this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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What can you eat without killing the environment?
meat is much less sustainable than non-animal food sources
By what metric? Do you mean its far more polluting than the rest because sustainable means something different.
False equivalencies are lazy and dishonest. Less harm is still less harm, and still plausibly closer to sustainability than YOLO BURN EVERYTHING DOWN FOR BORGER.
I didn't disagree with plants generally being less env friendly.
Most CO2 emmision wrt to meat is misleading because they are part of the carbon cycle. Pumping out oil is not comparable here.
A lot of fossil fuel is utilised in the cultivation, storage, transportation of various seasonal crops, often across the world. Same as for meat. Generalizing plant vs meat often hides those behind moral arguments.
What false equivalency? Polluting is not the same as sustainable? Sustainable how? Animal husbandry has been practiced for millennias and in many places is the main food source where agriculture isn't feasible.
Making a wide general statement and nitpicking in the arument is lazy and dishonest. Atleast read what I was responding to.
You're too high on your own farts and hypocritically ignoring what I had said to meaningfully respond to, but I'll try it anyway for anyone else reading.
Cultivating meat costs more energy (and generally has more carbon emissions) than using the same amount of land to grow edible plants. It's a basic rule of energy conservation, not a "moral argument."
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/ecology-ap/energy-flow-through-ecosystems/a/food-chains-food-webs
It looks more like you want your burger treats to go uncriticized until and unless some impossibly perfect alternative has absolutely zero-to-negative emissions. That way, your burger treats continue to go uncriticized for all of the forseeable future.
Your comment consisted of 2 points:
Calling me lazy an dishonest for asking a clarification on an ambiguous term 'sustainable'. I hadn't made any claims to be called at.
You again used sustainable to which i defined and responded how animal husbandry is infact sustainable.
So how have I not responded to your comment?
Its you pulling out accusations and imagining up arguments that was never made and making personal attacks rather than stick to making valid arguments and address the actual points being made.
Your argument about energy fails to distinguish between the typical carbon cycle of moving through plants animals and decomposition incontrast with the cabon introduced through fossil fuels. This was what I pointed out previously too.
And we cant just plop down plants that are human digestable in many places where we grow the feed for cattles. Correct me on that.
Spare me the claim that your sneering passive aggressive sanctimony (claiming that energy waste and environmental damage from factory meat production is a "moral argument") is somehow superior because you used more Reddit words to dress it up.
You used false equivalencies to hide your consumer-brained selfishness to try to justify the status quo. There was nothing more to it and there is nothing more worth saying to you.
Plants
Plants are part of that environment and you have to kill them to eat? *unless you are picking off fallen ripe fruits like roadkill eaters.
Also cultivation of those plants you eat are done in large cleared areas and are destructive to the environment.
You can't spell harm reduction without "harm" so why bother?
These things can be quantified in terms of co2 equivalents and water used per kg of food produced.
Eating plants (even root veggies when killing them) is magnitudes better for the planet than eating animals that eat plants.
While i agree to the points it still stands that the majority of CO2 and methane(a more potent greenhouse gas) are part of the carbon cycle that has been relatively stable.
It is not comparable to the dumping of carbon from fossil fuels. This is something many collate together and make disingenuous arguments. Correct me where I am wrong in understanding this.
One additional point(though i have no exact statistics) per kg isnt comparable between plants and meat. Large portions of plant are not edible and used as fertilizers or cattle feed at best. Meat is also energy dense and hence required in far less quantities than carbohydrates.
Not to mention water isnt equally distributed. Doing intensive agriculture in drought prone areas are far worse than cattle raised in water rich regions.
I would be interestsed in finding a study that takes a wide array of factors and calculates the effects.