I’ve read in an Article that meat production causes a lot of co² emission. Now I was wondering if we stopped eating meat completely, would that be sufficient to get under the threshhold of emissions what the planet can process? What is that threshold? Where are we now? How much does meat add to this?
This isn’t going to be a popular answer, but the only meats I don’t feel guilty about eating are those that come from my family’s farms, their, neighbors farms, or the wild game my family hunts. Commercial, large scale agriculture is damaging in many ways, but for most people who choose to eat meat it’s very difficult to avoid. We need to advocate for a more localized food supply for so many reasons.
Mmmm, meat. I typically enjoy 2 big, juicy burgers and one nice size steak (12oz minimum) per week.
Just upvoting because it’s a good question. I often find myself wondering just how much “X” can I consume before I should reign it in for the betterment of the planet. I’d like to be able to say I left earth better than I found it. Mainly thinking about things like gasoline, but food should certainly be on that list as well. Consuming zero of everything isn’t a solution, but figuring out how much is okay - yeah, that’s tough.
Danish research from March 2025:
255 grams per week. That’s the short answer to how much meat you can eat without harming the planet. And that only applies to poultry and pork.
Beef cannot be eaten in meaningful quantities without exceeding planetary boundaries, according to a scientific article published by a group of DTU researchers in the journal Nature Food. So says Caroline H. Gebara, postdoc at DTU Sustain and lead author of the study.
American study from 2016:
Abstract
[…]
Transitioning toward more plant-based diets that are in line with standard dietary guidelines could reduce global mortality by 6–10% and food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 29–70% compared with a reference scenario in 2050.American study from 2022:
Based on the model, published in the open-access journal PLoS Climate, phasing out animal agriculture over the next 15 years would have the same effect as a 68 percent reduction of carbon dioxide emissions through the year 2100.
This would provide 52 percent of the net emission reductions necessary to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, which scientists say is the minimum threshold required to avert disastrous climate change.the American study from 2022 is just warmed over tilman Clark (that American study from 2016), and the Danish study also depends on tilman Clark. so we should look at their methodology.
I did.
they compare a wide range of data from lca studies, even though this violated the best guidance on lca data.
lca studies are a bit like grand juries: the person designing the study can pretty much get any result they want.
and since these studies are all disparately methodized, you cannot combine them.
it’s possible the conclusions are correct, but these papers are not sufficient evidence to be believed.
I don’t have full access to the danish study, so I will have to take your word for it.
I do see that Tilman D, Clark M (2014) Global diets link environmental sustainability and human health. Nature 515(7528):518–522. is referenced in the 2016 study and the 2022 study.
the danish study is actually worse in some ways. it additionally cites poore-nemecek 2018, who themselves referenced tilman-clark, but egregiously gathered even more lca meta-analyses, and created something of a meta-meta-analysis of lcas. it’s bad science all the way down.
Do you have any links for someone who wants to read more about these LCA and why they’re not combinable?
hilariously, you can read the references from poore-nemecek, where the meta-studies they cite, themselves explain the problems with combining lcas, but then say “we’re gonna do it anyway”.
understanding how lca studies are conducted should be sufficient to understand why meta-analyses are misuses of the data, and the wikipedia article about lcas does a pretty good job of explaining the issues with the methodologies
255 grams per week is a lot more than I’d expect. Just for reference: the DGE - German Nutrition Society - recommends limiting intake of meat and meat products of not more than 300 grams per week, which is based on health aspects rather than environmental.
Don’t lose sleep over individual contributions. It’s the corporations that need to change behaviour. Put your energy into fighting them.
That’s why I’m fighting the animal agriculture industry by not giving them any of my money.
Corporations are only producing things that people want. I’m all for strict regulation, but “blame the corporations and not yourself” is a huge copout. Especially when reducing your meat consumption is one of the single most impactful things you can do to reduce your effect on the climate.
Think of EVs. Corporations didn’t want to manufacture them but people acting together forced them to. Then it only took a handful of people to let them drop it again (in the us).
If protectionism against Chinese made vehicles ever ends, GM and Ford are going to disappear overnight. They keep insisting on focusing on smaller quantity of less variety of more expensive vehicles, and resisting modernization
This exactly!!
Corporations caused this problem by buying politicians that created regulations favorable to them. They are the only entities big enough to fix this problem, for instance, by recapturing gases like methane. I refuse to be held responsible for simply eating.
Corporations are only producing things that people want.
Yea but not what you or I want. Or else they wouldn’t have turned turned the entire tech industry into an AI Ponzi scheme.
Corporations exist to create value for their shareholders. AKA the people responsible for 2/3s of pollution.
We can all eat shit and die and corporations will still cut that shit with the last of the Amazonian sawdust.
Corporations killed localized food supplies and all but eliminated traditional perennial crops that provided a lot of the nutrition we now get from meat/dairy.
Animal agriculture only produces 5.8% of greenhouse gasses[0], so even if everyone stopped eating meat tomorrow the effect would be less than 5.8% (not all animal agriculture is for meat).
That doesn’t Account for the deforestation caused by ever expanding beef pastures. It’s also unclear whether that slice includes the farming of soy, corn and alfafa grown exclusively to feed animals. And then there’s the “energy in agriculture and fishing” section that you probably missed. And let’s not forget how far meat has to travel, that’s in another slice in the energy section.
So probably there’s a couple percent more on top of that.
You forgot ocean acidification from farm runoff and the overfishing destroying the oceans ecosystem.
Google says livestock production creates 11-20% of global human co2 emissions. Even If we could make that disappear, it’s not enough
Meanwhile energy production is 73% so it’s critical to focus there
Realistically there is to switch to zero for any category of emissions so the only right answer is to cut as many as possible as much as possible
Not an answer, and I won’t get a lot of upvotes for saying this, but if your plan for saving the world is for people to change their behavior en masse, you’ve already lost. And we need population-level change in order to have a meaningful impact.
The way we get people off meat is by making the alternatives more (or equally) tasty, convenient, familiar, and affordable. The day we do that, the war is won. There will be some stragglers (of the “beef! murica!” variety) but not many.
We’ve made inroads. Indian food is delicious, way more popular in the West than when I was growing up, and vegetarian-inclined. Vegetarian burgers are more popular and varied than ever. New meat substitutes are being invented all the time. People are interested, but there’s not a well-lit path to vegetarianism for working-class folks just yet.
If you want to eat less meat, do it. But also, find some good meatless recipes and cook them for/with your friends. If they add those to their rotation and pass them along, that’s the kind of thing that can build toward change.
For the most part, not only does vegansim have the biggest positive impact on the environment that can be made with a personal choice, the animal products industries are like the third biggest contributor to climate change after energy (coal, oil, gas, etc) and manufacturing. Plus, as most farm land in the world is used for animal feed, it would free up land for reforestation.
P.s When talking about GHG emissions, it’s a really bad idea to use % of total emissions as an indicator of impact. Livestock produce plenty of methane, which is roughly 84 times more impactful than carbon dioxide on the short term (20ish years) but carbon dioxide is more impactful over the long term (centuries) as it does not break down as quickly.
Avoiding one long flight probably saves more carbon than a year of switching from eating meat to eating vegan. Also as others pointed out, not having kids would be by far more impactful by default.
I already fly only if there’s no alternative, and usually once a year to see my family. I know a lot of people that basically also make one trip per year. For these people, going vegan would be much easier than further reducing flying.
I don’t like the anti-kids arguments. Even better for the environment than not having kids is suicide but no one goes around suggesting that. Having kids is a very personal choice and someone has to do it, or we’ll be in a very bad place soon.
(virtually) No one is suggesting suicide. The “kids argument” is just something to consider. It’s one of several reasons I chose not to. I find it highly dubious that one datapoint is going to tip someone over the edge that will later regret it.
Yes, flights are a huge deal. One really long flight (like to the other side of the planet) should still be less co2e pollution than a non-vegan diet for a year, but not by much.
No doubt that flying often is the biggest impact, but most people don’t fly often.
not only does vegansim have the biggest positive impact on the environment that can be made with a personal choice
there simply isn’t any reliable data to support this claim.
There is:
https://www.wri.org/insights/climate-impact-behavior-shifts
Other than going car free (not possible in many countries where roads are just not bikable or walkable) not flying (yeah, you probably shouldn’t and personally I rarely ever do) and switching your home to green energy (again, not really possible in some countries plus high up fron costs keep it impossible for many) the biggest impact is achieved through veganism.
i don’t find this paper compelling evidence that being vegan has significant impact. it relies heavily on ivanova(2020), and additionally cites poore-nemecek(2018). ivanova, themselves, rely heavily on poore-nemecek for the data about food impacts.
so the question is: do you trust poore-nemecek 2018? i don’t. meta-analysis of LCA studies is bad science, and poore-nemecek not only designed a poor study, they didn’t bother acknowledging the problems their methods could incur.
Why don’t you bring a source to contradict?
This is absolutely not the only paper to support my claim
dismissing your source doesn’t require a contradictory study.
the rational thing to do, if there is insufficient evidence for a claim, is just to suspend judgement. it’s possible their conclusion is correct, but the evidence used to support it is insufficient.
Having fewer children is the biggest https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541
Yeah, I guess that makes sense even without needing a source
going car free …not flying … switching your home to green energy …veganism.
there are probably a thousand other things people could do. this study, for instance, didn’t account for the impact of sabotaging fossil fuel extraction, refinement, or transportation infrastructure. almost anyone can turn a valve. by limiting the scope of this study to consumer choices, they have chosen to artificially limit the possibilities.
That is illegal. while you can choose to do illegal things, it just makes you look like a troll to suggest it as a viable option.
there are still probably thousands of options besides the four proposed.
Wow you really want to justify eating meat.
this accusation of bad faith is, itself, bad faith
it would free up land for reforestation.
there is no reason to believe the land would be reforested instead of being further developed.
Lol, do you realize how much land that is? We wouldn’t have the resources to develop it, plus most of it is remote.
Also, even if we do develop it, that is a completely different story than using it to feed animals to eat them. It produces a different value to society with different GHG amounts and kinds.
When talking about GHG emissions, it’s a really bad idea to use % of total emissions as an indicator of impact.
we have a tool for mitigating your concern: we rate greenhouse gasses by their co2-equivalence. the co2e of methane is 28.
