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Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It
(sentientmedia.org)
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Vegans love to conflate all meat into one big group because their goal is to make veganism look good in comparison.
In reality, beef is the main problem.
It would be a lot more environmentally effective to convince people to reduce beef consumption and replace it with chicken/pork instead, but vegans aren't interested in that because for them it's not really about the climate - it's about reducing animal suffering and death.
This duplicity muddies the waters and makes getting real actual change that would benefit the climate harder to achieve and less likely to happen.
I'll double down. In reality, beef in Africa, India, and China are the problem (except agriculture isn't a significant enough problem to call "the problem"). In most countries, the climate impact of beef is low for the number of people fed by it.
And even in a full vacuum, plant-based food STILL accounts for 29% of greenhouse gas emissions caused by agriculture/horticulture.
who tf is eating beef in India?
Not nearly as many people as in the US. But between ranching and leaving them in the wild, about 1/3 of all cows in the world are in India. As you might have caught, most of the cows in India are actually used for milk... which is a real problem because the lower tech means they get dramatically less milk per cow than we get in the US. As in, 1/4 as much.
The environmental impact of the Indian cow population is non-trivial, both because of how many cows are not used for food and how inefficient their food processes are with cows. In comparison, the environmental impact of the US cow population is arguably quite trivial. Ditto with the other large beef/milk consumers of the western world like Spain.