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://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-beef-industry-fueling-amazon-rainforest-destruction-deforestation/

https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-06-02/almost-a-billion-trees-felled-to-feed-appetite-for-brazilian-beef

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.

  • 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.

    • @BestBouclettes@jlai.lu
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      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.

        • @BestBouclettes@jlai.lu
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          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

    • @ReluctantZen@feddit.nl
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      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.