Plowing pasture-land to grow soybeans is likely to reduce bio-diversity even more than running cattle on that land. A lot of pasture land is marginal land where a plow is very destructive, and is often a lot closer to the pre-human ecology where the land was grazed by large mammals.

Your primary point still stands -- eating tofu likely has a lower ecological impact than eating beef, but the trade-off isn't obvious, and second order effects can be significant.

If you stop grazing cattle on land, the owner of that land is going to find another use for the land to profit from it. Some of those uses are going to be better for bio-diversity, some are going to be worse. It's highly unlikely to become parkland.

So will going vegan reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase bio-diversity? Probably, but not certainly. This uncertainty shouldn't dissuade people from acting on "probably" though.

I would say it’s important to emphasize people don’t need to go complete vegan. Reducing consumption of animal products can be more realistic for most people.

> As omnivores above the poverty line, we can all make conscious and conscientious choices about what we eat.

This being a forum of mostly tech workers, many of us can afford to choose more sustainable animal products and support agriculture that promotes biodiversity and carbon sequestration too. If you don't want to give animal products up, then look for sources that engage in regenerative agriculture practices. They tend to be the most humane ways to raise animals as well.

In the end, demand for meat, eggs, and dairy is never going to disappear. Maybe someday lab grown alternatives can be molecularly and structurally equivalent. But until then the most effective change we can make collectively is to change government incentives to farmers so they choose better practices.

Please provide the research that say that going vegan is one of the most effective ways to combat global warming.

According to a Swedish study publish a few years ago (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541), going vegan is mid-tier in combating global warming. Who you buy your electric from has a larger impact on the environment than going Vegan, as does if/what car you own and naturally what kind of trips and vacations you do. A single trip with an airplane can have a bigger impact on global warming than all the meat they eat through their whole life.

A lot of vegans eat fake meat and dairy which shares many of the environmental problems of meat, such as needing a lot of inputs so a lot of plant material relative to the final product.. It also adds energy use, transport, packaging etc.

There are also environmentally beneficial meats. So much so that when rewilding we sometimes need to add the same animals back (as is happening in Scotland - rewilders are breeding cattle that look like wild ones to make it "natural"). In the UK you can buy venison from wild animals that need to be culled to to preserve the environment.

This is bullshit. The vast majority of CO2 is created by energy production.

The problem is systemic and blaming other people for their lifestyle choices is neither effective nor helpful and just leads to further division. It's exactly this sort of division that helps fossil companies to destroy the planet and keep making money.

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Vegans have never and will never appreciably reduced global emissions.

Global meat production is only increasing.

You're delusional with main character syndrome?

Give it a couple decades. Most 'vegans' stop being vegan well before that. I'll let you Google why they do.

Take a look to a soybean plantation for example, biodiversity totally destroyed. Also, are you doing a physical main work?

But someone still has to eat up all those cows before their methane mucks up the environment.

And if you're not willing to do your part, that just means the rest of us have to pull double duty.

I never understood this argument. With Oil & Gas you release green house gases that have been sealed away back into the air.

For methane produced by farming all components remain in a cycle. Everything released by animals eventually finds its way back to plants, which get eaten, which become exhaust of animals, etc.

This sounds to me more like a spin by big oil to finger point at another industry.

>Yes in the long run that matters, but its all the more reason that we should reduce animal agriculture right away as the payback is much faster than limiting Co2.

The long run is the thing that really matters. A faster payback only serves to cover the impact of those that want to keep pumping up oil and gas in the meantime(also to make synthetic fertiliser) for a few decades. It shifts focus from that on cow farts. As if the rotting plant matter and wild animal life that could replace it didn't emit any methane.

What percentage of anthropogenic methane emissions can be attributed to cow farts?

I would hazard a guess that the incidental methane emissions from one gas extraction field would astronomically dwarf the emissions from cow farts.

methane has less ir absorption than co2 and (as you said) a shorter half life.

No, we slaughter that many each year.

And maximize how they're fed in the last months of their lives in feedlots.

They were certainly not killing 30 million bison each year.

The only answer here is less meat production, especially feedlot-finished, no matter how people try to twist it.

I make this point and several more here, with some emissions figures: https://map.simonsarris.com/p/veganism-and-moral-intuitions

The ecology of it, including emissions, isn't really that bad if you're American. We're very efficient at beef production. It's really the global south that's most of the novel emissions, and that's mostly from counting land-use changes.

You're really close to figuring out that natural equilibriums and man made abominations have nothing in common even when the numbers look the same

I think the problem is how we keep the cattle.

In natural environment, they cohabitant with other animals. They migrates.

When we farm them, we remove anything not our primary product.

Yes and doing regenerative practices all the way to the end would naturally force this reduction in consumption. It would be really good, because the land used to grow feed could be redirected to other more efficient uses.

There is quite a bit in between too. Grass vs grain fed cattle, for example.

How about regenerative economics? I hate it.

And which do the vast majority consume because that is the only one satisfying industrial scale consumption needs?

That's a drop in the bucket

Total insect mass dropped by 70% in Europe in 30 years, no insects = no pollination, no pollination = no flower = real mass scale extinction of pretty much everything that lives on earth since 80%+ of plants need pollinators.

"Efficiency and ROI" can be applied to financial but also to environmental impact. Producing more with less [land use/fertilizer/water use] is also a form of efficiency, and it's good, but it requires vast capital that mom & pop farms don't have + strong government incentives. De-scaling is only an agrarian nostalgia fantasy, it's incompatible with reaching climate goals.

Managed grazing along with other regenerative techniques can sequester carbon in the soil. Factory farms have the problem of concentrated dung disposal which usually leads to letting it sit in methane producing conditions and also feed for intensive operations usually comes from non-regenerative crop farming which uses more fossil-fuel fertilizer and depletes the soil.

It's far easier do avoid producing so much meat. A vegetarian diet is perfectly healthy.

Stockyards are the worst offenders. This is due to how the dung is processed, which releases a lot of methane. Grass-fed cattle have much lower net emissions of greenhouse gasses.

I despair. Is it that hard for us to imagine eating less meat?

> Even on a site like HN, where rational and logical thinking is held in high esteem

That is until people are faced with stuff like this :D. Then emotions take over.

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

The rational and logical is mostly an aesthetic preference, not lived value.

HN leans strongly reactionary and just likes to dress it up a bit so as to appear more respectable.

Food needs to provide more than calories. Do the same comparison per gram of protein.

Indeed, that's the same answer when topics like public surveillance or dependency-inducing media are debated. It's difficult to criticize a problem, when you're a part of the problem, respectively paid to be the problem.

Ok but like, where do you get your protein? I'm sorry but bacon is tasty and I want to eat it.

/s

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Yes we can ... but most of us (including me) don't want to. (At least not completely)

you can, but you can also just reduce it, you can eat say half the meat/milk. Eat more vegetables and grains. Not only massively reduces the impact but pretty good for your body too

Genuine question, can you explain why we can't?

Theres a billion or so Indians that might suggest otherwise

I am not vegan, but I found dropping beef and lamb to be literally the easiest modification to my life possible. Dropping dairy is much harder, but as I am now discovering still incredibly easy to reduce.

You can eat bugs

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Everyone apart from a few stragglers agree the climate is changing. Most people agree the world won’t change its behaviour on its own to stop that.

So we can thus incentivise change (things like renewables being far cheaper than fossil fuel) globally, and adapt to reality.

There are a vocal minority whining about how we need to stop eating beef or milk annd stop using energy and there are those who make beef and milk more sustainable and make generating energy sustainable. I have time for the latter. The former can go hand out with the coal rollers.

Okay lets get this straight, animals do not contribute to global warming. The co2 they emit has been taken from the atmosphere from plants.

Methane breaks down to Co2 in the atmosphere on average in 9.6 years.

Animal rearing does not permanently affect the climate.

Increasing stock sizes does increase the methane level equilibrium but there are mitigations to this, there are additives to feed that can reduce methane emissions to 1%. Last I checked a few years ago, there were pilot programs to determine effects on animal welfare and product quality.

The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.

FWIW, no matter the issue, this kind of tone makes me close up for any rational arguments. I wish I could look past it, but I just can't.

Beef specifically. If everybody switched to pork, chicken and fish that would mitigate most of this and it's a much more realistic ask.

I would much rather have Europe install ACs instead. Stopping meat, not installing ACs, degrowth all look like masochistic ways to show that we are repenting.

It will be flagged because of the manipulative headline.

The miracle would be to read the article which states the biodiversity damage is 14 times higher per calorie than plant-sourced foods. Which means you could reduce the 40% to 2-3% if you would replace it totally.

You think cows are the only animals that require food production from farms?

What does that mean?