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Beef produces 85 kg CO2e per kg of food. Tofu produces 2.9 kg CO2e per kg of food.
(ourworldindata.org)
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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Isn't air travel and large ships far worse for the environment? I don't mean to derail a conversation, but I suspect that air travel and ocean liners have a significantly bigger impact and I don't see as much coverage on that issue.
Fortunately, we have a series of tubes connecting every computer on the planet that can help answer questions like this!
Source
In short Aviation (1.9%) and Shipping (1.7%) are smaller than Livestock & Manure (5.8%) even before factoring in the secondary impacts that are largely driven by the livestock industry, like land use change, soil loss, and deforestation.
If you're specifically talking about transportation emissions for food, there's a graph for that as well!
Supply chain represents ~18% of the overall food footprint, smaller than livestock and land use changes.
Source
Talking meat specifically, the transportation emissions are a tiny piece of their overall footprint, as is shown in the OP.
Damn these charts are nicely made.
Agriculture makes up a full quarter of our total emissions. Some of that is because of shipping it, of course, but there is absolutely no question whatsoever that agriculture is a huge contributing factor to climate change
No, there's plenty of coverage. If anything, there isn't enough coverage on animal agriculture because people can't fathom a world where they don't eat meat (or even just significantly reduce their consumption).
Data about greenhouse emissions from transportation is talked about more frequently than any other source in my experience. I don't see the relevance to this data as beef and tofu can be produced locally or shipped overseas, so the emissions to produce the product would be a separate discussion versus emissions in transit.
You are not derailing, you are putting the topic back on track.
We can talk about both issues, as I think they are both important, but I suspect that the larger issue is being ignored because it threatens establishment interests.
This dude's puns are seriously underrated