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0 pointssimonh7y ago0 comments

It’s great advice because it’s a tangible change individuals can make immediately. There is very little we can individually do about the 100 companies, or do at all in the short term. This problem will need to be tackled on multiple fronts simultaneously. Advising people not to do something that could make a real difference doesn’t seem particularly helpful.

I’m fed up reading comments along the lines of ‘we shouldn’t try to solve this problem, because we should be solving this other problem instead’. In every case I’ve seen this argument, there’s absolutely no constraint at all preventing us from doing both.

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keymone7y ago· 7 in thread

The advice may not be as great. Amount of land and water needed to grow crops that sufficiently replace nutrition provided by meat may be worse for climate change than just eating meat. Obviously that only applies to grass-fed cattle. I don’t have a source right now, but the choice is not as obvious as many think.

jaxr7y ago

The efficiency of converting plant based protein into animal protein to feed that to humans is very low [1]. A huge portion of the crops are actually used to feed cattle. If humans stopped eating meat tomorrow, we would have plenty of food (we'd better start eating a lot more soy, though)

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...

bitexploder7y ago

I’ll pass on the phytoestrogens, though. This doesn’t really address the fact that there are ways to still eat meat but minimize the greenhouse effects. For example, chicken and pork is dramatically less directly impactful than beef. There is still the feed efficiency problem, but America’s love of red meat is a better place to start than no meat at all.

https://timeforchange.org/are-cows-cause-of-global-warming-m...

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keymone7y ago

Cattle doesn’t convert plant based protein into animal protein. Also cattle eats crop that humans can’t eat and which grows in significantly more tough conditions than those required for crops used as feed.

Eating lots of soy is not healthy.

It’s a very weird and unconvincing argument on your part, to suggest humans should just start eating crops fed to cattle and that would somehow work in terms of sufficiently healthy and available nutrition as well as being net positive on climate change.

Cattle eats grass which grows everywhere in the world and cattle produces vastly healthier and nutritious profile of fat, protein, vitamins and other essential nutrients than what you could achieve by growing human edible crops for similar price. Sure you can achieve good nutrition with other expensive vegetables but that’s not what will happen if humans stop eating cattle. Let’s be realistic.

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perfunctory7y ago

> Obviously that only applies to grass-fed cattle.

There is simply not enough land to replace all meat supply with grass-fed cattle meat. So if we all want to eat meat from grass-fed cattle only, that would mean exactly radical reduction in meat consumption.

keymone7y ago

There is not enough land to produce equal amount of meat at the same price point. There is plenty land to produce enough more expensive meat. Which also reduces meat consumption. It’s a win all around.

jeremyjh7y ago

Isn’t most cattle fed grain?

keymone7y ago

Yes it is, which is the main issue because apart from impact on land, corn-fed cows do excrete(?) more methane than grass-fed.

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