this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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I wish it was that simple, but it isn't. If consumers replace chicken with beef, chicken will get more expensive and beef will get less expensive. Maybe some factory farmers and slaughterhouses will change species and ranchers will hire a PR firm to start a "eat more beef" add campaign. A new equilibrium will be reached with no significant impact on animal welfare or the climate, because the meat industry is well aware that consumer preferences shift over time and is happy to accommodate those shifts as long as consumers keep eating meat.
What sends a message is vegetarianism or veganism. And, to a lesser extent, buying your meat from a local cooperative or raising your own. Taking money out of the pockets of the factory farm industry as a whole saves animals and sends a message. Just eating less beef doesn't.
Ideally, more people would eat way less meat.
I stand by it being that simple. Beef production has more than 3 times the emissions per pound than other meats.
It isn't about sending a message, it is about reducing GHG emissions.
As far as prices, maybe. I don't know the ins and outs of raising animals for food. I don't think meat prices are entirely supply and demand due to different costs in raising different animals.
your link is new to me, so i dug through it a bit, checked some references, and i've decided the methodology is bad, and the authors either know this or they should have known this. the primary source for the LCA comparisons says, in plain english, in the introduction that LCA's should not be used for comparisons due to a lack of control for the data gathering procedures. the actual paper's purpose was to, i shit you not, ignore this guidance, average every datapoint they could find for any food type, and then stock them together in one paper.... to let you compare LCAs. this is shoddy work.
i didn't bother to go digging into the tertiary sources on which your link relies, but i will say i did some of the reading into the sources for other papers on the impacts of animal agriculture, and i have yet to find any investigation that doesn't attribute to livestock all of the impacts of everything in their diet. that seems reasonable: if a cow eats it, then it should be counted. but that falls apart under scrutiny. my primary example is that, in the united states, many cattle are fed cottonseed. cottonis not a food crop, though. it's a textile. the cottonseed is a byproduct, and whether we feed it to cattle or press it for oil, any such use is actually reclaiming resources. how should that be counted? it's not as though cottonseed is an essential part of cattle diets, it's only through the happenstance of its availability and relative price point that it's in there at all.
and this just points at a larger problem: everything in our agricultural sector is so intertwined and interdependent that the impact of anything is a mercurial notion, that changes on a seasonal basis dependent on the weather, technology, and people's feelings.
i don't believe beef can't be raised sustainably (which is to say, indefinitely on a given plot of land, given sufficient sun and rainfall). i'm open to data about this, but cattle were among the first domesticated animals, and we've seen all kinds of climate change since then, so cattle can't be the problem in-and-of themselves.
About half of the emissions from cattle are from methane; methane has about 80x the warming impact over 20 years that CO2 has.
Beyond that, cattle are slaughtered at 1 to 2 years old, while meat chickens are slaughtered at around 2 months. Cattle have worse feed conversion rates because they live longer.
as I said above, it's almost impossible to actually quantify the effects of any agricultural activity due to the interdependencies and variances in the industry. show me the source for you "half of the emissions" claim, and I'll show you a flawed methodology and a counterexample to the claim.
The half of emissions that are methane are the cow burps themselves, because their stomachs ferment grass and produce methane as a waste product.
Even if you want to quibble about the accounting of the other half, without cows grazing there would be way, way less methane produced.
you're just restating your case. I asked for a citation.
According to https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/2/2/127/htm conventional feedlot beef produces 501,593 kg of methane per 1 million kg of beef, mostly from both burps and composting manure. So that's about .5 kg of methane per kg of beef.
1 lb of methane is 84 kg CO2e; that is to say over 100 years 1 kg of methane warms the planet the same as releasing 84kg of CO2. So every kg of beef produces 42kg of CO2e, regardless of any quibbling about the CO2e of agricultural waste fed to cows.
By contrast, googling quickly the quoted CO2e emissions per kg of chicken is 18.2. Which is, of course, subject to the same quibbling.
i will be digging into the methodology in a little while, but I found this part of the summary might indicate it's not as bad as it is sometimes made out to be.
feed conversion is often a meaningless metric for ruminants, which can graze for all of their necessary calories.