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whyage 3 hours ago [-]
Plenty of people (including me) are vegan, healthy, and happy. As omnivores above the poverty line, we can all make conscious and conscientious choices about what we eat. Going vegan is one of the most effective ways to combat global warming (if you're not in a position to donate large sums of money toward climate change research or mitigation).
belorn 18 minutes ago [-]
Please provide the research that say that going vegan is one of the most effective ways to combat global warming.
According to a Swedish study publish a few years ago (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541), going vegan is mid-tier in combating global warming. Who you buy your electric from has a larger impact on the environment than going Vegan, as does if/what car you own and naturally what kind of trips and vacations you do. A single trip with an airplane can have a bigger impact on global warming than all the meat they eat through their whole life.
goda90 2 hours ago [-]
> As omnivores above the poverty line, we can all make conscious and conscientious choices about what we eat.
This being a forum of mostly tech workers, many of us can afford to choose more sustainable animal products and support agriculture that promotes biodiversity and carbon sequestration too. If you don't want to give animal products up, then look for sources that engage in regenerative agriculture practices. They tend to be the most humane ways to raise animals as well.
In the end, demand for meat, eggs, and dairy is never going to disappear. Maybe someday lab grown alternatives can be molecularly and structurally equivalent. But until then the most effective change we can make collectively is to change government incentives to farmers so they choose better practices.
softwaredoug 3 hours ago [-]
I would say it’s important to emphasize people don’t need to go complete vegan. Reducing consumption of animal products can be more realistic for most people.
BoingBoomTschak 1 hours ago [-]
Well, the problem is that it's much harder to climb on your high horse if you only "drastically reduce" your consumption next to even loonier individuals cutting it completely, isn't it?
softwaredoug 50 minutes ago [-]
Why do people take this stuff so personally?
Eat meat. Don't eat meat. Do whatever you want.
It's somewhat revealing to me that whenever this comes up people feel personally attacked by people trying to make ethical choices using data. Why is it so threatening to you?
IMO we should share data and let people make their own choices.
arbitrary_name 13 minutes ago [-]
point on the doll where the vegan touched you.
graemep 2 hours ago [-]
A lot of vegans eat fake meat and dairy which shares many of the environmental problems of meat, such as needing a lot of inputs so a lot of plant material relative to the final product.. It also adds energy use, transport, packaging etc.
There are also environmentally beneficial meats. So much so that when rewilding we sometimes need to add the same animals back (as is happening in Scotland - rewilders are breeding cattle that look like wild ones to make it "natural"). In the UK you can buy venison from wild animals that need to be culled to to preserve the environment.
softwaredoug 46 minutes ago [-]
Beyond Meat is one such product, and it generates a lot fewer greenhouse emissions.
> Based on a comparative assessment of the current Beyond Burger production system with the 2017 beef LCA by Thoma et al, the Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less energy, has >99% less impact on water scarcity and 93% less impact on land use than a ¼ pound of U.S. beef.
This is bullshit. The vast majority of CO2 is created by energy production.
The problem is systemic and blaming other people for their lifestyle choices is neither effective nor helpful and just leads to further division. It's exactly this sort of division that helps fossil companies to destroy the planet and keep making money.
nDRDY 3 hours ago [-]
Sorry, this is just not correct, even when you ignore the other greenhouse gases and focus on CO2.
More than 70% of CO2 from energy, less than 6% from ALL livestock.
whyage 26 minutes ago [-]
It's more than 6%. Cows eat a lot, so people cut forests to grow more feed (like in the Amazon). Deforestation contribute to global warming, not to mention the biodiversity damage.
2 hours ago [-]
dnautics 3 hours ago [-]
flip the vertical order on that graph, its super misleading.
deeplytroubled 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
firebot 3 hours ago [-]
Vegans have never and will never appreciably reduced global emissions.
Global meat production is only increasing.
You're delusional with main character syndrome?
whyage 1 hours ago [-]
Do you vote? Why?
firebot 3 hours ago [-]
Give it a couple decades. Most 'vegans' stop being vegan well before that. I'll let you Google why they do.
pastage 3 hours ago [-]
I am not vegan, will never be, but I have known vegans for more than two decades and they are doing fine. We need to make it easy to make the right choice about food, and one way to do that is to stop making meat meat meat the ONLY cool thing. I am fine with vegans serving me tasty food, they make alternatives easier. If you do not want to be a full time vegan just switch to 3 out 7 days of the week or something like that.
PxldLtd 3 hours ago [-]
I gather this is a vague snarky comment loosely implying that vegans don't get enough B12. If so, it's a profoundly ignorant point that shows you don't have any knowledge of a typical vegan diet nowadays.
expedited123 2 hours ago [-]
Yep, B12 is a solved issue. It's pretty cheap to supplement.
I do want to mention that you do also have to look out to get enough of : Omega 3, Calcium, Iodine, Iron, Selenium, Protein.
Takes a bit of work at the start to adapt but it's very doable, and it's not like Omnivores don't have comparable deficiencies from not eating enough plants and fruit. Not to mention other problems that come with eating animal products...
I only supplement with Omega 3, Vitamin D, B12, Iodine (although sometimes I go for wakame). Have been on a plant-based diet for around 4 years now, feeling healthy.
orwin 2 hours ago [-]
I know people who only eat chicken and beef, I'm pretty sure they need iodine way than you do. I don't have the issue, the main animal I eat (besides eggs and cheese) is fish, but I would bet you are healthier than a large part of omnivores.
softwaredoug 3 hours ago [-]
A couple of decades of not eating meat is a pretty significant improvement on you your carbon impact :)
0x000xca0xfe 1 hours ago [-]
Same for heavy chain smokers, motorcyclists, obese people and drug users. They are helping our climate a lot by voluntarily shortening their life /s
e40 1 hours ago [-]
I know a vegan who’s been doing it for 45 years. That I know of.
Buxato 3 hours ago [-]
Take a look to a soybean plantation for example, biodiversity totally destroyed. Also, are you doing a physical main work?
IsTom 3 hours ago [-]
The point is that you need multiple plantations like this to make enough feed for the cows to make equivalent calories/proteins.
Kichererbsen 3 hours ago [-]
Disclaimer: Not a vegan myself.
You do realize those soybean plantations are not for human consumption, right? And that that's what is factored into the quoted loss of biodiversity?
hackernud3s 3 hours ago [-]
But someone still has to eat up all those cows before their methane mucks up the environment.
And if you're not willing to do your part, that just means the rest of us have to pull double duty.
3 hours ago [-]
8by3 4 hours ago [-]
Not to mention that beef/dairy production is a primary source of methane which is 80x more potent than Co2, but constantly under reported due to its shorter half life. Yes in the long run that matters, but its all the more reason that we should reduce animal agriculture right away as the payback is much faster than limiting Co2.
DarkNova6 3 hours ago [-]
I never understood this argument. With Oil & Gas you release green house gases that have been sealed away back into the air.
For methane produced by farming all components remain in a cycle. Everything released by animals eventually finds its way back to plants, which get eaten, which become exhaust of animals, etc.
This sounds to me more like a spin by big oil to finger point at another industry.
Flashtoo 3 hours ago [-]
The methane will eventually break down and be part of new plants, but in the meantime it will heat the planet much more than if it hadn't been there. Think of it this way: industrial scale cattle farming essentially makes and feeds biochemical reactors that turn hydrocarbons into a gaseous form that maximizes their global heating effect. Consider the counterfactual where we don't stuff billions of fart machines full of corn.
orwin 1 hours ago [-]
> The methane will eventually break down and be part of new plants
To be exact, excess methane go in the high troposphere, where it is broken down in CO2+H2O (the half life is very short, I don't remember which is which but it's either 5 or 20 years). So in any case, it accelerate climate change.
pizzaiolo 3 hours ago [-]
It's not exactly a closed loop, though. A lot of crops are grown using fossil fuel-derived fertilizer.
nDRDY 3 hours ago [-]
This is literally backwards - plants absorb CO2, not methane!
The obsession with CO2, specifically emitted by fossil fuel use, for me indicates geopolitical motivations (for both standpoints).
modo_mario 3 hours ago [-]
>Yes in the long run that matters, but its all the more reason that we should reduce animal agriculture right away as the payback is much faster than limiting Co2.
The long run is the thing that really matters.
A faster payback only serves to cover the impact of those that want to keep pumping up oil and gas in the meantime(also to make synthetic fertiliser) for a few decades.
It shifts focus from that on cow farts. As if the rotting plant matter and wild animal life that could replace it didn't emit any methane.
enquirewithin 4 hours ago [-]
What percentage of anthropogenic methane emissions can be attributed to cow farts?
I would hazard a guess that the incidental methane emissions from one gas extraction field would astronomically dwarf the emissions from cow farts.
Not astronomically; marginally. Anyone who's been around herbivore farm animals will tell you they fart. A lot.
Then again, farm plants are a further 18%.
modo_mario 3 hours ago [-]
Those fossil fuels emit what otherwise wouldn't be available in the carbon cycle.
A cow that's fed on gras and farts emits nothing that that gras didn't pick up and contributes virtually nothing to climate change in the long term.
lotsofpulp 3 hours ago [-]
I imagine the fertilizers used for the grass to support the quantity and quality of the cows’ output require quite a bit of fossil fuels.
Otherwise, I wonder if non fertilizer supported grass could support sufficient cows to satiate demand (which has not even peaked yet).
modo_mario 3 hours ago [-]
Oh true and we consequently need to eat less cow meat, more different meat and/or have less people.
but focusing on that is shifting blame in an innefectual way of course. Pointing at cow farts puts the pressure on the individual and seeks to dampen effects in the short term.
Pump up less or no fossil fuels with actual long term thinking and those fertilisers will automatically become more expensive. At that point tho our oversized animal herd becomes harder to support and beef becomes automatically a lot more expensive whilst at the same time the manure becomes more important.
1 hours ago [-]
enquirewithin 3 hours ago [-]
I didn’t say animal agriculture, I said “cow farts”. The animal agriculture figure listed on that Wikipedia page includes all ruminant livestock (mainly cattle, sheep, and goats).
Also, from that Wikipedia article:
There is accumulating research and data showing that oil and gas industry methane emissions – or from fossil fuel extraction, distribution and use – are much larger than thought.[35][36][37][38][39]
Still, my “astronomically dwarfs” looks to be overstating it by a wide margin.
Llamamoe 3 hours ago [-]
> Then again, farm plants are a further 18%.
Yeah, but they also provide 80% of the world's calories to animals' 20%
tempfile 4 hours ago [-]
> farm plants are a further 18%
Apparently mainly rice growing. I knew paddy fields were bad, but I didn't know they were that bad. Per calorie I am sure it is more like a tenth that of ruminants, perhaps less, but still worth replacing with other carbohydrates.
Llamamoe 3 hours ago [-]
All the more so since rice is relatively poor in nutrients.
orwin 1 hours ago [-]
Rice is better than wheat or corn, just because of the fiber content and relatively low glycemic index.
Complete rice also carry lisine (although less than beans) which is a really hard amino acid to get on a vegetarian diet.
enquirewithin 3 hours ago [-]
Isn’t it the case that much of the land used to grow rice is good for little else?
dev_l1x_be 3 hours ago [-]
With corn based feeding.
pcrh 3 hours ago [-]
It isn't the "cow farts" that produce most methane, but rather the anaerobic processing of cow dung emanating from feed lots, dairy operations, etc.
Grass-fed beef cattle whose dung is "recycled" in a more natural way in the fields produce the same emissions as would wild ruminants such as antelope, bison, etc.
The biodiversity problem in the above refers mostly to new land clearances intended for farming, including for feedstock. This is minor in N. America and Europe, mostly as the clearances were done decades or over a century ago.
enquirewithin 3 hours ago [-]
This Wikipedia article linked to elsewhere in this discussion gives the impression that the agricultural methane emissions are primarily a result of enteric fermentation by ruminant livestock.
That's the source of emission by the cow or steer. Industrial processing of the dung produces vastly more.
Table 3 in this source [0] shows enteric vs manure methane emissions are 158 vs 137 kg CH4/yr for dairy cows, who are mostly fed in feedlots, and 58 vs 2.4 for meat and other cattle, in the US and Canada. So the CH4 emissions range 65-fold from 2.4 to 158 depending on how the cattle are farmed.
I would argue animal emissions do not matter at all, methane survives about a decade in the atmosphere. Eventually breaking down to co2, co2 that was already in the atmosphere to begin with. Fossil fuel emissions are the ones that matter.
aqme28 3 hours ago [-]
Not following your logic. A decade is a long time for such a powerful greenhouse gas.
throwawayffffas 3 hours ago [-]
There were cows a decade ago as well. The herd size dictates a level in the atmosphere it does not constantly increase the amount of methane in the atmosphere, there is an equilibrium.
Increasing herd sizes increases that equilibrium level and that is partially responsible for the overall increase.
But there are mitigations that can be applied there are feed additives that reduce the cow related methane emissions to 1%.
Overall point is cow farts can be a drop in the bucket in the overall scheme of things, all we have to do is modify their diet slightly. Should we do it yes. Is it a huge issue no.
Industrial methane leaks are a bigger problem, that methane when it breaks down will turn into co2 that was not there to begin with contributing to global warming permanently.
firebot 3 hours ago [-]
Look up the methane cycle. Methane is a flow gas. CO2 is a millennial gas that can stick around for millennia.
aqme28 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, exactly. I didn’t say anything to dispute that so I’m not sure what your point is. The time it spends as methane before turning back into CO2 is really bad
firebot 3 hours ago [-]
It's mainly burps. They chew their cud.
Cows produce around 50 kg CH4 per head per year. There's around 1.5 billion cattle. That's around 75 teragrams (million metric tons).
Humans release about 410 teragrams altogether. About 40 percent is agricultural. And another 40 percent is from fossils, namely natural gas.
The top 100 natural gas leaks release over 20 teragrams of methane a year. That's just the leaks. That's 400,000,000 cattle worth of methane just pissed into the wind.
guerby 2 hours ago [-]
Do you have a reference for the leaks? I read leaks were underestimated but I didn't find recent studies about it.
Thanks!
shiandow 4 hours ago [-]
You would be wrong, they are about equal in size, both accounting for about a third of the anthropogenic emissions.
mklarmann 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
4 hours ago [-]
dnautics 3 hours ago [-]
methane has less ir absorption than co2 and (as you said) a shorter half life.
christophilus 3 hours ago [-]
We have around 27 million cattle (in the US) today. There were something like 30-50 million bison in the US before we almost eradicated them. Were the bison equally bad? Or is the problem that we’re feeding these ruminants unnatural diets?
Incidentally, I’d love to see the Great Plains return to huge roaming ruminant populations, and find a way to build our meat industry around that.
dqv 35 minutes ago [-]
No, we slaughter that many each year.
And maximize how they're fed in the last months of their lives in feedlots.
They were certainly not killing 30 million bison each year.
The only answer here is less meat production, especially feedlot-finished, no matter how people try to twist it.
toasty228 37 minutes ago [-]
You're really close to figuring out that natural equilibriums and man made abominations have nothing in common even when the numbers look the same
The ecology of it, including emissions, isn't really that bad if you're American. We're very efficient at beef production. It's really the global south that's most of the novel emissions, and that's mostly from counting land-use changes.
j16sdiz 3 hours ago [-]
I think the problem is how we keep the cattle.
In natural environment, they cohabitant with other animals. They migrates.
When we farm them, we remove anything not our primary product.
simonsarris 2 hours ago [-]
That is not how we keep cattle in the United States. In the US about 82% of grazing land is rangeland, which continues to support the natural ecosystems (prairies, shrublands, steppes, etc).
In places like Ireland, where cows have existed for 6000 years, they're also part of the ecology by any meaningful metric. There are a lot of more recently arrived species considered native! Mice, hedgehogs, rabbits, and red deer all came later.
I'd love to read your definition of "natural ecosystems", is it something like "a system in nature", with "nature" meaning "on planet earth"?
avesi 4 hours ago [-]
There's more nuance here than reducing consumption of beef and dairy. Moving over to regenerative farming practices instead of factory farming will also improve the situation.
dqv 11 minutes ago [-]
Yes and doing regenerative practices all the way to the end would naturally force this reduction in consumption. It would be really good, because the land used to grow feed could be redirected to other more efficient uses.
graemep 2 hours ago [-]
There is quite a bit in between too. Grass vs grain fed cattle, for example.
soupspaces 3 hours ago [-]
How about regenerative economics? I hate it.
dev_l1x_be 3 hours ago [-]
Beef & dairy the industrial way drive this. Several studies and decade long experiments show the positive impact of the non-industrial alternatives.
imjonse 3 hours ago [-]
And which do the vast majority consume because that is the only one satisfying industrial scale consumption needs?
friendzis 2 hours ago [-]
One of the biggest biodiversity-related threats - as in able to trigger cataclysmic-level event - is IMO commercial honey production.
Farm honeybees are essentially one breed, which is in itself a huge problem as a single pathogen/parasite can quickly wipe them out globally. On top of that, honey farmers move their hives all over the place, effectively displacing any wild pollinators present in vast areas.
Commercial honey is farmed in the most ecologically risky way.
toasty228 31 minutes ago [-]
That's a drop in the bucket
Total insect mass dropped by 70% in Europe in 30 years, no insects = no pollination, no pollination = no flower = real mass scale extinction of pretty much everything that lives on earth since 80%+ of plants need pollinators.
testemailfordg2 4 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, the priority is increasing efficiency and ROI, rather than sustainability. This leads to centralization and operations at a scale which are not sustainable, without external input or causing damage to existing nature. De-centralization and sustainable practices are the only way forward, as it has been for centuries before us on this earth. Maybe space is the place for these kinds of centralised and intensive practices, like being planned for data centers.
concinds 3 hours ago [-]
"Efficiency and ROI" can be applied to financial but also to environmental impact. Producing more with less [land use/fertilizer/water use] is also a form of efficiency, and it's good, but it requires vast capital that mom & pop farms don't have + strong government incentives. De-scaling is only an agrarian nostalgia fantasy, it's incompatible with reaching climate goals.
imjonse 3 hours ago [-]
Even on a site like HN, where rational and logical thinking is held in high esteem, and where few could be suspected of climate change denialism, a factual statement such as this one from the article:
"On average, animal-sourced foods are associated with eight times more carbon loss and 14 times more biodiversity loss per calorie than plant-sourced foods."
is very likely to be countered by listing personal preferences, anecdata, concern for vegans' health or mockery of that lifestyle choice, and generally nitpicking.
Honest admissions like 'I am part of the problem and will maybe try doing something about it' are very rare.
igleria 3 hours ago [-]
> Even on a site like HN, where rational and logical thinking is held in high esteem
That is until people are faced with stuff like this :D. Then emotions take over.
The rational and logical is mostly an aesthetic preference, not lived value.
HN leans strongly reactionary and just likes to dress it up a bit so as to appear more respectable.
graemep 2 hours ago [-]
Food needs to provide more than calories. Do the same comparison per gram of protein.
3 hours ago [-]
soco 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed, that's the same answer when topics like public surveillance or dependency-inducing media are debated. It's difficult to criticize a problem, when you're a part of the problem, respectively paid to be the problem.
3 hours ago [-]
tdeck 3 hours ago [-]
Ok but like, where do you get your protein? I'm sorry but bacon is tasty and I want to eat it.
/s
znnajdla 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pastage 3 hours ago [-]
The key is "maybe try doing something", does not mean to destroy our culture. My child choose to be vegetarian but I just can not be bothered. I am too lazy. That does not mean I do not try to adapt. You can find the things that are wonderful with other ways of life.
sertraline 2 hours ago [-]
>criticizing meat and milk is just misanthropy
I'm more triggered by how they count and compare plant and animal-based calories. They ignore one critical detail: human body is not a calorie meter. They don't take into account protein digestibility, phytic acid, phototoxins, non-digestible oligosaccharides that cause bloating. 200kcal of boiled eggs versus 200kcal of peas? Some people just really enjoy their peas and beans, I guess.
vrganj 3 hours ago [-]
You think there's no point in living if you can't eat meat and milk?
Is there really nothing else going on in your life?
I'm sorry.
znnajdla 3 hours ago [-]
Is there nothing else going on in your life except to criticize other people's wanting to eat meat and milk, as humans have always done? That I'm sorry for.
vrganj 3 hours ago [-]
You're moving the goalposts.
I'm not criticizing people wanting to eat meat or milk.
I'm criticizing making it ones entire point of living.
Is there really nothing else going on for you? Meat and milk all you have to live for? Surely you must see how that's not good for you?
znnajdla 3 hours ago [-]
I did not claim that eating meat and milk is one's entire point of living. I claimed that the entire point of living is to live according to human nature. Wanting to eat meat and a milk is a part of human nature for pretty much all of humanity's history.
You seem incapable of understanding rhetorical exaggeration.
vrganj 2 hours ago [-]
Please reread the first sentence of your post above.
znnajdla 2 hours ago [-]
whoosh totally incapable of understanding a rhetorical exaggeration
jkahrs595 3 hours ago [-]
Ironic you advocate people kill themselves after claiming life isn’t worth living if you can’t have meat or milk.
As the kids say: no u.
chickenbig 4 hours ago [-]
Does this mean we should be advocating for more intensive cattle rearing? Stockyards and special breeds may not be the worst way to meet demand and reduce environmental impact (measured by CO2/methane emissions as well as biodiversity loss, for instance).
goda90 3 hours ago [-]
Managed grazing along with other regenerative techniques can sequester carbon in the soil. Factory farms have the problem of concentrated dung disposal which usually leads to letting it sit in methane producing conditions and also feed for intensive operations usually comes from non-regenerative crop farming which uses more fossil-fuel fertilizer and depletes the soil.
It's far easier do avoid producing so much meat.
A vegetarian diet is perfectly healthy.
pcrh 3 hours ago [-]
Stockyards are the worst offenders. This is due to how the dung is processed, which releases a lot of methane. Grass-fed cattle have much lower net emissions of greenhouse gasses.
tempfile 4 hours ago [-]
I despair. Is it that hard for us to imagine eating less meat?
throwthrowuknow 3 hours ago [-]
We need a new caveat cliche for these headlines like how people love to reply “in mice” to health research. For environmental research it’s almost always “in the 3rd world”
pjmlp 4 hours ago [-]
Thing is, will be anything left after we destroy the planet with war, data centers, rare earth minerals mines, nuclear and battery waste?
sudo_cowsay 4 hours ago [-]
But it's also not like we can just stop eating steak and milk.
lukan 4 hours ago [-]
Yes we can ... but most of us (including me) don't want to. (At least not completely)
DarkNova6 3 hours ago [-]
"Most of us" is a pretty bold claim.
lukan 3 hours ago [-]
Well, those are the numbers I found, that matched my intuition:
"Beef: roughly 70–80% of people eat it at least occasionally
Milk and dairy: roughly 85–90%"
enquirewithin 4 hours ago [-]
With the ever growing popularity and success of the ketogenic diet, it becomes progressively more evident that a plant based diet is massively suboptimal for a not insignificant fraction of people.
williamdclt 4 hours ago [-]
Our ecosystem dying is also pretty suboptimal.
Llamamoe 3 hours ago [-]
This has nothing to do with plant and everything to do with rampant prevalence of gut dysbiosis and harmful gut bacteria feeding on otherwise healthy fibers and carbs, as well as processed carbohydrate and sugar overconsumption plus insulin resistance driven by sedentary lifestyles, inflammation, etc.
Ketogenic diet is a band aid to both, not a solution, and plants are not the cause of either problem, either.
choo-t 3 hours ago [-]
You can do a keto diet without meat.
tonyhart7 4 hours ago [-]
we literally cant, human body its not designed to not eat meat
mschild 4 hours ago [-]
Not all meat is steak. Reducing and/or exchanging beef for other meat sources can at scale already make a massive difference.
Chicken, for example, produces 10% of CO2 per kg of meat compared to beef.
tonyhart7 3 hours ago [-]
if we going for efficiency, rabbit meat is no 1 choice
JoeyJoJoJr 4 hours ago [-]
But the human hand was designed to hold a banana.
lukan 4 hours ago [-]
Not quite true, but cooking becomes quite a bigger challenge.
But mainly, beef and meat is not the same, cattle needs way more ressources than chicken for example, or well, insects.
shiandow 4 hours ago [-]
There are other sources of meat.
Also dairy is not a meat.
hutattedonmyarm 2 hours ago [-]
Oh, I didn’t realize that I dropped dead years ago when I stopped eating meat
lukan 1 hours ago [-]
See, you didn't notice, because of the lack of B vitamins and the resulting nerve damage ..
tempfile 4 hours ago [-]
Ridiculous comment. The human body is not designed at all, and is very much capable of surviving without milk and meat. It's not even very hard!
lukan 3 hours ago [-]
Surviving and prospering aren't the same things, though. And you do need to mind a lot of substitutes you now need, if you just let go of meat.
ben_w 3 hours ago [-]
It's not *that* hard to prosper with even a vegan diet in the modern world, I know several who do fine.
Hardest part is knowing implicit animal ingredients you might not otherwise guess, which almost tripped me up when I visited the US and (as a vegetarian*) almost bought some yogurt before reading the ingredients list and finding to my surprise that it contained gelatine.
* it's mainly the cheese; I've substituted out other uses of milk. Also, vegan yogurt is a thing now, not sure when that happened, before or after that visit.
choo-t 4 hours ago [-]
There is no health reason to eat meat.
You can get your B12 elsewhere.
hackernud3s 3 hours ago [-]
You can get it from supplements. That's about it though.
ben_w 3 hours ago [-]
Supplements if you're vegan, there are vegetarian sources.
Just looked up the Wikipedia page to check on vegan, and… looks like all the animal and plant "sources" actually ingest the stuff from elsewhere?
Since only bacteria and some archea possess the genes and enzymes necessary to synthesize vitamin B12, plant and algae sources all obtain the vitamin secondarily from symbiosis with various species of bacteria,[5] or in the case of fermented plant foods, from bacterial fermentation.[86]
TBH fortified yeast flakes are a pretty good spice.
Aefiam 3 hours ago [-]
It literally is designed to survive without meat, meat used to be a luxury that was only eaten on special occasions for most people in history, we only eat so much nowadays because it became so cheap
lotsofpulp 4 hours ago [-]
And yet the most populous country in the world has an enormous contingent of people who do not eat meat (on the order of hundreds of millions).
firebot 3 hours ago [-]
Sure and like half of them have anemia.
tonyhart7 4 hours ago [-]
who ?? if you talking about indian, they still eat meat (around 6 - 12 pound every year)
ben_w 3 hours ago [-]
Mean != distribution.
The mean human has approximately one ovary, one testicle. A few hundred million Indians refusing all meat is compatible with the others not doing that.
lotsofpulp 3 hours ago [-]
“Indian” does not seem to be a sufficiently cohesive group to qualify referring to them as “they” (in this matter).
you can, but you can also just reduce it, you can eat say half the meat/milk. Eat more vegetables and grains. Not only massively reduces the impact but pretty good for your body too
not-kinsale-joe 4 hours ago [-]
Genuine question, can you explain why we can't?
4 hours ago [-]
techterrier 4 hours ago [-]
Theres a billion or so Indians that might suggest otherwise
bitlad 4 hours ago [-]
India is among the largest beef exporter in the world.
savolai 4 hours ago [-]
Does this make the vegetarians not exist?
lotsofpulp 4 hours ago [-]
Milk products are very prominent in many Indians’ diets. I wouldn’t be surprised if India’s milk consumption per capita is the highest in the world, given a large proportion of Indians avoid meat, so they might source more protein/fat from milk products.
If it’s not, it’s probably just poverty holding back consumption.
Edit: upon second reading, I realize techterrier was probably refuting only the steak part of sudo_cowsay’s comment
slau 3 hours ago [-]
India is about 100th in milk consumption per capita, consuming less than a third the average of the top 10.
It's also poverty holding back millionaire consumption.
There was a research, which I can't be arsed to google with mobile, that compared western vegan diet and Indian omnivore and, yup you guessed it, the western version was less costly in terms of future proof.
But as with the zillionaires the human predicament depends on weather we muster the courage to limit ourselves or die to the extinction that's already manifesting itself in forms like forest fires, droughts and crop losses.
tempfile 4 hours ago [-]
I am not vegan, but I found dropping beef and lamb to be literally the easiest modification to my life possible. Dropping dairy is much harder, but as I am now discovering still incredibly easy to reduce.
hackernud3s 3 hours ago [-]
Dropping lamb? Something tells me that won't be a problem for most of the people in this thread lol.
4 hours ago [-]
karakarakarakar 4 hours ago [-]
You can eat bugs
savolai 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
plaguna 4 hours ago [-]
Sadly, this being Hacker News, it won't catch much attention and will be quickly flagged by people who have too much karma.
But I think we are making progress, slowly, sadly too slowly, with the current summer we are having in Europe, of the impact of our past actions in the weather. And make no mistake, eating so much meat and drinking so much milk, is a huge impact we are inflicting on our planet.
Please do not comment with "I do X" or "In our house, we avoid doing Y" - it is not about you and me, it is about society. I am convinced, you are convinced, we need everyone to be convinced.
hdgvhicv 4 hours ago [-]
Everyone apart from a few stragglers agree the climate is changing. Most people agree the world won’t change its behaviour on its own to stop that.
So we can thus incentivise change (things like renewables being far cheaper than fossil fuel) globally, and adapt to reality.
There are a vocal minority whining about how we need to stop eating beef or milk annd stop using energy and there are those who make beef and milk more sustainable and make generating energy sustainable. I have time for the latter. The former can go hand out with the coal rollers.
jcattle 4 hours ago [-]
How do you make beef and milk more sustainable? I'm honestly wondering. To me it seems similar to saying: we can make coal power plants more efficient. Equivalent to more "efficient" (however you want to define that) forms of animal husbandry.
It doesn't change the fact that you're still burning coal, while you could be putting up solar.
Aefiam 2 hours ago [-]
It is not just a few stragglers, 30% of americans believe climate change isnt real, the us president is one of them.
Fighting climate change is not going to be successful without sacrifice, we tried that for the last decades and fossil fuel consumption has only risen.
Of course people dont want to do that and so instead deny it happening or that it will be magically fixed in the future.
throwawayffffas 3 hours ago [-]
Okay lets get this straight, animals do not contribute to global warming. The co2 they emit has been taken from the atmosphere from plants.
Methane breaks down to Co2 in the atmosphere on average in 9.6 years.
Animal rearing does not permanently affect the climate.
Increasing stock sizes does increase the methane level equilibrium but there are mitigations to this, there are additives to feed that can reduce methane emissions to 1%. Last I checked a few years ago, there were pilot programs to determine effects on animal welfare and product quality.
The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.
ben_w 3 hours ago [-]
> Methane breaks down to Co2 in the atmosphere on average in 9.6 years.
Despite which, over a 100 year period it has 25 times the warming impact as the CO2 it turns into.
> The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.
Everyone should focus on whatever they know how to make a dent with, the "sustainable" emissions rate is 0.1% of the current rate which is essentially "we need to fix everything everywhere except for pick one of grassland or North Korea".
Animal-emitted CO2 isn't the problem, but methane.
The CO2 captured by plants and eaten by livestock gets converted in part to methane, a more more potent greenhouse gas. This does eventually degrade back to the original CO2, but on a scale of decades, it's currently too slow to prevent accumulation of methane.
paweladamczuk 3 hours ago [-]
FWIW, no matter the issue, this kind of tone makes me close up for any rational arguments. I wish I could look past it, but I just can't.
pastage 3 hours ago [-]
It's probably not the tone. You only choose to hear that tone and close up. (From my experience)
I hold some fringe ideas, e.g. helmets are bad. So I have lots of experience with handling discussion where people close up for any rational argument. Because I am just wrong by definition. That really lets you explore how people react to ideas they do not support.
paweladamczuk 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, straight out denial of somebody's experience is another debate killer.
hackernud3s 4 hours ago [-]
Beef specifically. If everybody switched to pork, chicken and fish that would mitigate most of this and it's a much more realistic ask.
simianwords 3 hours ago [-]
I would much rather have Europe install ACs instead. Stopping meat, not installing ACs, degrowth all look like masochistic ways to show that we are repenting.
Aefiam 3 hours ago [-]
ACs are not going to stop storms, floods, droughts and the rising sea level. Fighting climate change requires sacrifice of current comforts for an easier life of future generations.
So of course we are not going to do anything about it, when it is much easier to deny it exists or pretend that it is going to magically fix itself in the future.
simianwords 2 hours ago [-]
The deaths due to lack of ac is more than predicted deaths due to storms or droughts
Yizahi 4 hours ago [-]
It will be flagged because of the manipulative headline.
pvaldes 4 hours ago [-]
Another way of saying the same would be: Agriculture causes almost 60% of the biodiversity damage linked to global farmland.
Yep, is the miracle of literature. An hectare of cattle allows more biodiversity than the same hectare of lettuce.
facecalm 4 hours ago [-]
The miracle would be to read the article which states the biodiversity damage is 14 times higher per calorie than plant-sourced foods. Which means you could reduce the 40% to 2-3% if you would replace it totally.
Buxato 3 hours ago [-]
And per protein gram? Taking into account bio equivalence and bioavailability between different kinds of protein source.
pastage 3 hours ago [-]
Vegetarian options are easier, cheaper and better to produce per gram of protein. Especially if you want to live in an society and not on the steppe.
tovej 4 hours ago [-]
You think cows are the only animals that require food production from farms?
According to a Swedish study publish a few years ago (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541), going vegan is mid-tier in combating global warming. Who you buy your electric from has a larger impact on the environment than going Vegan, as does if/what car you own and naturally what kind of trips and vacations you do. A single trip with an airplane can have a bigger impact on global warming than all the meat they eat through their whole life.
This being a forum of mostly tech workers, many of us can afford to choose more sustainable animal products and support agriculture that promotes biodiversity and carbon sequestration too. If you don't want to give animal products up, then look for sources that engage in regenerative agriculture practices. They tend to be the most humane ways to raise animals as well.
In the end, demand for meat, eggs, and dairy is never going to disappear. Maybe someday lab grown alternatives can be molecularly and structurally equivalent. But until then the most effective change we can make collectively is to change government incentives to farmers so they choose better practices.
Eat meat. Don't eat meat. Do whatever you want.
It's somewhat revealing to me that whenever this comes up people feel personally attacked by people trying to make ethical choices using data. Why is it so threatening to you?
IMO we should share data and let people make their own choices.
There are also environmentally beneficial meats. So much so that when rewilding we sometimes need to add the same animals back (as is happening in Scotland - rewilders are breeding cattle that look like wild ones to make it "natural"). In the UK you can buy venison from wild animals that need to be culled to to preserve the environment.
> Based on a comparative assessment of the current Beyond Burger production system with the 2017 beef LCA by Thoma et al, the Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less energy, has >99% less impact on water scarcity and 93% less impact on land use than a ¼ pound of U.S. beef.
https://css.umich.edu/publications/research-publications/bey...
Fake meat is just tofu with preparation.
The problem is systemic and blaming other people for their lifestyle choices is neither effective nor helpful and just leads to further division. It's exactly this sort of division that helps fossil companies to destroy the planet and keep making money.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-warming-by-gas-and...
https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
More than 70% of CO2 from energy, less than 6% from ALL livestock.
Global meat production is only increasing.
You're delusional with main character syndrome?
I do want to mention that you do also have to look out to get enough of : Omega 3, Calcium, Iodine, Iron, Selenium, Protein.
Takes a bit of work at the start to adapt but it's very doable, and it's not like Omnivores don't have comparable deficiencies from not eating enough plants and fruit. Not to mention other problems that come with eating animal products...
I only supplement with Omega 3, Vitamin D, B12, Iodine (although sometimes I go for wakame). Have been on a plant-based diet for around 4 years now, feeling healthy.
You do realize those soybean plantations are not for human consumption, right? And that that's what is factored into the quoted loss of biodiversity?
And if you're not willing to do your part, that just means the rest of us have to pull double duty.
For methane produced by farming all components remain in a cycle. Everything released by animals eventually finds its way back to plants, which get eaten, which become exhaust of animals, etc.
This sounds to me more like a spin by big oil to finger point at another industry.
To be exact, excess methane go in the high troposphere, where it is broken down in CO2+H2O (the half life is very short, I don't remember which is which but it's either 5 or 20 years). So in any case, it accelerate climate change.
The obsession with CO2, specifically emitted by fossil fuel use, for me indicates geopolitical motivations (for both standpoints).
The long run is the thing that really matters. A faster payback only serves to cover the impact of those that want to keep pumping up oil and gas in the meantime(also to make synthetic fertiliser) for a few decades. It shifts focus from that on cow farts. As if the rotting plant matter and wild animal life that could replace it didn't emit any methane.
I would hazard a guess that the incidental methane emissions from one gas extraction field would astronomically dwarf the emissions from cow farts.
fossil fuels contribute 33% farm animals contribute 30%
Not astronomically; marginally. Anyone who's been around herbivore farm animals will tell you they fart. A lot.
Then again, farm plants are a further 18%.
A cow that's fed on gras and farts emits nothing that that gras didn't pick up and contributes virtually nothing to climate change in the long term.
Otherwise, I wonder if non fertilizer supported grass could support sufficient cows to satiate demand (which has not even peaked yet).
but focusing on that is shifting blame in an innefectual way of course. Pointing at cow farts puts the pressure on the individual and seeks to dampen effects in the short term. Pump up less or no fossil fuels with actual long term thinking and those fertilisers will automatically become more expensive. At that point tho our oversized animal herd becomes harder to support and beef becomes automatically a lot more expensive whilst at the same time the manure becomes more important.
Also, from that Wikipedia article:
There is accumulating research and data showing that oil and gas industry methane emissions – or from fossil fuel extraction, distribution and use – are much larger than thought.[35][36][37][38][39]
Still, my “astronomically dwarfs” looks to be overstating it by a wide margin.
Yeah, but they also provide 80% of the world's calories to animals' 20%
Apparently mainly rice growing. I knew paddy fields were bad, but I didn't know they were that bad. Per calorie I am sure it is more like a tenth that of ruminants, perhaps less, but still worth replacing with other carbohydrates.
Complete rice also carry lisine (although less than beans) which is a really hard amino acid to get on a vegetarian diet.
Grass-fed beef cattle whose dung is "recycled" in a more natural way in the fields produce the same emissions as would wild ruminants such as antelope, bison, etc.
The biodiversity problem in the above refers mostly to new land clearances intended for farming, including for feedstock. This is minor in N. America and Europe, mostly as the clearances were done decades or over a century ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_emissions
Table 3 in this source [0] shows enteric vs manure methane emissions are 158 vs 137 kg CH4/yr for dairy cows, who are mostly fed in feedlots, and 58 vs 2.4 for meat and other cattle, in the US and Canada. So the CH4 emissions range 65-fold from 2.4 to 158 depending on how the cattle are farmed.
[0] Revised methane emissions factors and spatially distributed annual carbon fluxes for global livestock. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/pmid/28959823/
Increasing herd sizes increases that equilibrium level and that is partially responsible for the overall increase.
But there are mitigations that can be applied there are feed additives that reduce the cow related methane emissions to 1%.
Overall point is cow farts can be a drop in the bucket in the overall scheme of things, all we have to do is modify their diet slightly. Should we do it yes. Is it a huge issue no.
Industrial methane leaks are a bigger problem, that methane when it breaks down will turn into co2 that was not there to begin with contributing to global warming permanently.
Cows produce around 50 kg CH4 per head per year. There's around 1.5 billion cattle. That's around 75 teragrams (million metric tons).
Humans release about 410 teragrams altogether. About 40 percent is agricultural. And another 40 percent is from fossils, namely natural gas.
The top 100 natural gas leaks release over 20 teragrams of methane a year. That's just the leaks. That's 400,000,000 cattle worth of methane just pissed into the wind.
Thanks!
Incidentally, I’d love to see the Great Plains return to huge roaming ruminant populations, and find a way to build our meat industry around that.
And maximize how they're fed in the last months of their lives in feedlots.
They were certainly not killing 30 million bison each year.
The only answer here is less meat production, especially feedlot-finished, no matter how people try to twist it.
The ecology of it, including emissions, isn't really that bad if you're American. We're very efficient at beef production. It's really the global south that's most of the novel emissions, and that's mostly from counting land-use changes.
In natural environment, they cohabitant with other animals. They migrates.
When we farm them, we remove anything not our primary product.
In places like Ireland, where cows have existed for 6000 years, they're also part of the ecology by any meaningful metric. There are a lot of more recently arrived species considered native! Mice, hedgehogs, rabbits, and red deer all came later.
This is how cattle is kept in the US: https://www.hcn.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/sucked-dry-th...
I'd love to read your definition of "natural ecosystems", is it something like "a system in nature", with "nature" meaning "on planet earth"?
Farm honeybees are essentially one breed, which is in itself a huge problem as a single pathogen/parasite can quickly wipe them out globally. On top of that, honey farmers move their hives all over the place, effectively displacing any wild pollinators present in vast areas.
Commercial honey is farmed in the most ecologically risky way.
Total insect mass dropped by 70% in Europe in 30 years, no insects = no pollination, no pollination = no flower = real mass scale extinction of pretty much everything that lives on earth since 80%+ of plants need pollinators.
"On average, animal-sourced foods are associated with eight times more carbon loss and 14 times more biodiversity loss per calorie than plant-sourced foods."
is very likely to be countered by listing personal preferences, anecdata, concern for vegans' health or mockery of that lifestyle choice, and generally nitpicking.
Honest admissions like 'I am part of the problem and will maybe try doing something about it' are very rare.
That is until people are faced with stuff like this :D. Then emotions take over.
HN leans strongly reactionary and just likes to dress it up a bit so as to appear more respectable.
/s
I'm more triggered by how they count and compare plant and animal-based calories. They ignore one critical detail: human body is not a calorie meter. They don't take into account protein digestibility, phytic acid, phototoxins, non-digestible oligosaccharides that cause bloating. 200kcal of boiled eggs versus 200kcal of peas? Some people just really enjoy their peas and beans, I guess.
Is there really nothing else going on in your life?
I'm sorry.
I'm not criticizing people wanting to eat meat or milk.
I'm criticizing making it ones entire point of living.
Is there really nothing else going on for you? Meat and milk all you have to live for? Surely you must see how that's not good for you?
You seem incapable of understanding rhetorical exaggeration.
As the kids say: no u.
"Beef: roughly 70–80% of people eat it at least occasionally
Milk and dairy: roughly 85–90%"
Ketogenic diet is a band aid to both, not a solution, and plants are not the cause of either problem, either.
Chicken, for example, produces 10% of CO2 per kg of meat compared to beef.
But mainly, beef and meat is not the same, cattle needs way more ressources than chicken for example, or well, insects.
Also dairy is not a meat.
Hardest part is knowing implicit animal ingredients you might not otherwise guess, which almost tripped me up when I visited the US and (as a vegetarian*) almost bought some yogurt before reading the ingredients list and finding to my surprise that it contained gelatine.
* it's mainly the cheese; I've substituted out other uses of milk. Also, vegan yogurt is a thing now, not sure when that happened, before or after that visit.
Just looked up the Wikipedia page to check on vegan, and… looks like all the animal and plant "sources" actually ingest the stuff from elsewhere?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12The mean human has approximately one ovary, one testicle. A few hundred million Indians refusing all meat is compatible with the others not doing that.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-and...
If it’s not, it’s probably just poverty holding back consumption.
Edit: upon second reading, I realize techterrier was probably refuting only the steak part of sudo_cowsay’s comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_milk_cons...
There was a research, which I can't be arsed to google with mobile, that compared western vegan diet and Indian omnivore and, yup you guessed it, the western version was less costly in terms of future proof.
But as with the zillionaires the human predicament depends on weather we muster the courage to limit ourselves or die to the extinction that's already manifesting itself in forms like forest fires, droughts and crop losses.
But I think we are making progress, slowly, sadly too slowly, with the current summer we are having in Europe, of the impact of our past actions in the weather. And make no mistake, eating so much meat and drinking so much milk, is a huge impact we are inflicting on our planet.
Please do not comment with "I do X" or "In our house, we avoid doing Y" - it is not about you and me, it is about society. I am convinced, you are convinced, we need everyone to be convinced.
So we can thus incentivise change (things like renewables being far cheaper than fossil fuel) globally, and adapt to reality.
There are a vocal minority whining about how we need to stop eating beef or milk annd stop using energy and there are those who make beef and milk more sustainable and make generating energy sustainable. I have time for the latter. The former can go hand out with the coal rollers.
It doesn't change the fact that you're still burning coal, while you could be putting up solar.
Fighting climate change is not going to be successful without sacrifice, we tried that for the last decades and fossil fuel consumption has only risen.
Of course people dont want to do that and so instead deny it happening or that it will be magically fixed in the future.
Methane breaks down to Co2 in the atmosphere on average in 9.6 years.
Animal rearing does not permanently affect the climate.
Increasing stock sizes does increase the methane level equilibrium but there are mitigations to this, there are additives to feed that can reduce methane emissions to 1%. Last I checked a few years ago, there were pilot programs to determine effects on animal welfare and product quality.
The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.
Despite which, over a 100 year period it has 25 times the warming impact as the CO2 it turns into.
> The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.
Everyone should focus on whatever they know how to make a dent with, the "sustainable" emissions rate is 0.1% of the current rate which is essentially "we need to fix everything everywhere except for pick one of grassland or North Korea".
https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
The CO2 captured by plants and eaten by livestock gets converted in part to methane, a more more potent greenhouse gas. This does eventually degrade back to the original CO2, but on a scale of decades, it's currently too slow to prevent accumulation of methane.
I hold some fringe ideas, e.g. helmets are bad. So I have lots of experience with handling discussion where people close up for any rational argument. Because I am just wrong by definition. That really lets you explore how people react to ideas they do not support.
So of course we are not going to do anything about it, when it is much easier to deny it exists or pretend that it is going to magically fix itself in the future.
Yep, is the miracle of literature. An hectare of cattle allows more biodiversity than the same hectare of lettuce.