This seems to be neglecting the fact that animal agriculture absolutely requires a ton of energy production. It’s not just happening in a vacuum—it’s tied to things that you mentioned like transportation and fossil fuel usage. Also, as far as the point about transportation goes, just to be clear, the “local meat is more environmentally friendly than a vegetable that is transported across the world” take is not true.
The story’s subtitle declares that transportation costs of shipping foods to consumers is not a significant factor compared to whether those foods are animal-based (a lot of CO2 emissions from land use, farming, animal feed) versus plant-based. “The distance our food travels to get to us actually accounts for less than 10 percent of most food products’ carbon footprint.”
Animal agriculture will undoubtedly be more costly to the environment than plant agriculture—that’s for sure. And who knows? Maybe I was missing something about other sources of energy production being more costly than animal agriculture, but especially with the sheer scale of it (over trillions of animals exploited and slaughtered every year), it is very destructive regardless.
However, irrespective of any environmental concerns about certain things possibly being worse than animal agriculture, the exploitation of animals ought to be condemned from an ethical standpoint anyway, and ultimately, even if there are concerns about environmental destruction in other ways, reducing our negative impact on the environment by doing what we can as individuals and finding solutions on a broader scale would not preclude going vegan anyway, so it remains a moral obligation.
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This seems to be neglecting the fact that animal agriculture absolutely requires a ton of energy production. It’s not just happening in a vacuum—it’s tied to things that you mentioned like transportation and fossil fuel usage. Also, as far as the point about transportation goes, just to be clear, the “local meat is more environmentally friendly than a vegetable that is transported across the world” take is not true.
This table covers environmental impact of many factors.
Here is an actual high quality version of the image.
Edit: I misinterpreted IncorrigibleDirigible’s comment. My bad, G.
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👍🏿
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Animal agriculture will undoubtedly be more costly to the environment than plant agriculture—that’s for sure. And who knows? Maybe I was missing something about other sources of energy production being more costly than animal agriculture, but especially with the sheer scale of it (over trillions of animals exploited and slaughtered every year), it is very destructive regardless.
However, irrespective of any environmental concerns about certain things possibly being worse than animal agriculture, the exploitation of animals ought to be condemned from an ethical standpoint anyway, and ultimately, even if there are concerns about environmental destruction in other ways, reducing our negative impact on the environment by doing what we can as individuals and finding solutions on a broader scale would not preclude going vegan anyway, so it remains a moral obligation.
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