World News

39142 readers

2709 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

Lemmy World Partners

News [email protected]

Politics [email protected]

World Politics [email protected]

Recommendations

How to spot Misinformation and Propaganda

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

667

Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than being vegan, landmark study finds (www.independent.co.uk)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

892 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Meat production causes 25% of all GHGs in our atmosphere. Personal consumption, on this matter, is 100% the cause. No one is forcing anyone to eat meat on the staggering level North Americans do. If we as North Americans didn't demand so much cheap plastic shit to buy as part of our lifestyle, there would be less of it made, less of it shipped, fewer cargo ships, less GHG. Your beef isn't with people telling you that we consume too much, your beef is with the insurmountable prospect of convincing billions of people to cool it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Aaaaand we're getting into the US defaultism again

[+] [email protected] -14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This increases food insecurity. There is absolutely no way you remove a major source of food production without more people going hungry. I don't think I need to belabor this aspect further.

Not to mention, the logic of your argument also shifts the blame of fossil fuel emissions from corporation to consumer. No one is forcing us to use gasoline or plastic on the staggering level that North Americans do. If we simply cut back, then there'd be fewer emissions. For that matter in fact, this very discussion we're having is possible because of electrical power, which more than likely produced GHG as well. Should we hold the blame for this as our consumption, and let dirty coal plants get a pass?

Finally, these researchers have a major hole in their research. They haven't even looked at what emissions and resource usage we'd have if we scaled up vegan food production to replace current meat consumption. And I suspect we'd find one major health problem -- there are some amino acids we only get from meat. To prevent health deterioration, we'd need massive production of vitamin supplements that are mandatory for everyone to consume for their health. Even if we somehow manage this in a vegan friendly process, it will use an extortionate amount of energy, resources, and freshwater. Enough that I can't say definitively it would be less than meat consumption.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

The difference between the calories an animal consumes vs the amount that animal provides to us is huge. If we converted the animal feed to direct food production we would not have 'food insecurity'.

https://awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/ has sources, if you actually care to learn rather than talking from your armchair.

And yes consumers absolutely should have some blame in climate change. Corporations don't pollute for fun, they do it for profit. It's way easier for us to point fingers and continue to do fuck all while the planet burns.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

There is plenty looking at how it scales up and they account for nutrition

we show that plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115

The research suggests that it’s possible to feed everyone in the world a nutritious diet on existing croplands, but only if we saw a widespread shift towards plant-based diets.

[...]

If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

This is because it takes a lot of human-edible feed to produce animal products

1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013

Before anyone mentions something like grass-fed production let's note that grass-fed production very much doesn't scale and has enormous land use giving high pressure for deforestation as well

We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates

[…]

If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Damn an extortionate amount of energy, resources, and freshwater? Good thing all those cows and chickens don't need any of those to put them through an entire life cycle before we eat them.