(Bloomberg) -- The world’s most-developed nations will be told to curb their excessive appetite for meat as part of the first comprehensive plan to bring the global agrifood industry into line with the Paris climate agreement.Most Read from BloombergRussia Downs Drones Over Moscow in Ukrainian Retaliatory StrikeChina Says Multiple Pathogens Are Behind Spike in Respiratory IllnessesSodium in Batteries: Shift May Herald Another ShakeupMarkets Cheer as Milei Drops Dollarization for Macri BrassEvery
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.