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Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered

nytimes.com

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Re: Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered

#51

Post by lowken10 »

agentultra wrote: post #28

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…

Except that meat/dairy production have zero effect on climate change. Other then that you are correct.

Re: Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered

#52

Post by cageface »

There’s a bunch of good reasons you should reduce or eliminate meat from your diet, including environmental effects but also including your health and mistreating and killing intelligent creatures. If your diet requires people to do things to thinking, feeling animals that would be criminal to do to a dog, maybe having some bacon on your breakfast plate really isn’t that important after all.

Re: Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered

#53

Post by bryanlarsen »

belorn wrote: post #44

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 to stop raising -- the low carbon or the high carbon ones? My guess is that the high carbon beef is the marginal beef. When you stop eating beef you cause the price to drop, so the ranchers with the highest costs are going to be the first to go out of business. And carbon is one of the main costs of ranching, so I would predict that stopping eating beef would have a greater than average impact on carbon emissions.

Re: Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered

#54

Post by NeedMoreTea »

hammock wrote: post #37

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 packaging litter.

Re: Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered

#55

Post by Forbo »

kaitai wrote: post #38

A very thought-provoking article, but one that still leaves me with questions. * The vast agricultural monocultures of the US have changed our climate on their own. Our fields of soy, wheat, and corn have decimated local ecosystems, led to high nitrate levels in the water, changed air temperature and humidity on their own, and encouraged a US diet that is high in processed food, leading to its own set of health probl…

> If we all switch to tofu and tortillas with a side of Coke made with corn syrup, we overall preserve the agricultural status quo in the US.

It takes a lot less corn and soy to feed people directly than it does to feed a bunch of cattle. You get a lot of efficiency by skipping the intermediary trophic level.

Re: Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered

#56

Post by jamil7 »

lowken10 wrote: post #51
agentultra wrote: post #28

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…

Except that meat/dairy production have zero effect on climate change. Other then that you are correct.

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.

Re: Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered

#57

Post by anarchimedes »

epistasis wrote: post #48
anarchimedes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you kindly provide evidence to the contrary and not just to what Bjorn has done but also the USDA? And no, it is nothing like Fisher's contrarianism to the smoking issue. Both links acknowledged that the current global diet has an impact on CI, but tries to find the most likely size of the effect. I ask because the science and evidence behind this stuff is complicated, and much of what is being said has a huge…

> much of what is being said has a huge element of alarmism. Could you kindly provide any evidence for this sort of claim? And could you provide any sort of evidence that we should even use effort to examine Lomborg's claims, much less try to use it as what we compare the USDA to? He has a history of being wrong, and ignoring that history in order to "stop alarmism" seems like an equal sin to any potential alarmism.…

I provided links to the USDA report and it's findings. I provided the link to Lomborgs tweet and in it the referenced links to the findings. In it, he addresses the 10% reduction in emissions argument and show that it is cherry picking the available data. That to me has an element of alarmism in it.

"He has a history of being wrong" - if he does, I have not seen it. and I am open to changing my mind if there is evidence to the contrary - which I have asked you in good faith to provide.

Re: Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered

#58

Post by lovemymeat »

cageface wrote: post #52

There’s a bunch of good reasons you should reduce or eliminate meat from your diet, including environmental effects but also including your health and mistreating and killing intelligent creatures. If your diet requires people to do things to thinking, feeling animals that would be criminal to do to a dog, maybe having some bacon on your breakfast plate really isn’t that important after all.

Millennials are so freaking obnoxious. You should leave your comfortable 1st world environment and go tell this to someone less privileged to see the reaction you get.

Hint: eating domesticated meat has been done for thousands of years and your “think of the pigs!” argument is both laughable and insulting.

Re: Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered

#59

Post by misiti3780 »

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 energy needed to supply energy (13 percent).

Livestock is responsible for 5.5 percent, mostly methane rather than CO2, and aviation for 1.5 percent.

Here is the estimated sacrifice needed to bring carbon emissions down by half and then to zero:

It would require forgoing electricity, heating, cement, steel, paper, travel, and affordable food and clothing.

Both of these are taken from Enlightenment Now by Pinker, and I have not seen the numbers or his conclusions refuted. I'm open to someone trying to change my mind, but with these numbers, I do not see how that is possible.

Re: Questions About Food and Climate Change, Answered

#60

Post by dalore »

hkyeti wrote: post #29
dalore wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving up our growing space to grow lots of monocultured vegetables will be worse for the climate. The co2 emissions from cows aren't the problem. Factory farming yes is a problem, but if cows are put on grass that grass is a co2 sink and gives off far less. If you grow an acre of soy it's just as bad as it isn't sustainable. Also the fact that being vegan has serious health consequences and animals provide far more…

This is disproven by Oxford scientists. Grass fed beef is worse for climate change than CAFO beef. Look it up

I looked up the study, first up it wasn't "Oxford scientists" but a University of Oxford think tank called the Food Climate Research Network.

Follow the links, Monsanto has deep connection to the University of Oxford, at least £50 million pounds. UO professors routinely get consulting fees from Monsanto. They even have a Monsanto Senior Research Fellowship position.

There is a massive conflict of interest with Monsanto and the University of Oxford. You find this with most food and nutrition science. Since the funding for such sciences comes from the industry, any science that is critical of it's paymasters soon gets silenced.

This article outlines a bit more https://medium.com/@johnroulac/oxford-study-attacks-regenera...

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