Browsing social media, it’s apparent that people are quick to point out problems in the world, but what I see less often are suggestions for how to solve them. At best, I see vague ideas that might solve one issue but introduce new ones, which are rarely addressed.
Simply stopping the bad behaviour rarely is a solution in itself. The world is not that simple. Take something like drug addiction. Telling someone to just stop taking drugs is not a solution.
But my point is that we are keeping meat artificially cheap with lots of subsidies. Meat would be a luxury food if people paid the real cost of it, let alone if we paid the long term costs on the environment. I think maybe your analogy would be better with bicycles than electric cars. Bikes are more versatile and convenient than cars in short distances (10km), but most cities have been and continue being developed as car centric. If we used taxes to improve bike infrastructure, people would feel safer to ride bikes more often.
This exactly. I would say one of the main reasons a lot of people don’t currently drink plant milk is that per unit volume, it tends to be more expensive. This is seemingly starting to even out as the plant milk industry expands, but the most dirt-cheap dairy milk and the most dirty-cheap plant milk are still nowhere near each other on price. I’m willing to bet that if all subsidies were taken away altogether, plant milk would be cheaper, and moreover, if it were flipped in such a way that existing dairy subsidies went to plant milk, it would be game over for dairy milk. Plant milk prices would be through the floor, and dairy milk would be seen as a luxury product. There are a ton of good reasons for this:
your BBC link actually just relies on poore-nemecek 2018, which abuses LCAs and myopically focuses on distilling other studies into discrete metrics without understanding the system holistically. in short, your claim about the environment may be true, but the source that you use to support it is incapable of providing that support.
Okay, link to the academic paper refuting it. Or is your source just a shitty, Z-tier disinformation outlet called “Farmers Against Misinformation”? “your claim about the environment may be true” 💀 Don’t muddy the waters here: it is true. This was the only error noted in the paper, and the erratum correcting it still comports with the authors’ original findings that dairy is abysmal for the environment when compared with the alternatives.
Is your entire purpose on Lemmy to spread anti-vegan, pro-animal agriculture disinformation?
cannot be substantiated with the methodology used in this metastudy.
this reads like pigeonholing. my “purpose” is to keep conversations honest and challenge bad science and reasoning.
seems like an appeal to authority, but i encourage you and anyone interested to look into how LCAs were abused, and how much cottonseed is weighed in the water use and land use of dairy milk, despite cotton being grown for textiles.
I’m sorry, I’ve read the paper, seen absolutely nothing wrong with it (and seemingly neither have other experts in the field, as I’ve yet to see any peer-reviewed rebuttal of its findings), and definitely trust an expert on food sustainability from Oxford and an agroecology expert from Agroscope as well as their publicly available and well-reasoned findings compared to some rando on the Internet who just whines with zero elaboration that LCAs are “abused” and can’t seem to figure out that they could’ve said all this in one comment instead of four.
I bet Poore and Nemecek would’ve figured out how to use the “edit” button. (And yes, I did link to the correct article, as the only attempt I could find to debunk this paper was from, again, a disinformation outlet whose lies are explored in that AFP article.)
their objection had nothing to do with mine
your attack on my style does not address the substance of my objections. it is pure sophistry.
I’ve read it too, and enough of it’s references to understand that LCAs are not transferable between studies, and so all the LCA analysis must be disregarded.
I also have looked at enough of the source LCA data to understand that much of the water and land use (and GHG emissions) attributed to animal agriculture is actually a conservation of those same resources, as they come from second-and- third uses of crops.
your link doesn’t seem to align with anything i’ve said. are you sure you used the right link?