Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.
https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption
Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview
If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌 🙌
Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. Also, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
This is true, and also not usually well taken by most people, even the ones claiming to be pro environment.
Wait until this thread gets full of people saying that their habits are irrelevant because companies pollute much more - which they do indeed, but that absolutely does not negate the many studies we have that calculate a major impact if we simply dropped red meat.
Which is again quite obvious if you think about the energetic demand of growing food only to feed an animal that then will become food, rather than skipping this step and eating the original food instead.
This argument drives me crazy. Companies, in this context, are the people. The companies pollute exclusively on behalf of their customers. WE ARE THE COMPANIES.
What people are saying is that their habits are negligible because companies pollute much more.
But sure, try to shame the little guy who might be doing their negligible effort instead of going after the big polluters, that’ll help a lot.
That’s what they are saying, yes. They are wrong.
The idea that we have to grow food for food is ridiculous. Cows turn grass into meat just fine, why do we need to grow corn and soybeans for them
I bet it’s because, like with hogs, we’ve bred them to be so growth optimized they can’t get enough calories from grass anymore.
we need to feed them corn and soybeans because people want lots and lots of meat, and that’s the best way to get lots and lots of meat.
that’s… kinda why people advocate for eating less meat, so that there won’t be such a powerful incentive to turbomaximize meat yields to meet the huge demand…
Unfortunately grass-fed production is no solution. It both does not scale or help reduce emissions
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
Not scaling could be a feature and not a bug. It would raise the price of beef and thus lower demand.
To an extent, yes it would likely do that. Though on the other hand running into the maximum capacity limitations would not look pretty. Even countries that have a just bit higher grass-fed production than others have a fair number of issues (and still use plenty of supplemental grain)
For instance, in New Zealand, they use a massive amount of synthetic fertilizer on grasslands to try to make it keep up for dairy production
https://theconversation.com/11-000-litres-of-water-to-make-one-litre-of-milk-new-questions-about-the-freshwater-impact-of-nz-dairy-farming-183806
Or in the UK and Ireland where grass-fed production leads to deforestation and they still need additional grain on top of it
https://theconversation.com/livestock-grazing-is-preventing-the-return-of-rainforests-to-the-uk-and-ireland-198014
the first time in probably a year i’ve seen someone explain supply and demand correctly. thank you.
What?!?
It doesn’t mean that you must supply me with everything I demand?!?!
A huge aspect of this is ranchers not cycling their land and allowing it to regrow native grasses properly, which does end up running into the land use problem again. But right now we’re very unoptimized with land regrowth and there’s a huge difference that can be made with just properly handling the land and to stop ranching in literal deserts.
Nope it because politicians need votes from farmers so they continue to give farmers corn subsidies cos they lose votes if they take away the subsidies they where given decades ago.
In Australia most of our beef is grass fed. Not only is it cheaper (when u don’t account for the reduced price of subsidised corn) but because much of Australia is so desert like it can only support grass and cattle are the only way to convert that grass to food and profit.
Well, it’s not “growing” per se, but we produce fertilizers which are “plant food”, so you could say we grow food for our food even for plants.
we don’t. but we do grain finish most cattle, because it’s faster.
My partner and I reduced our red meat intake but I don’t think I could stop completely. A steak a few times a year just hits the spot too much. I’m keen for lab grown though.
That’s a very reasonable and effective individual strategy.
We don’t need everyone becoming a vegan - but we absolutely do need to stop denying the necessity of reducing meat consumption.
How dare you ask people to change literally any habit they have! It’s obviously someone else’s responsibility to change!
i find it annoyingly ironic how you’re acting like these people are behaving in some absurd manner when you’re, at the same time, asking an even more absurd thing of humanity by demanding the majority of people concurrently start behaving differently regardless of their privilege or economic status.
i swear to fucking christ every single person banging the individual activism drum in environmentalist circles is some corpo plant or something. do you not understand the vast majority of people who contribute personally to climate change by ignoring these suggested principles don’t really have a choice? sure, it’s john’s fault personally that the only economically viable way he can feed himself in the local food desert is calories from beef…
it isn’t a matter of morals or will - what you are asking or hoping for is functional impossible and has not happened once in human history, ever. even if all people agreed with these ideas and somehow magically got on the individual action horse, it wouldn’t fucking matter. because what makes individual action not work is systemic and has nothing to do with the moral quality of the choices people are making or their personal opinions and has everything to do with harsh economic realities that can’t be whimsically subverted by shaming people for the sins of corporate America.
Lol this is ridiculous.
Have fun completely abdicating your agency and making absurd rants though, I guess
P.S. no one argues that people should make personal changes in lieu of government/business changes. This is another bad faith assertion people make to attempt to abdicate personal responsibility.
My big problem is not with individuals ethically trying to do the right thing, or about people trying to convince individuals to be ethical and to do the right thing.
My big problem is the amount of effort in this when it will have only small gains. In today’s society, meaningful gains come from changes in government regulations and policies.
If you want people to stop eating as much red meat, get the government to stop providing subsidies to cattle owners. I have a money-focused relative who owns cattle only because of the subsidies. At least let the price of beef go up to its actual market value. You’d think that would be an easy sell for Republicans who believe in the free market, but they’re the ones who want the subsidy the most.
Of course, then, you can add additional regulations and encourage environmental responsibility.
We should push for large institutional change, but don’t ignore individual change either. Problem is how will you get said governments to act if people aren’t also stepping up and they expect backlash to acting? The more people expect it to be cheap and highly consumed, the harder it will be for them to act. Moving people away from meat individually makes it easier. Movements that succeed usually have both individual and institutional change
Institutional change that is achievable at the current moment is smaller. There’s been some success with things like changing the defaults to be plant-based (which is good and we should continuing to push for that), but cutting subsides is going to be an uphill battle until a larger number of people change their consumption patterns
I agree that individual change is important, but you have to go about it a certain way. Actually the way OP is phrasing it is pretty good. Let people understand that just eating less red meat is always better.
Because if the messaging is at all confusing, you’ll get the kind of result you got during the start of Covid with the masks. It was always true that any amount of masking helped, but when you started to make it complicated, you got a lot of backlash and people completely stopped masking. And of course, with both Covid and red meat, there are people out there incentivized to make things complicated so that people give up. I think it really needs to be dead simple to work.
Hence the bumper sticker that has been around since the 70s
REAL ENVIRONMENTALIST DONT EAT MEAT
Homesteaders and locally grown meat is a necessary way of life for those living in the country. CAFOs and suburban grillers can burn in hell.
I think it’s also a bit of a thing where most people treat it like a binary.
They either think you have to go full on vegetarian or you eat meat.
When what we should really be encouraging most people to do is cut down on meat. (You’re gonna have a lot less sucess if you ask them to straight up stop).
I eat meat and it has very little impact. I hunt.
But they fly for a vacation?
I enjoy red meat, but I avoid it most of the time because of trying to be healthier. Also guilt from seeing videos of happy cows looking like gigantic dogs.
Fucking shit though I had no idea coffee was so high up the list. I probably should drink less of it anyway, but ouch, that one hurt me way more than the beef.
If it’s any consolation, at least a kilo of coffee is many more servings than a kilo of beef.
it wouldn’t be very scientific but it’d be nice to have a graph like this with co2equivalent per serving
Same here. I only eat beef a few times a year as a treat both for health and environmental reasons. But coffee and chocolate so high up the list is more of a killer for me. I definitely enjoy a couple cups per day as well as at least one bite of dark chocolate. Probably should cut back now that I can’t claim ignorance.
I was surprised it was that high. I don’t ever drink coffee, so hopefully it offsets some of the meat. We have already reduced our consumption.
I’m one of those people, and I’ve brought the critical thinking required to prove it.
U see the issue with those studies is that they are calculating methane output from the animals themselves and that’s it. It demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of thermodynamics and chemistry. Methane is CH4 and is a product of fermentation (which takes place in the gut of said animals). We know that matter cannot be created or destroyed so this carbon and hydrogen must come from somewhere in the animals diet (in this case grass). Now the grass must get those elements from somewhere and if u did heigh school chemistry u would know that the answer is photosynthesis (6CO2 + 6H2O + Light Energy -> C6H12O6 + 6O2).
So what’s happening is grass gets eaten by an animal. Most of that grass passes through unprocessed and is excreted as shit (a carbon sink contributing to the biomatter of the soil). A small fraction of that grass undergoes fermentation and a small fraction of that fermented carbon is byproduct methane. All that carbon originally came form the atmosphere due to photosynthesis. A majority of that atmospheric CO2 is sequestered in the cow shit by contributing to the soil biomatter. That’s not even accounting for the additional plants that the cow shit helps to grow which are also carbon sinks.
Now as an Aussie where 99% of our red meat is grass fed that’s actually a net carbon negative activity. As for the dumbass yanks feeding livestock corn (due to politicians buying votes with corn subsidies) then u have a problem. But nobody is gonna acknowledge any of this they just gonna spend all day shouting at each other.
The problem is not just the farts, the problem is the absolutely humongous amount of feed and space cattle needs. Most crops grown around the world are used to feed cattle, just like most farmland is used to grow cattle. That’s what’s polluting, producing so much green house gases, deforesting, etc.
No matter how you turn it, red meat is an environmental catastrophe.
We are talking about carbon here not other environmental impacts. If u wanna talk about other environmental impacts I’m happy to discuss how bad monocrop agriculture is especially the ridiculous amount of pesticides getting into the water and fucking everything up.
Producing feed doesn’t make GHG producing feed is the systematised mass application of photosynthesis (turning atmospheric CO2 into sugar). Using more land isn’t an environmental problem unless ur doing mass deforestation which is happening in 3rd world nations not the west. So what ur actually saying is that 3rd world nations shouldn’t eat red meat cos its causing deforestation but ours is ok because it’s not.
Their is the feed and livestock transportation emissions cost and that’s about the only good argument u got. Except that problem is an electric vehicle problem not a red meat problem. And if ur gonna use the argument of its an additional carbon cost that u don’t pay for just eating plants then why don’t u go live in a grass hut cos the additional carbon cost of concrete is unnecessary.
Not to mention that grass fed cattle don’t have this problem. So eating grass fed or going hunting also solves the problem.
Where do you think most of the world’s red meat is coming from? Brazil is one of the top producers and exporters of red meat, deforestation is ravaging the Amazon.
3rd world countries are not eating red meat, we are. The link between rich countries and meat consumption has been established for a long time now.
Most cattle eat soy, not grass, that’s also a myth. Simply because soy is a whole lot cheaper, and a lot more abundant and easier to grow than grass. Also, grass is only slightly better than feed, but it generates more GEG overall because of digestion.
We need soy, so we need monocultures of soy, and that’s catastrophic, just like you said.
Transport is actually not that big of a problem with red meat. Land usage and the actual cattle are. They’re the top source of GEG emissions from agriculture.
You were talking about thermodynamics earlier. Red meat is incredibly inefficient converting resources to usable calories. 1kg of beef requires 25kg of feed.
You’re also using a lot of straw men in your arguments, living in a grass hut instead of a concrete building, or electric vehicles for cattle transportation?
You can enjoy red meat but you can’t argue in good faith that it’s not completely awful for the environment at pretty much every level.
A few sources to support my claims:
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production
https://bonpote.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Emissions-de-GES-a-travers-la-chaine-dapprovisionnement-1-scaled.png
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/23/americas/brazil-beef-amazon-rainforest-fire-intl/
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/grass-fed-beef-climate-change
Just a note before my comment: my reference is the Netherlands, which is struggling with too much cattle and too little land. I can imagine circumstances being different in Australia.
Methane is a worse greenhous gas than CO2 though (28 times more) and just growing more grass, which gets eaten pretty much immediately again, does not necessarily compensate for it. Tackling methane emissions is also a pretty effective short term improvement for global warming, due to it not being nearly as long in the atmosphere as CO2.
But methane is not the only problem with large amounts of cattle. The shit can actually become problematic in for the soil and water due to ammonia. This is a large problem in The Netherlands right now (and sadly we don’t have politicians in power willing to make actual changes here). Biodiversity and water quality are going down significantly and a very big contributor is cattle farming.
And let’s also not forget that the grass used is for optimizing growing cattle and producing milk (because the farmers get paid like shit). It’s not a grass field full of flowers, herbs and other kinds of plants that are good for insect life. They’re more or less green deserts.
most people don’t want to eat grass or soy cake. letting cows graze, and feeding soycake (the byproduct of soybean oil production) to pigs and poultry is a conservation of resources.
If only we mastered farming, allowing us to plant a wide variety of crops. But alas, we are left eating grass.
not all land is suitable for crops. letting cattle graze it is fine.
You’re delusional if you believe most of the meat you consume comes from cows eating naturally growing grass in areas no other crops can grow.
this is a strawman
The only way this is a strawman is if your statement is a non sequitur. Otherwise, my reply very much holds.
You can’t counter “raising enough cows to supply our current meat demand takes a lot of resources we could be eating instead” with “its okay for them to eat grass :D” unless the implication is that eating grass is sufficient to meet that demand.
Otherwise, you’re just commenting that cows eat grass. Which congrats, I guess? I think I know some middle school students who might be surprised by the information?
this conversation didn’t happen.
In that case, thanks for informing us that cows can eat grass. We are very proud of you. We absolutely had that knowledge already, but still, thanks for your effort.
Good news is that overall arable farmland usage goes down the less meat you eat. Don’t need to use all the same land, you have flexibility to move around production
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
I don’t think that has ever happened.
It’s worth noting that soybean meal is not a byproduct. When we look at the most common extraction method for soybean oil (using hexane solvents), soybean meal is still the driver of demand
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0926669017305010
This is even more true of other methods like expelling which is still somewhat commonly used
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/9/5/87
some studies show soybean oils being as much as half the value of the crop, despite being just 20% of the weight.
If we assume that’s the case, half of revenue is still not a byproduct, it’s a coproduct. The other half is still pretty relevant to its value and usage. If 50% of your revenue disappears from something, you’re going to be making a lot less of it
i think at this point we’ve devolved into arguing semantics. you’re not going to convince me soybean is a viable crop unless you can press it for oil, and i don’t think i can convince you it’s a viable product unless the meal is fed to livestock. but i hope you have a good night!
What are you talking about? Soy is great. Soy beans, soy curls, tofu, soy milk, soy sauce, miso. All kinds of great soy products.
hexane solvents are not the most common method of oil extraction. you have been misinformed.
See, OP is not saying we should “just drop red meat”, and this is probably why you get that kind of reactions.