- would it actually cut down emissions, methane? co2?
- the price of veggies would obviously go 10x in the short term but would be the impact long term
What makes you think so? My naïve view is if people eat soy instead of an animal eating the soy there's less total soy needed, by a fair margin. The pasture animals are a different deal but that represent a tiny proportion of consumes nutrients around the world.
Moreover, people that transition from omni to veggie diet don't eat 10x more veggies (with exceptions of course), even if grains and pulses are counted as veggies. We can't eat as much as what the livestock eat themselves.
Mass starvation probably. We aren't prepared for it. Give it 10 years and maybe it could be done.
> would it actually cut down emissions, methane? co2?
You'd have to do something about all the existing livestock. Again with 10 years' lead time you could just stop breeding new livestock and let them die out.
> but [what] would be the impact long term
Less deforestation, less fertilizer (and therefore fossil fuels) used, lower methane emissions. If people could adjust their diets the impact would only be good (other than losing meat and dairy, which would be sad).
How do you figure? The same logistics lines that carry animal feed and then the animal can just carry the ~animal~ human feed directly to the consumer. Sure, the animals starve to death, but it's just a silly hypothetical.
Humans can't just eat uncooked, unprocessed corn and soy. Most people don't know how to use them as ingredients. You'd have to retool or rebuild all the food processing plants that current deal with animal products. Ramp up oat/soy/almond milk production. And so on.
You mean edamame and sweet corn? You can grab an ear of the latter right off the field, husk it and eat it raw if you'd like. Or is there something about megafarms that prevent that?
> Most people don't know how to use them as ingredients.
If they get hungry they'll do what people have done since time immemorial and boil them. No-one will starve sitting on a cache of beans. For that matter, humans can eat pig feed directly (it's not as safe as human food, but you can boil it too).
Wikipedia[0] Says that US directs 4345 million bushels of just corn to livestock feed. Which would be ~13 bushels or 330kg per American.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...
Paper straws are such a nuisance how quickly they get wasted, that it is rather easy to find 1 euro shops selling "classical" straws.
Bottle caps being tied to the bottles hardly matters, it is quite common to see people in parks or at the beach, breaking the cap from the bottle to split them as always.
Then supermarkets still deliver most of the goods from several food areas in plastic containers for the most part.
What is worst is lack of education from most people, that throw away their garbage all over the place, regardless if it is paper, metal, cardboard, wood,....
This is the problem that paper straws hardly solve, other than what, I feel good when those people "forget" their paper straws on the beach and camping ground all over the place?
> Bottle caps being tied to the bottles hardly matters, it is quite common to see people in parks or at the beach, breaking the cap from the bottle to split them as always.
That's just not true and overly cynical. I also find it annoying, but the truth is that it has an impact. I'm not interested in further discussion I'm afraid.
- methane production would only drop by a max of 32% due to farming
- rice alone already emits 12% of world methane, this would increase
- only 15% of co2 comes from farming.
- 45% of the co2 from farming is plants. This would increase.
So it wouldn’t do anything.
Follow traditional cuisines that have worked out healthy vegetarianism. Don't buy fake meats.
> methane production would only drop by a max of 32%
Only? If I cut your salary by 32% would you say it isn't much of a drop?
> rice alone already emits 12% of world methane, this would increase
And would be more than offset by the methane emitted by cattle.
> 45% of the co2 from farming is plants. This would increase.
Why? Feeding people plants takes less plants than feeding animal plants and then feeding people animals.
To your point about increasing CO2 from farming plants: 40-66% of corn and 58%-77% of soy grown in the US is currently fed to animals, and we dedicate 5,000% more acres to growing feed crops than to vegetables[1]. Since between 3 and 10 calories of plants fed to an animal yields 1 calorie of animal product (depending on animal)[2], there would be room to either plant less, plant different, and/or use less emissive practices.
1: https://insideanimalag.org/feed-crop-takeaways/
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Conversi...
And it's worth considering what would replace all that land (maybe some would end up being biofuel production, but a lot might be allowed to return to nature if it's not profitable anymore), along with things like less demand for slash and burn.
And what percent of that is farming plants to feed animals?
The thing is, as you can see from the data, it’d reduce methane and co2, but not substantially.
Bottom line is that there is too much heavy industry, too much oil, gas and coal, and too many people.
The problem isn’t me eating meat. It’s 9 billion people eating anything.
massive deforestation to culture soy
And every human farting at the same time would make the cows look like saints.
Seriously. Anybody repeating this ideas again, should prove that they tried to read a handbook about ecology at least. Ecology is a science. This has been researched since the 70's.
Because humans eat a lot of ocean products that fall into omnivore diet and would need to be replaced by soy.
Because many arid places where you can have cattle are not suitable to culture soy, so if you remove cattle you are changing cattle by nothing and reducing the amount of feed produced, so we would need to compensate it killing some humans (not desirable) or increasing the pressure of agriculture over the natural areas somewhere.
Because vegetables are not enough in very cold places. You really need to eat animal fat there. Lots of it.
neither deserts or oceans or cold mountains or roads or cities are suitable to culture soy, the only remaining suitable places are the forests.
A meadow with cattle were it was a rainforest is a tragedy, but replacing the meadow with a monoculture of soy is making the problem much, much worse. The meadow is an ecosystem at least. The soy field is a dead zone.
I feel the same way.
> Because humans eat a lot of ocean products that fall into omnivore diet and would need to be replaced by soy.
How much seafood? How much soy?
> Because many arid places where you can have cattle are not suitable to culture soy
What percent of all cattle is that? What if only free-range cattle-rearing in already-existing pastureland were allowed to continue, but feedlots and grain-fed cattle were phased out?
> Because vegetables are not enough in very cold places. You really need to eat animal fat there. Lots of it.
Sure. We're basically talking about Siberia, Greenland, northern Finland/Sweden/Norway, and northern Alaska and Canada. Not very many people. They could continue to eat animal fats and it wouldn't make much difference.
> replacing the meadow with a monoculture of soy
Soy isn't the only bean. There are literally dozens of types of beans.
I don't think you realize:
1. How much soy and corn are grown to feed animals
2. How inefficient that is compared to feeding soy and corn to humans
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
China also makes most of the world's solar panels, EVs, and batteries.
They wont. When the IPCC said the worst case scenario is off the table, the reaction of the conservatives was, now it’s time to reduce all that climate change stuff and put some "common sense“ back in, so the companies have less environmental laws to follow
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/
and what I believe will end up bieng record low artic summer ice
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today
and what is heading towards record low antartic winter ice
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today#nav-paragraph-308563
more graphs and charts
I think you’ve simply misunderstood the basic mechanism/claim here.