Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

qz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 225 posts

Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

#41

Post by tsimionescu »

waihtis wrote: post #9

The discussion around plants, meat and dairy need to become much more nuanced. Let's take dairy as an example - has a great effect in boosting mTORC1 activity which causes better growth in children. Now, a non-insignificant set of people who have bought into zealous veganry are raising children who will be physically more fragile just because they've been marketed with the idea that dairy == bad. On the other hand, o…

You should note that large parts of the world's population have never consumed dairy throughout their history (except as infants, of course), and are still doing very well today (China being the largest such group). I don't think this is a good line of argument.

Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

#42

Post by sgu999 »

klipt wrote: post #18
Tade0 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. I looked at the different scenarios and we would probably do fine on chicken and cheese in terms of water consumption, CO2 and land use. Pork is where it starts being risky. Beef, lamb etc. are the most problematic parts.

Isn't beef bad because cows release methane, but feeding cows seaweed can mitigate that?

There's also what they're being fed, which apparently is mostly soy and corn... and require a lot of land, water (and chemicals) at this scale. As far as I understand, it'd be much more efficient to grow calories and proteins that we can directly consume instead.

Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

#43

Post by sofixa »

tdeck wrote: post #25

Why bother? Hardly anything the IPCC says seems to translate into policy.

> Hardly anything the IPCC says seems to translate into policy.

Following their reports multiple countries have adopted measures directly citing those reports, with targets based on those reports. E.g. to maintain warming below X C, we'll have to reduce by Y our annual CO2 emissions, so we'll ban new internal combustion engine cars sales starting 20ZZ, while also doing this and that.

Seen across the EU and the US btw.

Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

#44

Post by Tade0 »

himinlomax wrote: post #26
Tade0 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. I looked at the different scenarios and we would probably do fine on chicken and cheese in terms of water consumption, CO2 and land use. Pork is where it starts being risky. Beef, lamb etc. are the most problematic parts.

The water use claim regarding beef has been debunked, it was based on the weird accounting trick where you count rainfall on pasture as wasted water for some reason. Also speaking of pasture, afaik the equation for cattle is completely different whether they're fed corn vs grazing on marginal land as they're supposed to.

Most of the water input for beef comes from growing the crops to feed the cows.

Sure, there's rain and you can grow corn without irrigation, but the yields will never be as high as with it.

Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

#45

Post by autoexec »

anonyfox wrote: post #12

No matter where you stand (some meat eaters tend to become extremely emotional on this): The fact that the scientific results and recommendations get utterly censored like this before publication makes me really angry. It’s somewhat fine for me if people/governments choose to ignore or argue against these results after publication, but this is just absurd… and is then used from people all over the world to point to „…

> We must find a way to eliminate this lobbying/corruption, rather soon!

Who is the person who is caving to pressure or accepting bribes and making changes to scientific results? We could start by finding names and calling for them to become unemployable anywhere they could cause further damage.

Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

#46

Post by slowmotiony »

bobs_salsa wrote: post #10
lnsru wrote: post #7

[flagged]

What a baseless, fearmongering comment that isn't even relevant to the post. There are plenty of arguments for why our future may be leading to what you describe, but less meat in your diet is not one of them...

My diet, my choice.

Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

#47

Post by roenxi »

anonyfox wrote: post #12

No matter where you stand (some meat eaters tend to become extremely emotional on this): The fact that the scientific results and recommendations get utterly censored like this before publication makes me really angry. It’s somewhat fine for me if people/governments choose to ignore or argue against these results after publication, but this is just absurd… and is then used from people all over the world to point to „…

The UN is literally an international political organisation. The shocking truth here is that all the work they do is political.

Whether they are helping or hindering is only a question of what your political leanings are.

Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

#49

Post by fwungy »

Were these the same people who told us the glaciers would be melted and the Maldives under water by 2000?

How narcissistic do you have to be to believe the world is going to end in your little eye blink of a lifetime?

Look, the West can go carbon negative, but it makes no difference at all if China and India just use the West's carbon virtue to increase their own carbon consumption (that the West isn't using).

We really should be thinking about next generation nuclear and mitigation as first tier strategies and not attempting to remake human nature in a few generations time.

Re: The meat industry blocked the IPCC’s attempt to recommend a plant-based diet

#50

Post by realworldperson »

cinntaile wrote: post #24
waihtis wrote: post #9

The discussion around plants, meat and dairy need to become much more nuanced. Let's take dairy as an example - has a great effect in boosting mTORC1 activity which causes better growth in children. Now, a non-insignificant set of people who have bought into zealous veganry are raising children who will be physically more fragile just because they've been marketed with the idea that dairy == bad. On the other hand, o…

> I am a layman on this topic; feel free to correct any errors in my claims. This isn't how this works. You should back up your own claims with sources.

[dead]
Post reply on HN