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Plenty of people (including me) are vegan, healthy, and happy. As omnivores above the poverty line, we can all make conscious and conscientious choices about what we eat. Going vegan is one of the most effective ways to combat global warming (if you're not in a position to donate large sums of money toward climate change research or mitigation).
I would say it’s important to emphasize people don’t need to go complete vegan. Reducing consumption of animal products can be more realistic for most people.
> As omnivores above the poverty line, we can all make conscious and conscientious choices about what we eat.

This being a forum of mostly tech workers, many of us can afford to choose more sustainable animal products and support agriculture that promotes biodiversity and carbon sequestration too. If you don't want to give animal products up, then look for sources that engage in regenerative agriculture practices. They tend to be the most humane ways to raise animals as well.

In the end, demand for meat, eggs, and dairy is never going to disappear. Maybe someday lab grown alternatives can be molecularly and structurally equivalent. But until then the most effective change we can make collectively is to change government incentives to farmers so they choose better practices.

I started out doing a "meatless Monday," and have now been vegetarian for 7 or 8 years. For someone who grew up in rural Iowa, always had a freezer full of steak and ground beef from the cows my father raised and butchered, and avoided most vegetables, it was a lot easier than I thought it would be.
Plowing pasture-land to grow soybeans is likely to reduce bio-diversity even more than running cattle on that land. A lot of pasture land is marginal land where a plow is very destructive, and is often a lot closer to the pre-human ecology where the land was grazed by large mammals.

Your primary point still stands -- eating tofu likely has a lower ecological impact than eating beef, but the trade-off isn't obvious, and second order effects can be significant.

If you stop grazing cattle on land, the owner of that land is going to find another use for the land to profit from it. Some of those uses are going to be better for bio-diversity, some are going to be worse. It's highly unlikely to become parkland.

So will going vegan reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase bio-diversity? Probably, but not certainly. This uncertainty shouldn't dissuade people from acting on "probably" though.

Please provide the research that say that going vegan is one of the most effective ways to combat global warming.

According to a Swedish study publish a few years ago (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541), going vegan is mid-tier in combating global warming. Who you buy your electric from has a larger impact on the environment than going Vegan, as does if/what car you own and naturally what kind of trips and vacations you do. A single trip with an airplane can have a bigger impact on global warming than all the meat they eat through their whole life.

This is bullshit. The vast majority of CO2 is created by energy production.

The problem is systemic and blaming other people for their lifestyle choices is neither effective nor helpful and just leads to further division. It's exactly this sort of division that helps fossil companies to destroy the planet and keep making money.

Give it a couple decades. Most 'vegans' stop being vegan well before that. I'll let you Google why they do.
Take a look to a soybean plantation for example, biodiversity totally destroyed. Also, are you doing a physical main work?
A lot of vegans eat fake meat and dairy which shares many of the environmental problems of meat, such as needing a lot of inputs so a lot of plant material relative to the final product.. It also adds energy use, transport, packaging etc.

There are also environmentally beneficial meats. So much so that when rewilding we sometimes need to add the same animals back (as is happening in Scotland - rewilders are breeding cattle that look like wild ones to make it "natural"). In the UK you can buy venison from wild animals that need to be culled to to preserve the environment.

But someone still has to eat up all those cows before their methane mucks up the environment.

And if you're not willing to do your part, that just means the rest of us have to pull double duty.

Not to mention that beef/dairy production is a primary source of methane which is 80x more potent than Co2, but constantly under reported due to its shorter half life. Yes in the long run that matters, but its all the more reason that we should reduce animal agriculture right away as the payback is much faster than limiting Co2.
I never understood this argument. With Oil & Gas you release green house gases that have been sealed away back into the air.

For methane produced by farming all components remain in a cycle. Everything released by animals eventually finds its way back to plants, which get eaten, which become exhaust of animals, etc.

This sounds to me more like a spin by big oil to finger point at another industry.

>Yes in the long run that matters, but its all the more reason that we should reduce animal agriculture right away as the payback is much faster than limiting Co2.

The long run is the thing that really matters. A faster payback only serves to cover the impact of those that want to keep pumping up oil and gas in the meantime(also to make synthetic fertiliser) for a few decades. It shifts focus from that on cow farts. As if the rotting plant matter and wild animal life that could replace it didn't emit any methane.

methane has less ir absorption than co2 and (as you said) a shorter half life.
We have around 27 million cattle (in the US) today. There were something like 30-50 million bison in the US before we almost eradicated them. Were the bison equally bad? Or is the problem that we’re feeding these ruminants unnatural diets?

Incidentally, I’d love to see the Great Plains return to huge roaming ruminant populations, and find a way to build our meat industry around that.

No, we slaughter that many each year.

And maximize how they're fed in the last months of their lives in feedlots.

They were certainly not killing 30 million bison each year.

The only answer here is less meat production, especially feedlot-finished, no matter how people try to twist it.

I make this point and several more here, with some emissions figures: https://map.simonsarris.com/p/veganism-and-moral-intuitions

The ecology of it, including emissions, isn't really that bad if you're American. We're very efficient at beef production. It's really the global south that's most of the novel emissions, and that's mostly from counting land-use changes.

You're really close to figuring out that natural equilibriums and man made abominations have nothing in common even when the numbers look the same
I think the problem is how we keep the cattle.

In natural environment, they cohabitant with other animals. They migrates.

When we farm them, we remove anything not our primary product.

There's more nuance here than reducing consumption of beef and dairy. Moving over to regenerative farming practices instead of factory farming will also improve the situation.
Yes and doing regenerative practices all the way to the end would naturally force this reduction in consumption. It would be really good, because the land used to grow feed could be redirected to other more efficient uses.
There is quite a bit in between too. Grass vs grain fed cattle, for example.
How about regenerative economics? I hate it.
Beef & dairy the industrial way drive this. Several studies and decade long experiments show the positive impact of the non-industrial alternatives.
And which do the vast majority consume because that is the only one satisfying industrial scale consumption needs?
Unfortunately, the priority is increasing efficiency and ROI, rather than sustainability. This leads to centralization and operations at a scale which are not sustainable, without external input or causing damage to existing nature. De-centralization and sustainable practices are the only way forward, as it has been for centuries before us on this earth. Maybe space is the place for these kinds of centralised and intensive practices, like being planned for data centers.
"Efficiency and ROI" can be applied to financial but also to environmental impact. Producing more with less [land use/fertilizer/water use] is also a form of efficiency, and it's good, but it requires vast capital that mom & pop farms don't have + strong government incentives. De-scaling is only an agrarian nostalgia fantasy, it's incompatible with reaching climate goals.
One of the biggest biodiversity-related threats - as in able to trigger cataclysmic-level event - is IMO commercial honey production.

Farm honeybees are essentially one breed, which is in itself a huge problem as a single pathogen/parasite can quickly wipe them out globally. On top of that, honey farmers move their hives all over the place, effectively displacing any wild pollinators present in vast areas.

Commercial honey is farmed in the most ecologically risky way.

That's a drop in the bucket

Total insect mass dropped by 70% in Europe in 30 years, no insects = no pollination, no pollination = no flower = real mass scale extinction of pretty much everything that lives on earth since 80%+ of plants need pollinators.

Does this mean we should be advocating for more intensive cattle rearing? Stockyards and special breeds may not be the worst way to meet demand and reduce environmental impact (measured by CO2/methane emissions as well as biodiversity loss, for instance).
It's far easier do avoid producing so much meat. A vegetarian diet is perfectly healthy.
Managed grazing along with other regenerative techniques can sequester carbon in the soil. Factory farms have the problem of concentrated dung disposal which usually leads to letting it sit in methane producing conditions and also feed for intensive operations usually comes from non-regenerative crop farming which uses more fossil-fuel fertilizer and depletes the soil.
I despair. Is it that hard for us to imagine eating less meat?
Stockyards are the worst offenders. This is due to how the dung is processed, which releases a lot of methane. Grass-fed cattle have much lower net emissions of greenhouse gasses.
Even on a site like HN, where rational and logical thinking is held in high esteem, and where few could be suspected of climate change denialism, a factual statement such as this one from the article:

"On average, animal-sourced foods are associated with eight times more carbon loss and 14 times more biodiversity loss per calorie than plant-sourced foods."

is very likely to be countered by listing personal preferences, anecdata, concern for vegans' health or mockery of that lifestyle choice, and generally nitpicking.

Honest admissions like 'I am part of the problem and will maybe try doing something about it' are very rare.

> Even on a site like HN, where rational and logical thinking is held in high esteem

That is until people are faced with stuff like this :D. Then emotions take over.

The rational and logical is mostly an aesthetic preference, not lived value.

HN leans strongly reactionary and just likes to dress it up a bit so as to appear more respectable.

But it's also not like we can just stop eating steak and milk.
Thing is, will be anything left after we destroy the planet with war, data centers, rare earth minerals mines, nuclear and battery waste?
Sadly, this being Hacker News, it won't catch much attention and will be quickly flagged by people who have too much karma.

But I think we are making progress, slowly, sadly too slowly, with the current summer we are having in Europe, of the impact of our past actions in the weather. And make no mistake, eating so much meat and drinking so much milk, is a huge impact we are inflicting on our planet.

Please do not comment with "I do X" or "In our house, we avoid doing Y" - it is not about you and me, it is about society. I am convinced, you are convinced, we need everyone to be convinced.

Another way of saying the same would be: Agriculture causes almost 60% of the biodiversity damage linked to global farmland.

Yep, is the miracle of literature. An hectare of cattle allows more biodiversity than the same hectare of lettuce.

cow farts lol
Seems causally false.
We need a new caveat cliche for these headlines like how people love to reply “in mice” to health research. For environmental research it’s almost always “in the 3rd world”