That’s a fairly strange reading of the US data. It’s only true because of the USA’s massive use of emissions in other parts of their lives. In non-relative terms it’s still a huge reduction & if we can get in front of developing nations eating of ruminants it would pay large dividends.
I don't know what's "fairly strange" about it. Meat consumption, for Americans, does not make up a big fraction of our CO2 footprint.
Globally it's quite significant, but "get[ting] in front of developing nations eating of ruminants" is a much more politically fraught issue than doing the same in the U.S. My brother and I are 3-4 inches taller than my dad, because we grew up on a meat and dairy rich American diet, versus the rice and lentil-based diet my dad grew up with in his village in Bangladesh. Help me figure out the right messaging for what we should tell Bangladeshis that they shouldn't eat meat now that they're finally getting to be able to afford it.
As to the other components of GHG emissions--those are ramping up outside the U.S. as well, explosively so. Food delivery services are becoming quite popular in Dhaka. Help me figure out the messaging for how we tell Bangladeshis they can't have drive-through Starbucks and avocado toast like western people.
Directly from your link “Worldwide, livestock accounts for between 14.5 percent and 18 percent of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. The percentage is lower in the United States in part because our overall greenhouse gas emissions are so much higher than other countries: In the United States we emit 16.5 metric tons per person per year compared to a worldwide average of about five metric tons. Most of America’s emissions come from power plants and transportation, with each accounting for a third of the total.”
We emit 3x the emissions as everyone else. The fact that relatively meat is smaller than other places isn’t interesting. It’s lost in the statistical wash of our extreme usage but accounts for a large portion in real terms.
There is virtually no evidence that suggests calories from meat are better for your health than other protein but ruminant protein especially is carbon intensive. So the message is straightforward western countries moving to plant based protein decreases inequality in comparison.
>My brother and I are 3-4 inches taller than my dad, because we grew up on a meat and dairy rich American diet, versus the rice and lentil-based diet my dad grew up with in his village in Bangladesh.
No, your dad is likely shorter due to basic malnutrition. Malnutrition is caused by lack of appropriate macro and micro nutrients, irrespective of their source. Studies have shown that properly nourished vegetarians, vegans and meat eaters grow to the same height.
Also, "properly nourished" is a weasel phrase here. You see the exact same phenomenon among the U.S.-raised kids of Bangladeshis/Indians/Pakistanis from very comfortable families. The kids are way taller than parents who did not suffer any malnourishment back home. Just because it is theoretically possible to construct a vegan diet that results in the same growth as a diet including meat and dairy doesn't mean it's easy to do so with the kinds of foods readily available in the developing world.
First, you originally claimed meat as a factor (apparently still after an edit). Second, a vegetarian can eat dairy products. Finally, the only working link above is pretty much worthless (122 participants who were asked questions, measured, and checked again in 3 years) as it does not capture final adult height.
>Also, "properly nourished" is a weasel phrase here.
For sure, just like debating about meat consumption and pivoting to just dairy consumption as proof...
You need to remove the semi-colons from the link above. Three different studies showing that milk consumption results in taller children.
As to your second point--the issue under debate here is not meat consumption, but rather the CO2 emissions of animal agriculture. So we're talking about telling Bangladeshis to be vegans, not merely vegetarians.
Huh, these numbers really disagree in a couple places.
Nevertheless it seems like the most important way to minimize CO2 is to focus on grains, and that milk, eggs, poultry, pork, and fish aren't all that bad compared to the average vegetable.
And milk's easy to budget for, two cups a day is only 10% of a kid's calories.
Taller is not necessarily healthier. Cows milk is designed to bring a cow to adult size in one year. It has a very different composition than human milk. There is a lot of evidence that feeding that kind of rocket fuel for growth to humans has some serious downsides. Drinking milk in teenage years, for example, raises the risk of prostate cancer by 300% later in life.
It is, however, closely linked to status, especially in the developing world. Telling Bangladeshis they shouldn’t eat meat because Westerners blew the global CO2 budget is... problematic.
I don’t have the source for the 300 figure at hand now. I’ll try to find it again. Here’s a video review with links to sources that goes a lot deeper into the issues.
I'm Bangladeshi, from Dhaka. Trust me, no one is interested in getting drive-through. Dhaka is the traffic capital of the world, it's always a cost-benefit calculation to go out onto the road because you'll be spending extreme amounts of time stuck in traffic, inching along, burning gas. To get a Starbucks or a sandwich? Forget that.
What is becoming popular in Dhaka is, as you said, food delivery services which are mostly by scooter because of obvious reasons. For delivery, you're not going to order a sandwich, again for obvious reasons.
There's a huge argument for how worldwide culture is influenced by what's trendy and popular in Europe and NA. For a heartbreaking example, see the state of the Ganges river, in India— millions of kg of plastic, all of which looks awful and eventually washes into the ocean:
Historically when the people disposed of their waste into the river, it was feeding the ecosystem, but that's not the case any more now that they've inherited disposable plastic everything from the West. It's easy to turn a blind eye and say "yeah well, our plastic trash in North America is being properly land filled, so who cares— this is a problem for India to solve." But it's not that simple, of course: we exported the problem to India, and I think it's on us to figure out what the solution looks like too, and model it in our daily use so that it's reflected in the cultural exports (TV, movies, etc).
You see this same basic pattern for a lot of things, where the emerging middle class in a growth economy looks at their English-language media/entertainment for cues on what their next life upgrade should be, and some is mostly good (cell phones, clean water, organic food), but a lot is bad-to-horrible, at least from an ecological standpoint (single use plastic, personal automobiles, overseas vacations).
> Help me figure out the right messaging for what we should tell Bangladeshis that they shouldn't eat meat now that they're finally getting to be able to afford it.
Are you trying to say we shouldn’t save the world from environmental destruction because it might be awkward to ask some people to switch to fake meat?
How about this messaging: “we are destroying the world, we need to stop”
You're not going to "save the world from environmental destruction" by telling people to give up meat, because as India and China (not to mention Africa) develop, meat will become a minor component of their CO2 footprint just as it is in the United States. The anti-meat messaging will be seen as both stupid (because it won't help) and hypocritical ("how about we continue to eat meat, and Americans take their turn living the way Bangladeshi subsistence farmers used to live").
> You're not going to "save the world from environmental destruction" by telling people to give up meat
No, but by convincing people to give up meat, to travel less, to stop using disposable everything, to institute a carbon tax, etc. etd. you just eventually might. As 'Pfhreak wrote elsewhere in the thread, this is not a problem of finding 60%-there solution; it's a problem of repeatedly applying 0.5% - 3% solutions. Every component of CO₂ footprint is a minor one.
Also, don't forget the US is extremely good at exporting its culture. It seems whatever fad happens there, very soon half of Europe does it too, and a lot of other places aspire to it. Doing something in the US is likely to have quite big impact outside it as well.
Modulo the wars a sudden and strong carbon tax would likely start.
We're our worst problem in this fight :/. Outside HN, whenever I mention online or offline that carbon taxing is good and we really need more of it, people look at me like I'm crazy and/or call me communist. Regular people here in Poland seem to universally think along the lines of "look at our gasoline places, it's so expensive [compared to the US], most of it is taxes already, and you want to add extra tax?!".
> Regular people here in Poland seem to universally think along the lines of "look at our gasoline places, it's so expensive [compared to the US], most of it is taxes already, and you want to add extra tax?!".
You could suggest changing the road taxes or exempting gas from VAT at the same time as implementing a carbon tax. It would actually come out cheaper, if we can get the carbon capture price down to $100/ton or less (some estimate $60/ton is viable).
Your final point is the big deal. If western countries largely move to vegetable based meat, not only do we win in real terms we get a huge moral argument. Which is worth a lot.
I feel like you and Rayiner might be talking past each other. I read him to be saying that the moral argument you'd get from cutting meat wouldn't be worth much, either, because the US would still be emitting multiples more GHG than developing countries, even if they drove overhead from meat farming to zero.
But that’s the thing, if that’s his argument I disagree as well.
Simply put no matter what the reason to oppose meat consumption in the US still holds up. It’s a great improvement in real terms & it provides a stronger moral argument.
3% is a big deal. This isn't a problem with a single big lever that suddenly solves 60% of the problem. We're going to be looking for opportunities to reduce by 1% here, 0.5% there.
So far as I can tell, that number is speaking directly to methane emitted from livestock which is not where the majority of livestock emissions come from. It’s more related to the fossil fuel usage and transportation costs.
We'd be eating less tasty burgers for no real reason. Even eliminating meat farming entirely would only reduce the average American's GHG emissions by about 3%: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/climate/cows-global-warmi....