As negotiations get underway at COP28, we compiled a list of the leading research documenting the connection between meat and greenhouse gas emissions.
ITT people do all sorts of gymnastics instead of saying “I know but I just don’t care enough”
Just be honest with yourself, if the emissions, pollution, land useage, and staggering cruelty don’t bother you more than the 15 minutes of pleasure you get from a Burger pleases you just say it.
If it does, and you feel the need to defend yourself because of it just change. I promise you it’s less difficult than you think and there are millions of people waiting to help you learn new delicious and nutritious methods of preparing food. Remember basically all vegans were raised carnist and most of us are complete garbage fires (as the internet so loves to point out (-; ) I promise you that you can do it and you won’t even really miss meat after a few months.
ITT people do all sorts of gymnastics instead of saying “I know but I just don’t care enough”
Because the reality is that there’s more than two people in the world. Most people are neither vegans nor assholes who don’t care enough. There’s those of us who think vegans are wrong. It’s funny how many environmental scientists are not in support of a world exodus towards veganism and yet my choice are “stop eating meat or admit you just don’t care”
How about “having spent my life around cattle farms, I know more than the person talking to me on this topic so they can go fly a kite”? Or “I have cattle specialists with advanced degrees in my family and after long discussion with them, I see all the gaps that these half-ass arguments online are missing”
…no, you’re right. We just don’t care enough. Oh look, I just found a study that shows that eating vegetables might be bad for the climate. Stop eating vegetables too, or you “just don’t care enough”
My one rule on this topic is never getting into a gishgallop. Vegan advocates love to play the roulette of swapping topics every time they lose ground on one, until they manage to win the argument having lost every piece of it by just tiring the other side out. You pick one of those topics, and I will field that topic only with you. It might surprise you, I will agree with you on some of them (like saving the Amazon).
But if you make me choose, I will choose land use because it’s a slam-dunk. 2/3 of agriculture uses marginal land that cannot (and I believe should not) be made arable. If resources were spent changing that instead of vegans fighting with farmers, that number could approach 100%. There’s important asterisks about that (both crops and livestock become more environmentally friendly if done close to each other due to their symbiotic relationship) that need to be kept up. But reducing livestock population directly WRT marginal land is wasteful.
If you want to discuss this you’re going to have to get more specific. What agriculture, where in the world, are feedlots used etc You’re obviously excluding aquaculture, and non grazing animals like pigs, I suspect you’re also excluding egg production since that is almost monolithically cage farming.
Like you can’t really say “oh these pigs are on non arable land” if that merely refers to their physical location and not where their food is grown.
So could you please drill down a bit? what specifically are you referencing?
If you want to discuss this you’re going to have to get more specific
Which part of this? Marginal land? That’s a very specific topic. Why should we bring in 100 different variables unless you can show those variables matter to marginal land.
Or are you sayign there’s some prima facie point I’m missing where “nothing but wild animals on marginal land” will produce more sustainable food than “cattle on marginal land”?
Or are you just trying to get me to provide enough information to overspecialize my rebuttal so that your side need only say “ok, everything but that”?
I just need to know where you’re pulling that from and how it was calculated. Otherwise we’re just going “tis!” “tisn’t!” till one of us gets bored.
Like are you referring to cattle farming in Botswana? global stats? all animal ag including fishing in Japan?
I can’t discuss a magic number, I have to know how it was derived and under what assumptions. Then we can examine the assumptions and methods of derivation and determine whether or not we agree it to be true and why or why not.
My argument on marginal land is prima facie so far. I picked it because it seems obviously true on the surface, so I can let you provide your points to try to blow it up. I’m referring to the land use problem, which is the often-cited vegan argument that livestock land could be instead used as forests or croplands to sequester carbon.
If you want to contest the 2/3 marginal land number, I’ll cite a few references, but it seems an odd number to consider “magic”
A magic number is just slang for a number which has no obvious reason for its value.
I literally can’t discuss this because I have no idea what it’s saying. It seems obviously false to me when we factor in the land used for their food production. In the heaviest meat eating/producing countries only a minority of calories produced are from pastured animals. Most cattle are from factory farms involving feed lots, pigs/chickens/fish are fed crops grown on arable land.
Like ~75% of the world’s soy is grown for animal feed https://ourworldindata.org/soy and soy is a massive crop so it’s hard to imagine where all this saved land comes from. What are you comparing against?
ITT people do all sorts of gymnastics instead of saying “I know but I just don’t care enough”
Just be honest with yourself, if the emissions, pollution, land useage, and staggering cruelty don’t bother you more than the 15 minutes of pleasure you get from a Burger pleases you just say it.
If it does, and you feel the need to defend yourself because of it just change. I promise you it’s less difficult than you think and there are millions of people waiting to help you learn new delicious and nutritious methods of preparing food. Remember basically all vegans were raised carnist and most of us are complete garbage fires (as the internet so loves to point out (-; ) I promise you that you can do it and you won’t even really miss meat after a few months.
People want to change nothing and point at corporations or billionaires like their own choices couldn’t reduce suffering and emissions.
Because the reality is that there’s more than two people in the world. Most people are neither vegans nor assholes who don’t care enough. There’s those of us who think vegans are wrong. It’s funny how many environmental scientists are not in support of a world exodus towards veganism and yet my choice are “stop eating meat or admit you just don’t care”
How about “having spent my life around cattle farms, I know more than the person talking to me on this topic so they can go fly a kite”? Or “I have cattle specialists with advanced degrees in my family and after long discussion with them, I see all the gaps that these half-ass arguments online are missing”
…no, you’re right. We just don’t care enough. Oh look, I just found a study that shows that eating vegetables might be bad for the climate. Stop eating vegetables too, or you “just don’t care enough”
Ok I’ll humour you: what are vegans wrong about?
Land usage?
water usage?
Fertiliser usage?
That animal farms are hubs of disease outbreaks?
Thermodynamics?
Where the Amazon is going?
That killing/branding/doing surgery/forced impregnation etc when you don’t have to is wrong?
My one rule on this topic is never getting into a gishgallop. Vegan advocates love to play the roulette of swapping topics every time they lose ground on one, until they manage to win the argument having lost every piece of it by just tiring the other side out. You pick one of those topics, and I will field that topic only with you. It might surprise you, I will agree with you on some of them (like saving the Amazon).
But if you make me choose, I will choose land use because it’s a slam-dunk. 2/3 of agriculture uses marginal land that cannot (and I believe should not) be made arable. If resources were spent changing that instead of vegans fighting with farmers, that number could approach 100%. There’s important asterisks about that (both crops and livestock become more environmentally friendly if done close to each other due to their symbiotic relationship) that need to be kept up. But reducing livestock population directly WRT marginal land is wasteful.
If you want to discuss this you’re going to have to get more specific. What agriculture, where in the world, are feedlots used etc You’re obviously excluding aquaculture, and non grazing animals like pigs, I suspect you’re also excluding egg production since that is almost monolithically cage farming.
Like you can’t really say “oh these pigs are on non arable land” if that merely refers to their physical location and not where their food is grown.
So could you please drill down a bit? what specifically are you referencing?
Which part of this? Marginal land? That’s a very specific topic. Why should we bring in 100 different variables unless you can show those variables matter to marginal land.
Or are you sayign there’s some prima facie point I’m missing where “nothing but wild animals on marginal land” will produce more sustainable food than “cattle on marginal land”?
Or are you just trying to get me to provide enough information to overspecialize my rebuttal so that your side need only say “ok, everything but that”?
Relax I want to talk this out.
I just need to know where you’re pulling that from and how it was calculated. Otherwise we’re just going “tis!” “tisn’t!” till one of us gets bored.
Like are you referring to cattle farming in Botswana? global stats? all animal ag including fishing in Japan?
I can’t discuss a magic number, I have to know how it was derived and under what assumptions. Then we can examine the assumptions and methods of derivation and determine whether or not we agree it to be true and why or why not.
My argument on marginal land is prima facie so far. I picked it because it seems obviously true on the surface, so I can let you provide your points to try to blow it up. I’m referring to the land use problem, which is the often-cited vegan argument that livestock land could be instead used as forests or croplands to sequester carbon.
If you want to contest the 2/3 marginal land number, I’ll cite a few references, but it seems an odd number to consider “magic”
A magic number is just slang for a number which has no obvious reason for its value.
I literally can’t discuss this because I have no idea what it’s saying. It seems obviously false to me when we factor in the land used for their food production. In the heaviest meat eating/producing countries only a minority of calories produced are from pastured animals. Most cattle are from factory farms involving feed lots, pigs/chickens/fish are fed crops grown on arable land.
Like ~75% of the world’s soy is grown for animal feed https://ourworldindata.org/soy and soy is a massive crop so it’s hard to imagine where all this saved land comes from. What are you comparing against?
He chose gymnastics he just doesn’t realise it lmao