the big question that I have is: is it gonna be sustainable 7 billions or more people eating only vegan food?
What about deforestation & co, soja and palms they should be planted somewhere.
p.s. I’m not vegan but not a crazy consumer of meat; maybe 200 gr a week
Same here, I am not vegan and I do not buy red meat and take the vegetarian option in the restaurant.
I only buy chicken that I roast for my meal prep. as it is quicker and simpler for me.
I haven’t research enough vegan meals.
I also consume small fishes like sardines canned to top up my salads.
I do it for environnement purposes first then my health in second. A third motivation could be to lower my food budget.
At least a proper carbon pricing would help people realize what the issue is.
And unless carbon emissions continue going down in the western world, population changes wouldn’t help. Unless you’d want to prevent the rest of the world from reaching western standards.
People, don’t buy into the whataboutism-argument above re carbon emissions, kids & other sources.
We are hearing enough of measures to reduce carbon emissions by 2030, 2050 etc, to know something is going to change, and the quoted study ignores all this future change in emissions.
This article convincingly debunks the huuuuge effect of a child over all other emission sources going forward.
This graph sums it up nicely, it shows the 60t quoted (green), and it shows what it is more likely going to be (brown).
Good old Patron, equalizing cars and children.
I can live without a car. You can live without a car. I definitely can leave without your car. But both you and I, and everyone else, will not be able in the future to live without my children, and all other children of today.
Do you have source? Including the impact (economic, etc) of that?
Remember that we need to reach net zero in a few decades, I don’t know how fast population would have to drop for that. If the argument is that a civilization collapse would avoid a different civilization collapse, that might be technically true but also not very useful.
And remember that quite a few places on earth will become unlivable in the process (35° WBT), driving migrations.
But nobody demands that anybody eat less meat, drive less car or go less on holidays, those are measures that are part of the solution but they only apply on a voluntary basis, you won’t see anything like a ban of any of those in Switzerland (though some towns start taking measures against cars - it’s not environmentally driven, it’s that people don’t like the traffic and the noise in their neighborhood).
The demands would be that the environmental cost of those activities (and others) be adequately factored in their price, which is a very libertarian thing to do (do what you want but bear the full consequences of it). This would, indeed probably involve the CO2 tax, higher fuel prices and higher prices on meat, fuel-consuming holidays and car driving.
I don’t know what totalitarian future you are envisioning when thinking of environmental awareness but if our handling of Covid is anything to go by, we are not in any way going toward it. If anything, we’re more on track to not deal enough with the problem because it would imply revising our precious “quality of life”, which we favour above all else.
Not saying other measures shouldn’t be taken but I’m definitely saying that expecting measures that affect others to be taken before any measure impacting ourselves can pass is the highway toward crashing our head on the wall.
I get where @Patron is coming from.
The main problem for the planet is our overpopulation. Having less kids is the longterm solution, not having any kids at all will let us go extinct. So carbon taxing meat, cars, air travel and doing nothing about people having too many children is just inconsequential.
Anyway, I think the strongest arguments against meat are the ethical ones.
Did you just multiply world emission per capita? Because the growth isn’t uniformly distributed, and the countries that will grow the most in the next decades have much lower emissions. Switzerland is one of the worst with 14t per capita, vs 0.2t for Nigeria (Nigeria is expected to grow by 200M by 2050).
Other high growth countries are at 2t per capita at most.
Just out of interest: what is this kid doing in such a family that causes so much CO2 emissions?
Do you have anything to back that up? From random calculator: CO2 emissions calculator: Calculate your carbon emissions - myclimate vs CO2 emissions calculator: Calculate your carbon emissions - myclimate
We get 6t vs 24t per person. So a household of 3: 6t * 3 = 18t, vs 24 * 2 = 48t.
We need to reduce population growth and reduce emissions per person.
Beyond the eco argument there is a case that eating less meat contributes to food security - plant based foods require fewer crops and fertilizers. Means fewer citizens of the world get held hostage by Putin
From what I understand you want to credit the lifetime cost of a person at birth (without taking into account what the actual consumption would be, e.g. if as a society we manage to reach net zero).
Would you retroactively pay for all the currently living persons? What about people who die before standard life expectancy? What about those that survive beyond? (Doesn’t it seem obviously flawed, at least policy-wise / ethically?)
Just checked the number Patron advanced.
It is calculated by using the kids and all their descendents carbon footprint over their lifespan and divide it over the lifespan of the parents, by weighting their impact (50% for direct kid, 25% for grandkid etc.)
Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children | Carbon footprints | The Guardian.
They assume kids will have same consumption level than an average adult of today.
In my opinion, the numbers are therefore not at all comparable (all your descendents carbon footprint vs. your personal footprint). Also, what happens if you and your descendents become car free ? I guess this would have a pretty high impact, and chances your kids are car free when you are are much higher as you lead per example. Same for being vegeterian etc.
This is very true unfortunately… there is a lot of hypocrisy around such topics (not pointing mi finger towards anyone here ofc)
This is obviously, completely and irrefutbaly false. The main environmental problems are caused by high consumption western lifestyle.
Let’s do an experiment. Let’s keep 2020 lifestyle distribution but half the world population. We just kill one in two people, but keeping same lifestyle as deifned by CO2 emissions per year.
This means that in 2020, the world economy emitted 50.1 Gigaton of CO2equivalent emission in the entire year. Most of it was methan from livestock and CO2 from fossil fuel burning.
To keep warming to an acceptable 1.5 °C, we have a remaining budget (starting from 2020) of 460 gigatons of CO2equivalent emissions.
So if we have the same number of people as today:
For half the population, same lifestyle:
So let that sink in: killing one person every two in the entire world, buys you just 9 years of time. How can you possibly say “if we had population level of the 1970 we wouldn’t be calling an emergency”. 18 years out is still an emergency. And if you go even further and kills again 50%, with only 2 billions of people alive, you would still only have 36 years before you have locked in 1.5°C degree. Again, a timeframe worth calling emergency.
The problem is the lifestyle of the top 1% and the hyper-rich, before even talking about killing off 50% of the world population.
Additionally the discussion that Switzerland is too small to make a difference is ridicoulous. How can we ask China to do something, with an average GDP/capita lower than ours, if we don’t do anything. They can always point a finger and say “look at Switzerland: so rich and even they say it’s uneconomical and aren’t doing anything. Why should we do something”.
The reality is that Switzerland should raise debt to pay for infrastructure (isolation, heat pump instead of oil heating, solar panels, more electric lines, battery storage etc). We still have 40% of debt to GDP ratio. Ridicously low. I’m sure my grandchildren would prefer to pay off debt than fight a 1.5°C degree world or even 2°C.
my previous post was OT; let’s go back to the topic of eating meat.
Not all meat has the same environmental impact. For instance, wild board from Swiss forests has really low CO2 and it actually needs to be regulated down becuase of the lack of natural predators.
This meat can be eaten with no bad feeling for climate.
So the big problem is not meat per se, but the way meat is produced: big “animal farms” which uses considerable amount of livestock feed, with animals living together (increase risk for animal-to-animal pandemics and possible jump to humans) and filled with growth hormones/antibiotics/pesticide from the feed.
So even if you don’t care about climate change out of lack of empathy (psycopathics do exists) you should at least worry about the amount of chemicals you are eating, and the impact of daily shitty red meat on your diet.
So what are alternatives if you really can’t go vegetarian? Let’s make a list:
start hunting. Loooots of work, but it gets you near the source of food. You kill what you eat. Kind of poetic.
buy meat hunted exclusively in switzerland from wild animals.
Example: Best hunting meat, buy game meat fresh from the hunter - WILDWURST.ch | WILBURG TRADE & DEVELOPMENT
start fishing. Switzerland is a beatiful fishing country in the mountains. Not easy though. Even the big river have white fish, more difficult to prepare than salmonids (trouts etc) but can be packaged as hamburger and are delicious
buy Swiss wild fish at local markets - Felchen/Coregon, egli, zander
Regarding farmed animals, for fish I only point to two very nice farming systems in Switzerland. Clean water, no antibiotics, no growth hormones:
Regarding chicken meat, Demeter with the dual-usage-race (Zweinutzungsrassen) is the way to go. They are working hard on it since 2019:
Once you decide “cheap” meat is just filled with shit you don’t know, and wants something healthier, you switch to some of the provider above. Since they are more expensive, your natural weekly consumption goes down, for the benefit of everybody, your body included.
For my part, I’ve basically abandoned eating beef, pork and farmed meat in general. I do eat still from time to time if they are going to be thrown away, like on toasts on office apero etc. But never buying it myself. Bio&Demeter chicken from time to time, as well as swiss fish. Occasionally I place an order for wild boar.
Meat can be really good to eat. I personally love chicken broth in winter - so just pick the right option - is not like on this forum we don’t know how to order online. And since we care about money, we will naturally eat less meat.
Are there alternatives for people who don’t want to finance Demeter/biodynamy in any way?
It’s way too much into the esoteric and pseudo-science for me.
It’s genuine for sure; happy to open talk about that. The only question that I have or let’s call it, not
question is that we don’t know yet how is gonna be+how long is it gonna take to change the all food factory production all over the world. I think a huge solution would be drastically reduce the consume of meat, but, because there is a big but; what are we gonna say to the big factories?
Tomorrow you stop having animals and we plant only veggies.
Again, I’m also not eating meat every day and mainly veggies or seeds or legumes but the fight should start from each government of each nation and for me it never gonna happen.
I would suggest to watch the video of Kurzgesagt about meat.
Well, caring about animals and eating them it’s a paradox; yes the cow but not the horse (example), so I agree with you on the last point
I assume you know how to use Google - and it literally took me two seconds of googlin “zweinutzungrasse” and found some bio, Not Demeter, alternative.
So I wonder if you just use this post to attack Demeter. Is perfectly fine to be skeptical, and some of their methods are odd and pseudoscientifical, but overall if you analyze how they feed their animals and how they treat them they do provide the highest level of care, esoteric or not.
