Where do you draw the line though? Because plants themselves (DNA-beings) are also alive.

Unless you decide to go on a full mineral diet.

'Europe' is a big place. Here in Ireland good quality beef is readily affordable, and not particularly more expensive than chicken or pork.

I'm in the USA and I eat a lot less beef than I used to. The price has really jumped in the past few years, maybe since the pandemic?

Subbed pork, poultry, and eggs for the most part, some fish but that's not particularly cheap either.

It's still way, way, too cheap compared to its climate impact

>Beef is already too expensive for most people. Americans are probably the exception but I can assure you that most Europeans do not have beef heavy diets.

Beef is too expensive for many Europeans because GDP per capita/standards of living are declining in many European countries. People in East Asia, the Middle East, Oceania and South America still eat plenty of beef too.

Yeah, since COVID and then the Nord Stream terror act they raised beef prices to unsustainable levels. Döner (which is cheap ground sausage like beef in practice) between 7 and 10 EUR now (was between 3,50 and 4). Blockhouse steak (tiny) is 48 EUR.

My research seems to indicate its about on-par with chicken. IE a chicken filet is about the carbon impact of 8oz of milk.

And it seems here its about 1/4 carbon per kg of food as beef:

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

I switched to fortified soy milk and haven't looked back. Milk is tasty but soy has less sugar as well and now I prefer it. Cheese is harder to make a substitute but eating it 1-2 per year satisfies my craving.

It's the infrastructure required to create a pound of beef, including the farmed grains.

Forests burn and grow back. Healthy forests (not poorly-managed monoculture) are carbon-neutral on human timescales.

It’s more effective to convince people 95% of beef is very mid. So you’re not missing anything

I would never argue for banning red meat as it will certainly backfire and end up counterproductive.

To state the obvious, it's not about taking away the right to eat red meat, right? It's about trying to convince people to adopt a diet that is:

- healthier

- tasty

- cheaper

- a small contribution to keeping the planet livable for their children

- as a sign of respect for $DEITY/the planet/...

Many people will see some sense in at least one of the above arguments at one point in life.

What an oddly emotional response to a harmless suggestion.

Explain your thought process please.

On the ecological point, the difference is whether the grassland would naturally support that number of bison. Or if bison (or cows) are continually being grown, killed, grown killed at industrial scale beyond the normal bison lifecycle. With many carbon inputs (fossil-fuel based fertilizer, etc) and production costs (slaughtering, transport, etc).

Wild bison live 15-20 years.

Cattle raised for beef ~18 months.

That's beyond the natural carbon cycle an existing ruminant population.

Also horses, in my reading of the data, actually have less of a methane impact. They have a different digestive system entirely.

On the methane point, methane, yes, is a greenhouse gas that breaks down over years (~12 years). But has far worse impact on climate while its in the atmosphere.

It’s completely made up. All meat is carbon neutral because animals don’t produce carbon atoms from nothing. They get them from the plants they eat which in turn get their carbon from the atmosphere.

The carbon cycle is basic scientific fact yet confidently ignored by people who hate things like logging and meat.

Do whatever you want.

I'm just sharing my personal choices based on what I've learned.

What could be more American than that? :)

The problem is, you have to choose. Do you really think people can continue to eat meat 2-3 times a day, purely supplied by family farms where animals are able to roam free?

The reality is that the only way to feed people's insatiable demand for meat is to use factory farms. You can't factory farm without causing suffering to animals, and you can't factory farm without use of antibiotics, etc.

Also you say, 'evolved to eat'. Do you really think people were eating meat every day throughout human history? This started after WWII with mass agriculture and factory farming. That's why so many cultures have beans and rice as their primary dish: it's a perfectly balanced protein.

If 'evolved to eat' is your primary concern then actually you should be eating meat like once or twice a month, max. Evolution doesn't happen in less than a century.

Burgers don't drive cars.

People drive cars, and people eat burgers. Is that the context you were looking for?

We've identified two ways to reduce carbon production. 1) reduce production per human. 2) reduce humans.

Only the first one is being argued for here. Conflating it with the second is just a confusion.

Sorry but this is just such an ignorant comment. You really need to read up on how agriculture contributes to global warming and loss of land/deforestation. What do you think cows eat, air?

Nihilistic bullshit isn't the hot take you think it is. The problem isn't too many people. The planet couldn't handle billions more if we used resources correctly. Is your idea of "humans enjoying nature" extreme deforestation and water scarcety?

But you just read an argument, and then completely ignored it, instead started brining up other aspects of red meat.

That most red meat is very co2 expensive compared to getting the proteins from other sources is a relevant argument for many of us, and not a particularly 'strange obsession' for those of us caring about reducing our co2 footprint.

>Agricultural reform or innovation is certainly an avenue to explore; but this strange obsession with "stop eating red meat" is a bit too much.

Most of the people pushing it are doing so because they believe it's immoral to eat meat, so they'll latch onto whatever excuse they can to try to stop people.