People Don't Get the Link Between Meat Consumption and Climate Change (2016)

Actually, I think you'll find that people just really like the way meat tastes.

Meat is cheap. AND it's not up to individuals to make the broad policy changes needed to affect climate change. That's done by governments. People will follow suit. If there's a tax on meat, less meat will be eaten. To put the onus on individuals to make policy decisions is preposterous.

People still don&#x27;t get that haphazard false equivalences weaken trust in media.<p>I live in the rural south. The cows in my lumpy unfarmable backyard eat grass. How is it a harmful practice? I can&#x27;t convert grass to a complete protein source. Any link between wild game and climate change? Fishing?<p>Articles like this are alienating to the average person. Why not use this opportunity push more ethical options? Grass fed Beef, Wild game, carbon neutral feedstocks, locally produced, sustainable practices. Then your readers have a clear path to less harmful alternatives before converting to the 3 square soylents of the future.

If you&#x27;re interested in a research-backed analysis of how much impact various solutions to global warming would have, <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drawdown.org&#x2F;solutions-summary-by-rank" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drawdown.org&#x2F;solutions-summary-by-rank</a> is a good reference. &quot;Plant-Rich Diet&quot; is #4 on the list.

Only the elite should have access to meat in order to stop climate change, the rest will have to do with soybased fake meat substitutes. It&#x27;s healthier too!

Meat is a big one, but its the #3 - #5ish big one depending on how you look at things (at an individual westerner vs. other lenses).<p>Roughly in order it goes<p><pre><code> - having more kids than adults (population growth) - living in a single-family detached home (land use sprawl + hvac inefficiency) - owning a car - flying - eating red meat (particularly beef &amp; lamb) </code></pre> So yes by all means, eat less red meat, but after you&#x27;ve moved to a multi-unit building and sold your car and stopped going to conferences.<p>For context, a six ounce ribeye steak is the co2 eqiv (really its methane) of 330g of emitted carbon. That is almost the exact same number of grams it costs to drive an electric vehicle on an average u.s. grid mix 2 miles. Gas burners more like 1 mile.<p>So ditch the car and enjoy the steak.

<i>Currently, most communications around meat and climate change are in the category of ‘the pointing finger’, thereby creating guilt, shame, and stigmatization among committed carnivores, and activating psychological mechanisms of denial and downplay.</i><p><i>Stating that eating meat is ‘bad’ therefore doesn’t seem to work that well.</i><p><i>Consumption and lifestyles therefore tend to be shaped more by people collectively than individually. The most effective strategies thus engage people in groups...</i><p><i>One of my master students, Lena Johanning, translated this idea by developing postcards that humorously depict &quot;flexitarian&quot; superheroes on the front, with an invitation for a veggie dinner on the back, coupled with some amazing fact about meat and climate change.</i><p>So their answer is to convert &quot;carnivores&quot; with a Vegan Timeshare Sale Luncheon? =D

What the other people don&#x27;t get is that going vegan&#x2F;vegetarian is NOT the correct answer.

This is a useless article with a serious vegan bent.<p>Humans cannot survive as vegans, and suggesting so is a pretty backwards thing given that these are basic scientific facts; so called &quot;healthy vegans&quot; often are taking supplements that they believe are vegan when they are in fact animal-sourced, or they are using algae-based products that are often highly contaminated as a nature of their production.<p>Literally, the headline might as well be &quot;People Still Don&#x27;t Get the Link Between Humanity&#x27;s Existence and Climate Change, And All Humans Should Die&quot;.<p>In addition, they are unable to illustrate a link between humanity&#x27;s actions and climate change and just take the meme for granted. More and more evidence continues to mount that indicates the large scale climate trends are entirely driven by the sun (something that outputs 384.6 YW, strikes us with 174.0 PW of that, and the current human energy need is 18.0 PW), and the pollution of humans (which is undeniably bad, and maybe the second largest driver behind modern diseases; but does not sufficiently change the Earth&#x27;s albiedo to explain the trends over the past 100+ years) has very little to do with it.<p>On top of this, the continued use of crops that are a mismatch with our animal herds would actually have helped their climate change argument, but they purposely ignored it to instead focus on pushing a vegan agenda. As in: stop using corn and other toxic feed crops, and instead grow nutrient dense foods to feed animals instead.<p>The discontinuation of corn and cereal grains as cash crops (through methods such as ending costly government subsidizes and letting corn and grain-focused farms collapse under the free market, as they should) would do far more to reduce the pollution and (already small) effect on climate change than trying to get non-vegans to accept a lifestyle incompatible with the biology of humans.<p>The vegan religion continues to ignore basic facts about humans, the evolution of humans, and what humans require to survive and thrive, so I have no clue why Scientific American would allow themselves to become a mouthpiece for something that has no basis in science.<p>I&#x27;m honestly waiting for vegan &quot;researchers&quot; to start trying to use meat eating as an explanation for the magnetic poles rapidly moving away from their traditional positions, the Solar Grand Minimum that we&#x27;re heading possibly into this solar cycle, the eerily quiet solar surface, the unusually cold weather in the Middle East, AND the thickening of the ice shelf in Antarctica against the widely popularized (and not scientifically based) predictions by Al Gore.<p>Claiming humanity has this much control over the weather is a bit egotistical. The only time we&#x27;ve successfully done it on a large enough scale to matter, we caused a mini ice age in Europe, and choked London out with thick black (and certainly lethal) smog. In comparison, natural causes such as once-in-ten-thousand-year volcanic eruptions have done more damage.

People don&#x27;t believe the link between meat consumption and climate change.<p>It seems like one leftist agenda being used to push another leftist agenda and pretty much anyone who isn&#x27;t down with leftist agendas tunes right out as this is just too far fetched to even consider.<p>(Not a heavy meat eater myself but not for planet saving reasons. I just don&#x27;t like a lot of meat sitting in my stomach. Beans and whole grains and fruits and veggies and occasionally a small piece of meat is much better for me.)

Grrr, paywalled research articles.<p>I have some questions that maybe someone who has read the paper (or has access to it may be able to find out).<p>The abstract talks about Outstanding effectiveness and fairly positive effectiveness, what was the scaling they used? (Great, good, neutral, bad, awful? or something else)<p>Similarly, it talks about correlations with motivational and cultural factors, were these identified at all?<p>And what was the methodology&#x2F;measure for the effectiveness rating?

People Still Don&#x27;t Get the Link Between the Number of People on this Planet and Climate Change<p>(I hardly eat meat these days, but nothing will help if the population continues to grow at the same rate)

Trying to fix climate change as an individual consumer is hopeless.