[andy moles]

To be fair he's not wrong that eating other animals is 'natural'.

But it is disingenuous, because if there's a way for 8 billion humans to consume as much meat as we do (and as much as Maccy D seems to favour and condone) without relying on a meat industry that bears no resemblance to a 'natural ecosystem', I'm sure we'd all like to hear about it.
 

[shurt]

I find Dave's responses to people on social media pretty weird. As has just been said, arguing that McDonald's is totally fine for the environment and that mass global meat production and consumption is having no effect on the planet is crazy.

Eating less meat (ideally going plant based) is a common thread on pretty much everything I've either watched or read about reducing the planets temperature. The % of US agricultural land that's used for beef alone is startling, can't remember the stat exactly but it's over 80% I think (pls shoot me down if wrong).

Personally I think Dave's experiment is well gash.

[teestub]

arguing that McDonald's is totally fine for the environment and that mass global meat production and consumption is having no effect on the planet is crazy.

Has Dave said this somewhere? This isn’t what he said in the link above.

[petejh]

I find Dave's responses to people on social media pretty weird. As has just been said, arguing that McDonald's is totally fine for the environment and that mass global meat production and consumption is having no effect on the planet is crazy.

Eating less meat (ideally going plant based) is a common thread on pretty much everything I've either watched or read about reducing the planets temperature. The % of US agricultural land that's used for beef alone is startling, can't remember the stat exactly but it's over 80% I think (pls shoot me down if wrong).

Personally I think Dave's experiment is well gash.

As teestub noted, he hasn't said anything like that?

It's possible that:
a. meat contributes to climate change

can be completely independent of
 
b. meat is either overall positive for health outcomes or meat is overall negative for health outcomes.

which is also independent of

c. eating meat is considered by some people cruel to animals.


Also, some perspective on relative impacts on contributions of CO2 equivalent from https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541:

Abstract
Current anthropogenic climate change is the result of greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere, which records the aggregation of billions of individual decisions. Here we consider a broad range of individual lifestyle choices and calculate their potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries, based on 148 scenarios from 39 sources. We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year)


It's also true that US meat industry is not the same as the UK/Irish meat industry. We consume meat from the later not the former.

If it's about not wanting to kill/harm animals then I get it.

[crzylgs]

I find Dave's responses to people on social media pretty weird. As has just been said, arguing that McDonald's is totally fine for the environment and that mass global meat production and consumption is having no effect on the planet is crazy.

Eating less meat (ideally going plant based) is a common thread on pretty much everything I've either watched or read about reducing the planets temperature. The % of US agricultural land that's used for beef alone is startling, can't remember the stat exactly but it's over 80% I think (pls shoot me down if wrong).

Personally I think Dave's experiment is well gash.

Not shooting you down as such but that number seemed very off to me and wanted to check for my own knowledge... Googling '% of USA farmland used for cattle' gave me the number 40% still pretty high but slightly different ball park.

I agree with that majority for a variety of reasons society as a whole needs to shift its diet away from (esp. red) meat to other sources. However, a point that many people either intentionally neglect to mention or are ignorant of is that not all land is suitable for arable farming. Dave lives in Scotland... lots of the terrain (steep, hilly, floods, too cold, too wet, short hours of sunlight, shit soil etc) up there is not suitable for arable farming practices... BUT grass grows alright and you can let some sheep, cows lose on the land and they will mostly look after themselves and turn the rubbish grass into lovely protein. Obviously it isn't perfect and that is a slight dumbing down of the situation but it is worthy of consideration.

[Danny]

As as been noted, we can have a legit debate about the relative health benefits of eating loads of red meat, or not. That's fine.

But the claim that a majority meat based diet can be sustainable is such clear nonsense that it reveals some obviously lazy motivated reasoning on DMac's part. Particularly beef. I'm fully expecting him to share some holistic grazing pseudo-science any day now. I've seen him share some hilariously underpowered crappy studies on light and sleep recently, which are indicative of the same issue. He really isn't objective science man, despite what his insta feed may suggest. 

[abarro81]

Latest news: Dave has accused me of drawing a false equivalence between animal cruelty and eating meat. Which I would accept, if he wasn't tacitly implying the industrial livestock management by a multinational corporation was anywhere near "cruelty free"

https://twitter.com/davemacleod09/status/1592871283116867585

I may be wrong, but I read that interaction as his response quite specifically to what you posted, rather than his response to a critique of McDs current sourcing/farming practices or anything else. It may or may not tacitly imply what you say, but in the context of that interaction it's not obvious to me that it does.

[Bradders]

Latest news: Dave has accused me of drawing a false equivalence between animal cruelty and eating meat. Which I would accept, if he wasn't tacitly implying the industrial livestock management by a multinational corporation was anywhere near "cruelty free"

https://twitter.com/davemacleod09/status/1592871283116867585

I may be wrong, but I read that interaction as his response quite specially to what you posted, rather than his response to a critique of McDs current sourcing/farming practices or anything else. It may or may not tacitly imply what you say, but in the context of that interaction it's not obvious to me that it does.

Yes seemed more directed at George Monbiot than you.

[andy popp]

If it's about not wanting to kill/harm animals then I get it.

That's it for me. Specifically, I don't want to participate in the industrialized killing/harming of animals. By industrialised I mean introducing pretty much any distance between the killing and the eating, the eaten and the eater. This quote from William Cronon's magnificent environmental history of Chicago - Nature's Metroplois - really captures it for me:

"As time went on, fewer of those who ate meat could say that they had ever seen the living creature whose flesh they were chewing; fewer still could say that they had actually killed the animal themselves. In the packers' world, it was easy not to remember that eating was a moral act inextricably bound to killing. Such was the second nature that a corporate order had imposed on the American landscape. Forgetfulness was among the least noticed and most important of its by-products. The packers' triumph was to further the commodification of meat, to alienate still more its ties to the lives and ecosystems that had ultimately created it. ... The sheer variety of [the] new standardized uses testified to the packers' ingenuity in their war on waste, but in them the animal also died a second death. Severed from the form in which it had lived, severed from the act that killed it, it vanished from human memory as one of nature's creatures."

As to Dave Mac, when he says: "Trust is not required. Meat processing is already highly regulated in some aspects. It’s perfectly feasible to put proper systems, supervision and transparency in place and powerfully disincentive poor practice" in response to Rob's argument that "The problem is terrible animal husbandry is near ubiquitous in the global production of meat. You can't harp on about false equivalence when you're eating a maccies, it's just too scaled up to be able to trust every low paid employee caring for the livestock," he just sounds really hopelessly naive. Like he needs there to be no animal rights issues to be involved in his choices.

[Johnny Brown]

Some good posts here.

Dave lives in Scotland... lots of the terrain (steep, hilly, floods, too cold, too wet, short hours of sunlight, shit soil etc) up there is not suitable for arable farming

I’ve heard Dave make this argument before. It is a good point on one level, but agree requires a bit of a leap to justify a meat heavy diet. OTOH I’m fairly sure he’s stopped flying, and in general I think dissecting an individual’s choices in these things is counter productive. The magnitude of change required commands a top-down approach; nit-picking or virtue signalling exercises among the engaged only serve to divide.

but in them the animal also died a second death. Severed from the form in which it had lived, severed from the act that killed it, it vanished from human memory as one of nature's creatures.

Great quote Andy. In Being a Human, Charles Foster dwells long on the moment in humanity’s history when killing for food ceased to be a religious act soaked in meaning and respect; but he places it 5000 years earlier at the close of the Mesolithic. I suspect the debate is older than writing. For myself I try to catch and kill my own meat at least once a year (typically fish if that counts, opportunities for others are scarce) and try to be mindful that meat is respected and never wasted.

A common theme when diets are debated is the conflation of US and UK law and practices; that by eating a Macdonalds in the Uk you are therefore giving tacit approval to the worst of US practices. I don’t eat at MDs but I don’t think this is fair. Standards in the Uk are pretty high - treated better than refugees in many cases, if you can put the ultimate death aside but if it wasn’t for that they wouldn’t exist in the first place. Modernity is fucked up and our existence in such numbers is only at the exclusion of other life. I would argue arable is worse than meat in that respect.

[User deactivated.]

As this conversation is straying slightly into general debate about the ethics of meat consumption I think this chart showing GHG emissions across the supply chain from various foods is really useful: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

Someone on this forum kindly shared it with me a year or so ago and it had an impact on my diet. I now almost never eat beef and have all but given up coffee, chocolate and palm oil. I still eat wild caught fish daily, and occasional eggs and yogurt, but try to stick to seasonal, native vegetables and nuts to make up the rest of my diet. Despite eating animal products daily I'd anticipate my diet has a smaller footprint than many vegetarians. However, I do have 3 kids so perhaps it's all in vain!

[petejh]

Well, yes in reality it is. But at least you'll feel good about yourself!

There are 4 choices any of us in the developed world will make that will have a meaningful impact on contribution to CO2 in the atmosphere. Of those #1 is by an order of magnitude the biggest impact:
1. one fewer children. ~58t CO2e per year
2. driving or not driving a car.* ~2.4t CO2e per year
3. one fewer transatlantic flight per year. ~1.6t CO2e per flight
4. not eating meat for one year. 0.8t CO2e per year (based on US meat industry, not UK which is likely lower)

Anything else has a vanishingly small impact on personal CO2 contributions.

I agree on one level with JB that nitpicking isn't useful. It probably isn't, provided we can engineer the solutions at a high level. But unfortunately we're already there being nitpicked by certain sections of people. The meat issue is one example where the numbers are being used to justify people making choices. So if we're going to nitpick the numbers and if personal contributions matter, then lets quantify things. Personally I'd rather not but my reaction to someone telling me my choices aren't acceptable to their worldview is to want to know the facts behind it.


* even an EV. The raw materials that go into building EVs and charging infrastructure still take a large amount of CO2 to produce currently although that will drop in the long term with more nuclear/wind/solar.

* There's also the question of pets' CO2 contributions, and how 'sustainable' they are in comparison to other lifestyle choices such driving a diesel, taking a flight or eating meat.

[teestub]

I now almost never eat beef and have all but given up coffee, chocolate and palm oil.

I think these one value graphs are always going to be inaccurate, and the supporting decisions that D Mac would apply to eating his normal locally reared beef can be used to select a decent coffee too (to pick an example close to heart!). There are plenty of examples of regenerative coffee growers being sold by UK companies now, where that GHG portion for farming is going to be way inaccurate. If you’re interested in drinking a bit more coffee without the GHG guilt then there are decent options out there.
One I’ve had recently https://www.darkartscoffee.co.uk/collections/coffee/products/golden-axe-el-salvador


Interesting that you support your training on mainly just fish and nuts, I had assumed you’d be smashing in the whey and BCAAs!

Who would have thought D Maccy could have lead to an interesting thread 😄

[IanP]

Well, yes in reality it is. But at least you'll feel good about yourself!

There are 4 choices any of us in the developed world will make that will have a meaningful impact on contribution to CO2 in the atmosphere. Of those #1 is by an order of magnitude the biggest impact:
1. one fewer children. ~58t CO2e per year
2. driving or not driving a car.* ~2.4t CO2e per year
3. one fewer transatlantic flight per year. ~1.6t CO2e per flight
4. not eating meat for one year. 0.8t CO2e per year (based on US meat industry, not UK which is likely lower)

Anything else has a vanishingly small impact on personal CO2 contributions.

No. 1 is somewhat different in terms of how its worked out:

'For the action ‘have one fewer child,’ we relied on a study which quantified future emissions of descendants based on historical rates, based on heredity (Murtaugh and Schlax 2009). In this approach, half of a child’s emissions are assigned to each parent, as well as one quarter of that child’s offspring (the grandchildren) and so forth. This is consistent with our use of research employing the fullest possible life cycle approach in order to capture the magnitude of emissions decisions'

Which sort of explains the very weird result that suggests that having one child increases you annual emission by 4 to 10 times the total annual adult CO2 emmision (16 tonnes US, 6 tonnes UK).   Think this needs a a significant amount of further explanation to understand what it really means.

[petejh]

Isn't the easiest way to understand it in terms of thinking about the null future human that didn't pop into existence as a direct consequence of a current human's choice? 

[IanP]

Isn't the easiest way to understand it in terms of thinking about the null future human that didn't pop into existence as a direct consequence of a current human's choice?

Not really.

It is self evidently true that having an extra child won't increase you CO2 emission in the next year (or next 20 years) by anything like 58 tonnes per year, it will only be a small fraction of that, so the direct comparison with with the reduction that you will get each year by other changes appears somewhat disingenuous. 

And reading a bit further it seems the assumptions behind the 58 tonnes figure is that CO2 emissions per person will stay at 2009 levels for ever more a fact that is already not true and we will hopefully become significantly less true as policies to reduce CO2 emissions impact.

[petejh]

But wouldn't you'd sum up all future estimated CO2 emissions for a predicted number of future generations of people (who never appear), and allocate that figure to the parents, then divide that number by the average remaining lifespan of the current parents to get an annual figure?
So the high 58t of CO2 per year figure represents the sum of future generations' emissions brought back to present day and divided by remaining lifespan of the two people who chose not to have that one more child. It makes sense to me.

The 2009 figure had to be based on something but yeah they should taper it to account for future improvements. Still going to be a high'ish figure though, far higher than the other lifestyle choices.

edit: but yes the figure doesn't represent reality of the extra emissions per year of having one child, so could be considered misleading especially in terms of an issue that requires timely reductions of CO2 within the next 10-20 years.

[Johnny Brown]

Always worth bearing in mind that if all the engaged intelligent people have no/ less kids, then that fucks us too.

[Duncan campbell]

I guess in some ways that is true but not necessarily because just because you love gritstone soloing JB doesn’t mean your kids will love it.

Maybe they will love BMX racing more than a kid who’s parents can lap E6 BMX tracks.

Mostly playing devils advocate here as my gf’s parents are heavily environmentally conscious and all their offspring are more environmentally conscious than most. (Though to varying degrees)

[User deactivated.]

I now almost never eat beef and have all but given up coffee, chocolate and palm oil.

I think these one value graphs are always going to be inaccurate, and the supporting decisions that D Mac would apply to eating his normal locally reared beef can be used to select a decent coffee too (to pick an example close to heart!). There are plenty of examples of regenerative coffee growers being sold by UK companies now, where that GHG portion for farming is going to be way inaccurate. If you’re interested in drinking a bit more coffee without the GHG guilt then there are decent options out there.
One I’ve had recently https://www.darkartscoffee.co.uk/collections/coffee/products/golden-axe-el-salvador


Interesting that you support your training on mainly just fish and nuts, I had assumed you’d be smashing in the whey and BCAAs!

Who would have thought D Maccy could have lead to an interesting thread 😄

I suspected coffee might trigger a few people here 

The bold is quite amusing. Surely fish and nuts are at least as good as whey and BCAA's??? I get around 3,500 calories each day and generally around 100-150g of protein. I have a tub of whey protein but rarely use it. I do eat a lot of fish and yogurt is another easy win for protein  (although one of the highest impact foods I regularly eat). Those Skyr yogurt pots have almost 50g of protein!

[dr_botnik]

Interesting responses. I like Pete's broad brush strokes of his top 5 (well, 4) ideas for staving off humanities latest way to destroy itself. If anything, these macro ideas are more important than over analysing the micro decisions we make on the daily. Although, as a detail oriented person I do like to ponder

I actually agree with the idea that that small scale farming is the most sustainable, mixing up energy and nutrient cycles between animal and plant life. So in that sense, I agree with Maccy D.

I just don't like his rigidity of thought about promoting meat. It riled me how he sort of used this appeal to natural authority to counter George's challenge to our established way of thinking.

[teestub]

The bold is quite amusing. Surely fish and nuts are at least as good as whey and BCAA's???

Sorry if that came across wrong, of course they are better, but I guess a lot of people just take the easy powdered option to support their training, so it’s good to hear.

[IanP]

edit: but yes the figure doesn't represent reality of the extra emissions per year of having one child, so could be considered misleading especially in terms of an issue that requires timely reductions of CO2 within the next 10-20 years.

Yep, I think we probably agree on this - the figure for an extra child is calculated in a completely different way to the figure for e.g. not driving a car and they shouldn't really be compared on a single chart. 

To look at it slightly differently if you want to compare the 2 you could argue that lifestyle changes that reduce you annual CO2 should also be projected on to your future generations in the same way as having a child is.  This would mean that a 10% reduction in your emissions would also reduce your child related emissions by 10%, so for a two child family this would mean a near 12 tonne reduction in CO2 (2*10% of 58) rather than say 1.6 tonne (based on American emmisions). Pretty crude but maybe a bit more realistic way to think about the numbers. 

[abarro81]

Yep, I think we probably agree on this - the figure for an extra child is calculated in a completely different way to the figure for e.g. not driving a car and they shouldn't really be compared on a single chart.   

I'd say you just need the chart to have caveats, and to make it clear what's going on. Sometimes comparing things that aren't easily comparable is a worthwhile thing to do - this is a perfect example of that. Though I agree it doesn't make sense not to have a taper applied to the future emissions.

To look at it slightly differently if you want to compare the 2 you could argue that lifestyle changes that reduce you annual CO2 should also be projected on to your future generations in the same way as having a child is.  This would mean that a 10% reduction in your emissions would also reduce your child related emissions by 10%, so for a two child family this would mean a near 12 tonne reduction in CO2 (2*10% of 58) rather than say 1.6 tonne (based on American emmisions). Pretty crude but maybe a bit more realistic way to think about the numbers. 

IMO this is not a very good idea when it comes to how to apply the taper when it relies on individual choices around eating, flights, cars etc. Better to apply some kind of generic learning rate.

[mark20]

By this logic, are my carbon emissions zero, or very low, as they're covered by my parents'? The bastards!