i don’t believe the methodology used to calculate emissions from animal agriculture is appropriate: every examination i’ve done has attributed emissions to animals that are actually conservation, like feeding cattle cottonseed and then attributing the impacts of cotton grown for textiles to cattle.
But then you doubt the number and not the general effect of reducing carbon emissions by switching to a plant-based diet, right? Because it is pretty obvious, that growing plants and then feeding those plants to animals is way more inefficient than eating the plants without extra steps.
a lot of what is fed to animals are parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. there may be some reduction but i don’t believe it can be anywhere near 70%
you can see that 17% of all soybeans becomes oil. but a soybean is only about 20% oil altogether. in order to extract that much oil, we must press about 85% of the global crop of soybeans. the vast majority if the soy fed to livestock is the industrial waste from that process. you can see in that chart it’s called “soy cake” or “soy meal”.
Why? Because all the animal herders will still produce lots of meat at a loss and then just burn everything no one wants to eat?
i don’t believe the methodology used to calculate emissions from animal agriculture is appropriate: every examination i’ve done has attributed emissions to animals that are actually conservation, like feeding cattle cottonseed and then attributing the impacts of cotton grown for textiles to cattle.
But then you doubt the number and not the general effect of reducing carbon emissions by switching to a plant-based diet, right? Because it is pretty obvious, that growing plants and then feeding those plants to animals is way more inefficient than eating the plants without extra steps.
a lot of what is fed to animals are parts of plants that people can’t or won’t eat. there may be some reduction but i don’t believe it can be anywhere near 70%
Do you have any sources on hand? It’s hard to google for this stuff without running into sites by PETA etc, which are too biased for my taste.
i don’t know of any broad surveys across crop categories but i’m pretty familiar with soy
https://ourworldindata.org/soy
you can see that 17% of all soybeans becomes oil. but a soybean is only about 20% oil altogether. in order to extract that much oil, we must press about 85% of the global crop of soybeans. the vast majority if the soy fed to livestock is the industrial waste from that process. you can see in that chart it’s called “soy cake” or “soy meal”.
elsewhere in this thread i mentioned cottonseed.
But then humans can also eat that soy meal to get their proteins. It’s pretty tasty, I eat it regularly.
people do eat soy meal but they eat very little of the amount produced. if the vast majority of it weren’t fed to livestock it would just be waste.
We are talking about a switch to a predominantly vegan diet. People need to get the protein they got from meat from somewhere else.