On an industrial scale you basically have to ban meat to protect the environment. There simply can't be 8+ billion meat eaters.
Maybe bug meat could be environmentally friendly, but at that point why not just eat plants?
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
65 points (92.2% liked)
Ask Science
14089 readers
183 users here now
Ask a science question, get a science answer.
Community Rules
Rule 1: Be respectful and inclusive.
Treat others with respect, and maintain a positive atmosphere.
Rule 2: No harassment, hate speech, bigotry, or trolling.
Avoid any form of harassment, hate speech, bigotry, or offensive behavior.
Rule 3: Engage in constructive discussions.
Contribute to meaningful and constructive discussions that enhance scientific understanding.
Rule 4: No AI-generated answers.
Strictly prohibit the use of AI-generated answers. Providing answers generated by AI systems is not allowed and may result in a ban.
Rule 5: Follow guidelines and moderators' instructions.
Adhere to community guidelines and comply with instructions given by moderators.
Rule 6: Use appropriate language and tone.
Communicate using suitable language and maintain a professional and respectful tone.
Rule 7: Report violations.
Report any violations of the community rules to the moderators for appropriate action.
Rule 8: Foster a continuous learning environment.
Encourage a continuous learning environment where members can share knowledge and engage in scientific discussions.
Rule 9: Source required for answers.
Provide credible sources for answers. Failure to include a source may result in the removal of the answer to ensure information reliability.
By adhering to these rules, we create a welcoming and informative environment where science-related questions receive accurate and credible answers. Thank you for your cooperation in making the Ask Science community a valuable resource for scientific knowledge.
We retain the discretion to modify the rules as we deem necessary.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
There are also strong movements to healthier eating and a good strategy might be to build on that.
While it’s always dangerous to generalize from personal experience, I know far more people who have reduced their consumption of red meat, or even overall meat, For health reasons over climate reasons
Me included, I started bc i had some minor health issues and i was recommended to change my diet. What actually worked, but now i realised how this isn't even an effort and can have an impact. Even if we would eat only half the meat we eat now, there would be a noticable change in these statiscs.
Not an answer, and I won’t get a lot of upvotes for saying this, but if your plan for saving the world is for people to change their behavior en masse, you’ve already lost. And we need population-level change in order to have a meaningful impact.
The way we get people off meat is by making the alternatives more (or equally) tasty, convenient, familiar, and affordable. The day we do that, the war is won. There will be some stragglers (of the “beef! murica!” variety) but not many.
We’ve made inroads. Indian food is delicious, way more popular in the West than when I was growing up, and vegetarian-inclined. Vegetarian burgers are more popular and varied than ever. New meat substitutes are being invented all the time. People are interested, but there’s not a well-lit path to vegetarianism for working-class folks just yet.
If you want to eat less meat, do it. But also, find some good meatless recipes and cook them for/with your friends. If they add those to their rotation and pass them along, that’s the kind of thing that can build toward change.
"Everyone will just X" when X individually makes obvious sense for most people.
For some, it's a matter of cost. The cheaper option tends to get a lot of adopters. Making the better option cost less is sometimes a matter of engineering and innovation improving the cost of the better option. Or sometimes it's making the worse option cost more, sometimes directly through taxation or indirectly through regulations. Electric cars are pretty much on a self sustaining path at this point, where the economics of electric cars can be a much better financial decision for themselves personally, compared to similar ICE vehicles.
For others, it's a matter of cultural influence, where trends in adoption just make things different. Tobacco use, especially actual smoking, is way down. Drinking alcohol is down, too. In my lifetime, helmet use for bicyclists and skiers is way up. These broad societal preferential shifts can happen without necessarily having big mandates from government.
And even if nudged somewhere by temporary government policy or price, sometimes people stick with that option long term if that's what they learn to prefer. Seat belts kinda went this way, where seat belt usage rates went way up between 1980 and 2010, so that even after federal regulations were struck down by the courts and state level enforcement dwindled in the past decade, everyone still wears seat belts (including when visiting places where they're not required).
And of course, the big influential force for changing behavior is government policy. As a society, we've pretty seamlessly moved off of things that were banned (leaded fuel, CFCs), even if the transition took a few decades (lead pipes, lead paint), or quickly adopted things that were mandatory (child car seats, bike helmets).
Emissions from food production is one of those things that can shift a bit from all of these factors. We've shifted away from beef towards chicken in the last few decades, and that alone has made a difference in greenhouse emissions. We might see more shifting down that line, just culturally. Or we might see some economic nudges from the fact that beef and dairy production are so costly for reasons correlated to their environmental impact.
But ultimately, meat doesn't contribute nearly as much as driving does, for the typical American household. The real impact comes from how we design our cities, not on how we eat.
Wasn't there this product (cfc i guess )they put in fridges that caused harm to the ozon layer. And every fridge producer just stopped using it after we found out its really not good? to be fair its not common to happen but it proves its also not impossible that "everyone just..." I think if there's an easy solution, it is poasible.
That was done by multiple governments banning CFCs, which is the opposite of "everyone just." The point isn't that better things are impossible — a better world is absolutely possible. The point is there has to be real action to make it better, and that action often takes the form of governments stepping in to do the right thing.
I could argue "everyone just banned cfc" where everyone is not an individual anymore but governments. I see your point tho and you are right, action has to take place this way or that way for something to change. I just wanted to visualize sometimes things do happen because the initial thought of some scientist was probably "if we just stop using cfc, the ozone layer can be safe again"(symbolic for" they found out whats causing the problem") ...is not a solution in terms of action but the action that caused the stop was initiated by exactly such a thought. So i wouldn't categorically throw such thoughts in the wind..
I naively thought we were finally heading this way with climate change. It was always too little, too late, but there seemed to be a global movement by countries to finally take the right actions. Everything was coming together. But then the pendulum of politics swung the other way
Don't lose sleep over individual contributions. It's the corporations that need to change behaviour. Put your energy into fighting them.
I ask myself: How much does this cost me and how big is the effect... in this particular example the costs are close to zero and the impact, even if small, is there. So the Cost/effect ratio is blowing up to infinity at zero cost.
That's why I'm fighting the animal agriculture industry by not giving them any of my money.
Corporations are only producing things that people want. I'm all for strict regulation, but "blame the corporations and not yourself" is a huge copout. Especially when reducing your meat consumption is one of the single most impactful things you can do to reduce your effect on the climate.
Corporations are only producing things that people want.
That's backwards.
People select what to buy from a list of things offered. I want a rabbit sandwich. Stores only sell pig, cow, and chicken. Of course it's going to look like everyone likes pig cow and chicken.
I want an electric car under $30k. I want a phone that isn't made by children.
"But if enough people want it the market will provide" - ignores everything about barriers to entry and greed.
A person wants a rabbit sandwich, no one's gonna offer it. If people want rabbit sandwiches, they would be sold.
If, over the course of some time, people reduced their meat consumption by 25%, do you think meat companies would continue to raise and slaughter the same number of animals or would they reduce their stock to match what was being purchased?
You don't need to wait for trust busting or regulation to consume less meat. You can do it today, of your own will.
If people want rabbit sandwiches, they would be sold.
I don't believe that. The market is only good at meeting needs that make a certain amount of profit. Automation and tooling have forced us into a box that prevents interesting alternatives. Also, we've been programmed to be against some of those alternatives.
You don't need to wait for trust busting or regulation to consume less meat.
I'm already vegetarian, so I agree. But again, we're talking about me buying things that are available. There are alternatives to meat, of course. Eating beef is completely unconcible. But a reasonable society would be investing heavily in lab grown beef to protect the environment. We aren't. The profit isn't there.
I also believe that the marketing complex adds a lot of bias to the scene here. if you're being brainwashed/hypnotized into wanting chicken sandwiches and then buy it, you can't really say it was your choice, no?. i think people often forget how much money is pumped in commercials, and thats not because "sales go up a bit". I truly think marketing has gotten to a point where we should regulate it.
I consume almost no advertising. I can't remember the last time I saw an ad for a chicken sandwich. But I still want chicken sandwiches, because they are deliscious.
Corporations caused this problem by buying politicians that created regulations favorable to them. They are the only entities big enough to fix this problem, for instance, by recapturing gases like methane. I refuse to be held responsible for simply eating.
Corporations are only producing things that people want.
Yea but not what you or I want. Or else they wouldn't have turned turned the entire tech industry into an AI Ponzi scheme.
Corporations exist to create value for their shareholders. AKA the people responsible for 2/3s of pollution.
We can all eat shit and die and corporations will still cut that shit with the last of the Amazonian sawdust.
Corporations killed localized food supplies and all but eliminated traditional perennial crops that provided a lot of the nutrition we now get from meat/dairy.
Think of EVs. Corporations didn’t want to manufacture them but people acting together forced them to. Then it only took a handful of people to let them drop it again (in the us).
If protectionism against Chinese made vehicles ever ends, GM and Ford are going to disappear overnight. They keep insisting on focusing on smaller quantity of less variety of more expensive vehicles, and resisting modernization
This exactly!!
Danish research from March 2025:
255 grams per week. That's the short answer to how much meat you can eat without harming the planet. And that only applies to poultry and pork.
Beef cannot be eaten in meaningful quantities without exceeding planetary boundaries, according to a scientific article published by a group of DTU researchers in the journal Nature Food. So says Caroline H. Gebara, postdoc at DTU Sustain and lead author of the study.
American study from 2016:
Abstract
[...]
Transitioning toward more plant-based diets that are in line with standard dietary guidelines could reduce global mortality by 6–10% and food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 29–70% compared with a reference scenario in 2050.
American study from 2022:
Based on the model, published in the open-access journal PLoS Climate, phasing out animal agriculture over the next 15 years would have the same effect as a 68 percent reduction of carbon dioxide emissions through the year 2100.
This would provide 52 percent of the net emission reductions necessary to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, which scientists say is the minimum threshold required to avert disastrous climate change.
255 grams per week is a lot more than I'd expect. Just for reference: the DGE - German Nutrition Society - recommends limiting intake of meat and meat products of not more than 300 grams per week, which is based on health aspects rather than environmental.
the American study from 2022 is just warmed over tilman Clark (that American study from 2016), and the Danish study also depends on tilman Clark. so we should look at their methodology.
I did.
they compare a wide range of data from lca studies, even though this violated the best guidance on lca data.
lca studies are a bit like grand juries: the person designing the study can pretty much get any result they want.
and since these studies are all disparately methodized, you cannot combine them.
it's possible the conclusions are correct, but these papers are not sufficient evidence to be believed.
load more comments
(4 replies)
For the most part, not only does vegansim have the biggest positive impact on the environment that can be made with a personal choice, the animal products industries are like the third biggest contributor to climate change after energy (coal, oil, gas, etc) and manufacturing. Plus, as most farm land in the world is used for animal feed, it would free up land for reforestation.
P.s When talking about GHG emissions, it's a really bad idea to use % of total emissions as an indicator of impact. Livestock produce plenty of methane, which is roughly 84 times more impactful than carbon dioxide on the short term (20ish years) but carbon dioxide is more impactful over the long term (centuries) as it does not break down as quickly.
When talking about GHG emissions, it’s a really bad idea to use % of total emissions as an indicator of impact.
we have a tool for mitigating your concern: we rate greenhouse gasses by their co2-equivalence. the co2e of methane is 28.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(19 replies)
Just upvoting because it's a good question. I often find myself wondering just how much "X" can I consume before I should reign it in for the betterment of the planet. I'd like to be able to say I left earth better than I found it. Mainly thinking about things like gasoline, but food should certainly be on that list as well. Consuming zero of everything isn't a solution, but figuring out how much is okay - yeah, that's tough.
Google says livestock production creates 11-20% of global human co2 emissions. Even If we could make that disappear, it’s not enough
Meanwhile energy production is 73% so it’s critical to focus there
Realistically there is to switch to zero for any category of emissions so the only right answer is to cut as many as possible as much as possible
Animal agriculture only produces 5.8% of greenhouse gasses[0], so even if everyone stopped eating meat tomorrow the effect would be less than 5.8% (not all animal agriculture is for meat).
That doesn't Account for the deforestation caused by ever expanding beef pastures. It's also unclear whether that slice includes the farming of soy, corn and alfafa grown exclusively to feed animals. And then there's the "energy in agriculture and fishing" section that you probably missed. And let's not forget how far meat has to travel, that's in another slice in the energy section.
So probably there's a couple percent more on top of that.
You forgot ocean acidification from farm runoff and the overfishing destroying the oceans ecosystem.
That's more than industry (including concrete) so I still think it's relevant. Land use, waste (water, dead zones), disease and antibiotics etc. are huge problems as well.
load more comments
(9 replies)
This isn't going to be a popular answer, but the only meats I don't feel guilty about eating are those that come from my family's farms, their, neighbors farms, or the wild game my family hunts. Commercial, large scale agriculture is damaging in many ways, but for most people who choose to eat meat it's very difficult to avoid. We need to advocate for a more localized food supply for so many reasons.
Local is better. But even local cows are horrible. Grow rabbits instead.
view more: next ›