
Going Vegan Won’t Save the Planet - mancerayder
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-10/climate-change-meatless-diets-alone-won-t-reverse-damage
======
vfc1
> farms growing crops have been just as destructive as those raising animals

This comparison does not make sense. What this reporter and the public, in
general, fail to realize still in 2019, is that most of the farms producing
crops are doing so to produce cattle feed.

The majority of agricultural fields are planted to feed livestock, not humans.
Only a relatively small amount of crops goes directly to humans.

This is why eating plants directly is much less wasteful and more resource-
efficient. If more people eat plant-based, much less land will be needed for
crops, that's the point.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Farms grow crops that you can't eat, to feed to animals that you can.

Name the protein and fat sources that will replace meat. Tofu? We already grow
soy for animal feed as a cash crop and it's pesticide and fertilizer
intensive, and if people eat it directly instead of as an animal feed additive
its production will grow at the expense of forests and soil health.

Nuts? I'm all for perennial woody agriculture, but the calorie/acre ratio is
not great, and they are labour intensive for picking, netting, processing. I
say this as a person who has an orchard of my own with hazelnuts and chestnuts
in it.

The reality is that should meat be gone, we'd have to replace it with other
foods, grown on a mass scale on agricultural lands. Animals can graze on
products (grass, hay, soy, dent corn) that are marginal or useless for human
consumption, and turn it into high protein, high fat calorie rich food.

There are populations that eat primarily vegetarian, but mostly they are also
heavy on the dairy. But the moment you bring dairy into the equation you're
also bringing in non-productive male calves -- in other words, veal. Similar
story for eggs.

What we need to be doing -- along with reducing meat consumption some -- is
coming up with more ecological ways to raise meats, and diversifying our meat
products. Raising insects as feed stock for chickens, for example. Increasing
perennial woody agriculture instead of cash crops, with small scale grazing of
meat and dairy animals inbetween rows.

Cutting animals out entirely actually leads to a nutrient deficiency. The
classic pre-green revolution family farm forms a kind of nutritive circle with
manure, grazing, and rooting being an important part of soil health and
maintenance. That didn't scale out in the last 100 years, but it's a model we
need to look at.

EDIT: wow, the downvotes. Go vegans go!

~~~
baxtr
How much protein do you think a normal person needs? Valter Longo recommends
_".31 to 0.36 grams per pound of body weight). That comes to 40 to 47 grams of
proteins per day for a person weighing 130 pounds, and 60 to 70 grams of
protein per day for someone weighing 200 to 220 pounds."_ Why would you really
_need_ meat at all if those numbers are correct?

[https://valterlongo.com/daily-longevity-diet-for-
adults/](https://valterlongo.com/daily-longevity-diet-for-adults/)

~~~
mancerayder
Normal person?

What about abnormal athletes, or people who do weight training?

How many peas are required if you want both a calorie surplus and 1 to 1.5
grams of protein per lb of body weight?

~~~
sprflyprgrmrguy
Seems to be 4g of protein per 85g (1/2cup) of peas. I weight ~72 kg (~160lb);
recommendation is 1.5-2g of protein per kg, so I'd need 142g of protein per
day on the high end, which equates to roughly 3017.5g, 71 cups, of peas daily.

Frozen walmart sweet peas are .84c per bag, each bag contain 4 servings,
roughly $7.45 in peas per day.

For comparison, chicken breast @ 100g (3.5oz or .45 lb) is 31g of protein. I'd
need 458g of chicken breast, around 2.25lbs. I can get it for $1.99/lb, but
the better quality stuff is $6.99/lb, so $4.48 to $15.72/day. When I'm eating
to put on muscle I buy the cheap crap and slow cook it and toss hot sauce on
it.

Lentils are a better choice than peas, you'd probably need half as much. I'd
rather eat chicken than copious amounts of a plant alternative, but I have
started eating more lentils b/c they're not at all as bad as I thought they'd
be. I hate peas though.

~~~
davidivadavid
I'm not sure how realistic eating 3kg of peas per day is. People would just
get bored real fast, if they even manage to ingest that volume of food.

~~~
sprflyprgrmrguy
it would be awful. carbs are 11g per serving, I can't imagine how crappy you'd
feel eating 71 cups of peas in a day.

------
kmnns
> Undoing this damage [...] includes less meat, less intensive and more
> intelligent farming, and the application of new technologies, including ways
> to produce high volumes of food for cities.

So “going vegan won’t save the planet” by itself, but it plays a major role in
doing so. Makes sense, especially if one considers that the production of meat
presupposes the production of plant-based fodder worth about 10 times the
energy.

The title is misleading, or simply clickbait. Then again, it helps tricking
your meat-loving friends into clicking on it...

~~~
wtmt
> The title is misleading, or simply clickbait. Then again, it helps tricking
> your meat-loving friends into clicking on it...

I’d rephrase the latter part as “it helps tricking your meat-loving friends
into sharing it without reading or analyzing what’s true”. Most other places
on the web don’t get into value or fact based arguments.

------
tekstar
Okay article, terrible headline.

No single action in isolation will save the world from climate collapse. The
problem stems from countless actions taking place today that do not pay for
the external cost of emitting carbon into the atmosphere. The defeatist
attitude that something should not be done because it doesn't solve the entire
problem need to stop in order for us to begin to make progress.

------
falcolas
I'm going to say something very unpopular:

If your plan to save the world includes requiring all 9 billion people to
fundamentally change their lives (especially if its perceived as a degradation
of their current quality of life), it's never going to work.

Now I'll speak for myself. I will not go vegan, given the current offering of
vegan foodstuffs. It just doesn't taste as good. I know it may be better for
me than my current diet, and I know it could help decrease my overall carbon
footprint. I still have no plans to do it.

Perhaps it makes me greedy. Perhaps it makes me an asshole in the eyes of the
next 20 or so generations. But I look at it in the larger context - the ship
has sailed, our course towards permanent (on a human scale) climate change was
set by the industrial revolution and the speed set to flank by global
increases to our quality of life.

So yeah, I frankly refuse to permanently sacrifice my quality of life to have
no effect on the future.

~~~
vzidex
Current generation here (I'm 20). There's a lot of steps you can take without
decreasing your quality of life - is that cut of steak _really_ that important
to your quality of life?

If, aware of the problem of climate change AND of the solutions, you choose to
do nothing then you won't just be an asshole in the eyes of the next 20
generations, you're an asshole in the eyes of my generation too.

~~~
falcolas
It's not just steak. It's tacos, hamburgers, roasted (or friend) turkey, pork
chops, ham, BLTs, chicken tenders, milk, cheese, lattes, milk chocolate, white
bread, clam chowder (any chowder for that matter), sushi... The list of non-
vegan foods is quite long.

> you're an asshole in the eyes of my generation too.

I'm willing to accept that. The hate of a group of anonymous people is
something I have no problems with.

------
663e1b
>Undoing this damage, while also managing to feed the nearly 10 billion people
expected to populate the earth by 2050, is going to require lots of ideas
integrated together.

Back of the envelope calculation: The global cattle population is around 1.5
billion. A cow eats between 8 and 16 Mcals per day, which is roughly 4-8 times
what is recommended for an average adult (2 Mcals). If we diverted all those
calories to humans we could feed 6-12 billion of them (neglecting protein,
vitamin and mineral content).

~~~
bryanlarsen
Those calories are the way the world handles crop failures.

Let's assume that normally 2/3 of the grain calories are fed to livestock.
Then we get a massive crop failure and global yields are 1/3 of expected.
Price of grain goes up, farmers can't afford to feed their cattle so slaughter
their breeding stock and the price of meat goes down. In the short term meat
consumption goes up to counter-act the loss of grain calories due to the
failure. In the medium term the smaller amount of livestock eating grain means
humans eat a higher percentage of the grain grown. In the long term it's a new
harvest and cycles repeat...

------
ma2rten
I am wondering if there will really be a clever technical solution to climate
change. Maybe we just need to come to terms with the fact that we have been
living drastically above our means and we need to adjust our standard of
living accordingly.

~~~
spodek
Having written patents and helped build a satellite now in orbit, I wondered
about clever technical solutions until I finally concluded what many had long
before me: the belief and hope for and implementations of clever technical
solutions _cause_ our environmental problems.

Take electric cars. If their greater efficiency makes them a green solution
then the Watt steam engine's greater efficiency should have made it one of the
greatest sustainability solutions of all time.

On the contrary, it's the poster child of the industrial revolution. Each use
used less coal, but overall coal use went up. Increasing efficiency is
orthogonal to lowering total waste.

Making a polluting system more efficient pollutes more efficiently. Everyone
who isn't an economist can see the results of our world: more efficient than
ever and creating more total waste than ever.

Changing a system's goals, say from growth to enjoying what we have and from
externalizing costs to stewardship, will change its outcomes.

------
wysifnwyg
Electricity, transportation, and manufacturing add up to about 80% of all GHG
emissions. If you want your diet choice to have the biggest impact purchase
locally produced and unprocessed foods.

~~~
NickBusey
I don't doubt this is true in the least, but do you have a source I could
provide to others?

~~~
wysifnwyg
[https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-
emis...](https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions)

~~~
NickBusey
Hmm interesting, thanks. That is all GHG emissions though. I wonder if there
are numbers around buying produce or meat at the store, how much of the GHG
emissions tied to that product are agricultural vs the packaging,
transportation, etc.

In other words, how big of a difference does 'buying local' have when buying
food? Just wondering aloud, not necessarily asking anyone in particular.

~~~
wysifnwyg
I use to have the sources somewhere but I'm not finding them at the moment. So
let's just do this as a mind exercise.

Take into consideration that while ships are tremendously more efficient, they
travel significantly more miles. When comparing a single shipping container, a
cargo ship burns 0.3 gallons of bunker fuel per hour and a semi truck burns 10
gallons of diesel. If you add distance into the calculation, a cargo ship from
Brazil to NYC takes 122 gallons of bunker fuel while something produced
locally takes 1/12 of that in diesel. Further more, bunker fuel exceptionally
worse than diesel when comparing emissions.

This is just for the transport side of things too. The electricity production
in many other countries produce an increased amount of green house gasses
compared to the United States.

------
kgraves
Can't we just eat both? I eat vegan, vegetarian and meat dishes in moderation,
and my health has never been better.

------
JoshMnem
Going vegan isn't the only option. Humans need to give more consideration to
edible insects. (seriously)

See the history of eating lobsters for an example of how attitudes can change.

~~~
biztos
> See the history of eating lobsters[0]

Also, see lobsters themselves and ask why we are so freaked out about eating
bugs.

Of course some people will refuse to eat both bugs and lobsters for the same
religious reasons.[1]

[0]:
[https://oceanpointinn.com/blog/?p=74](https://oceanpointinn.com/blog/?p=74)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Islamic_and_Jewi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Islamic_and_Jewish_dietary_laws)

------
etxm
Honest question: of all of the things people can do to make the world greener,
why is it mostly (a subset) of vegans that look down their nose at other
people?

You don’t see people driving electric cars pulling up at red lighted and
giving people shit for driving an SUV

People in middle America don’t come into your city and shit on you for how far
food has to drive to get to your ass.

People that grow their own food aren’t protesting your grocery stores.

Chill out.

------
bjourne
IIUC, someone who flies to far away vacation destinations, drives a car and
eats meat will reduce their carbon footprint the most by becoming a
vegetarian. Myself I'd like to become a vegetarian because I eat too much meat
and it's something I feel a little guilty about. But it's hard. And I'm lazy.

------
reureu
Obviously one solution isn't going to solve the problem, but we'd get a lot
further if the single solution people adopted was eating less/no meat instead
of (say) not using plastic straws.

------
gaara87
I'm very curious about lab grown meat how it'll change the balance of the
arguments posed here.

Any chance, any of the readers here are researching on it actively?

------
Djvacto
The article title is obviously click-bait-y.

I don't disagree with any of the technological solutions discussed: I think
vertical farming seems neat, and hopefully promising, and I believe local
farming with special care given to rotating crops and maintaining soil health
is also important.

Given that I personally eat eggs and honey on a semi-regular basis, and am not
fully vegan like my wife, I also agree with the idea of buying local eggs. But
the article's actual contents do very little to support the title, since
everyone knows no one thing is going to save the planet.

TL;DR Not just one change is going to magically save the planet, but let me
take this technicality as a chance to call out veganism for more clicks.

------
corliss78
Going vegan is missing the point. There are too many people on this planet,
period. Im not going to eat an unhealthy diet just so we can squeeze 3 billion
more consumers into the economy. We need reproductive freedom and education in
any countries that are above replacement rate.

~~~
ainiriand
Please, educate yourself before coming here to say things like that. Do
yourself this favour.

