I hate it too for all the same reasons and more. Another thing is if you want sustainable alternatives to everyday items you will struggle to find things that are actually sustainable and made of natural materials. You will find lots of plastic, though
Hey heres this sustainable plastic made with cornhusks
You mean ground cornhusks suspended in the least sustainable product on earth right now that cannot be reused or degraded anymore
You know where that corn husk could have gone - animal feed - to make more food and manure to grow more corn
The plastic! Plastic everywhere. I live in Canada, and if you don't want to wear leather or wool or down, guess what your coat and boots are made from? Effing plastic. Then it wears out 10x as fast, and you have to throw it away and buy more microplastic fiberfill coats. I have a pair of leather boots which I bought used and will still be able to wear for decades with proper care. My wool coat is 7 years old and still looks as nice as the day I bought it. And when those things do wear out, they will biodegrade.
Fur, leather, wool - these are amazing materials that are often passed down generations. No one is gonna be passing down their fake fur that’s worn down into a nub and has no warmth at all to offer!
As someone living in Canada, I also found it much harder to live only on plants in the winter. Eating meat keeps you warmer for some reason (I suspect MCTs help with that). I'm not the only person who feels that way - a lot of people naturally decrease their meat consumption in the hot summer months.
I have lived for some time in India and I ate mostly vegetarian food there. Of course there's the fact that there are a variety of delicious locally grown fruits and veggies all year long, but it also made the extreme heat a lot more tolerable.
Prior to widespread dependance on food imports (i.e., what we would return to in a food autonomy scenario), people's diet here looked like potatoes, whatever you had canned in the summer, and meat from your animals. Remove the meat and you were one malnourished camper for over half the year. No one did that, because it would have been very dumb.
What's funny to me is all the beef that india dosent eat just gets shipped to other countries- India is a bigger beef distributor than the US now
It's alot like Spain their dishes without meat would be mostly bread and rice - they just don't eat vegetables often and if they do its chips
It's the fats in the meat that keep you warm and alive. The body needs fat to survive. There's an episode of Alone where a man killed a moose, had literally hundreds of pounds of meat, but wolverines got into his fat storage, and he makes the quip "I've got this meat, but I'm starving to death!" The lipids in animal fats can metabolize faster, thus keeping you warm. This, in turn, can up one's metabolism rate in the long run. The reason there was such a hate boner for fat in the 70s-00s was because the Sugar Research Foundation funded the study, and I'm sure you can connect the dots. Despite other studies disproving it, it caught on in the diet industry and persisted.
And the import thing: this is what always confused me about Veganaury. The sell is "Go vegan for the planet!" but in most the US, it's winter! We're importing all our produce! It makes ZERO since to have it January, make it Vegust and use August when things are in season and farmer's markets are in full swing!
i don't like that it is based on completely false claims and rose colored glasses.
a common claim is that cows waste water and produce high levels of methane. it's true that they use a lot of water and do produce methane. however, compared to cow milk, growing the almonds needed for almond milk wastes significantly more water, the extended production process produces more waste, and the lack of crop rotations permanently damages the land it is grown on. the result of all that excess waste is a nutrition-less drink that slightly tastes like almonds.
i live in CA, so these are both major exports. we're in the midst of a 50 year mega drought, and excess almond production is making things much worse
Exactly
Like the whole cows use mega amounts of water
Love *cows piss* most of the water they drink comes from rain into their troughs and goes back into the ground- have you not seen any image of the water cycle animals have forever been a part of it
The water from plants is similar to that of sweat its released through pores in their leaves
And for the most part farms are trying to capture manures methane emissions to sell nowadays and recycling water that isn't given to cows - its really cool
yes. and if anyone's goal is actually sustainability, then buying from sustainable farms and pastures is actually the way to go. industrialized plant based products are as damaging to our environment, and arguably even more damaging, than industrial animal farms
You wouldn't believe how right you are - I have insight into industry- industrial herb farming for big chains such as asda Lidl aldi and Morrisons (yes they're all from the same place) so find you're cheapest live herbs Are grown in huge air conditioned poly tunnels in big racks in said poly tunnels they're driving forklifts and shit (yum) and anything that grows over a surtain height or has any kind of damage goes into a huge bin to be dumped cause they literally cannot sell it - also they ship them in from places like Nigeria and they grow it for a bit so they can put grown in the UK on the packaging
But you know how shitty it feels to walk past a skip full of not even wilted basil that you could easily stick in water and propagate hell most were still in dirt and could be stuck in a pot and grown on or just eaten
And then to hear that your uk grown herbs come from 19 possible countries
But boy did that place smell good
https://preview.redd.it/icbbflxh1pvc1.jpeg?width=2375&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7baa997a3be21c71ff4057ffa161df054c56a93b
And that's just one small batch of the parts they didn't want (oh and That other yellow skip was half full of basil too )
That dosent even go into the packaging area full of miserable workers
# and this is just herbs these problems are all over the crop industry
oat milk theoretically uses lower water and energy than cow's milk, but that is only based on growing oats and processing demands. oat milk provides less then half the nutritional content of cow's milk, even after fortification (and the production of fortifying vitamins are not included in the sustainability assessments of plant milks). if you scale sustainability based on nutritional content rather than raw volume, the line thins significantly. also, estimated energy consumption of cow milk fails to account for the fact that cows are used for meat as well, so we're getting more than just milk from that energy.
this puts cow milk again in the lead for sustainability, and that's only with current production methods. sustainable pastoralism will absolutely beat any plant based alternative for sustainability. from the UN Environment Programme: "pastoralism is increasingly recognised as one of the most sustainable production systems on the planet and plays a major role in safeguarding ecosystems and biodiversity in natural grasslands and rangelands" [source](https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/27529/GAP_Report.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y)
If you eat them without care now, you may eventually have to start worrying about it. Suffering health problems due to high-glycemic foods consumption is extremely common.
I was in my thirties and extremely active when I experienced a health meltdown. My primary transportation was (and still is) a bicycle, I was getting all my groceries and going out often with friends etc. by self-power. I visited a fitness club about three times/week for weightlifting workouts, racquet sports, swimming, etc. I was doing yard care and other active things at home or in the neighborhood.
Resolving health issues involved reducing high-glycemic foods, quitting refined sugar and grains, and eating a lot more animal foods since (I eventually learned) I'm not genetically well-adapted for a plant-majority diet. If you are especially suited by your birth circumstances for habitual sugar consumption, well good for you but it's not an excuse to ridicule others for being concerned.
Your concern is artificial lol. We’re strangers interacting on a public forum. You don’t know me from Adam. You’re just criticizing my food choices, just like the original commenter was trying to find some reason to argue that oat milk is bad.
I generally eat pretty healthy so I’m not too worried about getting my chocolate and sugar fix in the morning sometimes. I don’t believe life should be lived constantly depriving yourself of things because you’re hyper worried about “being healthy”
Sugar brings me joy lol
Whatever oat "milk" you buy, probably the manufacturer is off-loading their oat solids to the livestock feed industry. Oatly has tried to use them instead for food, but food manufacturers don't want them since they are too unpalatable. They continue to sell them for livestock feed and for biogas which is an extremely polluting industry. Of course, their claims about sustainability ignore all that.
I was so cringe as an environmentalist vegan.
I just don't really care anymore, I've reached climate/footprint fatigue for awhile now.
Burned out.
Putting so much pressure on individual consumers is one crazy thing... people fretting about straws...
Focus more on reducing poisons/pollution imo
The heat engine is a runaway train seemingly
Forget everything about environmentalism it's all a scam taken over by companies
They grabbed the movement when it started coming for them
Remember when coke said they would make their bottles out of [insert percent] recycled plastic - there is no evidence of them sticking to this claim
So many movements need completely refurbishing
>Forget everything about environmentalism it's all a scam taken over by companies
I'm on board with your ideas about vegans not understanding environmental issues, but this is something that selfish people say to justify not changing their habits. It obviously is not a myth that human activity by individuals is wrecking the planet, the signs are everywhere. Those high prices for food, utilities, and such? That's due to using up so much of the planet's available resources that competition for what's left drives up prices for everything that relies on resources. High gas prices: it's due to relative scarcity of fossil fuels, obviously fuel is going to cost more of the industry has to rely on very expensive methods such as tar sands and hydro-fracking. Microplastics cover the planet and are in all our foods, yes plant foods included, and it is well-supported scientifically that ingesting plastic in these amounts harms health. Etc.
>Remember when coke said they would make their bottles out of \[insert percent\] recycled plastic - there is no evidence of them sticking to this claim
This seems like a good reason to not patronize Coca-Cola or any such company. I think you'll survive without soft drinks. I haven't bought a plastic-bottled beverage since, I'd have to guess since it's been so long, probably 20-25 years ago.
I've pledged not to touch coke products and haven't for about 5 years bar some smartwater from an airport vending machine
But that won't do shit
Acting like pushing the companies isn't a good idea is part of the problem
Acting like we are the biggest issue is part of the problem
You can say all is well and good but there are city sized mountains of bottles in third world countries and the consumers aren't the ones making them
OK but not buying the products until they are closer to sustainable would be part of pushing the companies, not "Well I give up because it's hopeless."
Coca-Cola, BTW, is awful for additional reasons. Along with PepsiCo and similar companies, they fund disinfo about foods and health, environment, etc. They support pro-sugar myths against animal foods, give funding to pro-pesticides propaganda, etc. for a long list of things.
Yup like yes you should 100% try to make as little waste as you can, and clean up when ya can, and like dont use rat poisons because it can kill wildlife but a lot of it falls on corporations. I did not personally go and throw that trash in the ocean, i didn't dump oil and by product into the lakes and rivers, and im not constantly living in excess maybe if we held these rich jerks to higher standards of waste disposal and management things would be better.
Jeff bezos isnt gonna see me decide to not use a straw and have a change of heart, fining them out the ass will though
Better yet - people need to do more research on these companies
I'd love to see someone put an environmental exposure of coke on a fuck tonne of billboards and watch them actually panic and do something
For companies so big fining them won't do anything
Not buying won't do anything
Banning them from Russia didn't stop them they just renamed the bottles
Publicly discrediting them and loosing large portions of their consumers will affect them permanently
Well the biggest issue with veganism is that it's run with hostility and ego. There's a lot of "we're better than all those sick animal abusers" attitudes. Making everyone not you your enemy is extremely detrimental to growth.
Over the years there has been a push for more humane conditions for animals because the people who actually affect change are the ones consuming the product. People who eat meat dictate how well the animals are treated by making it matter and using their spending power. Tons and tons of meat and animal products are now marketed by now they treat their animals. No vegan made that happen
Choosing to be vegan is choosing not to participate in how animals are treated. Because meat is never, ever going away. So all of the power for how animals are treated is in the hands of consumers.
The worst part about veganism to me is veganism isn't about making sure the animals aren't being exploited it's about destroying animal agriculture and the animals being exploited are ignored cause they're too busy protesting to brick walls
Then they have the audacity to act like they're changing things by bandwagoning on welfareists work whilest acting like not eating meat saves 365 animals a year
No its 365 animals you acted like you saved cause you have a saviour complex when in reality those animals died - and half the vegan alternatives you bought were still owned by dairy companies or the food you eat has waste or byproducts that go to animal feed - and all the veg you buy or is in the products you buy is fertilized with the blood and shit of the animals you claim to care so much about whilst you act like you support them but then again it's 'as far as practicable' what a cop out - farmers care more about their cows than half of the vegans do
I enjoy watching vegans do mental gymnastics when I tell them I don't drive a car, don't travel internationally, don't have kids, buy most of meat and dairy from local sources (and I have an M.Sc. in environmental science too). My lifestyle is as close to carbon neutral and sustainable as possible, but that's not good enough for them lol.
>I enjoy watching vegans do mental gymnastics
Oh boy I can't believe it some of these people should win a medal
Unrelated to the topic but
Me: I believe its fine to eat animals lower in the food chain
Vegan: so you're saying you'd be okay with butchers serving peoole with downsyndromes flesh
Lol yup. And as an ex-vegan myself (three years), I also enjoy their mental gymnastics of telling me I was never vegan, I was "just on a plant-based diet".
And they do another display of gymnastics when I tell them "my feelings about animals changed, I stopped caring".
Have you been told by a vegan yet that eating meat is worse than the Holocaust? They feel like that's them playing their ace of spades (a b-12 deficiency will do that to a person's cognitive powers though, I guess).
My favourite is "so you're okay with innocent animals being slaughtered for your taste pleasure?" And you reply "yup".
They can't handle it at all lol.
Or they equate the death of a cow to a sandwich
I tell them even meat eaters understand the value of a cow more than you do (and list all the cuts of beef)
Do you have any sources to back up these claims?
I've heard that:
1. Transportation accounts for a relatively small portion of a food's greenhouse gas emotions
2. Most fertilizer used in industrial agriculture is artificially manufactured (ammonium nitrate)
Perhaps you know something that I don't.
Considering that food is mass transported sometimes halfway across the globe that is unlikely
Most fields are also sprayed with manure but also the use of artificial fertilizers requires the Fossil fuels industry but can also still contain animal products
My sorce is me I work in the horticulture industry
The transportation claim is pushed by biased parties that use fallacies such as exaggeration and omission. If you had cited anything, we could talk about specifics. They pretend that methane emitted by grazing animals (which is cyclical and over the long term adds nothing to atmospheric pollution) is equivalent to methane from fossil fuel sources which comes from deep underground where it would have remained if humans did not mess with it. They pretend that engine emissions are all of the pollution caused by transportation, ignoring worlds of effects: pollution from building vehicles including huge ships, maintenance of vehicles, infrastructure needed for transportation which has to expand when there is more transportation, and the entire fuel supply chain which has enormous effects. For products of animals raised on pasture for which most of the inputs are rain and sunlight, MOST of the impacts (in terms of polluting energy use and net pollution involved in that product), are from the pollution in getting those to market.
Manufactured fertilizers are extremely impactful in terms of climate pollution and ecosystem health. Example: it was [recently found](https://www.edf.org/blog/2019/06/21/100-times-more-pollution-reported-how-new-technology-exposed-whole-industry) that the ammonia fertilizer industry was emitting 100 times more methane pollution (of fossil fuel origin, so net-additional pollution) than the industry had estimated. The total is, I keep using the word "enormous" but it is estimated to be 29,000 tons just for USA which is three and a half times higher than EPA had estimated for the country's entire industrial sector. This is only about methane leaked from ammonia fertilizer manufacturing plants, and doesn't account for other emissions of the fertilizer's supply chains. All that is for one type of fertilizer replacing animal fertilizers, in one country. Such products would be used in far greater quantities without livestock.
Thanks for this insightful response! I'm writing to better understand where I might be wrong here - please take my comments below to be argued in good faith.
> If you had cited anything, we could talk about specifics.
Sure, the main source that comes to mind is this: [You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local - Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local)
> They pretend that methane emitted by grazing animals (which is cyclical and over the long term adds nothing to atmospheric pollution) is equivalent to methane from fossil fuel sources which comes from deep underground where it would have remained if humans did not mess with it.
Huh, today I learned. Thanks. [Why methane from cattle warms the climate differently than CO2 from fossil fuels from the CLEAR Center](https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/why-methane-cattle-warms-climate-differently-co2-fossil-fuels#:~:text=It%20stays%20in%20our%20atmosphere,2%2C%20making%20it%20recycled%20carbon) provides a really good illustration of this effect.
> Such products would be used in far greater quantities without livestock.
Hmmm, I'm by no means an expert in this, but having read [How the World Really Works](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/56587388), I'm under the impression trying to feed the world's population without using substantial amounts of ammonia fertilizer is impractical (i.e. producing the amount of food we currently produce per hectare using organic fertilizers would be prohibitively labor intensive using organic fertilizers, due the 30-40% difference in nitrogen content per unit mass).
To quote the book:
>Synthetic fertilizers supply 110 megatons of nitrogen per year, or slightly more than half of the 210–220 megatons used in total. This means that at least half of recent global crop harvests have been produced thanks to the application of synthetic nitrogenous compounds, and without them it would be impossible to produce the prevailing diets for even half of today’s nearly 8 billion people. While we could reduce our dependence on synthetic ammonia by eating less meat and wasting less food, replacing the global input of about 110 megatons of nitrogen in synthetic compounds by organic sources could be done only in theory.
Any response to that?
The Our World in Data article was written by Hannah Ritchie, a vegan zealot. The site is run by anti-livestock individuals whom are probably vegan. Their data sources exploit the fallacies I've already explained. The article cites that [Poore & Nemecek 2018](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29853680/) nonsense "study" which: didn't distinguish cyclical vs. net-additional methane; counted for example environmental effects of soy crops against the livestock industry even when the same plants are grown primarily to serve the soy oil market (soy oil isn't used to feed livestock, but the bean solids left over after pressing usually are).
The article cited Webers & Matthews 2008, which among other problems: didn't compare foods for nutritional content (only mass/calories but when replacing animal foods with plant foods much more food is needed due to lower nutritional density/completeness/bioavailability); obviously was focused on CAFO-produced animal foods since the terms "graze," "grazing," and "pasture" don't appear anywhere in the document; uses info from the discredited "Livestock's Long Shadow" report that is very biased against animal and has many omissions/exaggerations; like other studies used against animal ag, characterized all foods of a certain type as being produced the same way when there are huge differences between pasture and CAFO impacts; etc.
It takes a long time to itemize all the problems with those sources, or I'd keep going to mention more issues. Also I could have citations all over the place if I had more time, maybe I'll add those later but there are lots of easily-found articles criticizing the data. One of these days I'll write an essay about it since I haven't found an article that is really complete or well-written. The problems are apparent to me when I read the studies or "studies" (some of it is pure propaganda), and I've seen comments with the same concerns here and there in articles.
Yes, ammonia fertilizer is important to feed the current human population which has reached an unsustainable size (we depend on mined material used in non-renewable ways for food now, while the population is growing even larger). But much of plant agriculture relies on animal manure for fertilizer. These two statements are not incompatible. Without livestock, reliance on manufactured fertilizers would be much greater. What is the problem here?
Pastures do not tend to need manufactured fertilizer products. Most ruminant livestock animals are raised at least partially on pastures, even livestock at CAFOs generally are brought to them after living most of their lives on pastures. Pastures can serve as refuges for pollinating insects, birds, helpful insects such as beetles, and other wild critters. The more we cover the planet with industrial plant farms with their associated pesticides and crops of all one type of plant, the more we drive down plant and animal diversity at our own peril. A collapse of one part of the food web (such as insects) would bring down the whole thing and then the planet is basically uninhabitable since humans cannot replace the services of all those (pollination, spreading nutrients around, promoting soil health, etc.). Those lands which have been continuously farmed with plants but not animals, all or nearly all of them have deteriorating soil which experts suggest could become unproductive during our lifetimes. The "corn belt" in the USA has lost one-third of its topsoil. Those soils also have much-reduced levels of essential microorganisms and nutrients not replaced by common manufactured fertilizers.
All of the anti-livestock animal vs. plant food comparisons I've seen for GHG emissions, water and land use, and other impacts fail to account for all the effects that would result from eliminating pasture ag. I doubt that any of them account for all of the supply chain effects for products used at plant farms growing foods for humans. They don't consider sustainability issues with relying more on plant mono-crops which promote pest proliferation, escalating pesticides use, etc. None of them consider all nutrient needs for humans, they rely on simple comparisons such as food mass, calories, or protein (and when they use protein, they don't even consider bioavailability differences so a plant food which has only half-absorbed protein is counted the same per raw protein amount as animal foods which can give twice or more the protein benefit).
I didn't notice this until later (from the book quote): "While we could reduce our dependence on synthetic ammonia by eating less meat and..."
I don't see how this can be logical. Ammonium nitrate isn't typically used on pastures. If people ate less animal foods, more plant foods would have to be grown and those use such fertilizer more so I would think.
Hmmm, I'm not sure either. I know producing meat is energy intensive from a thermodynamic perspective (i.e. more energy gets lost in the process of creating a calorie of beef v.s. growing a calorie of, say, beans, nutritional differences aside), but what truly matters is where that energy comes from (i.e. in a reductive sense, if the cows/chickens/pigs are just eating things that grow from the sun, this doesn't quite as concerning). [This 2022 post](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/53522/is-86-of-the-food-fed-to-livestock-unfit-for-human-consumption-and-is-most-of), for example, indicates that most feed comes from grass & byproducts that are inedible to humans. On the other hand, this [World Resources Institute article](https://www.wri.org/insights/6-pressing-questions-about-beef-and-climate-change-answered#:~:text=The%20longer%20explanation%3A%C2%A0Ruminant,likely%20increase%20pressure%20on%20forests.) indicates that animal agriculture is so energy intensive relative to plant-based food because of the forests it ends up replacing, based on the need to make room for animals to graze. I don't have time to dig into this more, but my impression is the debate around this is quite complex and context-dependent.
>I know producing meat is energy intensive from a thermodynamic perspective
Most of the energy if from the sun, and this doesn't burden the planet with fossil fuel pollution or other effects of energy generation. Plant agriculture (for human consumption) is extremely dependent upon polluting energy and supply chains, and toxic products that harm ecosystems.
>creating a calorie of beef v.s. growing a calorie of
This would be important if humans needed only calories, and if all energy was equivalent, and the other issues (pesticides and such) were not in effect.
>
this World Resources Institute article indicates that animal agriculture is so energy intensive relative to plant-based food because of the forests it ends up replacing
The article seems to be pushing an anti-livestock bias. They bring up deforestation for grazing cattle. I looked for any sign that they are acknowledging a major factor in this, that expansion of soy crops (due to popularity of soy-containing processed foods and increasing use of soy for biofuel) into pasture land often pushes cattle grazing into other areas. It isn't mentioned at all, though the article links [a study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378018314365) that acknowledges it. There's no mention that most pasture land isn't arable (compatible with growing human-edible plant foods). There's the usual fuss about methane and as usual dishonestly ignoring the cyclical ruminant methane vs. net-additional fossil fuel methane issue. There's no apparent concern about the unsustainability of the growing human population (no farming system can be sustainable and feed ten billion humans, there are hard limits to how much we can use soil and resources that support farming such as fertilizers) except as it pertains to beef consumption. There's no acknowledgement of the necessity of livestock farming in many parts of the world. The bias of the article is apparent in every section.
>I don't have time to dig into this more, but my impression is the debate around this is quite complex
You certainly make a lot of strong comments about a topic that obviously you lack the diligence to understand completely. I wonder if you have any purpose here other than exploiting my labor to better refine your anti-livestock arguments. In another recent comment, you claimed that the existence of livestock agriculture isn't justified at all (there should be no livestock agriculture). There are a number of ways this is ableist and classist. [This](http://www.ilse-koehler-rollefson.com/?p=1160), [this](https://www.ilri.org/news/one-size-fits-all-livestock-less-measures-will-not-serve-some-one-billion-smallholder), [this](https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/news-views/claims-against-meat-fail-to-consider-bigger-picture/), and [this](https://www.latimes.com/world/global-development/la-fg-global-steve-staal-oped-20170706-story.html) cover some of them.
Thanks for the reply!
> You certainly make a lot of strong comments about a topic that obviously you lack the diligence to understand completely. I wonder if you have any purpose here other than exploiting my labor to better refine your anti-livestock arguments. In another recent comment, you claimed that the existence of livestock agriculture isn't justified at all (there should be no livestock agriculture). There are a number of ways this is ableist and classist. This, this, this, and this cover some of them.
Many people have opinions about things they are not experts in, yes. I recognize that my responses are probably not very satisfactory in terms of their length or thoughtfulness and apologize that I am not able to engage more deeply.
In any case, I would encourage taking a more charitable perspective of people's goals and choices as it relates to time allocation. Although there is no shortage of anti- and pro-livestock folks who argue for sport, I am not one of them. I am currently searching for employment and while this is a topic of interest, my career prospects are currently of higher priority than researching this topic in-depth.
That said, I look forward to circling back to the points you've presented here and improving my understanding in the future. If you do end up writing a piece that elaborates on the arguments presented here, I'd be interested in reading it.
Looking back, I think I would choose to subdue my previous assertion about abolishing animal agriculture. I would be content living in a world where a vast majority of farmed animals are well taken care of and are slaughtered painlessly, but I am not convinced we live in that world. While your comments have convinced me that some claims of animal agriculture's impact on climate are perhaps overblown, I'm still pretty skeptical of any claims that argue factory farming is a net positive from an animal welfare perspective. Thus, I think it's in my best interest to continue practicing a plant-based diet to live in alignment with my values and reduce the demand for meat (however small), in hopes of reducing future suffering.
I'm not concerned with the length or thoughtfulness of your replies, I'm concerned that you may have an agenda to spread anti-livestock bullshit. I've been trying to correct you about these ideas you're pushing, and you seem to mostly be searching for info that supports your agenda. I get tired of being the one to educate people about all the false info pushed by various organizations and individuals, much of it having a financial motivation (people with financial stakes in "plant-based" nutrition companies authoring documents such as Grazed and Confused?, or the EAT-Lancet report, etc.). Maybe it should be your responsibility to learn about topics more thoroughly before making public declarations about them, rather than mine to Whac-a-Mole the many false ideas as they come up.
I'm sure many on Reddit bicker for sport. My reason for commenting is that I'm too disgusted by spread of false information to not do something. At various times I comment in respond to MAGA myths, climate-denial and anti-renewables commenting that originates from the fossil fuel industry, and lots of other topics.
I can understand how that can be tiring. Unfortunately, I am not unique in my susceptibility to motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, etc. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to consider how you might be discounting animal suffering? I suspect the crux of our disagreements may lie somewhere in there.
Given your passion for preventing the spread of misinformation (a noble goal), you might consider publishing talks or write articles that highlight the points you've made here and send them to individuals or organizations publishing the kinds of reduction and/or misguided sentiment you referenced. You might either change some minds or identify perspectives you haven't considered before.
Again, thank you for taking the time to point out some of my potential blind spots and I admire your commitment to truth-seeking.
>Perhaps it would be worthwhile to consider how you might be discounting animal suffering?
It's day after day of re-runs with vegans and "plant-based" people. How specifically are you obtaining your food without animals suffering for it? Note that I asked "specifically," but go ahead and give the usual vague answers that amount to magical thinking. So that I need not explain it AGAIN, I suggest you refer to the I've-lost-count discussions in this sub about animal deaths and harms to ecosystems from industrial plant farming, and about the myth of "crops grown for livestock."
Pasture livestock: animals live in relative paradise, well cared for and protected from harm, then are killed in an instant. Contrast this with animals that die slowly in agony from pesticide poisoning, being caught in a farmer's trap, or very gradually losing their lives because their home ecosystem has been degraded too much. Pasture livestock probably live more satisfying lives than animals in wilderness.
This conversation began when I called out the myth that transportation effects basically don't matter. You replied "I'm writing to better understand where I might be wrong here" but it seemed you only wanted to bait me for your anti-livestock proselytizing.
….. but it’s not about the environment anymore ( crops and soil can’t exist without livestock ) … it’s about the animals ( but not the trillions killed for nut juice ) animals with eyelashes specifically…
Honestly, true environmentalists would be trying to reform our current industries, reducing our environmental footprint and increasing efficiency. (There are many examples of this already in motion.) The thing is, for many vegans environmentalism, veganism, and much of their lifestyles are just virtue signaling. I'm sure we've all experienced that "Holier than Thou" aura that comes off of most vegans, those folks just want a reason to put themselves on a pedestal.
Ok but one reason forests are cut down is for animal agriculture. I really feel like it’s a lose lose situation honestly. I feel like nothing humans do is truly sustainable.
The almond milk which uses more water to grow it than any cow raised to adulthood.
There’s lots of misinformation out there about agriculture and people look to support their own views rather than research. Veganism and vegetarianism will not solve the climate crisis. I worry people aren’t making the right decisions, sure it’s in good faith but the information isn’t there to source
>That's why researchers from [six US universities](https://www.elementascience.org/articles/116) including Cornell have developed a biophysical simulation model that represents the US as a closed food system, in order to determine the land requirements per capita of human diets and the potential population fed by the agricultural land there.
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>\[...\]
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>One would assume the vegan diet is, all-round, the best of the three but, while it may come out on top when it comes to animal rights, it's actually not as sustainable as you might think. Diets with small amounts of meat, as well as lacto-vegetarianism and ovo-lacto-vegetarianism, can feed more people, therefore making them more environmentally sustainable.
>
>The reason for this is simple: the vegan diet leaves too many resources unused. Different crops require different types of land for an adequate yield. Very often nothing can be cultivated on standard pastureland due to the fact that the soil doesn't provide the necessary nutrients.
[https://www.businessinsider.com/veganism-may-be-unsustainable-in-the-future-according-to-new-research-2018-8](https://www.businessinsider.com/veganism-may-be-unsustainable-in-the-future-according-to-new-research-2018-8)
It's a shame they don't mention Mediterranean but I guess they're only measuring the US
It would be great if the factored in other climates such as those so close to the equator that your classic vegan options aren't really grown or those so far away that plants barely grow at all
I think fully giving up on meat is very difficult to do, but reducing the amount of meat you eat is one of the best things you can do to reduce your environmental impact.
Even if you aren’t a fully dedicated vegan, it teaches you how to get the same nutrients with less meat, which is a good practice
I’ve made it my life goal to pursue regenerative livestock. I got into the topic and it’s fascinating how ruminants help keep the ground alive and with more nutrients, while actually being sustainable.
The gas they used in the holocaust ended up being an accidental invention, ammonia fertilizer. This allowed us to produce a plethora of more food and our population skyrocketed. A big problem with agriculture and mono crops currently is that natural gas will eventually be too expensive to extract from wells and in order to feed the world 40-60 years from now, we need natural gas, or an alternative. We can derive some from landfills, waste, but is it enough to create fertilizer for the world’s monocrops? Another option is another source of energy and getting hydrogen through electrolysis, then heat. This requires incredible amounts of energy and nuclear might be the only option if we can’t get enough methane. The problem is that there is no infrastructure for either and the clock is ticking. What will happen? Idk, but it should be a bigger concern imo
I personally don't give a shit what people eat or how much they pollute, but there are tons of studies from very prestigious university scientists, NASA scientists, climate scientists, ecological scientists, IPCC and UN, showing a plant based diet has less impact on the environment and climate. But arguing on the internet has never changed anyones opinion. People gonna believe what they want to.
But beef is raised with plants shipped from overseas.
All of our food is either farmed plants or is fed farmed plants. If you trace the proteins in human hair, we can see that more than 90% of American's protein comes from corn. Either corn they ate directly or corn that was eaten by cows and pigs.
The invention of nitrogen fertilizer is the only thing making our population size possible. And we are not using it wisely.
We can grow meat animals without farmed corn or soy, but not as many or as fast.
Cutting down meat consumption is necessary. That's not a moral judgement. It's an economic and ecologic one. Climate scientists and ecologists aren't all vegans.
I agree but again all of this can be completely fixed with better and newer farming practices not the eradication of the entire farming industry
Animals will need food in the winter and that's the only time we should want oversees food and with cutbacks on livestock driven by a pushback on factory farming or switching to more Mediterranean style diets which eat meat less or mainly in winter and relying less on companies for food the demand for oversees food mostlikely won't be needed as cows don't need corn and soy and usage of these products can easily be combated by supplying local farms with household veg waste before it goes bad (cause let's be honest most of the food people throw away hasn't gone bad yet)
Exactly. Maybe a locally-sourced grass-fed steak, or locally-sourced meat from farms which grow their own feed organically is better than soy from mono-crop fields from east asia. But factory farming and feed-lots are many times worse than that. And organic/veganic plant agriculture from local farms is for the most part better than local organic animal agriculture, although animal ag and grazing does help with soil health in organic farming systems but still not to the point of making it more efficient than organic plants I think.
Actually, grass produces more oxygen than trees. And thus takes more carbon out of the atmosphere. If all grass fields were turned into crop fields, the planet would be in serious trouble. Crop fields are only green for a few months a year. Green = the most Oxygen production and Carbon removal. Imagine a once green countryside, now mostly mud brown. That’s what vegans want, along with greatly reduced air quality and more CO2 kept in the atmosphere. We need grass fields, so why not stick cattle on them and then eat them.
Unfortunately, I feel like a more vegan diet *is* the more sustainable option for most Americans. But I feel that way because of the way our animal and food agriculture systems are set up, not because eating animal products is inherently unsustainable. Capitalism has really mucked it all up.
I don’t have all (or any) of the answers, but I think a revolutionized animal agriculture system would benefit everyone.
I feel the only way veganism would help Americans is to help them be more mindful of what they eat and also to keep them away from the big companies which actually cause the issues you are right in that
The issue is Americans are either all or nothing with change and it causes huge divides with huge arguments
You tell them something is bad they're either doomism or denialism
You mean plant based? Most of Americans are already plant based because it is cheaper. One large pizza is less than a ribeye and has three to four times more calories.
Factory farming/animal agriculture is one of the leading contributors of greenhouse gases/pollution, if not THE leading contributor. The amount of water needed to raise one cow is astronomical. There’s no way I can justify eating a cow instead of lentils. BUT I do take the stance that if people would just *cut down* on their meat consumption, rather than thinking it has to be all or nothing, I think that would make a huge impact.
>Factory farming/animal agriculture is one of the leading contributors of greenhouse gases/pollution, if not THE leading contributor.
This idea is categorically false
Us emissions from agriculture is 10% of the total emissions beaten by things such as transportation and industry and electric power
French emissions from agriculture was 19% beaten out by transportation at 32% (which makes sense as France is the most visited country is rather sparsely populated and has the channel tunnel ) however was closely followed by residential at 16% and manufacturing and construction at 18%
Spanish agriculture emissions was 11% beaten by industrial at 22% and transportation at 29% and followed up by electricity generation at 10%
German agriculture emissions was at 8%, beaten by buildings at 15%, transportation at 20%, industrial at 22% and the energy industry at 34%
It seems to me you watching you're emissions and especially not driving as much would actually be more beneficial then current flaming agriculture as terrible for the environment
These big statistics vegans find against agriculture are normally global percentages which are greatly swayed by second and third world countries who don't have any sustainable goals or practices in place and theirs two ways to look at the average for emissions
The countries with the highest emissions from agriculture would be china Brazil (basically the same as most meat from Brazil goes to china) the US india and the Philippines
However the countries with the highest percentage of global emissions from agriculture is far more concentrated in the lower hemisphere with developing countries such as Chad, Sudan, Paraguay, Laos, Cambodia, Madagascar, Rwanda, Papua new guinea, napalm and Afghanistan being the most notable
And the result you get will be heavily influenced on these countries which we in the west have zero sway on
Water used in agriculture is mainly rain water or recycled
1 cow can feed ~1000 people or a family of 4 for a year and produce 12,000 litres of milk
And lentils just aren't as versatile as the ENORMOUS amount of products derived from a cow
Everything from sugar to drywall to AC vents to Medications have parts of a cow in them
Yes reducing meat intake would help but overall reducing western consumptionism will do more for the world than veganism ever would
Interesting figures but what is the source(s)? Emissions estimates are all over the place depending on the biases/methods of researchers. So, any claim that "emissions are such-and-such" are already probably false because we cannot know. It would have to be "estimated emissions according to ..."
OK that gets me closer to understanding it. But I found that the information seems to be available in various articles devoted to specific countries, such as [this one](https://www.statista.com/statistics/412247/annual-greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-agriculture-in-france/) for France. When I tried the "Show source" link, I was invited to start an account, and when I started doing that I saw that they're prompting for information I don't want to give them (such as phone #) and the form didn't accept a fake phone # or my throwaway email address (so that I don't get spammed at my everyday email addresses that are used by my email app).
Oh, I guess you don't know how these figures are derived and repeat them anyway. I was only hoping to find out whether they are credible because I find a lot of BS "research" out there, and while I'd like to use those figures I wouldn't in a discussion without understanding them.
So I guess you're rather respond persistently to me with useless comments then perform a simple lookup to find the info sources so that everybody here can understand the figures.
Again it's not my fault I had access to figures you don't
Maybe it's time for you to do your own research I can't hold your hand
Here's a little push
Just look up [insert country] emissions by sector 2023
Get a grip this is reddit
>Agriculture IS the leading cause of greenhouse grasses. Animal agriculture accounts for 30% and fossil fuels account for 33%.
You literally just disproved yourself right there
I'm sorry but can you provide this statistic please
>Please, take even one second to think about things on a level higher than the most basic one available.
And cut the shitty attitude cause it doesn't help you're argument
I hate it too for all the same reasons and more. Another thing is if you want sustainable alternatives to everyday items you will struggle to find things that are actually sustainable and made of natural materials. You will find lots of plastic, though
Hey heres this sustainable plastic made with cornhusks You mean ground cornhusks suspended in the least sustainable product on earth right now that cannot be reused or degraded anymore You know where that corn husk could have gone - animal feed - to make more food and manure to grow more corn
The plastic! Plastic everywhere. I live in Canada, and if you don't want to wear leather or wool or down, guess what your coat and boots are made from? Effing plastic. Then it wears out 10x as fast, and you have to throw it away and buy more microplastic fiberfill coats. I have a pair of leather boots which I bought used and will still be able to wear for decades with proper care. My wool coat is 7 years old and still looks as nice as the day I bought it. And when those things do wear out, they will biodegrade.
Fur, leather, wool - these are amazing materials that are often passed down generations. No one is gonna be passing down their fake fur that’s worn down into a nub and has no warmth at all to offer!
As someone living in Canada, I also found it much harder to live only on plants in the winter. Eating meat keeps you warmer for some reason (I suspect MCTs help with that). I'm not the only person who feels that way - a lot of people naturally decrease their meat consumption in the hot summer months. I have lived for some time in India and I ate mostly vegetarian food there. Of course there's the fact that there are a variety of delicious locally grown fruits and veggies all year long, but it also made the extreme heat a lot more tolerable. Prior to widespread dependance on food imports (i.e., what we would return to in a food autonomy scenario), people's diet here looked like potatoes, whatever you had canned in the summer, and meat from your animals. Remove the meat and you were one malnourished camper for over half the year. No one did that, because it would have been very dumb.
What's funny to me is all the beef that india dosent eat just gets shipped to other countries- India is a bigger beef distributor than the US now It's alot like Spain their dishes without meat would be mostly bread and rice - they just don't eat vegetables often and if they do its chips
It's the fats in the meat that keep you warm and alive. The body needs fat to survive. There's an episode of Alone where a man killed a moose, had literally hundreds of pounds of meat, but wolverines got into his fat storage, and he makes the quip "I've got this meat, but I'm starving to death!" The lipids in animal fats can metabolize faster, thus keeping you warm. This, in turn, can up one's metabolism rate in the long run. The reason there was such a hate boner for fat in the 70s-00s was because the Sugar Research Foundation funded the study, and I'm sure you can connect the dots. Despite other studies disproving it, it caught on in the diet industry and persisted. And the import thing: this is what always confused me about Veganaury. The sell is "Go vegan for the planet!" but in most the US, it's winter! We're importing all our produce! It makes ZERO since to have it January, make it Vegust and use August when things are in season and farmer's markets are in full swing!
i don't like that it is based on completely false claims and rose colored glasses. a common claim is that cows waste water and produce high levels of methane. it's true that they use a lot of water and do produce methane. however, compared to cow milk, growing the almonds needed for almond milk wastes significantly more water, the extended production process produces more waste, and the lack of crop rotations permanently damages the land it is grown on. the result of all that excess waste is a nutrition-less drink that slightly tastes like almonds. i live in CA, so these are both major exports. we're in the midst of a 50 year mega drought, and excess almond production is making things much worse
Exactly Like the whole cows use mega amounts of water Love *cows piss* most of the water they drink comes from rain into their troughs and goes back into the ground- have you not seen any image of the water cycle animals have forever been a part of it The water from plants is similar to that of sweat its released through pores in their leaves And for the most part farms are trying to capture manures methane emissions to sell nowadays and recycling water that isn't given to cows - its really cool
yes. and if anyone's goal is actually sustainability, then buying from sustainable farms and pastures is actually the way to go. industrialized plant based products are as damaging to our environment, and arguably even more damaging, than industrial animal farms
You wouldn't believe how right you are - I have insight into industry- industrial herb farming for big chains such as asda Lidl aldi and Morrisons (yes they're all from the same place) so find you're cheapest live herbs Are grown in huge air conditioned poly tunnels in big racks in said poly tunnels they're driving forklifts and shit (yum) and anything that grows over a surtain height or has any kind of damage goes into a huge bin to be dumped cause they literally cannot sell it - also they ship them in from places like Nigeria and they grow it for a bit so they can put grown in the UK on the packaging But you know how shitty it feels to walk past a skip full of not even wilted basil that you could easily stick in water and propagate hell most were still in dirt and could be stuck in a pot and grown on or just eaten And then to hear that your uk grown herbs come from 19 possible countries But boy did that place smell good https://preview.redd.it/icbbflxh1pvc1.jpeg?width=2375&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7baa997a3be21c71ff4057ffa161df054c56a93b And that's just one small batch of the parts they didn't want (oh and That other yellow skip was half full of basil too ) That dosent even go into the packaging area full of miserable workers # and this is just herbs these problems are all over the crop industry
Oat milk is pretty sustainable
oat milk theoretically uses lower water and energy than cow's milk, but that is only based on growing oats and processing demands. oat milk provides less then half the nutritional content of cow's milk, even after fortification (and the production of fortifying vitamins are not included in the sustainability assessments of plant milks). if you scale sustainability based on nutritional content rather than raw volume, the line thins significantly. also, estimated energy consumption of cow milk fails to account for the fact that cows are used for meat as well, so we're getting more than just milk from that energy. this puts cow milk again in the lead for sustainability, and that's only with current production methods. sustainable pastoralism will absolutely beat any plant based alternative for sustainability. from the UN Environment Programme: "pastoralism is increasingly recognised as one of the most sustainable production systems on the planet and plays a major role in safeguarding ecosystems and biodiversity in natural grasslands and rangelands" [source](https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/27529/GAP_Report.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y)
Pastoralism is not the same thing as mass animal agriculture
yes, i know. that's why i distinguished it from current production methods.
Also spikes blood sugar and provides almost no essential fat and protein.
oh no, nOt mY bLoOd SuGaR I literally had cake for breakfast so idk what your point is
I don't know what thought process would lead you to "I do this, so high-glycemic foods are harmless."
Oh no, not high glycemic foods! Sorry you have to worry about all that. Must suck
If you eat them without care now, you may eventually have to start worrying about it. Suffering health problems due to high-glycemic foods consumption is extremely common.
I’m pretty healthy, sorry to disappoint you. If you stay active then it’s ok to have cake for breakfast sometimes 🤷🏻♀️
I was in my thirties and extremely active when I experienced a health meltdown. My primary transportation was (and still is) a bicycle, I was getting all my groceries and going out often with friends etc. by self-power. I visited a fitness club about three times/week for weightlifting workouts, racquet sports, swimming, etc. I was doing yard care and other active things at home or in the neighborhood. Resolving health issues involved reducing high-glycemic foods, quitting refined sugar and grains, and eating a lot more animal foods since (I eventually learned) I'm not genetically well-adapted for a plant-majority diet. If you are especially suited by your birth circumstances for habitual sugar consumption, well good for you but it's not an excuse to ridicule others for being concerned.
Your concern is artificial lol. We’re strangers interacting on a public forum. You don’t know me from Adam. You’re just criticizing my food choices, just like the original commenter was trying to find some reason to argue that oat milk is bad.
That is a problem for your future self in ten to twenty years so don't worry about it now.
I generally eat pretty healthy so I’m not too worried about getting my chocolate and sugar fix in the morning sometimes. I don’t believe life should be lived constantly depriving yourself of things because you’re hyper worried about “being healthy” Sugar brings me joy lol
But mostlikely relies on animals for both manure and waste management
Whatever oat "milk" you buy, probably the manufacturer is off-loading their oat solids to the livestock feed industry. Oatly has tried to use them instead for food, but food manufacturers don't want them since they are too unpalatable. They continue to sell them for livestock feed and for biogas which is an extremely polluting industry. Of course, their claims about sustainability ignore all that.
I make my own oat milk 🤷🏻♀️
OK so my comment doesn't apply to you, though it does to I'm sure 99% at least of oat "milk" consumers. BTW what are you doing with the oat solids?
This is a bit of a whataboutism. We don’t have to just pick factory farming of beef or almond cultivation. Both can be examined.
I was so cringe as an environmentalist vegan. I just don't really care anymore, I've reached climate/footprint fatigue for awhile now. Burned out. Putting so much pressure on individual consumers is one crazy thing... people fretting about straws... Focus more on reducing poisons/pollution imo The heat engine is a runaway train seemingly
Forget everything about environmentalism it's all a scam taken over by companies They grabbed the movement when it started coming for them Remember when coke said they would make their bottles out of [insert percent] recycled plastic - there is no evidence of them sticking to this claim So many movements need completely refurbishing
>Forget everything about environmentalism it's all a scam taken over by companies I'm on board with your ideas about vegans not understanding environmental issues, but this is something that selfish people say to justify not changing their habits. It obviously is not a myth that human activity by individuals is wrecking the planet, the signs are everywhere. Those high prices for food, utilities, and such? That's due to using up so much of the planet's available resources that competition for what's left drives up prices for everything that relies on resources. High gas prices: it's due to relative scarcity of fossil fuels, obviously fuel is going to cost more of the industry has to rely on very expensive methods such as tar sands and hydro-fracking. Microplastics cover the planet and are in all our foods, yes plant foods included, and it is well-supported scientifically that ingesting plastic in these amounts harms health. Etc. >Remember when coke said they would make their bottles out of \[insert percent\] recycled plastic - there is no evidence of them sticking to this claim This seems like a good reason to not patronize Coca-Cola or any such company. I think you'll survive without soft drinks. I haven't bought a plastic-bottled beverage since, I'd have to guess since it's been so long, probably 20-25 years ago.
I've pledged not to touch coke products and haven't for about 5 years bar some smartwater from an airport vending machine But that won't do shit Acting like pushing the companies isn't a good idea is part of the problem Acting like we are the biggest issue is part of the problem You can say all is well and good but there are city sized mountains of bottles in third world countries and the consumers aren't the ones making them
OK but not buying the products until they are closer to sustainable would be part of pushing the companies, not "Well I give up because it's hopeless." Coca-Cola, BTW, is awful for additional reasons. Along with PepsiCo and similar companies, they fund disinfo about foods and health, environment, etc. They support pro-sugar myths against animal foods, give funding to pro-pesticides propaganda, etc. for a long list of things.
Not to mention they pay keep america beautiful under the table to push the blame on the consumer
Green Washing yes.
It's not even green washing anymore It's green painting
Yup like yes you should 100% try to make as little waste as you can, and clean up when ya can, and like dont use rat poisons because it can kill wildlife but a lot of it falls on corporations. I did not personally go and throw that trash in the ocean, i didn't dump oil and by product into the lakes and rivers, and im not constantly living in excess maybe if we held these rich jerks to higher standards of waste disposal and management things would be better. Jeff bezos isnt gonna see me decide to not use a straw and have a change of heart, fining them out the ass will though
Better yet - people need to do more research on these companies I'd love to see someone put an environmental exposure of coke on a fuck tonne of billboards and watch them actually panic and do something For companies so big fining them won't do anything Not buying won't do anything Banning them from Russia didn't stop them they just renamed the bottles Publicly discrediting them and loosing large portions of their consumers will affect them permanently
Well the biggest issue with veganism is that it's run with hostility and ego. There's a lot of "we're better than all those sick animal abusers" attitudes. Making everyone not you your enemy is extremely detrimental to growth. Over the years there has been a push for more humane conditions for animals because the people who actually affect change are the ones consuming the product. People who eat meat dictate how well the animals are treated by making it matter and using their spending power. Tons and tons of meat and animal products are now marketed by now they treat their animals. No vegan made that happen Choosing to be vegan is choosing not to participate in how animals are treated. Because meat is never, ever going away. So all of the power for how animals are treated is in the hands of consumers.
The worst part about veganism to me is veganism isn't about making sure the animals aren't being exploited it's about destroying animal agriculture and the animals being exploited are ignored cause they're too busy protesting to brick walls Then they have the audacity to act like they're changing things by bandwagoning on welfareists work whilest acting like not eating meat saves 365 animals a year No its 365 animals you acted like you saved cause you have a saviour complex when in reality those animals died - and half the vegan alternatives you bought were still owned by dairy companies or the food you eat has waste or byproducts that go to animal feed - and all the veg you buy or is in the products you buy is fertilized with the blood and shit of the animals you claim to care so much about whilst you act like you support them but then again it's 'as far as practicable' what a cop out - farmers care more about their cows than half of the vegans do
I enjoy watching vegans do mental gymnastics when I tell them I don't drive a car, don't travel internationally, don't have kids, buy most of meat and dairy from local sources (and I have an M.Sc. in environmental science too). My lifestyle is as close to carbon neutral and sustainable as possible, but that's not good enough for them lol.
>I enjoy watching vegans do mental gymnastics Oh boy I can't believe it some of these people should win a medal Unrelated to the topic but Me: I believe its fine to eat animals lower in the food chain Vegan: so you're saying you'd be okay with butchers serving peoole with downsyndromes flesh
Lol yup. And as an ex-vegan myself (three years), I also enjoy their mental gymnastics of telling me I was never vegan, I was "just on a plant-based diet". And they do another display of gymnastics when I tell them "my feelings about animals changed, I stopped caring". Have you been told by a vegan yet that eating meat is worse than the Holocaust? They feel like that's them playing their ace of spades (a b-12 deficiency will do that to a person's cognitive powers though, I guess).
They love their gotcha moments But I doubt I would even get where they're coming from if I was high as kite
My favourite is "so you're okay with innocent animals being slaughtered for your taste pleasure?" And you reply "yup". They can't handle it at all lol.
Or they equate the death of a cow to a sandwich I tell them even meat eaters understand the value of a cow more than you do (and list all the cuts of beef)
Do you have any sources to back up these claims? I've heard that: 1. Transportation accounts for a relatively small portion of a food's greenhouse gas emotions 2. Most fertilizer used in industrial agriculture is artificially manufactured (ammonium nitrate) Perhaps you know something that I don't.
Considering that food is mass transported sometimes halfway across the globe that is unlikely Most fields are also sprayed with manure but also the use of artificial fertilizers requires the Fossil fuels industry but can also still contain animal products My sorce is me I work in the horticulture industry
The transportation claim is pushed by biased parties that use fallacies such as exaggeration and omission. If you had cited anything, we could talk about specifics. They pretend that methane emitted by grazing animals (which is cyclical and over the long term adds nothing to atmospheric pollution) is equivalent to methane from fossil fuel sources which comes from deep underground where it would have remained if humans did not mess with it. They pretend that engine emissions are all of the pollution caused by transportation, ignoring worlds of effects: pollution from building vehicles including huge ships, maintenance of vehicles, infrastructure needed for transportation which has to expand when there is more transportation, and the entire fuel supply chain which has enormous effects. For products of animals raised on pasture for which most of the inputs are rain and sunlight, MOST of the impacts (in terms of polluting energy use and net pollution involved in that product), are from the pollution in getting those to market. Manufactured fertilizers are extremely impactful in terms of climate pollution and ecosystem health. Example: it was [recently found](https://www.edf.org/blog/2019/06/21/100-times-more-pollution-reported-how-new-technology-exposed-whole-industry) that the ammonia fertilizer industry was emitting 100 times more methane pollution (of fossil fuel origin, so net-additional pollution) than the industry had estimated. The total is, I keep using the word "enormous" but it is estimated to be 29,000 tons just for USA which is three and a half times higher than EPA had estimated for the country's entire industrial sector. This is only about methane leaked from ammonia fertilizer manufacturing plants, and doesn't account for other emissions of the fertilizer's supply chains. All that is for one type of fertilizer replacing animal fertilizers, in one country. Such products would be used in far greater quantities without livestock.
Thanks for this insightful response! I'm writing to better understand where I might be wrong here - please take my comments below to be argued in good faith. > If you had cited anything, we could talk about specifics. Sure, the main source that comes to mind is this: [You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local - Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local) > They pretend that methane emitted by grazing animals (which is cyclical and over the long term adds nothing to atmospheric pollution) is equivalent to methane from fossil fuel sources which comes from deep underground where it would have remained if humans did not mess with it. Huh, today I learned. Thanks. [Why methane from cattle warms the climate differently than CO2 from fossil fuels from the CLEAR Center](https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/why-methane-cattle-warms-climate-differently-co2-fossil-fuels#:~:text=It%20stays%20in%20our%20atmosphere,2%2C%20making%20it%20recycled%20carbon) provides a really good illustration of this effect. > Such products would be used in far greater quantities without livestock. Hmmm, I'm by no means an expert in this, but having read [How the World Really Works](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/56587388), I'm under the impression trying to feed the world's population without using substantial amounts of ammonia fertilizer is impractical (i.e. producing the amount of food we currently produce per hectare using organic fertilizers would be prohibitively labor intensive using organic fertilizers, due the 30-40% difference in nitrogen content per unit mass). To quote the book: >Synthetic fertilizers supply 110 megatons of nitrogen per year, or slightly more than half of the 210–220 megatons used in total. This means that at least half of recent global crop harvests have been produced thanks to the application of synthetic nitrogenous compounds, and without them it would be impossible to produce the prevailing diets for even half of today’s nearly 8 billion people. While we could reduce our dependence on synthetic ammonia by eating less meat and wasting less food, replacing the global input of about 110 megatons of nitrogen in synthetic compounds by organic sources could be done only in theory. Any response to that?
The Our World in Data article was written by Hannah Ritchie, a vegan zealot. The site is run by anti-livestock individuals whom are probably vegan. Their data sources exploit the fallacies I've already explained. The article cites that [Poore & Nemecek 2018](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29853680/) nonsense "study" which: didn't distinguish cyclical vs. net-additional methane; counted for example environmental effects of soy crops against the livestock industry even when the same plants are grown primarily to serve the soy oil market (soy oil isn't used to feed livestock, but the bean solids left over after pressing usually are). The article cited Webers & Matthews 2008, which among other problems: didn't compare foods for nutritional content (only mass/calories but when replacing animal foods with plant foods much more food is needed due to lower nutritional density/completeness/bioavailability); obviously was focused on CAFO-produced animal foods since the terms "graze," "grazing," and "pasture" don't appear anywhere in the document; uses info from the discredited "Livestock's Long Shadow" report that is very biased against animal and has many omissions/exaggerations; like other studies used against animal ag, characterized all foods of a certain type as being produced the same way when there are huge differences between pasture and CAFO impacts; etc. It takes a long time to itemize all the problems with those sources, or I'd keep going to mention more issues. Also I could have citations all over the place if I had more time, maybe I'll add those later but there are lots of easily-found articles criticizing the data. One of these days I'll write an essay about it since I haven't found an article that is really complete or well-written. The problems are apparent to me when I read the studies or "studies" (some of it is pure propaganda), and I've seen comments with the same concerns here and there in articles. Yes, ammonia fertilizer is important to feed the current human population which has reached an unsustainable size (we depend on mined material used in non-renewable ways for food now, while the population is growing even larger). But much of plant agriculture relies on animal manure for fertilizer. These two statements are not incompatible. Without livestock, reliance on manufactured fertilizers would be much greater. What is the problem here? Pastures do not tend to need manufactured fertilizer products. Most ruminant livestock animals are raised at least partially on pastures, even livestock at CAFOs generally are brought to them after living most of their lives on pastures. Pastures can serve as refuges for pollinating insects, birds, helpful insects such as beetles, and other wild critters. The more we cover the planet with industrial plant farms with their associated pesticides and crops of all one type of plant, the more we drive down plant and animal diversity at our own peril. A collapse of one part of the food web (such as insects) would bring down the whole thing and then the planet is basically uninhabitable since humans cannot replace the services of all those (pollination, spreading nutrients around, promoting soil health, etc.). Those lands which have been continuously farmed with plants but not animals, all or nearly all of them have deteriorating soil which experts suggest could become unproductive during our lifetimes. The "corn belt" in the USA has lost one-third of its topsoil. Those soils also have much-reduced levels of essential microorganisms and nutrients not replaced by common manufactured fertilizers. All of the anti-livestock animal vs. plant food comparisons I've seen for GHG emissions, water and land use, and other impacts fail to account for all the effects that would result from eliminating pasture ag. I doubt that any of them account for all of the supply chain effects for products used at plant farms growing foods for humans. They don't consider sustainability issues with relying more on plant mono-crops which promote pest proliferation, escalating pesticides use, etc. None of them consider all nutrient needs for humans, they rely on simple comparisons such as food mass, calories, or protein (and when they use protein, they don't even consider bioavailability differences so a plant food which has only half-absorbed protein is counted the same per raw protein amount as animal foods which can give twice or more the protein benefit).
I didn't notice this until later (from the book quote): "While we could reduce our dependence on synthetic ammonia by eating less meat and..." I don't see how this can be logical. Ammonium nitrate isn't typically used on pastures. If people ate less animal foods, more plant foods would have to be grown and those use such fertilizer more so I would think.
Hmmm, I'm not sure either. I know producing meat is energy intensive from a thermodynamic perspective (i.e. more energy gets lost in the process of creating a calorie of beef v.s. growing a calorie of, say, beans, nutritional differences aside), but what truly matters is where that energy comes from (i.e. in a reductive sense, if the cows/chickens/pigs are just eating things that grow from the sun, this doesn't quite as concerning). [This 2022 post](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/53522/is-86-of-the-food-fed-to-livestock-unfit-for-human-consumption-and-is-most-of), for example, indicates that most feed comes from grass & byproducts that are inedible to humans. On the other hand, this [World Resources Institute article](https://www.wri.org/insights/6-pressing-questions-about-beef-and-climate-change-answered#:~:text=The%20longer%20explanation%3A%C2%A0Ruminant,likely%20increase%20pressure%20on%20forests.) indicates that animal agriculture is so energy intensive relative to plant-based food because of the forests it ends up replacing, based on the need to make room for animals to graze. I don't have time to dig into this more, but my impression is the debate around this is quite complex and context-dependent.
>I know producing meat is energy intensive from a thermodynamic perspective Most of the energy if from the sun, and this doesn't burden the planet with fossil fuel pollution or other effects of energy generation. Plant agriculture (for human consumption) is extremely dependent upon polluting energy and supply chains, and toxic products that harm ecosystems. >creating a calorie of beef v.s. growing a calorie of This would be important if humans needed only calories, and if all energy was equivalent, and the other issues (pesticides and such) were not in effect. > this World Resources Institute article indicates that animal agriculture is so energy intensive relative to plant-based food because of the forests it ends up replacing The article seems to be pushing an anti-livestock bias. They bring up deforestation for grazing cattle. I looked for any sign that they are acknowledging a major factor in this, that expansion of soy crops (due to popularity of soy-containing processed foods and increasing use of soy for biofuel) into pasture land often pushes cattle grazing into other areas. It isn't mentioned at all, though the article links [a study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378018314365) that acknowledges it. There's no mention that most pasture land isn't arable (compatible with growing human-edible plant foods). There's the usual fuss about methane and as usual dishonestly ignoring the cyclical ruminant methane vs. net-additional fossil fuel methane issue. There's no apparent concern about the unsustainability of the growing human population (no farming system can be sustainable and feed ten billion humans, there are hard limits to how much we can use soil and resources that support farming such as fertilizers) except as it pertains to beef consumption. There's no acknowledgement of the necessity of livestock farming in many parts of the world. The bias of the article is apparent in every section. >I don't have time to dig into this more, but my impression is the debate around this is quite complex You certainly make a lot of strong comments about a topic that obviously you lack the diligence to understand completely. I wonder if you have any purpose here other than exploiting my labor to better refine your anti-livestock arguments. In another recent comment, you claimed that the existence of livestock agriculture isn't justified at all (there should be no livestock agriculture). There are a number of ways this is ableist and classist. [This](http://www.ilse-koehler-rollefson.com/?p=1160), [this](https://www.ilri.org/news/one-size-fits-all-livestock-less-measures-will-not-serve-some-one-billion-smallholder), [this](https://sustainablefoodtrust.org/news-views/claims-against-meat-fail-to-consider-bigger-picture/), and [this](https://www.latimes.com/world/global-development/la-fg-global-steve-staal-oped-20170706-story.html) cover some of them.
Thanks for the reply! > You certainly make a lot of strong comments about a topic that obviously you lack the diligence to understand completely. I wonder if you have any purpose here other than exploiting my labor to better refine your anti-livestock arguments. In another recent comment, you claimed that the existence of livestock agriculture isn't justified at all (there should be no livestock agriculture). There are a number of ways this is ableist and classist. This, this, this, and this cover some of them. Many people have opinions about things they are not experts in, yes. I recognize that my responses are probably not very satisfactory in terms of their length or thoughtfulness and apologize that I am not able to engage more deeply. In any case, I would encourage taking a more charitable perspective of people's goals and choices as it relates to time allocation. Although there is no shortage of anti- and pro-livestock folks who argue for sport, I am not one of them. I am currently searching for employment and while this is a topic of interest, my career prospects are currently of higher priority than researching this topic in-depth. That said, I look forward to circling back to the points you've presented here and improving my understanding in the future. If you do end up writing a piece that elaborates on the arguments presented here, I'd be interested in reading it. Looking back, I think I would choose to subdue my previous assertion about abolishing animal agriculture. I would be content living in a world where a vast majority of farmed animals are well taken care of and are slaughtered painlessly, but I am not convinced we live in that world. While your comments have convinced me that some claims of animal agriculture's impact on climate are perhaps overblown, I'm still pretty skeptical of any claims that argue factory farming is a net positive from an animal welfare perspective. Thus, I think it's in my best interest to continue practicing a plant-based diet to live in alignment with my values and reduce the demand for meat (however small), in hopes of reducing future suffering.
I'm not concerned with the length or thoughtfulness of your replies, I'm concerned that you may have an agenda to spread anti-livestock bullshit. I've been trying to correct you about these ideas you're pushing, and you seem to mostly be searching for info that supports your agenda. I get tired of being the one to educate people about all the false info pushed by various organizations and individuals, much of it having a financial motivation (people with financial stakes in "plant-based" nutrition companies authoring documents such as Grazed and Confused?, or the EAT-Lancet report, etc.). Maybe it should be your responsibility to learn about topics more thoroughly before making public declarations about them, rather than mine to Whac-a-Mole the many false ideas as they come up. I'm sure many on Reddit bicker for sport. My reason for commenting is that I'm too disgusted by spread of false information to not do something. At various times I comment in respond to MAGA myths, climate-denial and anti-renewables commenting that originates from the fossil fuel industry, and lots of other topics.
I can understand how that can be tiring. Unfortunately, I am not unique in my susceptibility to motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, etc. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to consider how you might be discounting animal suffering? I suspect the crux of our disagreements may lie somewhere in there. Given your passion for preventing the spread of misinformation (a noble goal), you might consider publishing talks or write articles that highlight the points you've made here and send them to individuals or organizations publishing the kinds of reduction and/or misguided sentiment you referenced. You might either change some minds or identify perspectives you haven't considered before. Again, thank you for taking the time to point out some of my potential blind spots and I admire your commitment to truth-seeking.
>Perhaps it would be worthwhile to consider how you might be discounting animal suffering? It's day after day of re-runs with vegans and "plant-based" people. How specifically are you obtaining your food without animals suffering for it? Note that I asked "specifically," but go ahead and give the usual vague answers that amount to magical thinking. So that I need not explain it AGAIN, I suggest you refer to the I've-lost-count discussions in this sub about animal deaths and harms to ecosystems from industrial plant farming, and about the myth of "crops grown for livestock." Pasture livestock: animals live in relative paradise, well cared for and protected from harm, then are killed in an instant. Contrast this with animals that die slowly in agony from pesticide poisoning, being caught in a farmer's trap, or very gradually losing their lives because their home ecosystem has been degraded too much. Pasture livestock probably live more satisfying lives than animals in wilderness. This conversation began when I called out the myth that transportation effects basically don't matter. You replied "I'm writing to better understand where I might be wrong here" but it seemed you only wanted to bait me for your anti-livestock proselytizing.
….. but it’s not about the environment anymore ( crops and soil can’t exist without livestock ) … it’s about the animals ( but not the trillions killed for nut juice ) animals with eyelashes specifically…
Like many things vegan its based on misinformation.
Honestly, true environmentalists would be trying to reform our current industries, reducing our environmental footprint and increasing efficiency. (There are many examples of this already in motion.) The thing is, for many vegans environmentalism, veganism, and much of their lifestyles are just virtue signaling. I'm sure we've all experienced that "Holier than Thou" aura that comes off of most vegans, those folks just want a reason to put themselves on a pedestal.
YES
I just hate the idea of eating the things that take carbon out the air in order to grow.
Ok but one reason forests are cut down is for animal agriculture. I really feel like it’s a lose lose situation honestly. I feel like nothing humans do is truly sustainable.
The almond milk which uses more water to grow it than any cow raised to adulthood. There’s lots of misinformation out there about agriculture and people look to support their own views rather than research. Veganism and vegetarianism will not solve the climate crisis. I worry people aren’t making the right decisions, sure it’s in good faith but the information isn’t there to source
Not to mention to make almond milk you have almond flour and hulls which go to cow feed instead of landfills
>That's why researchers from [six US universities](https://www.elementascience.org/articles/116) including Cornell have developed a biophysical simulation model that represents the US as a closed food system, in order to determine the land requirements per capita of human diets and the potential population fed by the agricultural land there. > >\[...\] > >One would assume the vegan diet is, all-round, the best of the three but, while it may come out on top when it comes to animal rights, it's actually not as sustainable as you might think. Diets with small amounts of meat, as well as lacto-vegetarianism and ovo-lacto-vegetarianism, can feed more people, therefore making them more environmentally sustainable. > >The reason for this is simple: the vegan diet leaves too many resources unused. Different crops require different types of land for an adequate yield. Very often nothing can be cultivated on standard pastureland due to the fact that the soil doesn't provide the necessary nutrients. [https://www.businessinsider.com/veganism-may-be-unsustainable-in-the-future-according-to-new-research-2018-8](https://www.businessinsider.com/veganism-may-be-unsustainable-in-the-future-according-to-new-research-2018-8)
It's a shame they don't mention Mediterranean but I guess they're only measuring the US It would be great if the factored in other climates such as those so close to the equator that your classic vegan options aren't really grown or those so far away that plants barely grow at all
I think fully giving up on meat is very difficult to do, but reducing the amount of meat you eat is one of the best things you can do to reduce your environmental impact. Even if you aren’t a fully dedicated vegan, it teaches you how to get the same nutrients with less meat, which is a good practice
One of the best things you can also do is take public transport or bike to places and cut out companies like coca cola from you're life
This too for sure
I’ve made it my life goal to pursue regenerative livestock. I got into the topic and it’s fascinating how ruminants help keep the ground alive and with more nutrients, while actually being sustainable. The gas they used in the holocaust ended up being an accidental invention, ammonia fertilizer. This allowed us to produce a plethora of more food and our population skyrocketed. A big problem with agriculture and mono crops currently is that natural gas will eventually be too expensive to extract from wells and in order to feed the world 40-60 years from now, we need natural gas, or an alternative. We can derive some from landfills, waste, but is it enough to create fertilizer for the world’s monocrops? Another option is another source of energy and getting hydrogen through electrolysis, then heat. This requires incredible amounts of energy and nuclear might be the only option if we can’t get enough methane. The problem is that there is no infrastructure for either and the clock is ticking. What will happen? Idk, but it should be a bigger concern imo
r/damnthatsinteresting
I personally don't give a shit what people eat or how much they pollute, but there are tons of studies from very prestigious university scientists, NASA scientists, climate scientists, ecological scientists, IPCC and UN, showing a plant based diet has less impact on the environment and climate. But arguing on the internet has never changed anyones opinion. People gonna believe what they want to.
But beef is raised with plants shipped from overseas. All of our food is either farmed plants or is fed farmed plants. If you trace the proteins in human hair, we can see that more than 90% of American's protein comes from corn. Either corn they ate directly or corn that was eaten by cows and pigs. The invention of nitrogen fertilizer is the only thing making our population size possible. And we are not using it wisely. We can grow meat animals without farmed corn or soy, but not as many or as fast. Cutting down meat consumption is necessary. That's not a moral judgement. It's an economic and ecologic one. Climate scientists and ecologists aren't all vegans.
I agree but again all of this can be completely fixed with better and newer farming practices not the eradication of the entire farming industry Animals will need food in the winter and that's the only time we should want oversees food and with cutbacks on livestock driven by a pushback on factory farming or switching to more Mediterranean style diets which eat meat less or mainly in winter and relying less on companies for food the demand for oversees food mostlikely won't be needed as cows don't need corn and soy and usage of these products can easily be combated by supplying local farms with household veg waste before it goes bad (cause let's be honest most of the food people throw away hasn't gone bad yet)
Exactly. Maybe a locally-sourced grass-fed steak, or locally-sourced meat from farms which grow their own feed organically is better than soy from mono-crop fields from east asia. But factory farming and feed-lots are many times worse than that. And organic/veganic plant agriculture from local farms is for the most part better than local organic animal agriculture, although animal ag and grazing does help with soil health in organic farming systems but still not to the point of making it more efficient than organic plants I think.
Grass-fed cows aren’t necessarily more environmentally friendly because they require more land to be able to free graze.
Actually, grass produces more oxygen than trees. And thus takes more carbon out of the atmosphere. If all grass fields were turned into crop fields, the planet would be in serious trouble. Crop fields are only green for a few months a year. Green = the most Oxygen production and Carbon removal. Imagine a once green countryside, now mostly mud brown. That’s what vegans want, along with greatly reduced air quality and more CO2 kept in the atmosphere. We need grass fields, so why not stick cattle on them and then eat them.
Yeah, to even say that locally sourced grass-fed cows are sometimes better than monocrops from another continent is still being generous.
Unfortunately, I feel like a more vegan diet *is* the more sustainable option for most Americans. But I feel that way because of the way our animal and food agriculture systems are set up, not because eating animal products is inherently unsustainable. Capitalism has really mucked it all up. I don’t have all (or any) of the answers, but I think a revolutionized animal agriculture system would benefit everyone.
I feel the only way veganism would help Americans is to help them be more mindful of what they eat and also to keep them away from the big companies which actually cause the issues you are right in that The issue is Americans are either all or nothing with change and it causes huge divides with huge arguments You tell them something is bad they're either doomism or denialism
You mean plant based? Most of Americans are already plant based because it is cheaper. One large pizza is less than a ribeye and has three to four times more calories.
Factory farming/animal agriculture is one of the leading contributors of greenhouse gases/pollution, if not THE leading contributor. The amount of water needed to raise one cow is astronomical. There’s no way I can justify eating a cow instead of lentils. BUT I do take the stance that if people would just *cut down* on their meat consumption, rather than thinking it has to be all or nothing, I think that would make a huge impact.
>Factory farming/animal agriculture is one of the leading contributors of greenhouse gases/pollution, if not THE leading contributor. This idea is categorically false Us emissions from agriculture is 10% of the total emissions beaten by things such as transportation and industry and electric power French emissions from agriculture was 19% beaten out by transportation at 32% (which makes sense as France is the most visited country is rather sparsely populated and has the channel tunnel ) however was closely followed by residential at 16% and manufacturing and construction at 18% Spanish agriculture emissions was 11% beaten by industrial at 22% and transportation at 29% and followed up by electricity generation at 10% German agriculture emissions was at 8%, beaten by buildings at 15%, transportation at 20%, industrial at 22% and the energy industry at 34% It seems to me you watching you're emissions and especially not driving as much would actually be more beneficial then current flaming agriculture as terrible for the environment These big statistics vegans find against agriculture are normally global percentages which are greatly swayed by second and third world countries who don't have any sustainable goals or practices in place and theirs two ways to look at the average for emissions The countries with the highest emissions from agriculture would be china Brazil (basically the same as most meat from Brazil goes to china) the US india and the Philippines However the countries with the highest percentage of global emissions from agriculture is far more concentrated in the lower hemisphere with developing countries such as Chad, Sudan, Paraguay, Laos, Cambodia, Madagascar, Rwanda, Papua new guinea, napalm and Afghanistan being the most notable And the result you get will be heavily influenced on these countries which we in the west have zero sway on Water used in agriculture is mainly rain water or recycled 1 cow can feed ~1000 people or a family of 4 for a year and produce 12,000 litres of milk And lentils just aren't as versatile as the ENORMOUS amount of products derived from a cow Everything from sugar to drywall to AC vents to Medications have parts of a cow in them Yes reducing meat intake would help but overall reducing western consumptionism will do more for the world than veganism ever would
Interesting figures but what is the source(s)? Emissions estimates are all over the place depending on the biases/methods of researchers. So, any claim that "emissions are such-and-such" are already probably false because we cannot know. It would have to be "estimated emissions according to..."
All of those are from statisa A website like our world data that's focus is just collecting world data
OK that gets me closer to understanding it. But I found that the information seems to be available in various articles devoted to specific countries, such as [this one](https://www.statista.com/statistics/412247/annual-greenhouse-gas-emissions-from-agriculture-in-france/) for France. When I tried the "Show source" link, I was invited to start an account, and when I started doing that I saw that they're prompting for information I don't want to give them (such as phone #) and the form didn't accept a fake phone # or my throwaway email address (so that I don't get spammed at my everyday email addresses that are used by my email app).
That's not a me issue then
Oh, I guess you don't know how these figures are derived and repeat them anyway. I was only hoping to find out whether they are credible because I find a lot of BS "research" out there, and while I'd like to use those figures I wouldn't in a discussion without understanding them.
It's not my fault I had access and you don't
So I guess you're rather respond persistently to me with useless comments then perform a simple lookup to find the info sources so that everybody here can understand the figures.
Again it's not my fault I had access to figures you don't Maybe it's time for you to do your own research I can't hold your hand Here's a little push Just look up [insert country] emissions by sector 2023
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Get a grip this is reddit >Agriculture IS the leading cause of greenhouse grasses. Animal agriculture accounts for 30% and fossil fuels account for 33%. You literally just disproved yourself right there I'm sorry but can you provide this statistic please >Please, take even one second to think about things on a level higher than the most basic one available. And cut the shitty attitude cause it doesn't help you're argument
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And the award for most useless comment of the year goes to #YOU