Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.
https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption
Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview
If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌🙌 🙌
Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. But, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
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The problem is not just the farts, the problem is the absolutely humongous amount of feed and space cattle needs. Most crops grown around the world are used to feed cattle, just like most farmland is used to grow cattle. That’s what’s polluting, producing so much green house gases, deforesting, etc.
No matter how you turn it, red meat is an environmental catastrophe.
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Where do you think most of the world’s red meat is coming from? Brazil is one of the top producers and exporters of red meat, deforestation is ravaging the Amazon.
3rd world countries are not eating red meat, we are. The link between rich countries and meat consumption has been established for a long time now.
Most cattle eat soy, not grass, that’s also a myth. Simply because soy is a whole lot cheaper, and a lot more abundant and easier to grow than grass. Also, grass is only slightly better than feed, but it generates more GEG overall because of digestion.
We need soy, so we need monocultures of soy, and that’s catastrophic, just like you said.
Transport is actually not that big of a problem with red meat. Land usage and the actual cattle are. They’re the top source of GEG emissions from agriculture.
You were talking about thermodynamics earlier. Red meat is incredibly inefficient converting resources to usable calories. 1kg of beef requires 25kg of feed.
You’re also using a lot of straw men in your arguments, living in a grass hut instead of a concrete building, or electric vehicles for cattle transportation?
You can enjoy red meat but you can’t argue in good faith that it’s not completely awful for the environment at pretty much every level.
A few sources to support my claims:
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production
https://bonpote.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Emissions-de-GES-a-travers-la-chaine-dapprovisionnement-1-scaled.png
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/23/americas/brazil-beef-amazon-rainforest-fire-intl/
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/grass-fed-beef-climate-change
Just a note before my comment: my reference is the Netherlands, which is struggling with too much cattle and too little land. I can imagine circumstances being different in Australia.
Methane is a worse greenhous gas than CO2 though (28 times more) and just growing more grass, which gets eaten pretty much immediately again, does not necessarily compensate for it. Tackling methane emissions is also a pretty effective short term improvement for global warming, due to it not being nearly as long in the atmosphere as CO2.
But methane is not the only problem with large amounts of cattle. The shit can actually become problematic in for the soil and water due to ammonia. This is a large problem in The Netherlands right now (and sadly we don’t have politicians in power willing to make actual changes here). Biodiversity and water quality are going down significantly and a very big contributor is cattle farming.
And let’s also not forget that the grass used is for optimizing growing cattle and producing milk (because the farmers get paid like shit). It’s not a grass field full of flowers, herbs and other kinds of plants that are good for insect life. They’re more or less green deserts.