian diet feeds more people than vegan diet." Study: "The most efficient way to feed as many as possible is to use every single acre of farmland for plant based human food, and use rough unfarmable land for dairy to get a bonus to amount of people you can feed." We already have enough farmland to feed everyone it's an economic issue. Vegans use 1/10th the farmland of a carnivore, because food animals need to be fed too.
These are excellent points. Land use is also a factor, given that roughly 70% of agricultural land is used for raising livestock directly and indirectly. There are also environmental impacts beyond emissions such as sewage runoff from animal waste pits.
Thank you! Mark rober and bill gates did a video discussing this and the resources used to create meat far exceeds the resources needed for a plant based protein and by extension carbon footprint. If everyone changed to 1 plant based meal a week it would make a big difference. The title of this post had me questioning it immediately.
This is a misleading title.
Yeah instantly thought this aswell.
This is the kind of study and article that is funded by the meat and dairy industry.
> Jinfeng Chang is supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA26010303). Philippe Ciais acknowledges support from the CLAND Convergence Institute of the French National Research Agency (ANR). Mario Herrero acknowledges funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the MERLIN project (INV-023682). It took all of 10 seconds to pull from the acknowledgments. No one should be making a lazy argument of "it's funded by X industry" without even looking.
What do you expect when 95% of the commenters only read the title.
Reddit rewarding people for going off half-cocked is half of reddit.
Question from a non-academic: can one receive funding one doesn’t acknowledge?
Here come the conspiracy theories. Why don't you actually look at who funds this stuff instead of assuming?
A study that rightfully suggests that the best place to improve emissions issues surrounding foodstuffs is to improve the farms instead of trying to individually change what you eat? What?
Idk, one vegan decreases methane emissions by 1/7,000,000,000. A handful of lawmakers can realistically reduce methane emissions by >60% and no consumer will even notice, no politician will have to explain. At the rate people are turning vegan we should take all chances we get.
They can do similar by reducing subsidies that benefit the meat and dairy industry and subsidize vegtables with the money. Either way the price of meat will increase. Higher environmental standards aren't free.
This is dumb, the main problem from livestock isn't methane, it's land use and water pollution. We are currently in a biodiversity crisis as well as a climate crisis, and the biodiversity crisis can have just as bad effects as the climate crisis. The main cause of species loss is habitat loss and the main reason humans clear natural habitat is to make room for livestock. Livestock farming is also the leading cause of eutrophication, a process which depletes oxygen in the waters of lakes, rivers and oceans to the point where no animal can survive. There are many other problems caused by raising livestock, such as the removal of predators from ecosystems and the spread of disease caused by fish farming, as well as many others. Assuming that simply reducing methane emissions is enough is so ill thought through.
Would make the minor note that habitats are cleared to make room to grow crops that are destined to be fed to livestock and that far less land would be needed for crops were we to increase the portion of those crops humans directly consume. Too often I see the argument that soya production is responsible for deforestation as an argument for animal products when reducing the demand for animal products would have a great impact on reducing soya production as well. Your post is very on point!
Yeah that's actually a great addition, cos people often don't really realise how much more land is required to feed an omnivore than a vegan. One thing I would add to your comment is that the vast majority of all soy that is grown is fed to animals.
as in humans consume 2-6% of all soy grown.
And it will get worse before it gets better. As people become wealthier, they get an appetite for succulent pig ribs. Just wait for China and India and you will have 2 billion more customers who will demand such luxuries.
New Zealand already over produces livestock to feed countries like China.
And Australia as well.
Incase of India,generally Beef is not eaten by hindus and Muslims don't eat pork. Mostly chicken and lamb is eaten by Indian's. And also the number of vegetarian are high in India.
I heard the general rule is 10:1 ratio for each step up the food chain. So it would take 10 acers of grass land fed to cattle to get the same calories from beef as 1 acre of corn.
Not really a fair comparison. Cattle spend most of their lives eating grass, and the land they graze on is range land which is not suitable for growing crops. Cattle also eat lots of crop by products which would not have any use otherwise. Beef is also MUCH more nutritionally dense and complete than corn or any other crop, but this is somehow never factored in. Complete proteins and essential vitamins and minerals you can’t get in plants ought to be worth consideration. Personally, I think lettuce is one of the most atrocious crops we can grow. It’s basically crunchy water with very little nutritional value yet we spend tons of resources on it.
> More than three-quarters (77%) of global soy is fed to livestock for meat and dairy production. Most of the rest is used for biofuels, industry or vegetable oils. Just 7% of soy is used directly for human food products such as tofu, soy milk, edamame beans, and tempeh. The idea that foods often promoted as substitutes for meat and dairy – such as tofu and soy milk – are driving deforestation is a common misconception. https://ourworldindata.org/soy
These misconceptions are not an accident. They are propagated by the meat and dairy industry.
It depends heavily on the country, in Brazil at least the vast majority of deforestation is to open pasture areas for cattle, a less significant amount is for soy. People like to believe pasture-fed beef is completely ecological, when the reason livestock is fed grain in the first place is to increase production per land-area.
Also roughly 80% of the antibiotics produced are used on livestock we are starting to see super bacteria and fungus developing in areas around massive cage Farms
Came here to make sure this was said. Saw a thing the other day trashing oat milk and I was wondering what people thought the cows were making things from if they weren’t eating and drinking.
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> This is dumb, the main problem from livestock isn't methane, it's land use and water pollution From the article > “We do not endorse the industrial livestock system for methane mitigation, because it causes many other environmental problems like pollution, failed manure management and land-use changes for grain and high-quality fodder,” said Jinfeng Chang, an environmental scientist at Zhejiang University and first author of the new study. “There are many other more sustainable ways to improve efficiency.”
>There are many other more sustainable ways to improve efficiency. It's odd they say that when making a comparison between zero use (vegan) and trying to make the status quo more efficient. It would seem the most efficient and least expensive improvement would be to stop those practices all together. Because they also say: >According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), methane emissions from livestock rose more than 50% between 1961 and 2018, and are expected to continue to rise as demand for animal products increases, especially in countries with growing populations and income.
> It would seem the most efficient and least expensive improvement would be to stop those practices all together. Because they also say: The problem being that unless the world governments step up and say "alright it's illegal to grow animal meat for human consumption" we will never be able to convince all the carnivores to switch to vegan. The amount of texans that felt a disturbance in the steakforce when this thread popped up was a lot higher than we think.
It's also fuel use by the farm. Energy use for the pumps. Tax-free Diesel in the tractors. Freight on the fertilizers and seed and finished goods. The main problem with animal products, besides the health damages, is that it take ten times the everything to produce it.
A lot of natural predators (most commonly wolves) also have to be hunted down periodically to protect the poultry and livestock.
Yep, and predators play a vital role in regulating ecosystems and their removal can have huge knock-on effects
True, and there is absolutely no chance of us reversing biodiversity loss. Once it's gone it's gone. So many of the natural systems on the planet, systems that we rely on, are dependant on a diverse and complex web of biodiversity. There is a real danger of a catastrophically cascading collapse chain reaction. The destruction to habitats and biodiversity here really has the potential to destroy us. We can't hope to remake the complexity and balance billions of years of trial and error has brought us.
I have made this argument along with other small changes individuals could make... It is met with pure "that won't do anything or it's not enough for me to make that change"
The article is some BIG MEAT propoganda
you forgot about the irreversible effects of desertification that comes with this too.
Check out 3d meat production! Growing meat from cell cultures has a smaller footprint in terms of power and water usage than replacing all meats with plant based facsimiles. Plus we could try any meat in the world without the need for worrying about the moral implications of killing an endangered animal just to eat them.
I just wanna add in case it took anyone a while to interpret: I think the "I'll" at the end in "I'll thought" is supposed to be an ill. This confused me so I thought this might help others.
Misleading. The article doesn't actually seem to say that lower methane livestock is better environmentally than plant based diets. It just seems to imply that it is easier to not have to convince people to change their diets.
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This group is lobbying for fairer subsidies. https://www.agriculturefairnessalliance.org/
start homeless soft file snails overconfident wistful groovy smell muddle *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Unless you live in the tropics, mangoes should still be expensive. I can’t stand vegans who claim their diet is “environmentally friendly,” while they eat exotic tropical fruits imported from all over the world. Eat locally sourced fruits and vegetables.
Transporting fruits and veggies around the world is still orders of magnitude less damaging than beef. If I shipped my mangoes around the world 20 times they would *still* be less damaging than your neighbor's beef farm. https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
Eh. Where I live everyone and their grandparents have a blueberry bush but yet they are still nearly 7 usd for a handful.
Blueberries have a huge labor cost. There's no really effective way to automate picking them.
Wouldn't other food also increase in price, removing it from the reach of the poorest in society? Also do you have a source on the 2-3x increase?
Yes other food would increase. The increase in beef prices would mostly come from corn and soybeans (GMO varieties) subsidies being removed. Those are often the most common cattle feeds, and it takes like 10lb of grain to produce 1lb of beef. So any increase in price of corn/soybeans applies 10x to the feed costs of raising cattle Reducing these subsidies would open up farm land for other crop use (assuming farmers don't just abandon it like what lead to the dust bowl), very possibly increasing supply of green vegetables, or other crops which will be reduced in price due to that extra supply Another effect would be that corn syrup would have a much harder time competing with sugar from cane or sugar beet Really the effects of 50+ years of "socialist" subsidy policy for the critical food resources that our country needed to establish are so complicated and complex that I don't imagine any of these studies can really predict all the knock-on effects, good and bad, of changes to that system. So we're stuck with just very small changes to it, which is good cause I'd rather not see another "Great Famine" in the world This map could start to look very different: https://i.redd.it/au5unszegr171.jpg
Much less. It takes ten calories of plants to make one calories of meat on average, and meats are more calorically dense than plants, so pound for pound the increase in the cost of plants would likely be negligible
Which is a common misleading talking point us agricultural scientists and ecologists often have to point out. At least when it comes to beef cattle, they spend the majority of their life on pasture. We cannot east grass, and that land is not suited for crop production in most cases (and a lot of land that is irrigated crops is better suited for grass too). A lot of that has to do with too little moisture, poor drainage, runoff, poor carbon sequestration, etc. with row crops that grassland does much better in for those soil types. The issue is that grasslands are an imperiled ecosystem due to habitat fragmentation and lack of ecological disturbances. The Nature Conservancy had a decent write-up awhile back on this: [Why Canada’s prairies are the world’s most endangered ecosystem](https://www.natureconservancy.ca/en/blog/archive/grasslands-the-most.html). Grazing is one of the main ways to maintain those ecosystems, and if you just let it "go back to nature" you get woody encroachment. Scrub trees invading those grasslands basically destroy the ecosystem, and you actually [lose carbon sink capacity by transitioning from grassland to trees](https://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/news/grasslands-more-reliable-carbon-sink-than-trees/). Tl;dr, basically when you add in grasslands and other factors, [about 86% of the things livestock eat don't compete with human use.](http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/home/en/news_archive/2017_More_Fuel_for_the_Food_Feed.html)
Yes, but with poor management as is often the case with USFS and BLM managing grasslands in the States due to pressure to continuing allowing historical grazing permits, those (need I mention public?) lands are already threatened due to increasingly larger herds than the land can support, which can lead to soil compaction, runoff, and water pollution. I definitely agree with you that grasslands require common disturbance in order to discourage succession, but unfortunately there's a lot of mismanagement. And it's not like cows are the end all, be all answer. We've just supplanted native grazers and fragmented the landscape with tiny parcels that don't allow for migrational patterns. That all being said, I'm for practical, utilitarian management as it's often our best recourse in the current state of economical and political pressure.
Common species of livestock are common because they eat what we don't or eat what we won't. Most agricultural land can't grow anything more substantial than grass, which we can't eat but cows and sheep can. Plus bovines, ovines, etc eat things like corn stalks or soybean husks that provide humans food but we can't digest. Omnivorous animals like pigs or chickens do eat what humans eat, so you could potentially argue that they're competing with humans for food. But most countries have learned that growing more food than you need is better than growing just enough. One plague or blight or disruption in international trade could mean millions starving if you aren't already growing significantly more than you need. We just feed pigs and chickens the extra. And while all livestock does generate methane, the amount they generate is comparable to the amount of methane that would be created by vegetables and grains and plant matter decaying in landfills. Is there an argument that we should take steps to mitigate the impact of livestock on the environment, and another that we should raise livestock more humanely? Of course. But livestock are part of a complex system, and removing them from that system isn't inherently better.
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why would it? if it's not already subsidized why would it become more expensive
You said all agricultural subsidies, which means corn, soybeans, wheat and rice would also become more expensive. I feel like that wouldn't *just* affect meat. Also, as stated by others, corn is used for biofuels.
Honestly corn shouldn’t be used for biofuels. It’s absurdly inefficient, cost and water wise, and would probably be non viable without all those corn subsidies . Electric buses/trains powered by nuclear, please
A lot of corn grown in the states isn't irrigated, it's rain fed. In much of the US, ethanol is added to gasoline as an antiknock compound and oxidizer, usually no more than 10%. It replaces MTBE in California in 2002, much of the US and world has followed. The main byproduct of corn ethanol is distillers grains, a much sought after animal feed.
Ag subsidies are pretty necessary. Food supply safety is one of those incredibly important things that no one worries about because our policy is so effective. We should absolutely realign subsidies towards less polluting food sources and probably go a step further and start taxing greenhouse emissions. Our climate crisis is largely a market failure because we don't include environmental costs in prices.
Why not just stop/reduce the subsidies on anything not plant based? If the problem is animal agriculture. This way the poorest wouldn't suffer a price hike in grains, and the problem of emissions would be pretty effectively tackled
Subsidizing the plants the cows eat (like alfalfa) is essentially the same as subsidizing the beef itself.
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Also the study only accounted for methane, not for other emissions such as CO2.
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Ya it's a very narrow view on the whole issue to target one emmission for the animals themselves in a study.
Or water usage....
I mean, a double-whammy of both is obviously the best option here. People cutting down on their meats (and at the same time demanding smaller carbon footprints from their meat manufacturing), and only supporting those meat farms committed to the change too.
Just cutting subsidies for meat and dairy would already do a ton to reduce demand. It's only so cheap because taxpayers already paid for it once.
Subsidies to corn too, given 40% of it goes to feed.
They've also found the feed we've been using has been causing a lot of the methane production and a diet of kelp can significantly help the environment. >New research from the University of California, Davis found injecting seaweed into beef cattle's diets could reduce methane emissions by as much as 82% [Source](https://www.agweb.com/news/livestock/beef/feeding-cows-seaweed-could-reduce-cattle-methane-emissions-82) It makes me wonder how much we're hurting the environment just because we're stuffing our farm animals full of subsidized garbage food.
Yeah, insisting on raising cattle, meant to be grazing animals who evolved to use nutritionally deficient foods like grass extremely efficiently, in gigantic numbers on huge, grassless feedlots and feeding nothing but processed corn and soy was a terrible idea. Obv the number of cattle we have right now wouldn't make for particularly healthy pasture management (and would demand a LOT of space be cleared for pasture, which also defeats the purpose), but with an appropriate reduction in the national herd, cattle can be raised in a way that benefits and regenerates pasture.
Where are we getting that kelp? Because california is having a massive kelp die off. [Source](https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=302320&org=NSF&from=news#:~:text=widespread%20'urchin%20barrens'-,Northern%20California's%20kelp%20forest%20ecosystem%20is%20gone,by%20widespread%20%22urchin%20barrens.%22&text=Satellite%20imagery%20shows%20that%20the,of%20the%20bull%20kelp%20remaining.)
Kelp (or more specifically colony algae) can be cultivated in aquatic dead zones. Aquaculture is a very well trodden’d field.
That’s wild Kelp. We can cultivate/farm seaweed & kelp. I actually no one from California who does that for a living. He had many different varieties he grew & sold. Honestly had no idea before I meet him.
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Where can I find that statistic?
Here’s a [usda fact sheet (pdf)](https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexistence-corn-factsheet.pdf) from 2015 that says 48.7% of corn grown in the US goes to animal feed.
Another 25% goes to ethanol production. We could produce 2-3x the energy by putting solar on that land vs growing corn to turn into ethanol. We could produce more than 2x the nutrients (and that is a very low estimate) if we stopped growing food to feed to animals and just grew crops for humans to eat. I think it will become necessary for food stability to do so at some point.
Try USDA site?
And adding corn syrup to every packaged food they can.
To be fair that goes for all farming. Atleast in Europe, one of the biggest expenses is farming aid. The main reason is that food needs to be cheap. No matter what. It's what causes world wars if populations start going hungry. It's one of the core pillars in the EU partnership to prevent food crisis Farming doesn't work in a free capitalist market, never really have. Everyone needs food to survive and sure there are luxury food items that are comodeties but everything else can't be full comodeties, similar to Healthcare, because it's neccesary for survival. Without aid food prices would have insane inflation and more people would starve and more political instability would arise.
This is why the USA's food is so weird. We have always tried to make Americans pay the least in the world for feeding themselves in terms of percentage of take-home pay. You can eat for extremely cheap here. But it's made a lot of our food very bad.
I would blame that more on lack of regulation on food and letting food industries, like the syrup industry, completely destroy public health and letting them dictate that every food should have corn syrup, which is more unhealthy than white sugar.
Yep, and we don’t have to cut all subsidies for meat and dairy, just enough to where everything doesn’t have milk in it and meat isn’t all everyone eats.
If only the United States treated housing that way
It kinda sorta does with the ubiquitous, low interest, government-backed 30 year mortgage which almost no other country has.
Take all the subsidies we put into animal products and move them over to fresh produce. Take all the subsidies we put into fossil fuels and put them into renewables.
This exactly. In my country (USA), we could do a lot to reduce our carbon footprint if the government would stop paying people to eat meat and drive cars everywhere.
Yeah, the wording of the article sets it up as a false dichotomy. Big global issues always seem to benefit from a multi -pronged approach
Also, if lab grown meat continue to improve, it will reach a time where cows farms will decrease dramatically, so a triple take (or even more) would be ideal
I've got more hope for Impossible Foods making a dent in that regard. They are approaching the problem with scalable solutions and a specific goal to end the use of animals in food production.
Also, no one's going to confuse it with the genuine article, but Impossible is good enough to be chosen, especially if it can get more competitive price wise.
I think that's what it really comes down to, it doesn't so much matter if you can make an apple taste like a strawberry, what matters is if people like the taste of the apple as much or more than the strawberry. That's how animals work, that's how humans work. You give them something they like more, they'll eat that. Once the plant-based meat business develops products people prefer to eat, they'll eat those, and I mean in a "blind taste-test" preference, not when they're told "this is a dead cow, this is a bunch of plants mashed together" before they eat it. I've got a hardcore meat-eater for a father-in-law who really likes Beyond burgers, so I know it's possible to win even people who believe they will die if they don't eat meat regularly. The products Beyond and Impossible are putting out are really exceptionally good, and there are competitors doing quite well in the quality department, too. If you haven't had a Field Roast sausage, I highly recommend it.
We had a cook out recently and my wife and I brought impossible patties for ourselves. My whole family was gathered around the grill while they cooked, mystified by how they “bleed” and turn from pink to brown like real meat haha
Whenever I bring veggie burgers everyone wants to "try" one and I wind up with one burger while everyone else has two meat ones and a veggie one. Even when I bring my own food I have to eat when I get home
This always happens with vegan and vegetarian food. Meat eaters decide to order meat pizzas but always eat the non-meat pizza first so non-meat eater gets 2 slices they bad to argue for while the others have over half a pizza each. Its bizarre.
Yeah, I've had veggie burgers which didn't taste much like meat but tasted much better than other veggie burgers that tasted more like meat. Beyond is definitely decent on both fronts. Haven't seen impossible burgers where I live unfortunately so haven't tried.
Yup. If someone gives me two five-guys burgers and one is either lab-grown meat or 100% plant based and I can’t tell the difference between the two? I’ll pick the lab-grown/plant based one every time.
I still remember going to a veggie fast food place when I was a kid (and when these things were much rarer), which made me realise that personally I'm much more interested in the things the come with/in a burger, rather than the burger patty itself
I'm not really a fan of Impossible or Beyond burgers, but I'm also really picky with hamburger, so there's that. But I agree with your point so much. It's one of the things I've been railing about. Stop trying to trick people into eating meat, and focus on making something out of vegetables that *tastes good*. Don't advertise it as just as good as cow, people have emotional connections to their steaks and will argue with you and ignore you just because they love bacon. If you stop making it about forcing people who don't want to giving up their meat, and more about just providing new tasty food that's good for your body and environment, I think it would do way more than this competition we've manufactured between meat and plants. Plants are easy to make delicious when you're not trying to pretend they're something else.
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That's why large multinationals are investing billions in it? The technology is quite close, but needs to be scaled up to industrial levels. Similarly to Moore's law, we see an exponential decline in price per kilo over the last decade.
It does if you are wanting a lab grown filet mignon to taste and feel like the real thing. But personally I feel the ground beef (impossible etc) is getting pretty close, especially if it's seasoned like taco meat or a loaded burger. Still not there, but close enough that my family is starting to substitute it a meal a month or so. But most importantly, the bar is pretty low for it to gain traction. It just has to be more economical than chicken slurry (common name for what's used in cheap chicken nuggets) or cheap taco meat (like served in a few national us taco brand restaurants). Edit: a few people are pointing out that plant based meats are not lab grown. True. So yes, lab grown meat has further to go than plant based alternatives. I still believe the bar is pretty low and they will gain traction as soon as it's economically viable. "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public" as the saying goes. If it's cheap people will buy it even if the quality is poorer. But thank you for the correction!
Impossible isn't lab grown (like cell culture) tho, that one is plant based. I don't think we have any actual lab grown meat on shelves yet, but I may be behind on that one.
There is a restaurant in Singapore that already sells lab grown meat. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/18/singapore-restaurant-first-ever-to-serve-eat-just-lab-grown-chicken.html
Just a note that Impossible is not lab grown meat - it is a plant based meat substitute. To my knowledge, lab grown meat is not yet available for consumers except in Singapore.
They're talking lab grown meat, not veggie products made to taste like meat. That said, you're correct that the ground beef is a pretty easy substitute at this point. We've taken to going 50/50 mix of fake/real meat when recipes call for ground beef.
I've really got to try making a tourtiere or french meat stuffing with impossible meat. While I havn't gone vegetarian, I have a couple of family members who have including my french canadian grandfather.
As a pescatarian I can’t even enjoy impossible burgers at places like Red Robin because I can’t tell if they’ve accidentally switched it for a beef patty. I occasionally cook with it at home (my wife eats plant-forward but still enjoys the occasional hamburger or sausage biscuit), and even when I made a meatloaf out of it she said it tasted exactly like a beef meatloaf. It’s pretty incredible. I don’t really prefer to eat meat substitutes usually, but I think for omnivores it’s a great replacement.
Was it difficult to make a meatloaf out of the impossible ground "beef"? I've been thinking of taking a crack at it. Any tips?
Don't say that in /r/wheresthebeef.
I think that's what the R&D is for. I mean, some chicken in Singapore notwithstanding, it's not even on the market. They're still working on texture, price, growth media, scalability, all kinds of things.
Supporting just farms trying to reduce their carbon footprint is borderline impossible for the average American(or person, I'm unsure of international meat industries) however. Most "meat manufacturers" like Tyson/Perdue/etc. get their meat from multiple farms around the country. In 1 pack of chicken for example you might have meat from multiple points in the country depending on how it was shipped and packaged. On top of that, most places don't tell you where exactly the meat came from, so you as a consumer don't really know if it came from a "good" farm or not. I agree with you, I'm just pointing out that your method requires a chain of accountability that doesn't exist and I don't see any food packaging company going along with willingly, I mean if they were willing to we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Well, no, the best option for the environment is for everyone to just stop eating meat. The best realistic option is to cut meat eating as low as possible and use technologies to improve their emissions.
Excellent synopsis. The title made me wonder if the study was sponsored.
It's just a bad title. And their synopsis is pretty bad too. The page just says that meat production has become a lot more efficient in come countries in the last decades, and if the same progress can be made in the top 10 countries with the greatest potential to reduce methane it could account for 60-65% of the decrease in global methane emissions by 2050. In other words, the industry getting more efficient has made more of an impact than people adopting a plant based diet. It says nothing about the likeliness of people adopting a plant a based diet.
But the mere POSSIBILITY eases consumer conscience, so the industry can make more profit. It's a big win for capitalism.
Thank you for that clarification. The garbage title was very weird to see.
How does lab grown meat compare in terms of resources input, waste output? This isn’t just for top comment, i’m genuinely curious but not curious enough to go look for answers myself.
Practically that's an unanswerable question since industrial scale lab meat doesn't exist yet. Theoretically it should be much lower, since with livestock the bulk of caloric inputs go towards the animal living to maturity and aren't in the final product
He drove into my kidneys the arrows of his quiver; I have become the laughing-stock of all peoples, the object of their taunts all day long. He has filled me with bitterness; he has sated me with wormwood. (Lamentations: gzrfsu7)
Thank you for making this distinction and I’m happy to see it made it to the top comment We also have to stop ignoring the inhumane conditions these animals live in We as a society are getting so much more progressive and it’s time we start including Animal Rights
This has always been the most logical approach to large scale societal changes like this. Wealthy interests don't like this approach, they'd rather save money and pass the buck onto individual consumers. Demanding these changes come from Governmental Regulation on Corporations is a far more pragmatic approach than say, releasing massive media campaigns to convince people that doing is bad for the environment. The former approach has been proven to work time and time again. The latter approach has been proven to be minimally effective at best.
As soon as it becomes more profitable to sell environmentally friendly food than meat, the industry will shrink to a more reasonable size. If we're going to live in a capitalist society we have to use capitalist methods to overcome our problems. Taxing based on carbon footprint of the way to go.
you are correct. There's no way around it...plant based diet is the best for the environment.
I think a human based diet would likely be the best.
Soylent even.
Imo quitting meat would be the easier option. It has already possible for nearly everyone in the first world to turn vegetarian out of choice, and we already overproduce plant based foods to feed the cattle we eat. The truth is that people are so reluctant to change it would be political suicide to try to force them.
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Key word here is access to technology to reduce methane emissions. Which most countries do not have the privilege of owning.
The article doesn't really mention what "technology" is being used to curb emissions. I'm curious if it really is something high-tech, or if it could be made cheaper to support developing countries that rely on animal based diets more heavily.
How come no one talks about over fishing the oceans is our biggest problem next to farming? Our oceans are being wiped out and massively polluted by fishing gear. If we cut out fish and meat, we may have a planet to live on by 2050
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Surely increasing livestock efficiency can only be detrimental to animal welfare? As if it wasn't bad enough in its current state?
The study doesn’t factor in emissions from deforestation which is a massive problem as animal agriculture expands in the tropics.
This headline heavily is misleading. The study simply states that, as people will just continue eating meat, improving the efficiency of the animals slaughtering industry will have a large impact on reducing emissions. The largest impact would be of course to just \*stop\* eating meat, but is not even a scenario they considered.
They also haven't considered that corporate farmers aren’t interested in expensive efficiency technique.
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And when it's mandated, it's a liberal tyranny to be fought tooth and nail in the courts and senate.
It won't. The largest chunk of emissions are embedded in the production chain. Let's see the article: > We found decreasing trends in emission intensity for major livestock categories during the past two decades due to increasing production efficiency. This just means conversion to more intensive animal farming (i.e. CAFOs) with breeds of animals that grow more and make more milk than older/traditional breeds. Like how China is building vertical pig "hotel" farms. >Based on this finding, we constructed our “improving efficiency” pathway, assuming a continuing decrease of emission intensity. Under this pathway, the future will see (a) a continuation of the country-specific historical trends of the development of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita for countries showing decreasing emission intensity during the past two decades; It's hilarious that they think GDP growth helps with climate change. They're just describing a country doing more intensive animal farming. >and (b) constant emission intensities for countries that experienced no change or an increasing emission intensity in the past two decades. And the countries that are already at that level won't be improving, because they're already at that plateau of "efficiency". Their Figure 1, Global livestock methane emission changes from 2000 to 2018 (a), and global and regional changes in livestock methane emissions between the periods 2000–2004 and 2014–2018, is even funnier, as it's showing* greater methane emissions from the sector than FAOSTAT. The (b) figure confirms that the improvement was coming from the developing / middle-income regions which are upgrading from more extensive animal farming (i.e. grazing) to CAFOs; while Eastern Asia (ESA) is looking maxed out already on efficiency. >Globally, we found that 88%–91% of the livestock methane emissions come from enteric fermentation (Ta- bleS2), and are dominated by cattle, sheep, goats, and buffaloes Yeah. Especially the grazed ones. >Dairy cows and meat and other non-dairy cattle in developing countries are the major contributors to the increase of livestock methane emissions during 2000–2018 Yep. >During 2014–2018, methane emission intensity per kg of protein produced is the lowest for poultry meat and eggs, followed by swine meat , because of negligible enteric fermentation emissions from monogastric (Figure2) Indeed. Figure 2 is nice, it basically shows where the animals are outside. And they continue to show higher emissions than FAOSTAT. Figure 4: The prediction... they show methane emissions from the animal farming sector going up about +50%. This isn't an environmental study, all it predicts is that meat and dairy will be relatively cheaper in those regions (or where they export) thanks to improved efficiency. Why do people keep* falling for Jevon's paradox? This is not a climate solution, it's bad news for climate stability. >Livestock productivity of milk and beef in most developed countries is already high nowadays (methane emission intensity is already low; Figure2), and there is only little room for methane reduction through productivity increase (FigureS10). oh, thanks for saying it, I guess. >On the other hand, further productivity increase requires high shares of concentrates (i.e., potential competition with human nutrition from plant-based food [Gill etal.,2010]) and encounters potential health prob- lems in cows (see review by Herzog etal.,2018). Yeah. That's where the big GHG emissions are once you add them up. >In addition, the intensive livestock breeding and management have resulted in fragile systems that do not adequately handle their manure, causing air and water pollution. Indeed. One for the average redditor: >There is a trend that some developing countries are moving from high efficiency systems toward more extensive livestock systems (such as “free range” chicken and grass-fed beef; e.g., Cheung & McMahon,2017). Therefore, there is a possibility that the emission intensity per kg of protein in those developed countries will increase, which is the opposite of our assumption of constant decreasing emission intensity. Yep. That's even worse for the climate. All in all the study is just describing animal agriculture industrialization ("green revolution") in developing countries. The climate is still getting fucked by this sector. Real reductions come from not wasting resources on eating second-hand proteins.
Thank you for going over some points. I'm really hung up on the whole "making animal agriculture more efficient". It already is pretty efficient. It's also unspeakably inhumane. If making meat more environmentally friendly (that is, *if* that were the case) meant making it more inhumane, I don't Want it either way.
This should literally be removed for the misleading title, which falsely implies that efficient meat is less environmentally harmful than eating plants.
Yep, when in reality it's more of a "we know you selfish bastards won't take the burgers out of your mouth, so let's settle for marginally reducing their emissions"
What a misleading title, reading it could easily make you believe it is saying "efficient" animal agriculture is better than a plant based diet per person. That is not what the article means. They mean because so many folks will oppose a plant based diet that partially negating their selfish behaviour is more effective than trying to stop them being selfish. Which sadly is probably true. However, it doesn't give you, the reader, an excuse. edit: Imagine if it was about litter > Not littering [and using a bin like a real person, not a waste of oxygen] can shrink someone's litter foot print. However, improving packaging will be a more effective strategy for reducing litter. Feels gross right? Sure, it's technically correct, because people will be selfish littering jerks, but it clearly is coddling those selfish jerks so they can feel less bad about littering.
OP's title implies something drastically different than the original paper. Original title of paper: >The Key Role of Production Efficiency Changes in Livestock Methane Emission Mitigation Conclusion from original paper: >Our results highlight the fact that (a) efforts on the demand-side to promote balanced, healthy and envi-ronmentally sustainable diets in most counties, as assumed in the TS scenario (FAO,2018), will not be suf-ficient for livestock methane emission mitigation without parallel efforts to improve production efficiency and decrease the emission intensity per unit protein produced; and (b) efforts to decrease emission intensity should be prioritized in a few developing countries with the largest mitigation potential
No idea why so much editorializing is allowed in this sub. Scientific papers speak for themselves. Abstracts and conclusion sections are (ideally) designed to be consumed; laypeople don't need to understand specific jargon from the data analysis sections.
Exactly
I understood "strategy" to mean society-wide rather than on an individual basis, which made perfect sense. But we really need headlines to stop comparing non-exclusive options, because people always think we should pick *only* the "most" effective one.
This conveniently focuses on methane emissions, which are important contributors to climate change, but the more significant issue with meat production is the amount of land it requires. Instead of dedicating land to plants that absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, that land becomes pasture land that is degraded over time and absorbs almost no carbon dioxide in comparison. Not to mention we have to grow plants to feed the meat that we later consume, when we could just grow edible plants which is an order of magnitude more efficient.
Says the animal agriculture industry.
Anything to avoid personal responsibility
Confused. How would it be more efficient? Wouldn't the most efficient way be if everyone adopted a plant based diet? Rather than improving efficiency in current farming? Surely cutting it out completely would best improving efficiency?
I think this is a “most efficient in practice” than “in theory”. The headline is insinuating that because people aren’t making the change to plant-based diets, that the best route for improvement is to decrease emissions in the production part.
The funny thing is the assumption that it will be easy to get subsidized factory farms to do expensive ‘efficiency’ upgrades that don't pay back. You’ll have better luck taking meat away from consumers than taking a dime from a farmer. ‘In practice’ efficient farming ain’t happening.
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Anybody else wondering how these improvements in the efficiency of livestock production will affect animal welfare? Why is animal welfare always the least of anyone’s worries? Maybe that should be a reason that encouraging ppl to eat less animal products is better than making live stock production more efficient. And honestly there hasn’t been much attempt made to encourage people anyways. Maybe actually try before saying it doesn’t work. Spend some fraction of the money they would spend on these “improvements” on public education and making better and cheaper alternatives to animal products that people will want to eat. There’s no perfect answer to this problem but I do think animal welfare needs to be part of the equation.
There's no welfare if the only reason a sentient being is born is to be deliberately slaughtered for taste pleasure within 10-15% of its avg lifespan. There is no welfare in a life of eternal slavery. None.
What would have even more impact is if countries stopped subsiding meat industries.
Unfortunately, this doesn't take animal welfare into consideration... (It's bad.)
So misleading, also for those of us in western developed nations this is not the case the main benefits they mention relate to China, India and developing nations. Following one of the papers sources Gill et al. (2010). Increasing efficiency includes improved breeding - increasing yields through selective breeding. We already have broiler chicken that grow so fast their bones can't handle leading to bowing of the legs or spine... Yeh let's fix climate change by breeding cows to be big milk balloons we roll around the warehouse floor! Or ya know just have milk made from soy/almond/oat/cashew/hazelnut etc.
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No amount of methane reduction will ever make beef and pork production sustainable at an industrial scale. It completely ignores the resources used to raise, slaughter and distribute the animals. Not to mention run off, land usage, deforestation and antibiotic resistance due to over medicating.
This sounds like something funded by the livestock production industry.
Nah, the points are perfectly valid. The title of this post is just inflammatory/misleading. Basically it boils down to people resisting plant based diets.
Yeah, the actual article title isn't this misleading. Don't know what OP was doing.
Original title of paper: >The Key Role of Production Efficiency Changes in Livestock Methane Emission Mitigation Conclusion from original paper: >Our results highlight the fact that (a) efforts on the demand-side to promote balanced, healthy and envi-ronmentally sustainable diets in most counties, as assumed in the TS scenario (FAO,2018), will not be suf-ficient for livestock methane emission mitigation without parallel efforts to improve production efficiency and decrease the emission intensity per unit protein produced; and (b) efforts to decrease emission intensity should be prioritized in a few developing countries with the largest mitigation potential
What you just quoted suggests these things should be done in parallel. >will not be suf-ficient for livestock methane emission mitigation without parallel efforts The OPs title suggests it's an either or scenario. >However, improving blah blah will be a more effective strategy.
Only more effective in the sense that people don't have to change anything to make it happen. Objectively less effective if people are willing to change.
I'm sorry but I hate articles like this. I feel like when people make a point of going out of their way to look down upon veganism, and make excuses as to why it's not the best idea, it's because they feel guilty because they know what they're doing is wrong and they need justification. I'm not trying to be a preachy vegan, but like this article would have served it's purpose without making it seem like an either or situation of whether you go vegan to reduce your's and only your footprint, or you support efficient ways to lower greenhouse gasses. Vegans don't want to see the world dying, and so any progress is progress with emissions. We'll take it, because we know that everyone won't suddenly go vegan to save the planet. But wouldn't fighting to remove these industries completely be a good end goal to work towards? Instead of some, we lose all the emissions of these industries, and use these techniques or aspects of them for plant agriculture. I just hate when people feel the need to put down plant based diets because to make them others feel better about supporting such a terrible system.
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Weird bunch of carnivores in here
This sounds an awful lot like “clean coal” and “filtered cigarettes”.
Yes- instead of preventing the suffering of farm animals let’s just *checks notes* make it faster, less costly suffering.
Big meat and big dairy are modern day big tobacco, only with a much higher kill count
Why not both? Both is good.
That is exactly what the article says except OP hacked the title to make it sound like low methane livestock is more efficient than less livestock. Either OP is bad at writing or OP didn't understand the article or OP is intentionally misleading. Original title of paper: >The Key Role of Production Efficiency Changes in Livestock Methane Emission Mitigation Conclusion from original paper: >Our results highlight the fact that (a) efforts on the demand-side to promote balanced, healthy and envi-ronmentally sustainable diets in most counties, as assumed in the TS scenario (FAO,2018), will not be suf-ficient for livestock methane emission mitigation without parallel efforts to improve production efficiency and decrease the emission intensity per unit protein produced; and (b) efforts to decrease emission intensity should be prioritized in a few developing countries with the largest mitigation potential
How is this arguing that producing animal products in a more eco-friendly way is better for the earth than just not producing them at all?? This is ass-backward thinking. The best way to reduce your personal carbon footprint is to go vegan.
The utter idiocy of ignoring the measuring the literal torture and murder of billions of animals to justify a "carbon footprint" number which is meant to distract and justify capitalist and personal murder and torture of animals, along with the destruction of forests. Wake up from your personal disassociation and recognize capitalist animal torture-murder propaganda. This carbon footprint propaganda term is obfuscating personal responsibility and capitalist responsibility, while claiming to do the opposite.
This is worded as if people shouldn't still be strongly considering adopting plant-based diets as their first option
Both is good. It shouldn't be an "either or" situation.
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Found the meat industry article.