Duh.

"Do-gooder derogation" strikes again.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/8/27/20829758/altruism-morality-molly-crockett-study-dating-do-gooders

From an environmental prospective, replacing chicken with tofu as a protein source is fairly minimal. The greenhouse gas emissions (in CO2 equivalent) per gram of chicken protein and gram of tofu (soy) protein are nearly the same. The real outliers are beef, lamb, and cheese, which due to methane production and slower growth rates have far higher (~5x) emissions than chicken/tofu. So to any meat eaters who can't fathom going vegan, cutting out the beef can bring you much of the environmental benefits. Obviously there is still an animal welfare argument, so this doesn't invalidate veganism, but that is a separate moral question.

Vegans are correct about the ecological and health benefits of a plant-based diet, but I've never met a preachy vegan that wasn't also preachy about a whole slew of other food-based bullshit.

Same argument applies to bicyclists, perhaps somebody should reauthor that NYT piece...

Give bicyclists a chance. We need better, more, and safer bicycling infrastructure so that more people will do it. The criminal pollution and environmental toll of the oil industry, and the unsustainability of its global rise — bicyclists are irrefutably on the right side of history. They are the vanguard. Climate scholars say that if we are ever to survive a warming planet, people will have to consume far less hydrocarbons than we do now. We will all have to become a little less car- dependent— and if we are to succeed in that, we will have to start by saluting bicyclists not mocking them.

Many drivers understand the toll that driving has on the planet and hate themselves for it. Drivers feel defensive when they are capable of identifying a bicyclist in social situations.

Shower them with respect because they are not occupying precious road space in the traffic jam. Bicyclists are reducing demand for fossil fuels which warm the planet, and by reducing demand, fuel prices should fall for you who cannot or will not bicycle. Bicyclists are the vanguard, they are the future.

Get used to it and build them more bike lanes. Should I send my resume to NYT now?

Says a lot that the message is "prevent impudent people from mocking vegans" and not "consider the points being raised by vegans."

Regenerative agriculture requires livestock.

Healthy, sustainable farms are ecosystems, not plant factories. If we want to repair the damage that industrial agriculture has done to soils, and then practice agriculture that sustains soil health, we're going to need a diet that includes a moderate amount of meat-- less than Americans eat today, but well above zero.

I don't know, it seems like most mockery of vegans occurs because they invite it by preaching (er, Dave?), not because people think their environmental arguments lack merit.

@3 You didn't mention the largest human source of methane production-- rice farming.

http://www.ghgonline.org/methanerice.htm
https://www.treehugger.com/climate-change/rice-growing-more-methane-climate-warms.html

There are even some paleoclimatologists out there who date the beginning of the anthropogenic greenhouse effect to the conversion of large amounts of land to rice paddies in China ~5000 years ago:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379108000760

...though to be fair, this is not settled science; another study built a computer model that managed to generate the methane anomaly solely via good old Milankovitch cycles:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09739

People mock vegans because they come across like holier-than-thou pricks, not because they have valid points.

"You're not wrong Walter, you're just an asshole."

@11 You need to feed your stock if you want to keep producing Soylent Green, and this is one of those situations where your "turtles all the way down" series converges on zero.

That said, composting human bodies is apparently a thing now, and not just an oddball hobby pursued by mobsters in the pine barrens. Every bit helps, maybe?

@12 While rice paddies produce a large amount of methane, rice production provides for 16-20% global caloric intake. On a per calorie basis it has a fairly low emissions, only slightly higher than wheat and lower than vegetables and pulses.

See here:
https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/Shifting_Diets_for_a_Sustainable_Food_Future_1.pdf

@9 Most estimates I've seen put the meat consumption under a sustainable agricultural regime at around 50 - 60 grams (~2 ounces) of meat per person per day. This is around half current average global consumption levels and a fifth of US consumption. So radically less for us.

@16 I don't think the climate cares about per-calorie measures, I'm pretty sure it only cares about total greenhouse gas emissions.

And by that measure, the measure that matters in accelerating or mitigating climate change, rice is a bigger producer of methane than beef, and a bigger producer than any single industrial source.

And if we do manage to get through the current crisis, at some point we have to start asking what 'sustainable" means-- do we want to simply maximize the human population the planet can support without fossil fuels? Do we perhaps want to maximize the resilience of the system instead? Are we going to do this on the scale or decades, centuries, or millennia? What will we need to get through a catastrophic event-- a global plague (plant or animal), a flood basalt, a snowball earth?

Calories per input unit cost, or "humans per hectare" probably isn't going to be the bottom line measure we want, when we start to think about answers to those sorts of questions.

@17 Those seem like reasonable ballpark figures to me. I expect the numbers would be a bit higher initially, as there's a whole lot of depleted soil out there that will need 10-20 years of cover crops and rotational grazing before grain/veg yields are viable.

But after that, yeah, "meat twice a week" sounds about right, maybe three times if we live near a coast and have somehow managed to not murder the ocean.

@5, Transportation is a very minor component of the overall energy usage associated with food. It's generally far more efficient (both financially and environmentally) to just grow stuff where it grows well and transport it, rather than trying to grow stuff locally in a less optimal climate. Local food is a good idea if you're focusing on trying to eat things that are normally grown in your climate, but buying boutique locally-grown exotic produce is usually not particularly environmentally friendly.

I’m no expert on this. I choose not to eat meat. I think the industrial meat complex should be abolished because of damage to the planet’s environment, cruelty to the animals and to the workers. We need healthy and tasty alternatives some of which already exist. Its a big struggle to change this because some billionaires will definitely do all they can to stop this change.

@20 If by "transportation" you mean end-product delivery, yeah. But a typical input-intensive, traditional-tillage operation has to truck in tons of seed, fertilizer, herbicide, insecticide, fuel, etc.

An established no-till operation needs only a fraction of all that (or none at all, in some cases), but it does mean you need the cows (or sheep) on the farm, or close enough to borrow for a while and herd onto the fields when it comes time for rotation. Which in turn means you're going to be able to source your meat from somewhere nearby whenever you can source grain or fruit nearby (though you may need to build a local processing facility or two, which can be a big capital and regulatory hurdle).

I mean yes, it's a bad idea to insist on local pineapples in Nebraska, but regenerative/soil-conservation operations will provide a pretty good product mix on a wide range of farmland.

And "local" or "organic" don't necessarily mean "sustainable," either-- we've still got to do our homework until someone credible starts doing some sort of certification for this stuff.

@21 AFOs/Feedlots have got to go. Not because anyone's a billionaire, though, but because they're so wildly and unnecessarily inefficient and unsustainable.

We might get a future where a billionaire elite run regenerative, ecologically sustainable agricultural operations. And if we do, we'll be far better off than we would in a future where agriculture was all-organic, owned by the people, and operated according to input-intensive, soil-depleting, unsustainable practices.

@16 Uh? How can you not take per calories per tons of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) into consideration? We need to produce calories to feed people, so we need to compare the relative sustainability of those calories.

I agree with your desire for a systems approach, but there will not be a single optimal system- the types of farming possible in South East Asia are not the same as those possible in the Midwestern United States. Looking at per calorie externalities is an important way we will decide which systems we need to scrap and which systems are worth building off of. The fact that rice-paddy agriculture has successfully supported high densities for thousands of years suggests there is something there, especially since its GHG impact is only marginally worse then wheat and maize.

robotslave @9 @12 @15 @18 @19 @22 @23, thank you for calling attention to the horrifically unsustainable methane contributions of rice farming. I don't know what makes me more angry: seeing the rainforests of the Amazon burning or seeing the vast stretches of rice paddies across Asia. Why isn't President Macron getting the G6+1 together to contribute $20 million to getting those Asians to stop farming rice?

Also, you make an excellent point @18 when you write: "I don't think the climate cares about per-calorie measures, I'm pretty sure it only cares about total greenhouse gas emissions." On a related note, I've long said the climate doesn't care one iota about automobiles' MPG ratings, and people have looked at me like I'm some crazy climate denialist.

Plus, thank you for raising making the point that vegans are really the foes of sustainable agriculture. Not a lot of people know this, but in their secret societies vegans call for the extinction of ungulates.

Finally, as long as we're on the subject of rice, I just want to say for the record that brown rice is superior to white rice. And the only reason white rice remains more popular is something I would call white rice supremacy.

@25 Do you feel a little better now, with all of that off your chest? I can point you at some researchers in paleoclimatology and regenerative agriculture, if you still have any data-free argument-averse sarcasm you need to turn loose on your internet-enemies.

@24 I can take "human dietary calories per" into account, and you can, but the atmosphere can't. The atmosphere doesn't care how many people are being fed. And really, if we're going to have an honest discussion here, we're going to have to stop talking about methane, which breaks down in on the order of 10 years, and start talking about carbon dioxide, which takes on the order of 100 years for the oceans to absorb the first 80%, and on the order of 100,000 years to break down the remaining 20%. There's a reason all of the organizations around the world working to fight global warming are focused specifically on CO2, and much less so on methane or other "CO2 equivalents" with much shorter atmospheric lifespans (e.g. water vapour).

robotslave @26, excellent points. I'd love to hear from "some researchers in paleoclimatology and regenerative agriculture." I'm a big fan of the paleo diet myself, and frankly, if it were up to me, the only role vegans would have in regenerative agriculture is if they were the ones doing the grazing.

Signed,
Your biggest Internet fan

@27 Right, then, I'll pass your notes along to the science people, if I can remember how hyperlinks work. Anything else?

the argument that herbivores are ruining the planet is false and simplistic. The natural process of animals grazing is beneficial to the planet and growth of plants.
60,000,000 bison and wood bison walked North America alone over 200 years ago it was beneficial to the natural growth of forests and plains. This process needs to be brought back. To plow under land and grow veg seems like a good plan but it isn't. The problem is fertilizing the land. When herbivores eat natural grasses and forest plants their droppings fertilize the land and it is all based upon plant s putting nutrients in the ground along with photosynthesis, a natural process of feeding moving on and plants growing like it has been happening long before humans came along.
But there is the problem, too many humans. If you grow grain or any veg for animal and human consumption and fertilize the ground to do this with fertilizers derived from a source locked far under the ground which is fossil based you release greenhouse gasses that should have never been exploited, it is causing greenhouse effect. But animals feeding naturally without the fossil based fertilizers is far less damaging.
It is not the animals it is the use of fossil based fertilizers and releasing that locked up fossil based carbon into the environment. Add that to the greenhouse effect from cars and planes and you have a problem that never existed. We have unlocked the fossilized carbon locked in the ground and made fertilizer from them and fuel for cars.
Cows are not the problem, humans are. You can grow all the veg you want from land that cows herbivores successfully grazed on but you will have to fertilize it with manufactured fossil based fertilizers. that land will never grow anything with out being replenished and herbivores can do that naturally like they always have.
You can eat a genetically modified product like Soy that is fertilized with fossil based fertilizers and wave the biggest vegan banner you like but you are adding to greenhouse gasses.
Eat local, grow your own, learn to put back nutrients into the soil naturally before you start hugging bags of produce and saying you are saving the planet when most of it is a GMO and fertilized with fossil based fertilizer.
Every environment for growing plants is different on this planet and many are dependent on herbivores. Removing the herbivore component will end the existence of many cultures dependent on them especially in areas that can't grow plants because the land is not capable of doing so.
It is just not so simple to go vegan or vegetarian thinking the land will supply you with food. You can be Vegan but you have to be part of the growing process not just the end part, the eating part.

@29 - Exactly. There are too damn many people. Nothing else we do matters if we add another couple of billion. I take a vegan's concern for the planet a lot more seriously if they aren't also breeding like rabbits.