A new University of Oxford study adds to the growing body of evidence that plant-based foods, even the processed ones, are better for the planet than meat, especially beef and lamb.
Beyond Meat's Beyond Burger Life Cycle Assessment: A detailed comparison between a plant-based and an animal-based protein source
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
You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local ... Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%.
What's the carbon footprint of the manufacturing? Meat is also distributed.
What's your source for this claim about ethanol fuels? You can get pure ethanol at any pump in Brazil, it's widely used, and it's even 10% in gasoline. You sure they are losing money on that?
Can you answer the question about the carbon footprint of manufacturing plant based foods?
The study on corn ethanol looks so-so, however it's only one study and has a lot of disclaimers about possible problems in methodology. They claim the difference could be as low as zero and as high as 24%. They also are quite strong in saying biofuels must be a part of managing carbon. Just that we need something more efficient than corn. And some scientists have already found problems with the study.[1]
As far as the numbers being the same for sugar cane, that's completely wrong. It produces close to double the fuel.
I'm skeptical, because many things, like Corn Ethanol, are actually not what they're promised to be. I would love it if this wasn't the case here, but I suspect it is.
For B12? You do know that animals don’t produce B12, but microorganisms (that can be found in soil and untreated water) and that farmed animals eat B12 supplemented food?
So no, people don’t need meat. Not for B12, or for proteins or for iron or for anything else.
Do people want to eat meat? That’s a different story.
If you want to turbo optimize your life and give up caffeine so your body can absorb non-heme iron be my guest. It’s far simpler to eat as omnivores as humans were meant to be, especially with so many factors on the scale against your favor.
Humans weren't "meant" to eat any single way, for what it's worth. We have the good fortune of possessing exceptionally flexible diets, but we can survive readily on many variations of what's possible.
Something people frequently overlook (or are unaware of) is that in much of the world, animal agriculture utilizes B12 supplementation. This is part of why there is B12 in commercial animal products. Without that, B12 levels in commercial animal products would be lower. Further, people who eat animal products aren't guaranteed to avoid deficiencies.
The idea that we "need" meat is thoroughly debunked by decades of excellent, high-quality research. What we "need" as far as B12 goes is essentially less sanitary environments; we (and animals we ate) used to get enough from food and water which wasn't clean by current standards.
For me it makes no difference whether I consume animal products or not. I’ve consumed no animal products in about five months now, and aside from needing to spend a bit longer looking at labels when I first started, now I know what I’m doing I spend no more or less time on food.
I take a big multivitamin in the evening and that’s it.
how frustrating it is for you to do what you do and know what you know? I only know the “common” knowledge about climate change and it makes me angry every time I think about what we know and where we’re still heading.
I'm fairly early in my career (read: youngish). And, truthfully, I'm very much having an existential crisis. I often wonder what the worth in studying the climate is. After all, we already have an extremely detailed understanding of the basics. Does refining our estimate of melt and other such issues, reducing the error bars, really contribute anything more to society? I'm not sure. It feels fruitless. But I recently had a friend explain that I should consider myself more a documentarian than a researcher which shifted my perspective quite a lot. Some people here will like the quote:
"Somebody has to document what happened, it's better than selling ads on the internet. Imagine a world where we burn ourselves to death and we didn't even keep track of the specifics, it seems even more tragic."
Anyway. I think the answer is clearly... frustrating.
>And, truthfully, I'm very much having an existential crisis. I often wonder what the worth in studying the climate is. After all, we already have an extremely detailed understanding of the basics.
This same line of thought is what turned me away from pursuing a degree/career in climate science. It feels like an area where you can make significant contributions to the analysis of impacts and gain greater understanding of the future direction things will take (and the rate), it'll be akin to shuffling deckchairs on the titanic in terms of being able to actually effect any meaningful change; since I was frustrated in my current career with a sense of futility I realized the move into climate would not be satisfying, as much as the topic was of interest.
Similarly with working in industry 'tackling' climate change. Pinning hope on technological advancements are (IMO) fundamentally flawed. Plus much of 'green' industry where the majority of jobs are to be fund amount to a thin veneer of PR for organizations that are significantly exacerbating the issue.
As an aside, how much stock do you put in the notion that the first Blue-Ocean Event will significantly ramp up the rate of change being felt globally?
Due to the situation in Ukraine (big exporter of vegetable oil), the world is currently quite dependent on palm oil. You know the one they cut down rainforests to make. It was interesting to follow the politics around the Indonesia's temporary export ban back in May.
Have no idea why you get downvoted, but I did notice few times now how HN crowd doesn’t know much about veganism or appreciates people who think animal agriculture is cruel.
Maybe because it's a biased POV, that doesn't take into account that the isssue is simply being human, nobody can call themselves out or blame some activity more than others.
For example many vegans and animalists own pets to "save them from cruelty"
But
Loss and others of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that free-ranging domestic cats (mostly unowned) are the top human-caused threat to wildlife in the United States, killing an estimated 1.3 to 3.7 billion birds and 6.3 to 22.3 billion mammals annually.
And that's only in the US...
Wild life is a constant threat to our life style, like it or not, being a modern human in modern society means being responsible for animal suffering even if you don't personally eat them.
For example in my country the war on hunters (mainly by radical animalists) produced that
Roughly 2.3 million wild boars roam around Italy, with roughly 20,000 in the area of Rome, according to farm trade group Coldiretti. And while African swine fever can't be transmitted to humans, it can infect and kill domestic pigs
well, this is the reason why people downvote these comments.
muslims don't eat pork, Hindu don't eat cows, every religion impose dietary restriction, doesn't mean that non believers have to follow them.
Veganism is no exception to the rule: if you believe you're reducing animal suffering, good for you, go on with your religion and be happy.
But in truth you aren't, vegans kill a lot of animals too, there are billions of people in the World that cause much less damages than us westerners, even if we lived only on rainwater and rocks.
So you might be a "true vegan (TM)" but you aren't better for the environment or for animal suffering than anybody else.
I don’t see evidence that the HN crowd as a whole doesn’t know much about veganism. Are you measuring knowledge about veganism via adoption of veganism?
The comment contributes absolutely nothing to the conversation. No definition, no solution, no relevance.
If livestock is less than people is it ok then? These graphs are just hotspots it's impossible to use them quantifiably at USA levels. They only show there are a lot of "cows" "there"
You are just roping your common repetitive viewpoints into the story.
Why don't you care about human slavery? Do you not think that is cruel? I'm guessing because you are rich and the poor can eat vegan cake on the other side of the world? Why do vegans get to bring up veganism every conversation when so many people have such awful lives like being slaves?
None of this is relevant to livestock heat maps using a measure of X times people.
Lab grown meat is the answer. One can never convince a statistically significant amount of people to switch to meat, so one must find ways to make the meat itself more sustainable.
It's thinking with the end in mind. Once you axiomatize the ends, you can then figure out the means to get there.
This is an unhinged reply. The fact that you ask why the other commenter doesn’t care about slavery really drives home the point that you don’t know what you’re talking about and you have a hard time constructing an argument. I hope you educate yourself about veganism. there are endless resources!
funny enough, was asking my self the same question yesterday after 5-minute googling didn’t get me anywhere. I see a recommendation mentioned below, but as I also saw, hard to find something where you can control signal to noise ratio
once I switched there’s no way I’m ever going back to cow’s milk.
Why?
Health, much greater taste variety, no cruelty involved to make it, environmental benefits.
There are some horrendous practices prevalent in the dairy industry for sure, but it’s naive to think there is no cruelty or environmental detriment involved in plant based milk.
The natural ecosystem of the land that is now crop was obliterated before the first seed was sewn, and most likely the soil’s nutrients are depleted more and more each year, due to pesticides and crude plowing techniques.
If a moral high ground is what you’re looking for, drink water.
There is no perfect way to produce consumable resources because it takes other resources to make them, whether it’s animals, land, water, fuel or whatnot.
Someone will always find something to be unhappy or offended with even if we grow oat milk in space in a vacuum and teleport it back to earth.
Reducing horrendous practices of abusing animals to have a milky cup of coffee is great step forward and people have the right to feel they’re making a positive impact without judgements that’s it not good enough or that poor soil’s nutrients are taken away instead now.
You can’t change the world being binary about these things, it’s a step forward in the right direction.
We’ll change world being agile and iterative, not by turning it into a waterfall project of “everything now is magically 100% environmentally friendly and everyone’s happy”.
No, I'm not. I get annoyed when people pretend plant based alternatives are a strict win with absolutely zero downside.
If you think about it, there actually is a perfect way to produce consumable resources, and it existed long before humans came along. Ruminant animals graze, migrate and their dropping rejuvenate soil in perfect balance with nature.
I'm not making the case that it's practical or even possible to feed 8 billion people in this way, but the way that we're depleting the Earth's nutrients with industrial farming is not practical in the long term either.
Most farming is done for live stock feed, so your argument makes little sense. Also if there's the choice to be made between soil and live animals I'm choosing the animals.
Not true, live stock feed is mostly the husks and stalks of the plants that are inedible to humans, which if it weren't for livestock, would be discarded as waste. See this video for some more common misconceptions, if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g
Every plot of land used to grow crop represents countless animals that used to live there, and were wiped out by the farmer. Farmers constantly battle against pests, which too are animals, just trying to live. Vultures are often seen following combine harvesters, to prey on the corpses of field mice and other small mammals that get caught in the blades. Zero harm is a myth.
Zero harm is a myth for most things. But harm involved in producing cow’s milk (to animals, to environment) and plant based milk is HUGELY different.
It sounds to me you want to make everything relative so that the conclusion is “everything involves some harm, so I might just eat me some steaks and drink some cow milk, it won’t matter”. But it matters greatly. So let’s not do that.
That's exactly my point - your original comment said there is "no cruelty involved to make it", which is plainly incorrect.
You're mistaken about my motivations - I believe that eating ethically sourced, grass fed, grass finished, certified organic meat is better for the environment than a plant based diet. Watch the video I linked if you'd like to understand how someone could possibly make that argument.
I’m not looking for any high ground, I’m looking for decent ground. There’s no way you can compare the cruelty involved in producing cow milk to that of producing oat milk for example. It’s not in the same universe.
I didn't say the cruelty was equivalent, I'm pointing out that you don't escape the cruelty entirely by switching to a plant based milk - many thousands of small animals died for it.
> Isn’t this an objective data driven problem and we can decide what’s better for short / medium / long term?
No, such questions never are. Even if you could remove the prevailing strong emotional responses from the debate (humans aren‘t always rational), you would still find that at heart, the debate is not about technology but about values. What targets are we actually aiming for, and why? If you can‘t agree on what the problem is, you aren‘t going to find a common solution. And worse: often such issues pose multiple problems, the solutions for some of which may actually make the others worse. So how do you deal with these trade-offs? What do you prioritize?
Nuclear power is a hard problem not because we don‘t know the solutions, but because we can‘t agree on which problems are the most urgent. And again, that’s not a question about technology, but about values.
