What makes you think so? My naïve view is if people eat soy instead of an animal eating the soy there's less total soy needed, by a fair margin. The pasture animals are a different deal but that represent a tiny proportion of consumes nutrients around the world.
Moreover, people that transition from omni to veggie diet don't eat 10x more veggies (with exceptions of course), even if grains and pulses are counted as veggies. We can't eat as much as what the livestock eat themselves.
> i wonder what would happen if the whole world went vegan from tomorrow
Mass starvation probably. We aren't prepared for it. Give it 10 years and maybe it could be done.
> would it actually cut down emissions, methane? co2?
You'd have to do something about all the existing livestock. Again with 10 years' lead time you could just stop breeding new livestock and let them die out.
> but [what] would be the impact long term
Less deforestation, less fertilizer (and therefore fossil fuels) used, lower methane emissions. If people could adjust their diets the impact would only be good (other than losing meat and dairy, which would be sad).
I was able to find sources for your methane production figures, but can you provide them for the CO2?
To your point about increasing CO2 from farming plants: 40-66% of corn and 58%-77% of soy grown in the US is currently fed to animals, and we dedicate 5,000% more acres to growing feed crops than to vegetables[1]. Since between 3 and 10 calories of plants fed to an animal yields 1 calorie of animal product (depending on animal)[2], there would be room to either plant less, plant different, and/or use less emissive practices.
- i wonder what would happen if the whole world went vegan from tomorrow
- would it actually cut down emissions, methane? co2?
- the price of veggies would obviously go 10x in the short term but would be the impact long term
> the price of veggies would obviously go 10x
What makes you think so? My naïve view is if people eat soy instead of an animal eating the soy there's less total soy needed, by a fair margin. The pasture animals are a different deal but that represent a tiny proportion of consumes nutrients around the world.
Moreover, people that transition from omni to veggie diet don't eat 10x more veggies (with exceptions of course), even if grains and pulses are counted as veggies. We can't eat as much as what the livestock eat themselves.
> i wonder what would happen if the whole world went vegan from tomorrow
Mass starvation probably. We aren't prepared for it. Give it 10 years and maybe it could be done.
> would it actually cut down emissions, methane? co2?
You'd have to do something about all the existing livestock. Again with 10 years' lead time you could just stop breeding new livestock and let them die out.
> but [what] would be the impact long term
Less deforestation, less fertilizer (and therefore fossil fuels) used, lower methane emissions. If people could adjust their diets the impact would only be good (other than losing meat and dairy, which would be sad).
[delayed]
GHG would keep leaking out of the permafrost. Warming goes up even if we stop all emissions tomorrow.
- people would have nutritional deficits
- methane production would only drop by a max of 32% due to farming
- rice alone already emits 12% of world methane, this would increase
- only 15% of co2 comes from farming.
- 45% of the co2 from farming is plants. This would increase.
So it wouldn’t do anything.
I was able to find sources for your methane production figures, but can you provide them for the CO2?
To your point about increasing CO2 from farming plants: 40-66% of corn and 58%-77% of soy grown in the US is currently fed to animals, and we dedicate 5,000% more acres to growing feed crops than to vegetables[1]. Since between 3 and 10 calories of plants fed to an animal yields 1 calorie of animal product (depending on animal)[2], there would be room to either plant less, plant different, and/or use less emissive practices.
1: https://insideanimalag.org/feed-crop-takeaways/
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_conversion_ratio#Conversi...
> people would have nutritional deficits
Follow traditional cuisines that have worked out healthy vegetarianism. Don't buy fake meats.
> methane production would only drop by a max of 32%
Only? If I cut your salary by 32% would you say it isn't much of a drop?
> rice alone already emits 12% of world methane, this would increase
And would be more than offset by the methane emitted by cattle.
> 45% of the co2 from farming is plants. This would increase.
Why? Feeding people plants takes less plants than feeding animal plants and then feeding people animals.
> - 45% of the co2 from farming is plants. This would increase.
And what percent of that is farming plants to feed animals?
We could not spend 200 billion on fixing the Climate... but we can spend 3 trillion on using neural nets to format JSON...
Let's not ignore the money spent on killing people in different countries, funding cartels, and ensuring that climate change hits faster and harder.