And let's not forget the cows.

I'm in no way a vegetarian. And I'm too set in my childhood-established food biases to make huge changes. (I tried for a year or two. It didn't take.) But the Impossible and Beyond burgers are close enough for me. Could I tell them apart in a patty taste test? Probably. But once it's on a bun with cheese and barbecue sauce and whatnot, I don't notice a difference.

So at that point, I'm like, "Cows are nice animals." I have made the acquaintance of a few and I like them. For an equivalent experience, I can either kill the cow or not. So we've been gradually shifting toward the high-grade fake meats. I look forward to further improvements on this front.

I don’t like the push to define humanity as a thing somehow separate from the Earth and all that entails. Cows wouldn’t exist at all if humanity didn’t depend on them. The most pro-cow stance is to raise them with love and respect and use all they offer us without wasting.

Do you really believe that if everybody turns vegetarian tomorrow cows will just stop existing? If so, India would like a word.

I’m talking about the past, not the future. Bos taurus/indicus wouldn’t exist without man: https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-domestication-of-co...

Ok? I don't think that has anything to do with what I said, but you do you.

I have grazed steers on my property and they didn't make such a positive impression on me. If they didn't produce beef I'd much rather not have them around.

Not to go down this annoying rabbit hole, but if you and others didn’t eat it, wouldn’t it not exist in the first place due to lack of market demand? Is a short life with a quick end worse than no life at all. Would it be acceptable if they were sufficiently happy or cared for? Is this a form of slavery and therefore bad? Where do we draw the line? How much freedom and life is a worthy trade off vs no life at all?

It seems to me that this argument isn’t sufficiently strong. The global warming argument seems strong.

Buddy, I'm not making an "argument". I'm explaining my thought process. If I can live my life in ways that are equivalent except one has less unnecessary killing, I'm going to pick that one. If that doesn't matter to you, that's fine by me.

Every vegetarian should look up "Dairy is scary" on YouTube.

Wouldn't be one for much longer.

Ah, reality. As defined by somebody so unable to function in it that he can't make it 24 hours here without getting 3 flagged/dead comments and a negative karma score.

But thank you for the comment. It's nice to know that the people opposed to crazy things like human rights are this dysfunctional. You give me hope for the future.

> Meat processing is one of the single worst industries for climate change

Wild claim!

Despite all the media coverage on farming/meat industry, coal-powered power plants remain the single most polluting industry in terms of GHG.

Followed by all the hydrocarbon fuel based Transportation and (by a large step margin) the steel industry.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/09/Emissions-by-sect...

I'd likely to have to do more research before I'm confident to address everything you've said. However, I have issues with the way things are categorized because meat production is more than just livestock. It uses a lot of energy and transportation both of which are huge categories on your source. I spoke to a climate scientist I'm friends with a while back and it's my memory of the conversation that gave me the anecdote above. I'll have to do more research before weighing in any further than that.

To be clear I am 100% in agreement that the meat industry is both unsustainable and unethical. However, specifically on GHG it really is not the worst offender.

Effectively if you would stop commuting with a car, reduced AC/Heating to bare minimum and simply bought less 'stuff' (non-essential goods), you would be doing more for the environment than not eating meat.

The unconfortable truth is that once we start discussing these things very few people are willing to curb their 'standard of living', in reality it is a first world luxury not a given right.

Nevertheless if you tell me that we need to curb meat consumption to avoid animal suffering than I am equally on board with you. But the environmental angle in my view is a distraction from the other elephants in the room.

The better question is whether or not meat can be produced sustainably. Humans have been raising livestock for millennia, and climate change only seemed to start after the Industrial Revolution, so meat isn’t obviously necessarily causative of climate change.

To my understanding, the climate problem is basically one of not having closed loops. For instance, burning fossil fuels is a problem because you’re taking carbon that’s buried underground and pumping it into the atmosphere. So to the degree that meat is a problem, there’s probably a loop we need to close. Energy and transportation are instances of the same burning-fossil-fuels problem that we need to solve anyway.

As for the livestock themselves, I know they produce methane as a byproduct of digestion, but that seems like a potentially closed loop to me. Wasn’t it a closed loop during all the centuries that humans raised livestock before the Industrial Revolution? If so, what changed? The way we produce fertilizer, for one. But we also need fertilizer to grow vegetables, so we need to solve the fertilizer problem anyway. Plus, livestock are also the primary source of organic fertilizer, so maybe they’re part of the closed loop. They sure used to be.

Did you finish your research? Everything I've ever read confirms what u/DoingIsLearning said, which is that coal is a far, far bigger concern for GHG than the meat industry, despite the propaganda here in the west to make one think otherwise.

Tax meat, then, and get the prices into parity. I know it's literally violence to have to pay for your externalities, but that's a couple of the main things that governments are for: to do violence and tax externalities.

You don't even need to tax meat in most situations. Just remove subsidies.

meat producer subsidies already don't exist.

I feel like you're making fun of me but I am genuinely okay with implementing a carbon tax.

I am not. I am agreeing with you enthusiastically.

That is great since a carbon tax is not a meat tax. Taxing the natural gas that goes into artificial fertilizers would increase the cost of a particular method of maximizing the growth speed and weight just before slaughter, but its not a method that farming must employ. They could just let the animals graze land that have vegetation naturally grow without artificial fertilizers, avoiding the tax and accepting a slower growth speed.

Any food that require artificial fertilizers would have to pay the carbon tax, making carbon-neutral food better in comparison.

We're talking about the US market, right? You can't tax meat here. You might as well propose to a new tax on baseball or the national anthem.

Why do you think the tax system should be used for this?

The tax system should have a single purpose - Raise funds for government expenses.

This is why the tax system is the mess it currently is. Everyone thinks the solution to their personal "social change" is to "tax whatever they disagree with".

You dont like carbonated drinks, advocate for a "soft drink tax".

You dont like people eating meats, advocate for a "meat tax".

Should we increase the fuel taxes to account for all the diesel used to produce a vegan diet? Besides the farming, there is the water and transportation to account for. Some produce (nuts, avocados) are very damaging on the environment, should we tax them?

Or, is this a "bad tax" because it impacts you?

"a couple of the main things that goverments are for: to do violence and tax externalities"

huh? Maybe in authoritarian countries, but not in countries whose constitutions are geared for individual liberty. Your fascist tendencies are showing.

A country with a constitution that is geared like this is still using violence or the implied threat of it to guarantee these rights or even private property in general.

What? It's the people that focus really hard on individual liberty that call government action violence, my dude.

Only when government action infringes on what they want to eat, dude.

That depends on whether you consider taxing externalities to be infringement.

I definitely don't. Taxing externalities is great and not fascist.

Would you care to source that claim? All of the research I've encountered suggests agriculture in toto contributes around 8% of total GHG emissions, with meat production responsible for at most 60% of that number. Even if meat production was eliminated that would not in yield a 5% reduction in GHG as additional plant-based food production would be required to pick up this slack. Given the current state of play of arable land globally (near maximum utilization, available land shrinking rapidly, unrecoverable topsoil depletion rampant globally) one wonders where proponents of this idea think all of this extra agricultural output is supposed to come from.

Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories. See the source for a list of nations with globally unsustainable diets in terms of land.

https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

36% of crops globally are used for animal feed. This climbs to 67% in the USA.

https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...

Given the frequency with which livestock is grazed on land that is utterly unsuitable for any other agricultural purpose that 80% is substantially less meaningful than it may appear at first glance.

These numbers don't really translate to meaningful information.

Livestock eats bulk commodities like corn and grain, which modern mechanized farming has made incredibly efficient. Those staples are grown in regions that don't require irrigation (iowa, kansas, etc). Wheat and corn are already so cheap that they're almost free in the US. Humans get their fill.

It's not like little Johnny can't have broccoli this week because the fat cats are eating burgers.

Look at it from this perspective: Shipping corn and wheat is a relatively efficient way of moving "water" from places that rain a lot to places where it doesn't.

This doesn't account for the carbon cost of fixing nitrogen for fertilizer to grow corn in monocultures

Or the unused manure, nitrogen runoff, methane from cows

Livestock also produce organic fertilizer though.

Measuring food production by calories feels like measuring programmer productivity by lines of code.

How does it compare to other sources of proteins with full amino acid profiles?

Irrelevant. You can get a full amino acid profile by combining plant based sources. It is basic high school biology that there’s less energy available the higher up on the food pyramid you go.

Farming Lions for meat would be less economical than farming cows. Farming cows is less economical than farming wheat.

> You can get a full amino acid profile by combining plant based sources.

Well, yeah, that's why I'm asking how meat compares to those rather than pure calories sources like corn or sugar cane.

Because most people don’t agree with the ethical premise that it’s bad to eat meat.

It feels like most people don't have ethics most of the time. You have to convince them on other grounds. Price would be a part of that.

Ethics is subjective.

Is it ethical to eat dogs? Some societies do, some don't.

Should we judge lions for eating meats? Perhaps convince them to move to a vegan diet?

What you are advocating is forcing your views on others, and that "price" should be the factor.

What if others don't want you do to do something, would you enjoy having it priced out of your reach?

Why do you "have to convince them" in the first place? wouldn't it be easier to do what makes you happy and keep your opinions to yourself and your like-minded friends?

> I mean why isn't ethical enough?

It is. GP is just saying that different people have different ethics.

It seems evident why ethical isn’t enough as we could just eat meat and only consume a nutrient slurry for ethical reasons.

There needs to be an economic reason and it doesn’t make sense that an impossible whopper costs more than a whopper.

For that price, I’d rather have a sustainably raised, organic whopper that tastes the same or better.

There probably is enough economic reason if the externalities were properly accounted. If it’s not in the price (and worse-subsidized) there’s no hope of the market reaching a suitable equilibrium.

Impossible meat is substantially subsidized right now and it’s still expensive.

I think veggie food is cheaper (rice and beans) it’s just this synthetic fake meat stuff that costs more.