Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than being vegan, landmark study finds
Meat-free eating found to have much lower environmental impact on land use, water pollution risk, water use and biodiversity loss
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Better title "Eating meat creates four times more greenhouse gases than not eating meat".
No, the title is correct as far as I can tell from quickly skimming the actual Nature article.
Unrelated rant - I hate the fact independent.co.uk hyperlinks the word 'study' which just searches it's own site for the fucking word 'study' rather than linking to the actual source data. Fucking shitstain practices.
I found the original article by plugging the independent article into ground.news. Fucking love that website.
Edit: what's more is that it's eating more than 100g of meat per day is 4 times more GHG than eating vegan. Eating <50g per day is about 2 times more than veganism.
The problem is the misuse of the word "vegan". Veganism is a moral philosophy. It is more like feminism than like vegetarianism. Veganism has to do with animal rights and liberation. That has consequences on the diet a person eats but also all other things a person does and doesn't do. None of these studies are concerned with or discuss the rights or experiences of animals, so they aren't about veganism. It would have been better to use a different term, like "plant based". It's a relatively small thing except that veganism is so poorly understood, so extra diligence is always appreciated.
The study is about diets and their consequent impact on GHG. Why does it matter that it's not about philosophy?
Jesus, thank you. It's hard to get to the actual studies about the environmental impact of dietary choices without being bombarded by vegan propaganda. And even this study doesn't take poultry and other small livestock into account and treats all meat as corn fed beef.
I've never said that the title is wrong, or the content is wrong. I just wanted to highlight that the focus should be on the "act" (eating) and not on the "being" (vegan vs not-vegan). The graph you've pasted would look friendlier if instead of saying "meat-eaters" ... "vegans", would say something like "high meat consumption" ... "100% plant based". Grouping the actions and not the people.
This seems needlessly pedantic, presumably because of a similar argument as the other commenter - that veganism is a philosophy and not just a diet. However, as the other commenter highlighted, veganism begets a vegan diet.
You also don't have to follow an entirely vegan philosophy to follow a strict vegan diet.
Not to mention "100% plant based" implies you don't eat fungi!
I agree that it might be pedantic to some, but I think it is important to strive for a clear message.
You also don’t have to follow an entirely vegan philosophy to follow a strict vegan diet.
That's the point I wanted to make on my original comment.
Not to mention “100% plant based” implies you don’t eat fungi!
Yeah, my examples didn't want to be the definitive nomenclature.
Jesus that's a massive overlap in environmental impact for everything that isn't super high meat consumption. You can be a low meat eater and have a smaller impact than some vegans.
The call to action that they're making in the study and article is flat out stupid. Looking at this data, there is significant better gains going from high meat consumption to lower meat consumption; far higher than going from low meat consumption to vegan. That's what the takeaway here should be, and it's what a lot of people are already doing too.
Bear in mind that graph that I copied overlaps more due to it being relative to high-meat diets (hence no error bars on that group).
The supplementary data shows much less overlap of 95% confidence intervals.
Gotcha! Thanks for the clarification.