101–110 of 143 posts
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Care to provide a source to back up that claim? If you read the article and associated sources you'd find a stack of scientific evidence to confirm that it has quite a large impact.
http://www.infohow.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Greenhouse... Edit: Downvoted for providing data? A new low.
It is not as simply to reduce climate impact based on what you eat. The data this article use is based on averages, and as in every industry the lowest standard it drastically different from the top and carry more quantity. On the very top you got meat produced that actively helps the environment. Highland cattle that keeps national reservations open comes to mind. There is also overpopulated and invasive species. At…
Meat is almost perfectly substitutable. So going out of your way to ensure that the beef you eat has low carbon impact isn't really doing much good. All you're doing is ensuring that somebody else won't eat the beef you bought and will eat something with higher carbon impact instead. Where it does matter is when you choose not to eat meat. Less demand for beef means less beef raised, but which cattle are they going t…
The high carbon beef is basically all import here in Sweden, and there is no deforestation issue from farming. From a environmental perspective we actually need more open fields to maintain bio diversity.
When climate aware people stop buying beef the ratio of imported beef increase. In last few years we have actually seen an decrease in imported beef, which has been attributed to more awareness of low carbon beef vs high carbon beef. People buy more local and significant less imported. Locally produced beef cost between 2-4 times as much as imported, which naturally impact how much people buy.
This is a great article. Do I have to go vegan? No. But it would have the biggest impact if you did. Is organic farming the answer? No. It tends to use more land for less output (although maybe the health-foodies could get off the No-GMO bandwagon). I also appreciate that the authors recognize that for some people living in certain cultures and climates _have_ to eat meat and there's no shame in that. The bulk of the…
This is an awful article because it doesn't put numbers on the various alternatives. Without hard numbers, the discussion of alternatives is meaningless. Even going from an average diet to fully vegan will only reduce your food-related emissions by 40%, which only accounts for about 12.5% of your carbon emissions to begin with (in the US): http://www.greeneatz.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/foods-ca... . Cutting your…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an awful article because it doesn't put numbers on the various alternatives. Without hard numbers, the discussion of alternatives is meaningless. Even going from an average diet to fully vegan will only reduce your food-related emissions by 40%, which only accounts for about 12.5% of your carbon emissions to begin with (in the US): http://www.greeneatz.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/foods-ca... . Cutting your…
I agree with both you and agentultra. I'm struggling to understand why. You're correct on the comparative impact. But I've long believed psychology is important too. We lefties are frequently criticized, for better or worse, for hypocrisy. Maybe personal pro forma efforts will remove that rhetorical angle of attack. Also, there's got to be some priming benefits, an opportunity to educate about the larger issues. Howe…
"No silver bullet," is something I've said elsewhere. I don't think this article nor I have implied that if everyone went vegan then the climate crisis could be averted. I think it's a good article because it doesn't try to frame our dietary choices as a solution. It informs us of the impact of our choices and makes sure people realize that eating some meat is okay. But if you want to do more, you can, and it will have an impact -- however small -- and that's a good thing in my books.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meat is almost perfectly substitutable. So going out of your way to ensure that the beef you eat has low carbon impact isn't really doing much good. All you're doing is ensuring that somebody else won't eat the beef you bought and will eat something with higher carbon impact instead. Where it does matter is when you choose not to eat meat. Less demand for beef means less beef raised, but which cattle are they going t…
Low carbon production has higher marginal costs and tend to be small farmers which is the group that suffer first when prices drops. The high carbon beef is basically all import here in Sweden, and there is no deforestation issue from farming. From a environmental perspective we actually need more open fields to maintain bio diversity. When climate aware people stop buying beef the ratio of imported beef increase. In…
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The main argument in favor changing diet, to me, is the potential psychological and social effects. When something you do multiple times a day is different from what you used to do, and what many others around you do, it stays active in your thoughts and might trigger other, more meaningful activity. I don't know if this is actually true, but anecdotally at least it seems to be. The people around me who seem to be mo…
> The people around me who seem to be most active when it comes to the topic of climate change also tend to be vegetarians or vegans. What do these people do? Unless they're working on renewables technology or carbon-capture technology, they're not doing anything useful. That's just how the math shakes out. The climate problem is so huge that only engineers and scientists can help us now. Everything else is just putt…
For those that would like to hear a mind blowing discussion about climate (and the earth in general), watch all of the podcasts with Joe Rogan, Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock. They are three hours each and I promise you will learn many things that give perspective on the repeat arguments and confusion about the climate. There are many other podcasts with these gentlemen, but here are three to start with. Joe Roga…
This reminds me of propaganda from the environmentalism movement of the 70s, which sought to shift the blame for litter (increased use of disposable packaging) from corporations onto consumers. Yes individuals can take responsibility for their own actions by "voting with their wallet" etc. - not denying that. But in a democracy, if you'd rather fight for greater regulations on Big Ag than give up meat in your diet, t…
> propaganda from the environmentalism movement of the 70s, which sought to shift the blame for litter Oh really? Keep America Beautiful was conceived, paid for and started by: Philip Morris, Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi, and Coca-Cola and others. Then they started shifting blame onto the individual. That was in reaction to Vermont proposing to require deposit and return bottles for drinks, after a surge in single-use packa…
Phillip Morris and the beverage makers you mention were fighting against the threat of regulations that would prevent them from continuing to pump out non-biodegradable filter cigarettes and single-serve drink containers.
We could have had filterless cigarettes and returnable glass-bottle Coke. Instead, Keep America Beautiful was their brilliant idea to redirect the focus onto consumers, away from manufacturers.
Did you misunderstand me?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main argument in favor changing diet, to me, is the potential psychological and social effects. When something you do multiple times a day is different from what you used to do, and what many others around you do, it stays active in your thoughts and might trigger other, more meaningful activity. I don't know if this is actually true, but anecdotally at least it seems to be. The people around me who seem to be mo…
> The people around me who seem to be most active when it comes to the topic of climate change also tend to be vegetarians or vegans. What do these people do? Unless they're working on renewables technology or carbon-capture technology, they're not doing anything useful. That's just how the math shakes out. The climate problem is so huge that only engineers and scientists can help us now. Everything else is just putt…
I know this isnt going to be a popular opinion here, but I'm going to say it anyways -- we are simply not going eat our away out of this climate change problem, and we shouldnt even try, we should focus the efforts in other places Here is the current breakdown of the world's emissions as of 2018: 1. heavy industry (29 percent) 2. buildings (18 percent) 3. transport (15 percent) 4. land-use change (15 percent) 5. the…
And we have been in a global warming trend for thousands of years. Most of north america ( including NYC ) was under a sheet of ice, in some places sheet of ice 2 miles high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
It's disappointing to me that the nytimes would use climate change as a tool to push a highly environmentally and biologically destructive lifestyle like veganism. I wonder how many of the authors of the article has even farmed a day in their lives.
And the article reeks of ideology rather than news. Where is the news in the article? It's just pushing vegan propaganda which harms more young people everyday than nonsense like anti-vax movement. Vegans have starved their babies to death thinking that veganism is a healthy human diet. But I doubt they'd get as much backlash as the netflix '13 steps' producers did. The most environmentally and biologically friendly human diet is the omnivore diet. It has been since humans began and it will be while humans exist.
Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is a well established idea. I wish journalists would simply report news rather than pushing destructive ideologies, especially since they haven't a clue what they are talking about most of the time. They aren't an expert in almost anything they write about. So why not stick to reporting? Why give "advice"?