0:00 - Intro 0:47 - Who is Dr Frank Mittloehner? 1:50 - Humans can't eat the food that animals eat? 5:20 - Greenhouse gas emissions/2.6%/methane 18:49 - Food waste 19:44 - Water consumption/almonds/rice vs beef/liver 24:35 - Joseph's intensions with this video Whilst my response is focussed on responding specifically to the points that Joseph makes, what he fails to mention is as equally important as the flawed arguments he makes. He ignores the deforestation and habitat loss caused by animal farming, the decimation of wildlife and species extinction being caused by animal agriculture, the water pollution and agricultural run off that causes eutrophication and dead zones, and the soil erosion caused by animal farming, as well as other negative impacts. My next video is going to be a comprehensive guide to the impact that animal farming has on the environment, so stay tuned for that. I hope this debunking is helpful. Make my work possible by becoming a supporter of my activism here (thank you!): www.earthlinged.org/support Make the switch to vegan & get all of the support you need: switchtovegan.co.uk
😫🦠💩🍖🥓🍳🍕🍣🥩.. “Everyone is doing it, I’m going to do it because everyone else is doing it. Because I’m scaared. Cult following”. 🤦🏼♂️ Normal. I’m vegan. I don’t hurt animals. That’s that ✅👍. It’s normal for me. Everyone else follow the leader 👈😫🦠💩🍖....
I've read about the wonders of the Mediterranean diet. Fish, eggs, olive oil, and of course vegetables, are the optimal combination for a nutritious diet.
I think being aware of who funds Dr. Mittloehner is absolutely necessary but I do not think that on its own should blanket disqualify what he says. Many of the sources you cite are funded by or are from organizations that have a pro-plant based view. That doesn't mean people should assume whatever these sources find is right or wrong based on that. The merits of the studies and findings should be the determining factor. If we're to write off Dr. Mittloehner's research then the same standard should apply to pro-plant based research funded or produced by those that are pro plant based, which would be dumb.
To add to this many scientists themselves have specific beliefs about climate change and a morality which likely includes seeing minimisation of animal suffering and ect as an ends in itself and this will bias, at least unconsciously but also often deliberately their research. Will to power is greater than will to truth even in scientists. The scientist we must remember is not some objective perfect android but instead flawed as any other human.
He didn't dismiss their research offhand because they are funded by the meat industry. He discussed issues with their research and then argued that it might be due to a financial and ideological bias. I agree with what you're saying, but you are straw-manning Earthling Ed's position.
@@Pinkie007 Is it really though? The only reason you don't think believing that eating meat is morally okay makes someone an "ideologue" is because the belief is so prevalent that it seems like the default.
@@AFastidiousCuber Well no I’m only saying it because 90% of the time when someone tries to tell you what to eat, it’s a vegan. No-one else cares about what you eat. But almost every single time someone is shamed for their diet, it’s vegans shaming them. Like no-one really can disagree here, it’s where the whole stereotype of the “annoying vegan” comes from. And that’s just classic ideologue behavior. It’s their way or the highway. So while not all vegans are like this, they are infinitely more like this than any other diet community to the point where even chill vegans are annoyed by them for giving vegans a bad reputation.
Someone called „Lucas Bleyle“ posted this under WIL‘s video: "As a student studying sustainable agriculture, I thought I would do my civic duty and shine some light on some of the misrepresentations or straight-up misinformation in this video. 1. The U.S. eats vastly more meat than most people around the world, especially those in developing countries. However, the position of the animal agriculture industry is to bring up all developing countries to a meat consumption level comparable to the US. This means expanding production significantly with the associated increase in resource use and GHG emissions. If we really want to maintain or even reduce emissions from animal agriculture, we can’t keep alive this notion that American meat consumption is sustainable if adopted by the whole planet. 2. Emissions from animal agriculture in the US are diluted by extremely high per capita emissions, so dietary emissions are a smaller fraction of the total. Attributing the small percentage all to increased efficiency in the US is misleading. 3. The U.S. has an enormous amount of cropland that is rain-fed and has excellent soil. Most of the midwest (currently growing predominantly animal feed and biofuels) could be used to produce human food. California isn’t particularly well suited for food production, at least not that much better suited than much of the midwest. This idea that there is all this land that can only be used for animal agriculture is a talking point I would be careful about using. 4. It is straight-up antiscience to suggest that methane doesn’t matter because it is part of a “natural carbon cycle.” We don’t care about where the carbon comes from, we care about its global warming potential. Non-ruminants don't produce a lot of methane so the carbon we eat is breathed out as carbon. Human respiration is carbon neutral. When ruminants convert it to methane, they multiply the global warming potential by a factor of 20 to 90 (depending on the time scale it is averaged on). This transformation of carbon to methane makes it irrelevant whether or not it will eventually be taken up again by plants. While it is in the atmosphere it is contributing to additional harm than if it had stayed as CO2 the whole time. 5. Also, enteric fermentation is only one source of animal methane. Manure management is another area of emissions so you need to add that when discussing methane emissions from livestock. On this same note, manure also leads to N2O emissions that you didn’t address at all. 6. Yes, there were a lot of ruminants in the past, but in the past, we didn’t have a climate crisis and the atmosphere was in balance. In a world with climate change, we have to do whatever it takes to reduce warming including diverging from what might be prehistorically true. This is an appeal to nature fallacy, that doesn’t hold up in the modern world. 7. Veganism is not the end all be all, but most vegans also take significant steps to address their personal carbon emissions across the board. You will never hear a vegan deny that fossil fuels are the main contributor to climate change. 8. Also, you never addressed livestock emissions from a land-use change such as land degradation or deforestation (especially in places like the Amazon rainforest). If so much land can only be used for animal agriculture why are we perpetually expanding into natural ecosystems to create more land for it? 9. What I’ve Learned, I beg you to stop presenting topics as though you have overturned the scientific consensus on a topic. You have a big audience who put a lot of trust in your content. You have a duty to present an issue accurately. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you just simply misunderstand the food system and were hoodwinked a bit by Dr. Frank Mitloehner. What you’ll find is that the animal sciences are full of people who own animal farms. It often presents a clear violation of conflict of interest in research, because researchers have a vested interest in the outcomes of studies. This is particularly pronounced in studies that are life cycle analysis/modeling because there is an enormous amount of subjectivity that goes into the design of this type of study. The responsible thing would be to follow this video with another video discussing some of the ways you misrepresented this very important issue."
4:34 one piece of criticism, not every place is fit to grow a particular thing, you can’t just plant whatever you want anywhere you want, I live in the Netherlands where we have polders (which you can look up if you want) that have silty soil thanks to how they are created, and that doesn’t let much grow other than grass and conveniently also tulips
That is of course correct, but no problem if you want the world to go vegan. You can just take all the land that is currently occupied by farm animals and give it back to nature and take some of the land that is currently used to grow crops for the farm animals and grow food for people instead. The rest you can again give back to nature.
My immediate thought with the beef rice comparison: 'Hmmmm, I've just become vegetarian/vegan, I used to have a beef cassorole with rice for dinner, but now I must replace the beef with something else. What substitutes could I make? How about m o r e r i c e?
-Is the livestock feed being grown on land that human edible crops can be suitably grown on? -Are the pasture and grazing lands suitable for human edible crops? -Cattle is not one food item, have you not heard of dairy? -You keep talking about beef being inefficient calorically when calories particularly in western countries are in overabundance -So now we're pivoting and acknowledging not all the land used in meat production can be used to grow food but instead talk about reforesting? Why don't we want to use it for food? You were just criticizing the agricultural land being supposedly wasted on animal feed. What even makes you think humans would reforest that land instead of finding a more economical use for it? You are correct about CH4 being a more potent GHG in that it has 21x more heat trapping ability, however CO2 once introduced remains in the atmosphere between 300 to 1000 years whereas for CH4 it's around 9 to 14 years. You say the short life cycle is a good reason to focus on CH4, I think that makes it a less important issue and a smokescreen deflecting from the real issue. -The difference between CH4 from cattle and food waste is that while both are part of the natural carbon cycle, we actually get way more out of cattle than food waste. He doesn't create a dichotomy that you can't be Vegan and care about food waste, he lays out the fact that humans tend to waste more plant based foods than animal based. Edit: Looking at your film-making work and Animal Rights Activist history, I'd say if you're going to criticize someone else for having ulterior motives, you're clearly also in a position to personally gain by misleading people on this topic.
@@theSafetyCar Theoretically you could reforest some of the land, key word here being some. One requirement for the land to be reforested is that said land has to be suitable for forests, and a lot of land used for animal agriculture was never forest to begin with. It was grassland and still is grassland today. The only "better use" alternative he proposes for the land is reforestation, to which I would oppose the claim that most of this land is even suitable for forest. I'm not convinced by the idea that meat production is a waste of land. If I go through the food present in my home (granted I'm not American) I can see according to nutritional information the meats are a more efficient in providing protein per calorie. With exercise and paying attention to my food intake I've been able to make myself way healthier than I was before the pandemic started, and a big part of that was meat being an efficient protein food. There's also the subjective that I enjoy meat and meat is incredibly important to the food culture where I'm from. As for the CO2 and CH4, could the situation be improved? Sure less CH4 means less heat absorbed, but the long-term impact of CH4 doesn't hold a candle to all the carbon we are introducing from the Geological Carbon cycle, which should be our focus. There's also the impact that CO2 has on our cognitive functionality. The concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere have increased from 300 ppm to 400 ppm in natural landscapes and 500 ppm in urban areas. Cognitive functionality has been shown to decrease by 15% in 1000 ppm. CO2 not only warms our climate but also reduces our Cognitive functionality and as a result ability to combat climate change. We can waste our time fighting over implementing veganism, but that's all effort that could be put into reducing fossil fuel emissions and other measures to reduce CO2 levels. Based on Ed's past work and moral stances on meat, I think it's possible Ed is more concerned with reducing meat consumption than he is with reducing the impacts of climate change, and that's why I think a lot of the points he makes are presented in the way that they are, without the context of how much more impactful Geological Cycle CO2 is than CH4, without the context that calories aren't an issue. Should we have more forests? Sure but let's not pretend that it's the meat industry standing in the way of that. Edit: It's also worth mentioning that even in a lot of lands suitable for human edible food, currently being used for animal production, fruits and vegetables aren't the kinds human edible crops that could be grown there, it's grains, and grains are a super nutrient inefficient food. A good vegetarian diet needs a lot of fruits and vegetables, which is not something fields only suitable for grain crops can provide.
@@hax7998 I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say, but the western prairies and grasslands exist and there is a lot of meat production coming out of those areas.
@@marsbolcan9311 there is not a LOT of meat production coming out of these areas. Only about 1% of meat comes from grassfed cows. Grassfed is not sustainable anyway, not for the entire population.
@@Combinationlock ah yeah because it is so smart to believe that humans would eat all the animal feed if we stop farming animals, selfishness really makes people dumb
Grazing land =/= farmable land. This is addressed in the video you are critiquing and you just ignore it. You frequently repeat "lets grow food on grazing land" assuming that is possible to just swap out land for any use case.
I noticed that too. However, what if the land used for growing crops for animals, double that of the land used for humans in the US, was used for human crops? That could work.
@@mattruscoe4353 There are no economic incentives to do so. We don't have a shortage of carbs, in fact we have a very huge surplus of them. Theoretically, we have a lot of land that can be turned into flourishing forests using our industrial capacity. There's a proposal to plant 1 trillion trees that costs like $300 billion, the problem is no one is willing to pay for it. But I think we don't need to be carbon-negative to solve climate change although it certainly helps, and more biodiverse forests would certainly make earth green again. Still, we don't *need* to turn grasslands to forests. We only need to be carbon-neutral and stop using fossil fuels.
He actually did address this, he stated that not all land used in animal agriculture can be used for farming. But it does not have to be, estimates show that if the US went vegan we could reduce our agricultural land usage by around 70%. Some of that 70% will be that land that is unsuitable for farming, and that 70% can be restored and rewilded to help sequester carbon.
@@Combinationlock He pointed out several mistakes and also how some of the stuff WIL said can easily be misleading, and selectively went against some of his own points without us noticing. Obviously there's too much to mention in a short comment (the video is after all 26 minutes long). The study that WIL and the guy he interviewed refer to, saying that if everyone in the US stopped eating animal products, then it will only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2.6%, that's very wrong, and they make crazy assumptions, such as humans needing to eat all the food we currently give to animals and that everyone would eat 4700 calories a day. Even then there are other mistakes as well. Then there's the thing about the land that "would go to waste" if we don't use it for grazing livestock, since that is also wrong. It wouldn't go to waste, and we could in fact make a big, positive environmental impact if we did use that land better. There was also the stuff about how much water is used to make beef, and even if we use the numbers that WIL refer to himself, then it is very clear that animal products use much more water than crops for human consumption. WIL use the example of nuts as the only outlier, but even considering that case, then in California (I think it was that state, but I might be wrong), there is still much more water being used on animal products. WIL tried to justify some of the extra water use for beef by saying it is much more nutrient dense than white rice, which is also an incredibly bad example to use. It was easy to put together vegan food for the same amount of water use as the beef, and it being more nutrient dense. There were also a whole lot of other smaller points (and maybe bigger ones I missed too) that he mentioned as well, so I'd recommend watching it.
Okay... Remember the book Animal Farm, where the two pigs are trying to convince the rest of the farm animals of their own point, and the animals are always convinced by whoever is speaking at the time? I feel like the farm animals. How does one solve this conundrum, without being any good at researching?
you don't have to be good at researching to accurately inform yourself. There's plenty of academic research that you can find and read without needed a background in research.
That book is about communism my guy, doesn’t quite apply here, but I guess I get it a little, when watching videos like this, don’t trust what anyone says, science as a whole is biased, you are taught fair tests at school but in life it is extremely hard to make a fair test, so in other words, your mind makes your own opinions, if you can’t decide who to trust, trust neither
This is one of the reasons why economic power breaks democratic systems. You can use money to create a false standpoint between which and reality people start looking for the middle ground to believe in. In a democracy, all power has to root in the voters. Every one of the voters has to have an equal share of power. There is no power left over which could be distributed according to capital. In a well functioning democracy, all channels in which money can be turned into political power have to be closed. That reaches from examples like influence on the voters directly to corruption and economically rooted lobbyism to unequal political advertisement.
Interesting video, but I want to point out couple of thing. It would be great to see more details on them: 1. It's vary common that studies and research is funded by the companies, that have direct interest and investment in that area. Who should be funding the "meat studies" the soybean producers? Or maybe fishing industry? There always be a problem of who funded the studies, but by itself it's not the proof it was correct or wrong. Also the fact one scholar made bad research, does not mean automatically the others do. You need to prove the certain research is incorrect. Sorry, but this is not an argument. 2. You say the metrics are important and we should use calories instead of weight, but then you say it is irrelevant. It's very confusing. 3. The main rule of research is that you study one factor only at a time and assume everything else stays the same - ceteris paribus. So it means that research, that only accounts the direct emissions of meat is correct. If it would try to calculate the changes in other productions in chain, it would make it very inaccurate. Also you say it like, the change from farming for animals to farming for humans automatically means that farming will be emitting less greenhouse gasses. 4. The Lifecycle approach to product is very problematic, which was shown in many studies, including the ones that say meat is responsible for over 10% of emissions. The lifecycle approach includes energy, water, transport, labor, secondary emissions. But those will be there if you switch from meat to soy, corn or other products. It's also problematic, because one truck can transport multiple types of goods. They still need to be there, in other proportions, but it's impossible to accurately say how they will change. And if the transport sector and energy sector changes, that will decrease the emissions of lifecycle of all products. Taking this, we should use direct emissions for comparison. 5. Point on blue water consumption - I think in both videos it presented in wrong way. You state that it is important how much blue water is used in total and that calories matter. So you should use how much water per calorie is used. In case of beef it's 0.36, so twice as much as in case of vegetables (0.18 l/kcal), but eggs use 0.17 and pig meat uses 0.16 l/kcal, so it's not that all good for plant based farming. (not only nuts are using a lot of water per kcal 0.55 but also fruits use 0.32 l/kcal almost the same as beef). So the question you should really answer is, how much water would be used when we would switch to plant based food, but maintaining the same caloric production.
Great comment. That would be awesome to hear. For me it would be the first time to hear a cost benefit analysis before making drastic changes to society.
1. But how it is that research funded by the meat industry always favours meat industry, and at the same time is completely opposite to the rest of the research? 5. Why do you average the amount of water for every vegetable and compare it to the amount only for one type of meat? Of course lettuce is going to have more water per calorie, as it has barely any calories. Compare meat to the soy as it is the main source of protein and calories in plant based diet. Also, did you took into account the proportions of certain meats and vegetables in an average diet? Which diet uses less blue water per calorie?
In response to your third point, I think that's fair for a study to do that, and the results are interesting - but the results are absolutely being misinterpreted now they've made it into the real world to fit people's agenda. Many people won't understand that all other variables are being kept the same so It should be made clear that it is a scenario that would never exist if people were to switch to a plant based diet. The inefficiencies that would lead to us eating 4700kcal per day of mainly cereals and soy, could be cut out leading to far better outcomes. That's not what is presented when people refer to the numbers in that study so it's important to point out it's not representative of any real change that would occur.
You know, there's always the ethical point, that shouldn't be ignored. I very unfortunately ended up in farming animals, not my choice. I was horrendous
@@aristotlespupil136 Eh? The OP post is not talking about the underlying process of going vegan - therefore what you're saying is not analogous. The impracticality of convincing everyone to stop fighting to achieve world peace is irrelevant when there is a power invoked to instantly make it happen.
WIL loves telling his followers that they shouldn´t feel guilty about their lifestyile. That is what gets him most likes. And I would even say he should have written "paid promotion" as caption in his video.
He provides excuses for those who want them. The video was clearly tailored for them. The false choice fallacy between almonds and beef instantly gave it away.
Omg. Really, just read, or watch the video. Go to the statistics of how many calories livestock need for raising and how much comes from grain. I have no time to endlessly discuss with anyone who is unable to challenge its own beliefs. It is so ludicrous when meat eaters criticize vegans as if they held a dogma. When vegans are the ones who challenged their own preconceptions about the way we treat animals and decided to change, regardless of how much they could miss eating chesse, etc. Really, how much more intellectual honesty can you ask for to someone who already changed a lifestyle after realizing it was a mistake.
When we speak about food efficiency I would love to know which way is the most efficient at providing all the 4 essentials: 1) amino acids. 2) fatty acids. 3) vitamins. 4) minerals. Only debating about macros and calories doesn’t do the discussion about sustainable health justice
cows that's the answer it's well studied by science the scientific consensus is that it's complicated and depends on many factors, but the overall top, if any one thing can be said to be, is cows
1: humans need much less protein than they think thanks to marketing. Resistance training makes a bigger difference than anything else. Human milk is only 5-6% protein calories. Plus legumes are plentiful in protein, lentils are 40% calories from it. Fatty acids are more complex but omega 6 isn't a worry for sure and omega 3 we probably already don't get enough of. Eating greens and other plants gets us closer and algea supplements exist for those worries about it. Notable most animals don't need to supplement it. Vitamins much the same if you're eating a varies diet, and for B12 we even have to inject that into animals because their diet is deficient in it. And minerals aren't so difficult in practice.
@@mikafoxx2717 Marketing isn't pushing the idea that people need a lot of protein. Vegans and bodybuilders are trying to get more protein, and we hear about it by word of mouth. Pretty much nobody is trying to get less protein, so the community consensus in most peoples' minds is that protein is something we ought to have more of if anything. Marketing just brags about anything people think is good ("our product contains protein!" "our product is gluten free!" "our product has low sodium!"). People don't need very much protein if they have a significant amount of animal products in their diet. Vegetarian diets require much greater amounts of protein because the types of protein and amino acids from plants are not right for the human body. The amount of protein in high-protein plants like rice or potatoes seems high enough if you look at how much beef or chicken a person needs to meet their protein requirements, but when you check how much protein a person needs when all of their protein comes from plants, suddenly the amount in rice and potatoes seems like barely enough.
@@TheReaverOfDarkness You have some good points. Most people do get enough protein, short of eating processed stuff like just sugar wheat and oil. And exercise is too rare. Makes sense that bodybuilders want to get more protein, though it's inversely related to longevity to eat a high protein diet. Up to 1.6g/kg lean bodyweight is about the maximum protein that can be utilized, even under huge desire to use it. But even a kilo of muscle mass is only 230g of actual proteins over maintenance need. One could build a lot of muscle on just 80g a day of protein from any source. Prisoners gain a whole lot on even less than that.
It's the 100 companies or whatever that make all the bad things. That means I can do no wrong. I'll just burn my trash in a garden because veganism is classist or racist or sexist I forgot. But its definitely bad. Fishing is awesome tho. It definitely helps the oceans by killing everything in it. The oceans are overpopulated anyways. Or was it the world overpopulated
he is saying that we should focus on bigger problems, meat consumption is not going to make the planet so hot we cant live here anymre but burning fossil fuels will
I mean that's just psychological bias that we are all privy to. I bet every person owns or uses something that directly harms the environment that they wouldn't want to give up, such as cars, cellphones, most forms of clothing, etc. My biggest gripe with the vegan community is how they demonize people who eat meat, and claim that non vegans are evil people who hate the environment, while they drive off to work in a fossil fueled car. I do agree that vegetarianism is an effective way to reduce carbon emissions, but there are other ways as well. Edited for grammar
@@collamus6901 ed always says nomvegans are not evil. He often tells the story of how he became vegan. And concludes I wasnt evil when I wasnt vegan. I dont know what vegans you are talking about. This guy is someone that most vegans agree with and he doesn't act in the way you described
I always find it funny when they talk about methane production.. and yet they never bring up the fact that the Earth used to have far more bullvine running around and it does today. For instance the massive herds of Buffalo across America. Or the reality that 1 dairy cow today produces four times the milk of one in the 1960s. Or the factor that they've discovered that by feeding seaweed to cows. Even only 1% of it they're getting 40% less methane per animal. overall though I kind of think would be kind of cool if people start eating more fish. Way easier to raise.
@@skeletorrocks2452 I mean these are good points but I'm pretty certain that there have never been more cattle than now, there's literally over a billion cows on earth rn, even the bison herds in NA at their peak wouldn't even come close to that number. And even if they did it wouldn't matter because the Earth naturally needs SOME greenhouse gases to maintain its climate but human industrialization is really what threw this entire thing out of balance with us dumping an unimaginable amount of carbon into the atmosphere
@@Dell-ol6hb You do have a point. But then add on all the other grass eating animals that used to exist in large numbers in the wild. So ultimately we replaced a large number of wild animals with domestic ones. Domestic ones that can literally be bred over time to produce less methane. Along with better feed options. It's a problem that will probably be solved in our lifetime. I mean consider that they've bred milk cows that produce four times the milk then the average cow 70 years ago. If anything the people shouldn't be so worried about cow methane.. Really they should be concerned about if the climate does warm. All the methane trapped in the tundra and under it. There's a documentary on Tundra sinkholes. If you consider all the Ancients ancient stored methane that could be slowly released from the Tundra melt. It kind of makes the cow thing look like a joke.
@@skeletorrocks2452 you're right, I'm not disagreeing that there are other more pressing issues, we need to tackle this issue on every front we possibly can which includes domesticated animals and the industrialization of livestock as well as all other aspects of our lives. Ultimately the easiest way to vastly reduce our fossil fuel consumption (and by extension our excess c02 production) is by transitioning to fully renewable energy production
@Road Hobbit Start with yourself ☠️🤭 But on a serious note. Most of the problems that people claim are the problem could easily be slowly changed. And if you want to reduce the population. Stop giving food to the third world. And stop giving tax benefits for morons pumping out children in the first world. And simply slowly change over to better technology. But realistically. All these common-borns always talking about humans are the problem. I happen to take up the George Carlin outlook on this. When this planet wants to it will shake us off with a meteor or something.
"What I Learned" deleted all my rebuttal comments from 3 different YT accounts I used (I didn't use links)---- seems like a really shady dude. He's spewing dangerous misinformation and disinformation, and seems intellectually dishonest. Shame on him.....
There were people claiming in the '90s that there were more trees in the US at that time than in the 1800s. Not sure where that claim came from, but yeah, that's about the size of it.
I agree. I do like MicTheVegan, but I realise he is also biased. However, he does present the science for each of his claims. Kurzgesagt is pretty unbiased imo, but they only have one or two videos on the subject.
what? that is not true, the way to go about not being biased is using objective data, it is just that because it is an economy based subject people have a hard time being objective , and unfortunately a lot of average people do not understand or know if the data presented is correct or not so they decide that it is ultimately an ethic or moral choice , when it should just be a logical one based on the fact that if we do not take better decisions we will all die
For those interested, What I've Learned responded to this video. You can see the response by going over to What I've Learned's video - Eating less meat won't save the planet. The link to the response is in the video's description.
The worst thing about the video is that it has made such a large impact on a lot of omnivores. So many people in the comment saying " finnally and unbiased video on meat" meanwhile the video is insaly biased towards meat. Tons of conformation for their bias.
@Vegan Vamshi Krishnan i live in a third world country with 40% annual inflation and I'm a student. It would bankrupt me to go vegan while getting my nutritional needs met.
@@everflores9484 Sorry if this is ignorant but isnt plants like beans and rice quite cheap? I see meat as something expensive, at least thats how its been historically and currently in first world countries.
@@Freakyjohnsson1 white rice? Yeah. Beans not so much. I practice a very intensive sport and are on my feet for most of the day. Meat here is not as expensive tbh and it covers my caloric and nutritional needs very well. I don't even eat that much but according to my nutritionist, it wouldn't do me any good to go veggie right. Not on my budget at least lol
One of the main and less talked about problems when it comes to environmental impact of meat/crop is the use of fertilizers. It is scientifically proven that synthetic fertilizers contain much more nitrous oxide and phosphates than organic ones leading to much more environmental pollution (increase in N20 air emissions and groundwater pollution) while reducing soil quality. Cutting meat production to zero, as this video suggests, will lead to greater synthetic fertilizer usage to offset the loss of organic fertilizer production. This in turn will reduce the impact of removing animal agriculture land on emissions. My point being that being extremist and advocating for total elimination of meat production is largely unbeneficial. Optimizing parts of the production chain (balance of meat vs crop production) is in my opinion a much better way forward than altogether removing the production of one food group. Humans have evolved as omnivores and eating both meat and plants alike constitutes a balanced diet.
I don't know a lot about fertilizers. I will take for granted for this argument that animal-sourced fertilizers may be superior to synthetic fertilizers in terms of environmental impact, as you say. I want to point out though that in the US about 2/3 of all crops are used to feed animals. We would need only a fraction of these crops to make up for the lost calories. Not having to feed the animals with crops in the first place would therefore massively cut the overall amount of fertilizer needed for crops. Does that make sense to you or am I missing something? Let me know, happy to learn!
Even if there wasn't such a thing as vegan organic fertilizers, currently we produce 20x the animal waste than can be used in manure. It's actually an ecological disaster, so another reason to stop relying on animals for food. We can keep them around in diminished populations if necessary, but to get to the point where there is even a problem 95%+ of current meat eaters would have to go vegan.
Yeah, plant based research is never compromised. But when the meat industry has to fund research (for there to be actual meat research) then it's compromised. The sign of a true vegan is that you denounce the meat industry for doing the exact same thing that the plant industry is doing. Never mind that the meat industry is doing it far less.
@@wtfronsson do you really believe that all studies done in favour of plant based diets are driven by some desire to make everyone vegan?! Surely no one would want to fund that, large majorities of plant based product is bought for animals to eat, almost every industry should be against this movement. Another alternative is perhaps there is truth to the papers in favour of plant based diets and the agriculture industry are throwing their toys out the pram. It all sounds very much like big Tobacco, you think the meat industries wouldn’t put up a fight?
@@jenuism8506 Yes, anything that says you should eat a diet mainly consisting of plants is BS. This is my stance on the matter, and many doctors and other experts are also trying to bring light to this. Actual comparative studies to a carnivore diet barely exist. You have to look at how many carnivore studies exist vs plant based studies. And this tells you a whole lot about which diet the establishment is trying to hide. Yes I know you disagree, but that's fine. Let's disagree. You can call the meat industry out for acting like Big Tobacco, and I will call out the plant based cult for the same. There's also the matter of organ meats not being promoted, and pretty much all meat being cooked instead of raw. Our bodies evolved with raw meat, including lots of organ meat. So it's just clear what we should be eating. Organ meats have incredible nutrition to weight ratios. Even if you did everything else wrong, you'd be quite healthy just eating a pound of raw beef liver every week. And maybe some fat from another source.
@@wtfronsson I was going to laugh and call out the fibre deficiency backing up into your brain space, but now I am genuinely scared. Eat raw organs? Are you a movie monster or an terror from some legend? Windigo? Chupacabra? Do you drink the blood of infants as well?
0:29 Earthling Ed: "Joseph ... makes so many ridiculous and anti-scientific points, and I'm going to go through and debunk each and every one of them" 0:47 poisoning the well, ad hominem (he explains that Dr. Frank Mittloehner is paid by the agricultural industry) 1:27 Earthling Ed claims that Dr. Mittloehner's points go against the scientific consensus but never demonstrates this. He also claims that Dr. Mittloehner has been criticized by experts and shows four quotes on screen criticizing him, but the quotes aren't labeled and no sources are given for them. They also appear to be lacking important context, but it's pretty difficult to find out for sure when he doesn't even say where the quotes are from. 1:51 red herring, motte and bailey (he points out that the weight of the food isn't necessarily the best metric, which is dodging the actual point being made which is that many of these crops aren't edible to humans in the first place) 3:01 he claims that foods being inedible to humans is not relevant, that it's all about how the land is used (ignoring the point made in the video that not all land can be used to grow human food crops) 3:19 Earthling Ed: "Now to give you a sense of perspective, in the US, animal farming uses ten times more land than plant-based farming for human consumption." completely ignoring that this point is addressed in the video in-depth and preferring to just toss it out there as one of the vegan favorite go-to quips that sounds like a good argument against meat despite it having been debunked so many times. 3:33 lie, Earthling Ed says that What I've Learned "conveniently glosses over" the following point that land which is used to grow animal feed could be used to grow human food. This is false. What I've Learned does indeed talk about this point, and demonstrates that much of this land cannot in fact be used to grow human food. There's nothing of value in this video. I'm four minutes in and have yet to see anything which isn't logically fallacious or an outright lie.
@@wtfronsson i'm sorry but killing 70 billion animals in a year is not natural nor sustainable for the planet. Besides, the living conditions of those animals are far from "natural".
@@wtfronsson Humans have always tried to distance themselves from nature through scientific discoveries and cultural development. Something that is natural is not automatically ideal
@@laranipic3606 Plant agriculture is killing animals too. Smaller animals, but I don't believe the principle of minimizing harm says anything about the size of the harmed animal. Rodents and insects are dying because of your soy and grain fields. Cows on a pasture are not killing anything, unless maybe they step on something. The cows don't need to die until they stop milking, which is a healthy age. This is already the standard in my country. We have no beef cattle, only milk cattle that becomes beef once the milk stops. 97% grass fed. No problems here. If some other country can't do the same, don't blame us. There is plenty of room on Earth for free range meat, dairy and eggs for all who want it. Of course there is, look at all the empty room! And also, the only effective way of reversing desertification is to make it a cow pasture, and let the cows keep dumping there for a while. Presto, desert is turned into land you can even use for farming your precious plants. Isn't that something?
@@oivanurminen8946 Science doesn't have to be distancing from nature. Discoveries and advancements can be used to be more in line with nature instead of less. Something that is unnatural is by default more likely to harm your body. Because that body was not evolved eating _anything_ unnatural, only natural. There is no natural culture that made it this far without heavy emphasis on meat. India figured out they can enforce the cast system more effectively, if the low cast thinks meat isn't good for them. So they were probably the first veggie propagandists, starting thousands of years ago. Plato said don't feed your slaves meat, and they will be easier to control.
I was waiting for Ed and his team to address this. The channel "Veganism Unspun" did a particularly good job of debunking the What I Learned video too....
@@veganfortheanimals6994 I already watched it, and agree with you - the video from „Veganism Unspun” was very informative and revealing. I find it very expressive that both Ed’s and Veganism Unspun’s video manage to debunk Joseph’s video with both studies and incredible humor and funny comparisons.
@@veganfortheanimals6994 Dr. Gil Carvalho from "Nutrition Made Simple!" did a review of the video too and explained the flawed studies that WIL cites and even mentioned that the study about 2.6% GHG reduction had received major kickback from a lot of peers when it was published and he basically said that it's a very misleading video but he was very polite about it. And he's not even vegan! WIL even responded in the comments and was literally grasping at straws.
@@MukulVyas5 yes, I saw that video too and called out WIL for deleting my rebuttal comments....the WIL guy seems really intellectually dishonest with his video and with rebuttal comments disappearing
* ~.FACT CHECK.~ * 4:16 Not all the land used for growing food for animals is suitable for people food agriculture use. 5:01 Ethanol based fuel doesnt have a net positive impact on carbon emissions. And just a little percentage of crops are usable for this. 5:06 If it isnt proffitable to make paper this way, who is going to pay for that labor? unreallistic. Again, a dream where maybe a couple crops could be used. Basically, most of the residues of the crops arent nearly as profitable or useable as he preaches. That would be amazing, but thats not the reallity and the research for those kind of technologies were that system could be used is just a wild dream -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now about the carbon emissions: 5:27 Again, not all the farmland used to grow food for cattle is suitable for any use, including gigantic forests full of life and secluders of carbon. Thats not reallistic at all, indeed maximizing the margin for unreallistic values. The owners of those farmlands wont be happy to give up their properties and stop producing anything at all. People are conducted by profits, and so that wont happen unless the Federal govmt stops the "freedom" of civils. No Give me a real number please! 14:00 Perfectly fine for the most part, but the comprenhension of this topic is highly biased. All that explanation ultimatly means is that ALL the carbon that cattle produce by eating grass, is the net amount produced by the cattle consumption of plants for the past 12 years. Yes, 12 years is the average lifespan of methane. TWELVE. Not 10 nor 20. Afterwards that carbon dioxide is the same as what the plants used to grow to feed the cattle, cancelling each other. Not all the livestock has the same carbon cycle neither. Cows are the worst on this regard, but this doesnt mean all livestock are the same. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks for your attention. Hope this could prove some facts. IMO on a climate change perspective, the effect of cattle is highly lower than the rest of factors in our lifestyle. If you trully want to save the planet, eating vegan isnt even a tenth as usefull as using a bycycle, lower your energetic consumption, etc. And all that is thanks to the carbon cycle. People are used to separate those two (emissions vs carbon capture) which shouldnt be the case, at least on this matter. *You dont feed cows with fossil fuels, just your car.*
Have you tried soy milk? It also tastes pretty good imo. Its emissions are a little bit higher, but water use and land use are both lower. Especially water use, almost half the footprint. (Poore & Nemecek, 2018)
i am not sure that comparing calories is very good analogy when you are comparing two different digestive systems, please correct me if I am wrong, but due to the cow's different digestive system they can actually get more "energy" out of pasture grass because they can break it down more. Human's can't eat grass and gain a lot of energy out of it bc our bodies can't break it down so it makes sense that we'd "lower" the amount of calories it provides to us, bc we simply can't access most of it like a cow can. However i do agree with the latter argument that the amount of land used is WAY more important. If we have terraformed the land for agriculture by reducing or replacing natives species that are efficient at GHG sequestering, then that is a BIG issue.
You're correct: cows are polygastrics (several stochas, literally) and their digestive system is capable of extracting nutrients from raw grass while monogastrics (like us) can't. ~70% of the agricultural lands are permanents pastures. Those surfaces are used for animal agriculture since they can't be used for crops for various reasons and in general they are pretty efficient at GHG sequestration. You're very right at posing the issue toward the croplands: no matter the destination (animal or humans), the improvement of the cultivation methods in order to sequester more carbon on those surfaces (no till, permanent cover, etc.) is key, in my opinion, to improve the agricultural GHG balance. Very good view on the situation imo 👍
We do get nutrients from raw plants Humans are herbivores, and thus have the digestive system of one We are mongastric herbivores,.while cows are multi chambered herbivores You said humans can't eat grass. But we do. Wheat is a type of grass
@@antioxidantfool7362 ik we can get nutrients from raw plants, but when it comes to some things like prairie grass, which cows eat, cooking it isn't goin to help much. Humans can choose to be herbivores, or omnivores, i mean since we have access to supplements and pills we can pretty much eat watever we want within reason
@@okidoxb4846 I don't think you understand. Being an herbivore does not mean that animal can eat literally any plant on earth. And you are making a false comparison. A cow can eat praise grass, but a human can't, so that means we aren't herbivores? Humans and cows are both herbivores, but are still different species. Humans are anatomically herbivores. We have no business eating animals unless in a starvation situation
@@antioxidantfool7362 _"Humans are herbivores"_ No they're not. Gary Yourofsky is a pathological liar. It's important to avoid propagating this bs because some people could believe that and that could cause health issues to some. _"We are monogastric herbivores"_ No we're not. Horses, rabbits are. In any case their are way less effective at extracting effective nutriments from the grass than polygastrics. Most of them need to address this with different strategies: the rabbit eats its droppings back (don't try it). The horse has specific bacteria's in its digestive tube (we don't). Bottom line: you can eat grass but you can't digest it, you'd get almost nothing from it but undigested fibers. _"Wheat is a type of grass"_ And since we're not herbivorous, we eat the grain, not the straw.
I love how Ed at the end is like "If you've been sent this video by a vegan friend..." because that is exactly what I'll do if anyone sends me that WIL video
@@georgewashingtom6516 have you watched any slaughterhouse footage? It's one thing knowing your food is a dead body when we've been raised to believe it's normal, it's another to watch it die before eating it.
@@graystone2802 wooosh what other animals do is irrelevant to humans killing sentient beings without any need for it. We have moral agency and we can generally live perfectly fine without animal products.
@@graystone2802 I think Angela explained it pretty well. Meat isn't a requirement so the mass genocide we commit is purely recreational. We have moral agency, we understand that killing is wrong and feel empathy for the victims whilst actually predatory animals don't.
What I've learned should rename his channel to What I learned According To My Confirmation Bias He doesn't really want to learn. He wants to establish what he thought he knows with "science" and fallacious logic so that he really doesn't have to change anything about himself when it comes to hid diet. 🤣
@@lux_ye13 ('Academic philosophy answer' warning). There are two ways in which your statement can be correct: (1) under error theory - then ok but cringe; (2) Humean rejection of an ought - basically, there are some moral philosophers who would deny the sensical nature of "an ought" but still claim that moral statements are truth-apt and that some are in fact true. So in this view nothing changes that much because even though they can't say "someone has to (ought to) do smth" they still say "it would be better is sb did smth" and it's well-replicating psychological knowledge that if we have reasons to act (eg to not buy meat) and no overriding reasons to the contrary, then a mentally healthy human being would almost always act in this way. So if "What I've Learned" guy were to agree on everything with Ed (and with implications of matters agreed upon) then it would be very likely that he would take some actions to ameliorate the cognitive dissonance between those reasons and his action (maybe not being full vegan but at least limit or decrease animal products). // There's some chance that this comment is useful or smth so here you go.
@@lux_ye13 In formal ethics - see my previous comment (if smth would be better, but it's not true that sb has to do something that's the position "(2)" I mentioned), additionally, in human right ethics it's more complicated eg bc by contributing to climate change you don't *directly* harm anyone, just indirectly it's probable that you do harm some people in the future, so it's not so clear. In law - prohibiting eating anything would be ridiculous. It's not even illegal to eat sand (and eating humans is rarely *directly* illegal, in most countries acts of cannibalism are commonly charged not for eating but for murder or desecration of corpses). BUT I think one could make a good case for taxing more on things that have super high carbon emissions (like meat). And if we were in extremely bad situation like: meat industry causing global pandemic every 5 years bc of higher mutation rates or/and antibiotics resistance started to happen THEN I think it would be justifiable to make some legal restrictions on selling it (but not eating it).
Table of contents: Claim: We shouldn’t measure edible and inedible feed in terms of weight, but calories. ・Disagree, but I can see where he’s coming from. We should measure in weight as calorie content isn’t particularly useful for farmers when talking about amounts of livestock feed. However, I suppose knowing how many calories of human-edible feed livestock are eating would be useful to know for these types of discussions. 2. Claim: Animal farming uses a lot of land, and that land that should be used in other ways. ・Misleading. Animal farming may use plenty of land, but you can’t grow crops on most of that land. 3. Claim: 127M acres is used to grow food exclusively for animals. ・False. Land is used to grow crops. The crops that take up the majority of the acreage (corn and soy) are not grown “exclusively” for feeding animals. 4. Claim: We could take cropland used for animals and grow food for 350M people. ・Data provided does not support this claim. The suggested replacements for beef, pork, chicken and eggs in the study cited would not be adequately nourishing. 5. Claim: Grazing land would be better suited for something else. ・Unrealistic. The current use of grazing land is very likely the best use for reasons explained in detail below. 6. Claim: We could compost 43 billion kgs of crop residues instead of feeding them to animals. ・Unrealistic, overly optimistic scenario. This drastically underestimates how massive of an undertaking this would be. It would require 8,600 new large scale composting operations. 7. Claim: Authors of a study Joseph cited assumed an overly grain-rich diet for Americans in their simulation and this calls into question their credibility. ・Irrelevant. Nutrient adequacy was not discussed in my original video. Misses the objective of the study. While this may seem odd at first, there was a reason this assumption was made in the study. 8. Claim: We could grow something else with the land in Hall and White’s scenario. ・Feasibility remains to be proved. How much of that land is actually suitable for growing other things is debatable and irrigation limitations need to be considered as is explained in Hall and White’s paper. 9. Claim: Hall and White assuming a very high calorie diet for Americans in their simulation calls into question the credibility of the study. ・Irrelevant. Misses the objective of the study. The large calorie consumption actually reflects the objective of the study. Explained below. 10. Claim: Hall and White’s assumption that crop residues would be burned in their simulation is nonsensical. ・Gerald misses important information. See point #6 above. What are we to do with 43 million tons of residues per year? There is sound reasoning behind the incineration scenario. 11. Claim: Cattle emissions are too large considering the amount of calories they provide. ・Misleading. Beef is not prized for its calorie content but for a wide variety of key nutrients. 12. Claim: A scenario where Americans obtain 100% of their calories from beef would be environmentally damaging. ・Irrelevant. While many are discussing the environmental benefits of an entirely plant-based diet these days, no one is suggesting environmental benefits from a 100% beef diet. 13. Claim: Half of all agricultural land is used for beef production. ・Misleading. Most agricultural land is not suitable for crops, but is for animal agriculture. 14. Claim: A scenario where Americans obtain 100% of their calories from beef would require far too much land. ・Irrelevant. For similar reasons as point #12. 15. Claim: Beef-related emissions aren’t 2% they’re 3.7% according to life cycle analysis. ・Very nuanced topic that requires more discussion. This is discussed in detail in section C titled “Poore and Nemecek study Flaws and the difficulties with life cycle analyses.” 16. Claim: Methane emissions from animal agriculture may be higher than official data suggests. ・Speculation. Top-down models for measuring methane are not yet sophisticated enough to pinpoint the reason for the discrepancy with bottom-up models, this is an unresolved question. 17. Claim: Agricultural emissions could be reduced 61 to 73% by a plant-based food system. ・Insufficient evidence for this statement considering the many flaws listed in point #21 18. Claim: We can expect a 6.4 to 7.7% reduction in emissions if everyone went vegan. ・Insufficient evidence. See section C 19. Claim: We can discontinue animal agriculture and “rewild” the freed-up land; we don’t need it for food production. ・Doesn’t consider the magnitude of the challenge of feeding an expected 9.5 billion people. ・Well-managed cattle can provide food while improving soil health and the soil’s carbon sequestration ability. This will be invaluable going forward. Explained in detail in section C. 20. Claim: We could sequester 8.1 billion metric tons of CO2 - 15% of our emissions if we went plant based globally. ・Insufficient evidence. See section C. 21. (14:58) - Says a plant-based food system would address 21.4 to 22.7% of emissions. ・Insufficient evidence for this statement considering the many flaws listed in section C. 22. Claim: Because the amount of agricultural land per person in the U.S. is double the world average, the carbon capture potential of rewilding U.S. agricultural land may be higher than other areas. ・Non sequitur. More agricultural land per person doesn’t mean more agricultural land… 23. Claim: Joseph’s description of the carbon cycle is wrong. ・It's not. After saying the explanation in my video is wrong, he goes on to explain pretty much exactly what was described and showed on-screen. 24. Claim: Methane is 86 times more potent over a 20-year period, therefore we must therefore scrap animal agriculture ASAP. ・Technically correct if looking at “in vitro” data, but atmospheric methane’s effect on actual warming depends on many factors. Methane is discussed in detail in section D. 25. Claim: Joseph did not explain that the reason ruminants are bad is because they take carbon dioxide and turn it into methane, a gas with a higher warming potential. ・Misrepresents my video as this information was indeed presented. You can find it at 16:48 in my video. 26. Claim: Joseph’s food waste discussion proves his understanding of the carbon cycle is questionable because food also decays and releases methane. ・Misrepresents that section of the video, misses important information and claims something was said in the video that was not. 27. (19:21) - Says: I’m sure Joseph and I will agree that food waste is something that needs addressing. ・I do agree. 28. Claim: Joseph created a false dichotomy by saying you can’t care about food waste and be plant based. ・Misrepresentation. I did not say this. 29. Claim: Joseph didn’t discuss the blue water consumption of beef. ・Misrepresentation. I did in fact discuss the blue and gray water consumption of beef which is a less flattering presentation of beef than if I just mentioned blue water consumption. 30. He agrees that almonds are water intensive and that we should drink oat milk. ・Nice to agree on the almonds. I’ve never had oat milk. Maybe I’ll try it. 31. Discusses: irrigation of hay production in California, similar to another video I made a post about. ・I discuss this in another post. You can find that one here. 32. Says: Where 80% of the world’s almonds come from California, only 20% of the U.S.’s milk comes from California. ・Point unclear. If his point is that people drink a lot of milk, he’d be right. 33. Explains: Why plant-based foods are actually more efficient ・Misrepresentation, exaggerates my point. My point wasn’t that beef is less resource-intensive than plants, just that the claims against cattle are way overblown. 34. Says: Joseph justifies blue water usage of beef by saying beef is more nutritious than rice. ・Misrepresents my point (and apparently assumes I don’t respect the audience’s intelligence.) 35. Says: Plants are actually better from a water perspective. ・Misrepresents (exaggerates) my point. 36. Claims: my video said you get 200g of liver with 200g of beef. ・Misrepresents (blatantly) what was said in my video to make conclusions about my intentions.
Is amazing how people this pdf reply actually achieves anything in debunking this debunk. Most of the replies are like "misinterpret" without saying anything lol. Guys, please read the science. Don’t even trust Ed or Joseph, the data doesn’t lie and there can’t be two opposite ways to look at it.
Let’s talk about the first response about calories vs weight. WIL says that 80% of the food that are fed to livestock are non-edible for humans. 80% in weight. Which is true. But this is mostly grass and leaves right ? Food that are extremely poor in calories. So yeah, to meet a daily caloric need, you’ll need way more grass than anything else. If you wanted to eat 2000 calories of salad in a day, that would be 13kg (28 pounds) of it. It becomes irrelevant to say that most of what cows eat is grass because thats absolutely not a good representation of what keeps them alive. You might then say "then we just eat grass fes cows", yes that would be better. But this would become event more unsustainable since we’ll need way more grass. OR, we would have to eat beef once every six months or something, for it to have a respectable impact.
EDIT : I had misread and the numbers are actually correct, but will leave my mistake so the comments make sense (and in case someone else had a similar interrogation). At 13:51, the amount of carbon dioxyde that could be removed from the air is not 8.1 billion tons every year, but 8.1 billion tons in total over 100 years, so 81 million tons every year. It's still a huge amount, but 8.1 billion every year would be more than what the US currently emit every year, at around one sixth or 15% of worldwide emissions (Which is physically impossible given the rate at which carbon is released at the moment.) It makes all the following argument inaccurate, as 81 million tons per year is far from accounting for an additional 15% percent of the emissions removed, at least from the data evoked in the video. Apart from that, thank you very much for this video, I can only aspire to make writing as clear and relevant as you did here. I was a bit skeptical after seeing the "original" one, I hope it reaches as many people as possible !
No its not, read again, that is a global figure, which he said it after he quoted (he does not imply only the animal agriculture land in the US is rewilded, it is the whole globe). Global land net sink every year is for certain at the order of magnitude of billion tons (or gigatonnes/petagrams commonly reported in scientific papers). 15% offset (and some estimated even higher) of global emission by land means is not impossible in many hypothetical "best-case" scenarios, I read this kind of papers every day. However, that figure is of course a big exaggeration if extrapolated to 100 years, regenerated/rewild land will have at most 2 to 3 decades of high C sequestration until it reaches a near steady-state.
@@y37chung You're right thank you ! For some reason I was convinced that the sentence covered US land only, which made it unrealistic to reach such an amount of captured CO2, but re-reading it and listening to the whole part made it clearer it makes sense. (Plausible at least, haven't dug further). I agree about the limited potential "re-naturing" has since it will mostly capture during the growth, but we can imagine/hope that if it is indeed done, by 2100 we will be consuming/producing/polluting much less in general, and we will be part of the cycle so that most of our emissions are quickly reaobsorbed by the younger plants.
Most of what you say is correct, however, all that pasture land will never be used or farmed for anything else. If that pasture land was viable for crop farming, then we would be farming it right now just to add to our feed for beef and with that higher yield, we would have plenty of area left to farm bio-fuel crops.
Presumably you're responding to the bit at 2:35 where he compares how many calories you can get from oats to how many you can get from the equivalent weight of pasture grass. That's the only bit I can find where he refers to pastureland. But the point he's making is not that you could simply convert from pastureland to oat or other crop farming, he's debunking a point of WIL's that's based on a simplistic comparison of crop weights. He immediately goes on to say that 10 times more land is used for animal agriculture than growing crops for human consumption and that a great deal of that could be put to better use. But given that animals - even so-called grass-feed cattle - are not for the most part being put out to pasture, the majority of that land is currently already crop land being used to produce animal feed and could be used for different crops. And while some pastureland might not be suitable for growing crops, a lot of it could, as Ed's comments suggest, be rewilded and reforested, providing habitats for diverse species and better carbons sinks.
@@JohnMoseley As someone who worked in wildlife conservation and even as a ranch hand on occasion. A vast majority of cattle are on land unsuitable for large scale farming and that is why it is mentioned that in the US 2/3rds of the land is not arable while 1/3 is mostly farmland if it hasn't been taken over by human settlement. Usually ranchers will grow crops but only as a nutritional boost to animals and it is usually in small patches that wouldn't be useful for distribution. Most of them don't even do more than plow and plant(not even fertilizing) . They also tend to have their own gardens for their own vegetables. However most of them still buy produce because not everything is sustainable or even growable in their climate. Something like 98% of cattle spend most of their lives on pasture before they are sent for fattening in a feedlot for a few months, where most of the food is remnant waste from human food farming. Cattle do NOT typically need massive deforestation as they work in natural pastures and are moved from one to another as needed. The idea the reforestation is needed in the US is a joke too because we have programs where every tree cut down usually involves 2 to 3 new trees cut. On average we gain forestland by 1 million acres each year. The funny thing is that agriculture for farming does need massive deforestation as the machines used and the land use increases dramatically.
Typical, one side say something, the other side say another thing. We can't exclusively go plant-based. We humans want perfect looking food, and for that we will use the shit out of pesticides to get perfect looking fruit and veggies = bad for environment. We also can't go fully meat-based, that won't solve any of the current problems, let alone the questionable "health benefits" of going full on meat. I rest my case, a balanced diet that doesn't include meat every single day is the best choice. Eat responsibly. And let's shift our attention to fossil fuel usage. Because that's a real problem...
Many people are finding a carnivore or high saturated fat diet very beneficial. To say that eating meat is the culprit for diseases in the western diet is Simply unverifiable given the amounts of sugar and carbs that are present in the diet. Both of which causes inflammation. Meat does not cause inflammation.
I was trying to be more heathy i started lifting weights and i was seeing results and i had energy to do it but when I stopped eating 2 chicken breasts a day i became tired and didn't have the energy to lift
@@baleful941 And that is the problem with the lies that have erupted because of the war on animal agriculture and animal products. The reality: meat and animal fats are healthy.
Thanks, Ed! The creator of that video said he might make a response to you. I wonder if it would be worth it to reach out for a live debate or discussion with them.
I read the entire PDF that WIL responded with and I have to say it was actually incredibly well put together. I hope that Ed does respond to the PDF because as of now WIL's responses to Ed leave me questioning a lot. This isn't to say i'll stop being vegan. At the end of the day I could not contribute to animal suffering, but WIL's PDF response makes me question whether Ed jumps the gun a bit with his responses before doing adequate research and leaning heavily on creating suspicion over the individual doing the research, rather than the research itself. Really hoping Ed does a response to the PDF.
Calories are not important. It's about the nutrients that are provided. Mass in mass out! Calories mean nothing to any animal. We cannot consume calories, as calories are heat. Calories are mass less and only pertain to the energy released in a bomb calorimeter on a sample of food. Humans are not bomb calorimeter. Look at India for eg. Over 305 million cows, yet in the US their are 9 mill. Yet in the US , 1 cow produces as much milk as 11 Indian cows. This is called efficiency. This reduces so much resources. India and Brazil have over 80 per cent of the total cow population in the world. The problem with methane emissions is largely with developing countries. Developed countries have very efficient and maximize yields using the least resources. India is basically a vegan country. Pasture grass is upcycled to high quality protein and fat not to mention vast amounts of minerals and vitamins. Vegan food is all carbs, which no human actually needs. Yes food is grown exclusively for animals, on land animals which include cows dogs, cats, horses, pigs, chickens. These animals include pets. Yes pets. Pets do not upcycle or give back anything. It's obvious that you need larger areas of land. What would you do with grazing land Ed? Its hilly, very difficult terrain, very hard to irrigate. Machines could not operate in these conditions. You merely state something else with? Tell us. Compost...that is what cows and ruminants do every day. They poo and urinate wherever they go. This is some of the best natural fertilizer you can have. Organic farming which vegans support can only be organic if natural fertilizer like manure is used. Yes biogas. That is methane. The stuff that nearly every household using natural gas uses to cook with. This is what Prof Frank is doing in California now. By 2027 they will be in a negative warming scenario. Methane is sequestered meaning it's in a cycle. Reusing it does not add more to the environment. Yet fossil fuels which is the real problem here constantly adds to the environment. Wetlands for eg produces more methane worldwide than any other source by a large margin. Never hear you complain of that. Crop residues given to ruminants would go to feed people not make paper. The environment needs ruminants. They have existed on earth for millions of years contributing in huge ways. They have been emitting methane for millions of years. Global warming has become a big issue only in the last 50 years ed! 50 years. Yet you are blaming ruminants that have occupied earth for about 40 million years for our pollution problems today. Not once have you mentioned electricity, heat, transportation or manufacturing. You want to wipe them out of existence. It's like wiping out bees, or any species just for your agenda. If the environment is so important. Let's stop electricity, heat, transport and manufacturing. That will wipe out 80 per cent of the worlds greenhouse gases. What about fish. It's by far the largest of all slaughter of sentient animals many times over. They produce negligible emissions, yet they provide food for even the poorest nations in the world with essential omega 3s something which plant food cannot in meaningful quantities that can sustain life. Where did you get that figure of feeding 350 mill people ed? That would also increase deaths of more animals, indirectly or directly, more fertilizer, meaning more nitrous oxide emissions, herbicides the list goes on and on. Yes ed in the production of vegan food. Look at the amount of processing involved in making vegetable oil, cereals, meatless burgers, the rest of your vegan mush. Meat doesn't require much processing. That table of emissions shows nitrous oxide to be even more of a problem. This is even more potent than methane. Look at those numbers. Food Waste is proof that all those resources used for food was for nothing. Most were vegetables and fruits. Animals also urinate. They give back water to the land and it comes with added benefits. Compare beef to any legume. It beats it hands down. Remember when eating ruminants you never need vitamins or minerals. Facts are the facts. A vegan diet cannot sustain life without supplements. Humans do not require plant food, nor do they need carbs.
You compared beef to veg in the form of weight when being grown under blue water sources, however earlier you claimed weight it not a good metric to compare by when energy provided by the food is what really matters.
the table he showed also had caloric values, as well as the water footprint per unit of nutritional value (calories/litre) and his point very much holds true.
What’s wrong with comparing the vegetation by volume? I feel like it was demonstrating the ratio of how many crops go to live stock, which is an overwhelming majority, and criticizing the use of weight doesn’t further your argument IMO. Another thought; if the overwhelming majority of plants go to animals and human beings have food waste that’s 82% plants, then wouldn’t it be a better idea to allocate the current farmland that we have now to not be excessive and replace it with trees? Also, What do you think we should do about those millions of cattle in third world countries? Your own data about the gas emissions of agriculture and meat shows that a theoretical drop would occur if everybody switched to plant based. But I think that’s really not a realistic goal or expectation. I don’t believe that humans are natural herbivores, I think humans were omnivores from the beginning of time. I don’t think going meatless is the main way we should think about climate change. That’s too ambitious and unrealistic of a goal. The overall contribution of cattle to the amount of methane isn’t very large. I forgot WIT’s statistic, but entirely getting rid of animal agriculture doesn’t seem like it’ll make that big of a dent or give us a significant amount of more time. I may be wrong tho. I’m not anti vegan, I’m not someone who doesn’t believe in climate change, and I’m not trying to trigger any vegans. I thought your last point about almonds and water and plant based stuff being better in nutrients was well made. Love your accent too. I just had a few doubts about some points you made.
Where does your "82 % plants food waste" figure come from? Does or does it not include food waste in animal feed production? Does it take into account the fact that 75 % of the animal feed crops' calories consumed by farm animals are wasted, due to poor conversion efficiency? Does it take into account that "wasted" plant food is compostable, and the main issue we have is that much of it ends up on landfills due to poor waste management? Methane production is one of the smaller factors when it comes to cattle farming. There are other factors, such as deforestation, and missed potentials in reforestation. And climate change isn't the only issue. No, the world going plant based alone won't be enough to mitigate the worst effects of climate change (and other environmental damage). But it's the most impactful (and not the only) thing you and I as individuals can do. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0594-0
Just want to add a note on your comment. Initially humans were mainly herbivore and occasionally scavengers. At the beginning, they were quite a weak species trying to find their way through the wild nature. It s only later by socializing and helping each other that they were able to chase down animals (big ones like in Australia where they wiped out most of them) . Moreover, your digestive system is closer to a herbivore than a carnivore. We have the capability to eat/digest meat, that's different. Beyond that, everything is about macro and micro you bring to your body and the way you absorb these nutrients. It is not a question of "I think". There are quite some scientific topics to read on that :)
medium nitpick, What the US uses for agricultural land is naturally pairie and steppe land, not forests. Returning it to nature would not have any significant tree growth and carbon reduction. It is mostly useless for anything but farming or city development, and both of those require massive abuse of water
Another issue I have with this video is that if we DID switch to 100% Veganism, things like Nuts would need to be produced in a much larger quantity as they are one of the best sources of protein (as well as other nutrients) among plants. Since nuts consume a HUGE amount of water, this may change the equations for how water intensive each diet is. I dont know what the numbers would show, but if your goal is to remove all meat, you HAVE to account for what the new diets people will eat to replace that meat would actually look like. Also, another factor is, Cows also produce Milk. Milk is mostly water that is drinkable. This means while cows do consume a lot of water, they also PRODUCE drinkable water. Some plants also contain a lot of water in them as well. Meat as well contains quite a bit of water. I wonder what those charts of Blue water consumption would look like if you actually accounted for the water that ends up in the final product. There are quite a few things in this video that I feel could be expanded upon more.
@@user-ci5it7gw1d this is carbon that naturally exists in nature/atmosphere and would end up back in nature/atmosphere if all humans died literally tomorrow. Because eventually it will be eaten, burnt or just rot and turn back into a greenhouse gas before being absorbed back into the earth in a new plant.
@@eragon78 Beef cattle is not producing any milk that people consume. And dairy cattle has an atrocious water to milk conversion, 628 liters of water are required to produce one liter of cow milk. While just 28 liters of water are used to produce soy milk. Also nuts are NOT the main source of protein for vegans, beans are. And if you want to eat nuts, you can skip almonds and pistachios to really lower your water footprint.
@@aenab.4596 Again, you also have to consider how much of that water is actually wasted though. Cows peeing that water back out means its not wasted. Pee will get filtered and enter back into the water system. I mean Humans consume vastly more water than cows do, but its not an issue because the water we excrete goes back into the water cycle. This has been the case for all life on earth pretty much. And my point was stuff like this still wasnt BEING considered. 28 liters out of 628 liters is still a significant portion. Thats nearly 5% still from just that alone. This also isnt considering again the usage of where that water comes from. Green vs Blue vs Grey. Most of the water cows consume comes from their feed. Its "green" water. This is water that already wasnt being used by humans. It was water that was already being used by plants in the water cycle and not water we added into the system from elsewhere. Blue water is the water you dont want, because this is human consumable water that we are taking out of the system of things like aquafers and providing to animals. So if you compare the BLUE water usage to milk production, im sure the numbers are much closer and its a much larger percentage. Green water usage is hardly a concern because its just part of the natural water cycle. This is the stuff that basically most wild animals consume as well. So when this stuff is actually all taken into account, im sure the numbers look far less extreme than theyre trying to portray it as. It may still not be great, idk what they are. But people acting like we're dumping hundreds of gallons of water from our water supplies like aquafers for each cow over its lifetime isnt accurate. Most of their water is coming from the food they eat, it returns to the water cycle, and they also for SOME cows at least, they also produce fluid back into the system. You are right that dairy cows and beef cows are different, but dairy cows still make up a sizable portion of the cow population which is why its still something to consider.
Well i think you might have gotten this part wrong when you showed the graphic at 3:45 where 77.3M acres of land is being used for us to eat but 21.5M acres of land is also used for wheat exports that also feeds people and some amount of the 68.6M acres of land is used for other grain that is also used for human consumption. Plus out of the 51M acres of land that is kept fallow, that land is also necessary to grow crops since crops are cycled on different pieces of land throughout the year, which ultimately means that crops for human consumption are taking up more land than livestock feed
I wan gone make a similar comment to this becouse the stats used is agriculture land and not crop land. Grasland used for animals is also in this. Graslands are generally graslands becouse they are bad for crops. Only in some rare occasions you see cropland used as grasland but most of that is close to farms so the cows can go outside or the chickens can go out side with free range eggs and (weide melk). If that data said crop land i would have thought wauw that is a lot of land being used for animals but it is agricultural. On a second note look at the biofuel that is all cropland. And becouse of these mistakes at this point already two i still can’t get to watch this video
Most of the arguments in this video are him getting things wrong. Also check his 'sources'. most of them are not scientific for the least and even the scientific ones are questionable at best.
Both his and Josephs VIdeo are informative, they both have very valid points and they both have cases of terrible interpretation of Data, somewhere in the middle lies the truth
Give the PDF debunking this debunk videon in the original WIL video! The more information and perspective we have, the better. :) (Not advocating or going against any certain perspectives, FYI.)
@@whitelotusmember8664 one example, Ed completely disregards capitalism, when he said that we could “give the land back to the nature, this would reduce emissions etc.” it’s an empty argument. Just because companies Or farmers don’t hold animals anymore, they wouldn’t give agricultural land away for free, most of them would grow crops and Pestizide the hell out of it (I come from Germany and over here that’s a huge problem in many regions)
@@whitelotusmember8664 bu far the biggest issue tho is that Ed doesn’t even acknowledge (maybe in 1 sentence idk but not in the structure of his video) that Joseph’s point was “Growing meat hurts the environment, but not as bad as people make it out to be, it’s neither the biggest nor the easiest to fix problem when it comes to environment” and that is 100% true To prove that let’s look at Ed’s stats for “Global Agricultural emissions”, in the US animals make up a few percent because cars and industries are way worse, the global number ist misleading because Malaysia emission are obviously 90% animals cause there isn’t much else, the global emission percentage is therefore a completely useless number to talk about. And while this doesn’t mean animal impact isn’t high in e.g. the us, it proves that the impact is quite less dramatic than Ed makes it out to be (so exactly Joseph’s point)
Last point is that Ed says “their numbers are wrong cause they come from meat companies” while his numbers are right cause they come from pro vegan companies? Just watch a video on how statistics are falsified then you know that most of the numbers are rigged in a way that fits ones agenda (Like with gender pay gap that exists but is pushed quite a few percent through convenient focus)
The fact that Dr. Frank Mitloehner works for the agriculture industry is not a secret. The original video clearly mentions it. Yet you choose to present this as some sort of a revelation and use innuendo and insinuations to engage in ad hominem attacks without addressing the actual arguments he makes. I'm sorry, this by itself has reduced the credibility of this video.
Why should someone who works for the meat industry be taken as a legitimate source at all? He's 1000% biased, he clearly isn't getting that double chin from plant-burgers. He's a beef boy for life. It's called food-preference bias.
@@Powsimian _"He's a beef boy for life."_ Wow, quitting meat was THAT hard for you? I guess you grasp motivation wherever you find it, including being judgmental. Speaking of biases...
@@ginabean9434 I'm biased, yeah once you know the truth and you realize how easy it is to live your life aligned with your own values. I'm sure you cringe at the thought of kicking a dog, well I cringe at the thought of giving myself a heart attack or cancer by killing animals. You have cognitive dissonance if you draw a line of distinction between the two. Motivation?
@@Powsimian The motivation seems obvious: lecturing others. If the motivation was to save animal, there'd be no need to brag about it. Note that a dog is not raised to get kicked, while a farm animal purpose is to feed us. While refusing it you ensures it never gets born, so you don't save any live anyway. But again, it's not the motivation.
"But almonds" is one of the dumbest gotchas against vegans. Like we just spend all day munching almonds and downing almond milk. I haven't had almond milk even once this year.
@@CeravvvEgan Same, it is the worst plant milk. Weird that it's the most ubiquitous considering it has the worst taste/texture, isn't the cheapest, and is the worst one environmentally. Soy and oat are sooo much better.
"But almonds" also is very funny because almonds are calculated to be the most nutritious food on our planet. So if we could afford to eat one food that's bad water-consumtion-wise, almonds would literally be the best choice. Meanwhile, beef isn't even on the list. And besides, who uses almonds (nuts or milk) as their only alternative to meat or cow milk? If we were to average what almonds can be an alternative to with other alternatives, we would again be in the realm of low numbers. Source: www.bbc.com/future/article/20180126-the-100-most-nutritious-foods
So what do You eat for Any of Your multiple meals per day that killed less sentient beings or brutally? More Protein deficient "vegan" brains needing strawmen. Then yall throw a hissy fit tantrum and run off. Meat eaters dont spend all day munching Meat nor does it kill as much
@@ValseInstrumentalistI think more the argument is that why would we consider almonds vegan as well as other large scale plant ag that causes so much damage.
A large percentage of agricultural land is pasture, which lends perfectly to grazing. In areas with light brown soils, and little rain where mostly only grasses grow, livestock is common. You can't just swap out pasture land and start growing tomatoes. In Alberta where we farm the south eastern part of the province and much of Saskatchewan is semi arid desert and large tracks of land are pasture because there's no irrigation, the soil sucks, and the rainfall is minimal. In agriculture you produce what the confines of your area allow. This is why agriculture is so varied around the world, in a single area the agriculture only 100 miles away can be vastly different.
He talks about this around min 13:10 There are many things we can do with that land, that aren't suitable for growing vegetables, f.ex. let them get back to their natural state, grow trees,...
Aggree, it seems the only way to make those lands fruitfull is with lots of chemicals. And yes we can wipeout all animal live and live purely on chemicals, but do we really want that? I prefer my cows eating natural grass and not some soja or what else.
Pasture land for ruminant grazing is amazing and more rotational grazing should be done as it can be a net carbon sink! Problem is most people buy cheap beef and that’s where the demand is. cheap beef is finished in a feedlot on feed that has been grown using damaging agriculture practices and dedicated to livestock. This is the problem, not beef production in general. We definitely can grow grass-finished beef 100% on pasture land but that is not what most producers do since you can’t pump out as much volume. With livestock you need a lot of volume to make money off cheap beef which the world loves.
Hmm in 18:50 it sounded as if you didn't understood the food waste part. The reason for methane of animals was (if I remember correctly), that the total number is nearly constant over the decades. So he just claims that there is no significant increase compared to 10 or 20 years ago. The stated reason why food waste is a "bigger" Probleme with plants is that a much bigger percentage of plants ends up in the trash bin. An study which I found stated : Only 15% of wasted food comes from animals. So by following this logic. If you increase veganism and keep the food waste as it is, you will end up increasing food waste by a lot. BIG BUT . This study also says that only 26% of our total food comes from animals. So while it is true, we waste less animal produced food than plant based food, I doubt that there would be a gigantic increase in food waste. Maybe 10% to 20%
2:35 I'm surprised you don't know how the digestion of herbivores works. The majority of their calories doesn't come from the strict caloric content of grass food as humans calculate it, it comes from from their bacteria manufacturing fatty acids in their guts, therefore the argument of strict calories is irrelevant.
@@lukemunro363 🤦♂️ok let me sum it up again. The cow eats grass which has a certain caloric content in itself but it's irrelevant because it is not enough at all. Grass cellulose goes through cow intestine and bacteria munch on that and produce fatty acids that feeds the cow the true caloric needs. Is it crystal clear for the ones in the back
@@jom1409-r9g but the caloric intake that the cow can digest from the grass will never be more than the figure in the video which shows 100% of the calories in a kg of grass (I think it was roughly 530 calories). What is your point here? The cow doesn’t make energy
i feel this video is as biased as the other if not more. i feel this video response is missing several important points but then again, im not an expert on the subject and this subject is waaaay too complicated to be glossed over without misinterpreting important data.
I "feel" people want to believe one thing or another, and will seek out information that supports their feelings. I feel it's wrong to eat animals if we don't have to. It's not for the environment, it's not even for my health (though I FEEL great), it's for the animals, most of whom FEEL as we do, to some degree.
@@HunterBelkiran the main point being both videos could be biased and could be unfairly judging/misrepresenting one thing or another. at some point i'd argue the same for plants after spending so much time on the internet. i've seen many reseach on how plants work and on some level they aren't that different from other living beings. at the end of the day, i eat not out of spite but so that i dont starve or get malnutrition. i am thankful for the food i can get and don't have to starve while my home area is going into lockdown. but that is a different story.
I have some questions about a point that, in my opinion, wasn't addressed enough in this response, and that is about Marginal land. A lot of the points made in this video are heavily US-centric, and the problem is that the same conditions that exist in the US don't necessarily apply to other countries. Take tropical countries for instance. Brazil is the 2nd largest producer of livestock but ranks 18th when it comes to vegetables. This is due to the fact that, being a tropical country, it contains heavily weathered soil, and thus growing a large and varied amount of vegetables is rendered near impossible. A shift from meat and plant-based produce to just plant-based produce would imply a drastic decrease in local products with an increase of imports would it not? Another example is Greece. 70% of the land cannot be used for agriculture, due to it being forested or incapable of bearing agricultural plants. And even in that third of the total landmass that can be used for agriculture, not everything can be grown there, thus we see Greece producing mostly maize, wheat and barley as well as cotton and tobacco leaving the rest of the essential plant products to be imports. Additionally, being a country with a Mediterranean climate, almost no plant-based products can be produced during the colder months thus further increasing the need for imports. And Greece is not the only country that is like this, which begs the question: Can the main exporters of fruit and vegetables, such as Argentina, supply a drastically expanding demand for plant-based products?
The vast majority of evidence is concluding the same around the world. The largest and most comprehensive study on the environmental impacts of our food system to date. University of Oxford found that by ditching animal products your dietary carbon footprint can be eliminated by 73% -reviewing data from nearly 38,700 factory farms in 119 countries. -In addition to greatly reducing your carbon footprint, researchers found that if everyone went vegan, global land use could be reduced by 75%. - 40 products representing ~90% of global protein ad calories consumption. -the study confirmed that a vegan world would save countless animals, including wildlife, since factory farming is one of the main causes of wildlife extinction. -Lead author of the study Joseph Poore explains: "A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use. It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car." Joseph went vegan based on found evidence. Article www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth "Biodiversity conservation: THE KEY IS REDUCING Meat Consumption. Consumption of animal-sourced food products by humans is one of the most powerful negative forces affecting the conservation of terrestrial ecosystems & biological diversity. Livestock production is the single largest driver of habitat loss, & both livestock & feedstock production are increasing in developing tropical countries where the majority of biological diversity resides." www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969715303697 Written by a 100 scientists of over 100 countries, International Panel on Climate Change --> Vegan diet is the single best way to save the environment. www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2019/08/4.-SPM_Approved_Microsite_FINAL.pdf www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2019/08/2f.-Chapter-5_FINAL.pdf
You gloss over the huge point that you cannot grow all crops everywhere. It is ridiculous to assume that you can grow high value human edible food in all of the lands used currently to grow animal feed. I really like your point that returning farming land to nature can aid by recapturing C02 in the form of trees and other vegetation. One issue I see with this is that much of the farming land in the US was never forested but globally, this is probably something that we really need to consider. Not just with the case of meat farming, but plant farming too. Also, it likely takes a very long time to grow a forest to the scale that absorbs the amount of C02 that you cited there. The statement that we could just compost the material that animals currently eat is kind of confusing to me, because by having the animals eat the food, they compost it for us. I don't know the difference in emissions of the two, but I'd be willing to bet that composting that feed would release a similar amount of methane. Finally, I would have liked to hear what you think about the point being made in Joseph's video that not eating meat won't have as much of an impact on helping the environment than other means of going green like installing solar panels or something. Whether you or he are right about this, I think its clear that reducing emissions in other industries like the power industry would have a greater impact than not eating meat.
To add onto that first point: countries like Saudi Arabia and Australia are terrible for farming food. They’d have to rely on the rest of the world to pick up the slack if the world goes meatless
@@General_Fuck_Yeah_AnimeTitties Eh, us Australians actually have an area in the Great Dividing Range where we grow a lot of crops, however we don’t grow enough elsewhere and we’d most likely full short as you said. We have lots of droughts that would make it difficult for crops to stay alive without an overuse in human supplied water, which even then wouldn’t be able to balance out with the extreme humidity and sun, so they’d all die. Our meat farms struggle if there’s droughts, so we have no choice but to bring in human supplied water, which probably adds massively to the statistic of “water being used too much”.
@@mrhaz8939 aye. So the situation is even worse when you factor all that in, not to mention we’d have to deliver more food out to the outback (as opposed to what we already do. Much more non meat products would be needed) I think what vegans need to focus on first is eliminating food and drinks like lollies and soft drink from our diet as well as the vast majority of vast foods. That’s far more harmful to both ourselves and the planet than meat farming
People seem to get confused by the whole "70 % of agricultural land is grassland" and "you can't grow human-quality crops on most of that land" statements. According to the FAO, 70 % of agricultural land is grassland, but that includes land where you have maybe 0.1 cows per acre. The Everglades, parts of the Sahara, etc. make up about 30 % of that grassland. Of the remaining 70 %, just over half could be used to grow crops. So only about 24 % of agricultural land is grassland that can be used for animal farming, but not for high quality human crops. Hardly any of that land is suitable for feeding animals all year round (even Swiss farmers import hay from Eritrea). On top of that, there's the 70-80 % of non-grass-agricultural land currently used to grow animal feed, much of which could be used to grow human grade crops (though we would only actually need about a third of it, if I remember correctly - don't take that exact number as a fact, as I'm recalling it from memory). Finally, many people don't realise that even if we can't grow high quality human crops everywhere, we don't need to. Processed food (for example pea protein extract) does not need to be made from high quality crops. So no, not even in Australia would getting rid of animal farming be even a minor issue. Source: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
as an Agro specialist i want to make some comments on your video, there is no farmer that would rather plant livestock feed other than proper crops, since the price per acre of animal feed is 5-8x less. the thing you gotta consider is much deeper than simply area of land, most crops only grow on certain types of soil, landscape, weather and many other variants, the size of the crop also depends on those variables and many others on top of that. simply come out with a number that an area would produce this much food to feed this much people then is impossible and completely absurd. Second, live stock feed is nothing more than weed. weed that grow anywhere but is used as a crop in commercial farming because it needs almost zero care, grows pretty much anywhere and it's hardly affected by plagues since it kinda is one, also consider this data, the area of human feed crops did not grow since the 70's you know why? you never considered one factor, efficiency, certain crops deliver 25x more per acre today than in the 70's because of technology, better crop handling, new techniques and so on, so there is no need to go after perfect farming grounds that usually means removing woods of a forest from where it is. second, composting has not even a fraction of the effectiveness that manure has in fertilizing crops, there is no organic crops without manure, and no organic vegetables for vegans to eat. there are only two kinds of effective ways of fertilizing commercial crops. manure blended with the soil by a truck that dumps it on a way and a tractor comes behind with a big rake and blends it with the soil. that is how 99% of commercial organic products are produced, with cow manure. the other alternatives are chemical fertilizers, what you think is best? in the end, all of this is hypocrisy, if all of you really wanted do help with the green gas concern we would not be discussing the 5% or 10% impact of cattle or agriculture, but the 65% impact of fossil fuels and energy production. for me this is all a smoke curtain. farming and livestock production never been as sustainable and green as it is today, and it will be much more in the future, this is not the problem that needs to be removed from the root to fix climate change, please stop being so naive. People need to eat. and if they want to eat meat they should, the same way if you want to be vegan you should, both productions impact the environment in their own bad ways, never think that your morning avocado is "green" it's as harmful as the cattle is. but we need to eat, and the processes are getting better and better, and it will be perfect someday. lets focus on the real stuff, thank you for the video, you guys keep eating and we will keep producing.
Aside from me having any opinion in the discussion at hand, your argument is really stupid (sorry). The guy studies the effect of gaz such as methane in the atmosphere, measures it, and takes into account many different sources, such as, yes, cattles. You seeing a picture of the guy in a field with cows was an indicator, for you, to estimate he was shaddy? When he probably was doing his job and measuring things where he has to measure them? That's a terribly skewed and biased view of the world.
For all of what is said here, if you're unserious about Nuclear power, you're unserious about the whole thing. After all, only 10% energy total consumed is for food production. Also, do you want to reforest or change the animal agriculture to human agriculture. What do you pick? What proportion should it be split? If you're doing lifecycle analysis, I encourage the electric car enthusiasts to do the same.
I love that the whole video is basically a self-own. He says the biggest contributor is food waste with animal products being a smaller share than fruits and vegetables which means eating a plant based diet would ultimately reduce both types of food waste by decreasing demand for animal products and increasing consumption of fruits and vegetables.
One thing you didn't address: isn't some of the land these cows are grazing on already in its natural state? (grassland) Feels very helpful to get this perspective. I'd be interested to see a response from WIL.
i get your point but almost no grassland is at its natural state anymore because of fertilizer etc, whenever you see grassland with just 2-3 types of flowers it is probably fertilized and thus not in its natural state :) because of the fertilizer there is a lack of biodiversity when it comes to the grass/flowers/herbs and thus also in all the insects etc, plus (too much) fertilizer an destroy the soil, groundwater nearby swamplands, forests and more. i hope this answers your question😊
@@debcress6718 "but almost no grassland is at its natural state anymore because of fertilizer etc" Absolute nonsense. I have zero clue what you are talking about with "2-3 types of flowers" but you sound like someone who's from a large city, and doesn't go outside often. This is my own personal opinion of course, but when an argument is as weak as yours I don't really need to spend my day trying to disprove all the nonsensical anecdotes you are pulling out of your ass. 😊 If you think the growing of natural grasses, and legumes for cattle feed degrades soil quality more than the highly competitive, chemical pesticide sprayed, and genetically modified fruit and vegtable markets, you are delusional. And I really don't blame you for assuming that pastures are some kind of industrial horror to the environment, because the only resources on the topic of fertilization of pastures you find on the internet are extremely dry scientific analysis, or ones that debate the nesscesity, and cost efficiency of nitrogen/potassium fertilizers on pastures. Just understand that for the most part, these large industrial scale cattle ranches, and dairy operations don't actually have the ability to spray a bunch of chicken/pig/cow shit over hundreds of square miles of grazing pastures, and they don't really need to regardless. for the most part, it's sun/rain grown grass and clover. Just as it was 60,000 years ago, before the humans showed up.
Here you go: ucmp.berkeley.edu/exhibits/biomes/grasslands.php "A third type of savanna, known as derived savanna, is the result of people clearing forest land for cultivation." "Overgrazing, plowing, and excess salts left behind by irrigation waters have harmed some steppes..." Not all grasslands are natural and cattle farming is often not beneficial to natural grasslands.
I raise cattle on strictly grass. I’ve had salesmen call on me to try and sell me on their feed to boost my production; it’s a waste product and can’t be eaten by humans FULL STOP. And at the price they sell it there’s no way in hell it’s human edible. I couldn’t afford to feed my cattle human foods, it’s just not feasible. But the waste product they sell for cattle feed is so dirt cheap I’d come out financially better using it. It’s only for ethical reasons I stick with strictly grass because I could raise a lot more cattle on the same land if I fed them the trash that’s for sale. Water consumption is a dumb argument also. The water where I live is dirt cheap, my bill is $20 a month with sewage and trash in that price for my home. But even here, I’d go broke very quickly providing my cattle water out of the tap to drink. The only tap water used for my farm is to wash off the side-by-side I use to travel the property. Ranchers build ponds and utilize that water, not because of some environmental reason, but strictly financial reason; we can’t afford it. On my place I don’t even use mechanical means to move the water, I’ve built ponds at elevation and gravity feeds it into pipes. When the ponds are full I’ll even use it to hose down my cattle on a hot day. Beef is artificially cheap right now because ranchers are selling a lot of cattle because of draughts in the west. Why would they be doing that if they can just get water out of a tap, or get it trucked in? Because cattle ranchers can’t afford to spend money like that, we’re in a low profit industry where we have to wait 3 years for return on investment. I don’t have diesel equipment blowing, planting and harvesting my product. I have a tractor that I occasionally use to pull the cattle trailer around the property and a side-by-side to travel on. I don’t spray pesticides. Which is also a big deal because we (humans) have killed half the earth’s insect population through pesticide use. I don’t spray fertilizer, there’s no need. My crop is the grass that naturally grows, the cattle provide all the fertilizer I need. I don’t kill herbivores to protect my product like farmers do. When I was a young man I hunted deer in Alabama with friends. On 3 occasions farmers saw our hunting gear and requested we hunt their property to protect their crops. I don’t lose soil when it rains. I don’t feed mega corporations money for patent protected goods. The same can’t be said for farmers. Another thing, ranchers generally don’t buy land that can be farmed because it’s too damn expensive; big agriculture has chased us out into land that can’t be farmed due to hills, rocks or low production soils. I’m on some nice flat land that would make good farming, but I inherited. If I had to purchase it the cattle business could not have paid it off.
It's so abundently clear you have no real counter-argument with any real life data supporting your claims, when your move is a direct, personal attack. I mean, the title says everything about your credibility. I honestly think you should have a sit down with Joseph, so we could hear both sides at the same time. Maybe read his response to this video. Ho-Ly-Shit. Your argument at 18:40. Did you even care to read the other numbers in the statistics you put on screen? Because I did. And your argument right after about foodwaste. The point isn't that the CH4 was already a part of the plant, but that we spent RESOURCES transporting it, cooling it, packing it and then throwing it out. Imagine if that food was never produced, but instead used for growing trees! Wauw-e.
There's no sit down, there's no strawman, there's no character assassination. The majority of plant produce goes to animal livestock. End of story. Go live in your Jordan Peterson echo chamber where you can argue yourself out of facts.
@@biggiesmol And that is why I buy free range, grass fed. No need for produce from farming if the cows just eat grass. But maybe your plant lifestyle had made your brain fact repellent. Do not try to insult me on a personal level, that is just childish. Grow up. And look at the report from the ICCP about cows and GHG. They say, that it has been overstated by a factor of 3-4. Besides, regenerative agriculture does not introduce new carbon into the atmosphere, like ..hmmm let's see.. oh right, like unsustainable agriculture that requires manure from, you guessed it, livestock to keep the soil at a gold enough quality to be used for plant produce. Besides that, your argument is completely invalid if you have thrown out any food in the past 5 months, because I have not, since i portion everything I eat. Go live in your turd-throwing ignorant bubble of vegans, believing that they are the solution. 84% revert back anyway, when they realise they get sick from eating wrong. Go put your focus into something that doesn't mean humans dying out, something that actually puts out NEW carbon, instead of being part of a cycle. And no, I will not reply when you think you come back with a brilliant answer, because you won't ever change your mind, because you only want to believe what makes sense to your incredibly deficient knowledge.
Just watched Joseph’s video before coming here. And it really really annoys me when you are truly trying to be educated on sometime. There should be no left or right, this group or the other group. There needs to be only research and the product of those facts. However, research is never finished.
@@Roman-gy7pr The truth is that the meat industries make billions and use that money to create disinformation against plant based diets bc they don't want to lose money from people going vegan.
@@Roman-gy7pr human language will never allow the existence of 'objective truth', so no matter where you go you will always be met with biases and opinions. It's sadly just a matter of which biases you want to believe and how far you're willing to lean into those biases.
Why does the assumption get made that the crop residues get burned? Because All the food that gets wasted, more then 80 of it, is plantbased food. Why is that waste not used already? How can anything else get assumed? Cus right now there's already not being done a really good job
Wait @4:09 you say the land is is used for growing food for livestock but in his video, he said that the food livestock eat can’t be eaten by humans such as corn stalks and grass… so this argument is invalid
The argument still isn't invalid lol. Deforestation gives room for crop growth that is fed to cattle, and then humans eat the cattle. Humans cause the deforestation/natural land destruction to make room for cattle feed in the first place. Just because we can't eat cattle feed doesn't mean we should eat cows instead.
They don't just eat corn stalks though. There is feed corn for cattle, not just the stalks. And cattle feed has soy, not just stalks. If he said they only eat stalks, he lied. Some use barley as well. And beets.
Год назад+14
1. Whether a study was paid by someone, does not imply the study itself is incorrect or fake. There are a lot of pro-vegan studies for example sponsored by beyond meat etc., which you don't question. 2. Organic animal foods are a magnitude more nutritient dense, so you're not comparing apples to apples. 3. Water usage is only relevant while comparing all output nutrients, including all micronutrients. Beef for example has a wide range of micronutrients, that corn does not have. 4. There are no doubt inarable lands, where you cannot grow anything you want, but it's fine for goats for example. So these lands should be excluded from all comparisons accordingly. 5. We should talk about green water usage as a global problem and not cherry-picking the meat industry. The food industry altogether uses significantly less green water than other industries, so I'd completely exclude this topic and get to the points where the most difference is made. 6. To the comment section: I firmly believe that eating meat is way healthier than not eating meat. And my belief is based on scientific data and personal experiences. What's good for someone might not be good for someone else though. We all have different microbiomes. Don't be a cult.
What I'd also recommend to the author of this video is to move his gay butt over to the countryside and see that composting capacities are very limited and people actually do burn residues seasonally
Cults do unfounded things out of a state of no necessity. for example choosing products with victims included when there's an option without direct victims. But what do I know with my Journal sience puplished "Reducing food's env impacts through producers and consumers" with 1530 studies included in the meta-analysis by J.Poore et al. Dont look it up if you want to keep gaslighting yourself with pseudo arguments like -land usage that could be used for reforestation -or coping that nutrient dense animal products are still not nearly as efficient when understanding that animal products always need to factor in their meat production too as seen in the graphs of to newest big science mag published "Levelling foods for priority micronutrient value can provide more meaningful environmental footprint comparisons" by Ryan Katz-Rosene et al for example. -or comparing water consumption of enjoyment products to base animal products while actually ignoring the actual base foods cough cough legumes in the worst comparison more than twice as efficient, up too 100+ times more efficient -> peas with pmv score of 0.9 to dairy 100+ (17+81+x[milk]) how is clinging to taste not extremist and ideologic cult behavior?
Playing devils advocate. I agree with most of your points, this might get lost in the sea of comments but here we go. 9:26 Crop residues when used for any other purpose will be carbon neutral, much like burning them. This is unless you have some kind of carbon capture mechanism in place. Yes a decent amount of carbon may get taken up by the plants you are growing, but cycle that a few times and it is obvious that it is more or less carbon neutral whichever way you look at it. 14:40 Reforesting only captures carbon for the lifetime of the plants in that system. Even if it is well maintained it has a limited carbon capture potential in short time scales. I would posite that using some of that land for some forms of CCS cycling (Like growing fast growing plant mass, burning it in some form of power station, capturing carbon and using the ashes as a fertilizer base) would be better use of that land. Of course this will take some time to develop and I don't think this is in place anywhere yet.
Both of these videos have serious flaws. So here are the flaws in this debunking video. 1) calories are not the only essential nutrient, protein is as well. So when measuring water usage and green house gas emmisions you need to look at both the calorie and protein requirements of the average diet and calculate water usage and green house gas emmisions when compared to various diet choices eg, vegan, vegetarian, low meat, high meat. You also made a false comparison of meat calories to plant based calories as if people that eat meat ONLY aquire their calories from meat, which is absolutely false, people that eat meat are omnivores and also get calories from plants. 2) Land usage is complex. Marginal land cannot be used for crops that is a fact but crop land is and can be used to grow animal feed. What this video is neglecting is the grading system used to sort crops. Most crop farmers seek to produce the best quality crop for human consumption because that crop get the highest returns. However, the quality of the crops are graded, for example a crop of wheat high in protein is typically graded for human consumption while low protein wheat crops get down graded as animal feed. Rarely do farmers want to grow crops for animals because they have lower returns, but that seasons weather conditions as well as market forces means they will sell what they can to whomever is buying. 3) Crop residues can be used for compost, but then you need to get it to the place where the composting is done at scale, compost it for up to 6months and then distribute it to the relevant crop farms. On the other hand crop farmers typically don't just crop, they rest their field with a rotation of grazing. By delivery the crop residues straight to the animal, the animals then process and distribute the 'waste' across the field at no cost and prepare the soil for the next crop. This dramatically cut transport and CO2 emissions and returns vital nutrients to the soil, something that using it for paper or other uses wouldn't do. 4) Neglecting to site sources was wrong but let's not forget the cereal industry i.e. kelloges has it's own scientific propaganda arm. and the AHA take sponsorship from not only the cereal industry but also the pharmecutical industry too, which have a vested interest in selling pharmaceuticals to people with poor diets that are high in calories and low in nutrition. 5) We probably would have to consume what is grown for animals or watch the farmers whose very livelyhood depends on growing these crops fall into poverty and forced to sell their land at record low prices because it has no value anymore. So unless you have a profitable alternative for the land for these farmers (and the communities they support) then under current economic conditions you are left with consuming the crops or seeing a good segment of rural communities destroyed. (oh the alternative of growing fruits and vegetables that have incredibly short shelf is utter insanity, any benefits made would be eaten up by transporting perishables to the market of another 350 million people, that is assuming that the land is suitable for fruits and vegetables which need access to large amounts of water). And yes crop residues would be burnt, because the cost of transportation to a composting facility will probably be more than the residues will be worth under the current economic system. 6) Beef may make up only 3% of the calories but yet again protein requirements is ignored.(and yet again extremely few humans would be completely carnivore) Full life cycle green house gas emmisions must be taken into account, but if we compare protein requirements met by a meat based or vegan diet which will have the greatest life cycle greenhouse gases, especially when you consider the high levels of processing needed for 'alternative meat'. I want to see the study on that. 7) 20% land mass for beef production in US...let not forget this is primarily marginal land not suited to crops 8) the major thing you need to understand about meta analysis is that they can only compare like with like. As such they would only compare one conventional farming systems with other conventional farming systems. Alternative farming grazing systems by default would not be included in the study. A comparison of conventional farming systems to regenerative agriculture /grazing systems would be much more informative. 9) Alternative uses of this agricultural land is indeed rewilding, but let's not forget that is land is already marginal (not suited to crops) and typically not suited to forests, which leave grassland which would require the reintroduction of bison, deer, elk etc which are guess what... ruminates. That's right ruminates that can sequester CO2. Something that regenerative grazing practices actually mimics. 10) the average US citizen may have the most 'agricultural land per capita' but I bet you bottom dollar they are not eating all the food that comes from their 'allocation' how much of that is exported food I wonder. 11) Both videos have the carbon cycle very wrong. Both neglect how ruminate animals manure actually sequester carbon into the soil. Grasses that are not grazed oxidise returning all the CO2 to the atmosphere. It's interesting that Ed previously said that rewilding this land (with ruminates) can sequester CO2 but apparently using ruminates in agriculture will just add to greenhouse gases. 12) The methane from the food waste is a problem because it's not being offset but carbon being put into the soil by the ruminate carbon cycle. Nor is the carbon that makes it into the food waste dumps where it needs to be which is on the grassland where it can help build a spongy soil profile that absorbs and stores water. 13) So let's go back to protein, what is the blue water consumption of vegan protein sources and what is the blue water consumption of meat based protein. Last I heard vegans still need protein in their diet and I bet a lot of it comes from nuts. In Conclusion...no human strictly eats only meat as this video implys, and Ed doesn't in anyway understand agricultural economics and natural systems. And finally the blame for greenhouse gas emissions is not with having any particular diet but in an economic system that priorities profit over the environment and the wellbeing of people.
Ouuhouuhouhh ohh slow down.Your conclusion just sounds as if you wanted comunism.That terrain is steepyyyy.and if i continue like this my brain is going to BUM!!🤯🤯
You’re curling the curl here! Both parts might have missed a few details, as you pointed out, but it seems Ed is presenting more scientifically proven facts. He can’t possibly cover all the details in a 30 minutes long video. I do want to touch base on your fifht point though . You mention farmers might lose their jobs if we go vegan. These farmers could still grow crops for human consumption (if we switch to a plant based demand will inevitably grow). Besides, it wouldn’t be the first time an industry has to adapt to new societal changes. As an example: there have already been several cheese production firms which have switched successfully to soy or cashew cheese productions. I any case, while the environmental benefits of a plant based diet might be debatable (to some extent) there is no argument to defend the cruelty we inflict to farm animals. That alone, should be argument enough to change to a vegan lifestyle. Thanks for sharing your views btw!
these are good counter-arguments, but don't address what i think was the most important argument: that arguments over food choice and other consumer-end choices are very often a smokescreen for fossil fuel use. obviously climate change has multiple causes, but politicians and executives especially love to narrow the focus to any cause that can be pushed onto the end consumer, instead of the larger-scale decisions they are responsible for.
@@RexBuyeo His most recent post is about this video. He doesn't like drama so he wrote the response without mentioning the video by name and even gave Ed a fake name. If you read the document however, it's clear that he's responding to all the points in this video. For example, he addresses Ed's claim that we should measure how much human food cows eat by calories rather than weight, which as far as I know is an argument only Ed made.
@@Justin49499 he has linked this exact video in the comments section of his patreon pdf link so yes, we can be absolutely certain it is a response to this video. And boy what a response.
It's this one www.patreon.com/posts/response-to-of-51285771 (pdf attached) Haven't read it yet myself Edit: After reading most of it, it seems very clear he doesn't actually touch the core of most points made in this video, only the presentation. A good example of this is the false dichotomy one. Quote from the document: "Claim: Joseph created a false dichotomy by saying you can’t care about food waste and be plant based. ・Misrepresentation. I did not say this." Joseph indeed did not literally say this. However, the claim was never that he said it's a dichotomy, but that he created one. By arguing that we should focus on food waste instead of reduced meet production he act's like we can't do both (like we should). Also of course it links to his Patreon again, what a coincidence... 🙄
@@afwasborstel112 I agree with your point. Although, I fail to understand why linking it to his patreon is a topic of controversy. It's still freely available on the internet, he isn't asking anyone to pay for it, how does it make a difference ?
@@afwasborstel112 i dont think he implies that we can't do both. It's similar to black lives matter, like obviously all lives matter but we emphasize the ones who are suffering the most rn. (sorry not the best analogy but couldn't think of a better one) Veganism and reducing food waste both help the planet but the latter is a much bigger problem and its effects are less controversial imo so that's why we should focus on that more.
Ed, this is off topic but I’d love to hear your opinion regarding veganism and abortion, especially when people disregard veganism as hypocritical when a vegan is pro-choice. Or really anyone else reading this comment, I’d like to read some more opinions on it.
Veganism and abortion are, to me at least, two totally different topics. Veganism is about no longer using animals for our own gain/benefit. This can include food, clothing, entertainment, ect. Abortion rights is about ensuring that women have the right to terminate a pregnancy. A woman may need an abortion for many reasons. Her health//life might be in danger if she goes through with it, the childs health/life might be in danger, the pregnancy might have been the result of rape and is traumatic for the woman, the woman in question might have become pregnant at a young age (teenage pregnancies), or a woman may recognize that she isn't responsible enough or isn't able to care for a child. Animal rights is about ensuring that animals, wild or in our care, have certain rights that they have been denied. In the eyes of the law an animal is a thing to be bought and sold like a chair or a car and welfare laws are quite lacking and full of loopholes.
I don't associate with other people who call themselves "pro-life." Most pro-lifers aren't vegan, and don't even care about the lives of humans once they're born. I do, however, consider myself to be strictly "pro-life" in the truest meaning of the word. Yeah, it is hypocritical to be vegan and pro-choice. One of the reasons vegans don't eat eggs is because baby chickens are killed at birth. But then they think it's okay to kill a baby human who is in the womb. It makes no sense to pick and choose which one to kill. Just don't kill either of them. "My body, my choice" isn't a valid argument for killing a baby because the baby's body is not your body. A meat eater will try to argue that eating meat is a personal choice, but that isn't a valid argument either since an animal's body isn't their body. There are plenty of ways to prevent pregnancy. Either A) Don't have sex. B) Use a condom. C) If all else fails, use a morning-after pill.
I'm vegan and pro-choice as well, and I've actually participated in the abortion debate quite a fair amount, although mostly I'm just interested in learning more about people's perspectives. I don't see why there should be any issue between being vegan and pro-choice. I'd love to share my perspective and also hear what your own opinion is. I don't think it's bad to abort before sentience is possible to have, because it's exactly the same as preventing that person's existence before they ever existed. It would be impossible for me to tell the difference between me being aborted as an early stage fetus and me never being conceived to begin with, because in both cases, my perspective never existed. So how could one of these cases possibly be worse for me than the other? I also don't think it makes sense to say that a person is the same as their human organism. If I was brain-dead, then even if all of my body was kept alive, it would still be exactly the same as if I don't exist anymore. Similarly, if my brain was moved and now fully functioned in another body, then I would continue to live on in that body, because that's where my consciousness is. In short, I am not my body, and just because my body started growing at the moment of conception, it doesn't mean that I began my existence at that point. Again this also leads to my opinion that an early abortion is actually just preventing the potential person's existence before they ever existed. But what is your opinion regarding all of this?
You didn't get the point in many areas. for example when explaining green vs blue water you want to still point out that beef consumes more blue water than Vegetables. Unfortunately the same chart you shown show that in term of nutrient per liter of blue water consumed the stats are all in favour of meat.
I'm not part of any of these 'sides' of the argument, I'm just a bored guy interested in the topic looking for info, these were some of my conclusions on this matter for you to read if you don't want to spend hours on this: -Most of the viewers are in favor of someone they like supporting their side instead of finding better answers for everyone, this is why they use words as "destroy" and "pawn". It's not a victory to annihilate a different take on the matter, it's a victory when you learn something from the opposing side and improve yourself with it. -The anti-meat narrative on the mainstream media is insanely blown out of proportions, farm animals don't need a gazillion liters of reserve water, neither they generate an insane amount of carbon emissions. However the livestock does in fact create carbon and it does in fact drain water from the reserves, basically it's a problem but it's way smaller than the other emission generators, and we do need to work on it. -The Pro-meat narrative used a lot of underhand tricks, misleading charts, ignoring issues, contradicting arguments, and more stuff just as ignoring main lentils, they blame all in almond (they are a problem, but a Californian problem because they produce mostly for exporting, not for USA consuming). So basically the pro meat guys did a very nice presentation but it has lots of flaws when you put it under the microscope. -Most of these views and arguments are all centered in the USA, and they have insanely egocentric views on the world, which is very different from them. The USA folk wastes horrendously huge amounts of food (even when adjusted per capita), they also package the heck out of everything in lots of plastic for some reason, and they pretty much ignore the fact that in order for them to buy lettuce they have to purchase it with thick layers of plastic on it. The laws and policies did this to them, food places are required to dump food after X amount of time, they are required to package it in a certain way, and it's SO dumb when you look it from an outsider's perspective. Most meat and veggies on sale in other countries aren't packaged like that, they don't use so much chemicals on them, and they don't have to be thrown out so abruptly. Finally I'd say this is a complex argument. I don't have the answers and neither will you after hours of reading about it. Most media out there is meant for someone to watch it, they aren't really sources of real information. You need to go into technical data, you need to read scientific papers, and judge them by yourself with the proper tools and knowledge. Also reminder that the so called 'scientific community' has both great researchers, and it also has ton of simply bad professionals, so giving credibility to something 'scientific' without being properly peer reviewed by organizations from different countries it's just dumb.
You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep. It’s pretty much impossible to make a man understand something if his paycheck depends on him not understanding.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
0:00 - Intro
0:47 - Who is Dr Frank Mittloehner?
1:50 - Humans can't eat the food that animals eat?
5:20 - Greenhouse gas emissions/2.6%/methane
18:49 - Food waste
19:44 - Water consumption/almonds/rice vs beef/liver
24:35 - Joseph's intensions with this video
Whilst my response is focussed on responding specifically to the points that Joseph makes, what he fails to mention is as equally important as the flawed arguments he makes. He ignores the deforestation and habitat loss caused by animal farming, the decimation of wildlife and species extinction being caused by animal agriculture, the water pollution and agricultural run off that causes eutrophication and dead zones, and the soil erosion caused by animal farming, as well as other negative impacts. My next video is going to be a comprehensive guide to the impact that animal farming has on the environment, so stay tuned for that. I hope this debunking is helpful.
Make my work possible by becoming a supporter of my activism here (thank you!): www.earthlinged.org/support
Make the switch to vegan & get all of the support you need: switchtovegan.co.uk
😫🦠💩🍖🥓🍳🍕🍣🥩.. “Everyone is doing it, I’m going to do it because everyone else is doing it. Because I’m scaared. Cult following”. 🤦🏼♂️
Normal. I’m vegan. I don’t hurt animals. That’s that ✅👍. It’s normal for me. Everyone else follow the leader 👈😫🦠💩🍖....
We love you ed :)
This is the best response video I've seen for this video so far!
imagine being on the net for your pleasure at the cost of harm to sentient life
disgusting D:
I've read about the wonders of the Mediterranean diet. Fish, eggs, olive oil, and of course vegetables, are the optimal combination for a nutritious diet.
I think being aware of who funds Dr. Mittloehner is absolutely necessary but I do not think that on its own should blanket disqualify what he says. Many of the sources you cite are funded by or are from organizations that have a pro-plant based view. That doesn't mean people should assume whatever these sources find is right or wrong based on that. The merits of the studies and findings should be the determining factor. If we're to write off Dr. Mittloehner's research then the same standard should apply to pro-plant based research funded or produced by those that are pro plant based, which would be dumb.
To add to this many scientists themselves have specific beliefs about climate change and a morality which likely includes seeing minimisation of animal suffering and ect as an ends in itself and this will bias, at least unconsciously but also often deliberately their research. Will to power is greater than will to truth even in scientists.
The scientist we must remember is not some objective perfect android but instead flawed as any other human.
He didn't dismiss their research offhand because they are funded by the meat industry. He discussed issues with their research and then argued that it might be due to a financial and ideological bias. I agree with what you're saying, but you are straw-manning Earthling Ed's position.
@@AFastidiousCuber To be fair though, the vegan community is composed of infinitely more ideologues than non vegans
@@Pinkie007 Is it really though? The only reason you don't think believing that eating meat is morally okay makes someone an "ideologue" is because the belief is so prevalent that it seems like the default.
@@AFastidiousCuber Well no I’m only saying it because 90% of the time when someone tries to tell you what to eat, it’s a vegan. No-one else cares about what you eat.
But almost every single time someone is shamed for their diet, it’s vegans shaming them. Like no-one really can disagree here, it’s where the whole stereotype of the “annoying vegan” comes from.
And that’s just classic ideologue behavior. It’s their way or the highway.
So while not all vegans are like this, they are infinitely more like this than any other diet community to the point where even chill vegans are annoyed by them for giving vegans a bad reputation.
Someone called „Lucas Bleyle“ posted this under WIL‘s video:
"As a student studying sustainable agriculture, I thought I would do my civic duty and shine some light on some of the misrepresentations or straight-up misinformation in this video.
1. The U.S. eats vastly more meat than most people around the world, especially those in developing countries. However, the position of the animal agriculture industry is to bring up all developing countries to a meat consumption level comparable to the US. This means expanding production significantly with the associated increase in resource use and GHG emissions. If we really want to maintain or even reduce emissions from animal agriculture, we can’t keep alive this notion that American meat consumption is sustainable if adopted by the whole planet.
2. Emissions from animal agriculture in the US are diluted by extremely high per capita emissions, so dietary emissions are a smaller fraction of the total. Attributing the small percentage all to increased efficiency in the US is misleading.
3. The U.S. has an enormous amount of cropland that is rain-fed and has excellent soil. Most of the midwest (currently growing predominantly animal feed and biofuels) could be used to produce human food. California isn’t particularly well suited for food production, at least not that much better suited than much of the midwest. This idea that there is all this land that can only be used for animal agriculture is a talking point I would be careful about using.
4. It is straight-up antiscience to suggest that methane doesn’t matter because it is part of a “natural carbon cycle.” We don’t care about where the carbon comes from, we care about its global warming potential. Non-ruminants don't produce a lot of methane so the carbon we eat is breathed out as carbon. Human respiration is carbon neutral. When ruminants convert it to methane, they multiply the global warming potential by a factor of 20 to 90 (depending on the time scale it is averaged on). This transformation of carbon to methane makes it irrelevant whether or not it will eventually be taken up again by plants. While it is in the atmosphere it is contributing to additional harm than if it had stayed as CO2 the whole time.
5. Also, enteric fermentation is only one source of animal methane. Manure management is another area of emissions so you need to add that when discussing methane emissions from livestock. On this same note, manure also leads to N2O emissions that you didn’t address at all.
6. Yes, there were a lot of ruminants in the past, but in the past, we didn’t have a climate crisis and the atmosphere was in balance. In a world with climate change, we have to do whatever it takes to reduce warming including diverging from what might be prehistorically true. This is an appeal to nature fallacy, that doesn’t hold up in the modern world.
7. Veganism is not the end all be all, but most vegans also take significant steps to address their personal carbon emissions across the board. You will never hear a vegan deny that fossil fuels are the main contributor to climate change.
8. Also, you never addressed livestock emissions from a land-use change such as land degradation or deforestation (especially in places like the Amazon rainforest). If so much land can only be used for animal agriculture why are we perpetually expanding into natural ecosystems to create more land for it?
9. What I’ve Learned, I beg you to stop presenting topics as though you have overturned the scientific consensus on a topic. You have a big audience who put a lot of trust in your content. You have a duty to present an issue accurately. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you just simply misunderstand the food system and were hoodwinked a bit by Dr. Frank Mitloehner. What you’ll find is that the animal sciences are full of people who own animal farms. It often presents a clear violation of conflict of interest in research, because researchers have a vested interest in the outcomes of studies. This is particularly pronounced in studies that are life cycle analysis/modeling because there is an enormous amount of subjectivity that goes into the design of this type of study. The responsible thing would be to follow this video with another video discussing some of the ways you misrepresented this very important issue."
Thank you for this!
@@jinwoo2038 you’re welcome. I consider his comment important.
He reposted that under Mic the Vegan's rebuttal video as well; it's excellent and I hope it wasn't deleted by WIL under his original post.
Let’s be honest, we were all waiting for this.
Yep.
I figured it would be this week, glad it's here
Yes.
Yes, another awesome video from Ed!
Was going to message Ed but knew everyone else would lmao
4:34 one piece of criticism, not every place is fit to grow a particular thing, you can’t just plant whatever you want anywhere you want, I live in the Netherlands where we have polders (which you can look up if you want) that have silty soil thanks to how they are created, and that doesn’t let much grow other than grass and conveniently also tulips
That is of course correct, but no problem if you want the world to go vegan. You can just take all the land that is currently occupied by farm animals and give it back to nature and take some of the land that is currently used to grow crops for the farm animals and grow food for people instead. The rest you can again give back to nature.
California is not fit to grow almonds and yet here we are :v
@@jjbarajas5341 nah it is that’s why they grow them there lmao, the problem is water not land
@@chimp09 yea we could do that but that’s not what this person is arguing
@@admirablerook3619 it perfectly addresses his point. You can't grow human edible crops everywhere, but it's not a problem, since you don't need to.
My immediate thought with the beef rice comparison: 'Hmmmm, I've just become vegetarian/vegan, I used to have a beef cassorole with rice for dinner, but now I must replace the beef with something else. What substitutes could I make? How about m o r e r i c e?
My exact thought haha
Lolol
haha, just use chickpeas :)
If you're wanting to replace the taste, texture and protein from beef then the closest I've used is seitan that I make myself.
Mushrooms.
-Is the livestock feed being grown on land that human edible crops can be suitably grown on?
-Are the pasture and grazing lands suitable for human edible crops?
-Cattle is not one food item, have you not heard of dairy?
-You keep talking about beef being inefficient calorically when calories particularly in western countries are in overabundance
-So now we're pivoting and acknowledging not all the land used in meat production can be used to grow food but instead talk about reforesting? Why don't we want to use it for food? You were just criticizing the agricultural land being supposedly wasted on animal feed. What even makes you think humans would reforest that land instead of finding a more economical use for it?
You are correct about CH4 being a more potent GHG in that it has 21x more heat trapping ability, however CO2 once introduced remains in the atmosphere between 300 to 1000 years whereas for CH4 it's around 9 to 14 years. You say the short life cycle is a good reason to focus on CH4, I think that makes it a less important issue and a smokescreen deflecting from the real issue.
-The difference between CH4 from cattle and food waste is that while both are part of the natural carbon cycle, we actually get way more out of cattle than food waste. He doesn't create a dichotomy that you can't be Vegan and care about food waste, he lays out the fact that humans tend to waste more plant based foods than animal based.
Edit: Looking at your film-making work and Animal Rights Activist history, I'd say if you're going to criticize someone else for having ulterior motives, you're clearly also in a position to personally gain by misleading people on this topic.
@@theSafetyCar Theoretically you could reforest some of the land, key word here being some. One requirement for the land to be reforested is that said land has to be suitable for forests, and a lot of land used for animal agriculture was never forest to begin with. It was grassland and still is grassland today. The only "better use" alternative he proposes for the land is reforestation, to which I would oppose the claim that most of this land is even suitable for forest. I'm not convinced by the idea that meat production is a waste of land. If I go through the food present in my home (granted I'm not American) I can see according to nutritional information the meats are a more efficient in providing protein per calorie. With exercise and paying attention to my food intake I've been able to make myself way healthier than I was before the pandemic started, and a big part of that was meat being an efficient protein food. There's also the subjective that I enjoy meat and meat is incredibly important to the food culture where I'm from.
As for the CO2 and CH4, could the situation be improved? Sure less CH4 means less heat absorbed, but the long-term impact of CH4 doesn't hold a candle to all the carbon we are introducing from the Geological Carbon cycle, which should be our focus.
There's also the impact that CO2 has on our cognitive functionality. The concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere have increased from 300 ppm to 400 ppm in natural landscapes and 500 ppm in urban areas. Cognitive functionality has been shown to decrease by 15% in 1000 ppm. CO2 not only warms our climate but also reduces our Cognitive functionality and as a result ability to combat climate change.
We can waste our time fighting over implementing veganism, but that's all effort that could be put into reducing fossil fuel emissions and other measures to reduce CO2 levels.
Based on Ed's past work and moral stances on meat, I think it's possible Ed is more concerned with reducing meat consumption than he is with reducing the impacts of climate change, and that's why I think a lot of the points he makes are presented in the way that they are, without the context of how much more impactful Geological Cycle CO2 is than CH4, without the context that calories aren't an issue.
Should we have more forests? Sure but let's not pretend that it's the meat industry standing in the way of that.
Edit: It's also worth mentioning that even in a lot of lands suitable for human edible food, currently being used for animal production, fruits and vegetables aren't the kinds human edible crops that could be grown there, it's grains, and grains are a super nutrient inefficient food. A good vegetarian diet needs a lot of fruits and vegetables, which is not something fields only suitable for grain crops can provide.
People who try to tell you that there is "grass land" for cows in the industry schould one not argue with. :D
@@hax7998 Hey, is english your first language?
@@hax7998 I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say, but the western prairies and grasslands exist and there is a lot of meat production coming out of those areas.
@@marsbolcan9311 there is not a LOT of meat production coming out of these areas. Only about 1% of meat comes from grassfed cows. Grassfed is not sustainable anyway, not for the entire population.
It's annoying that this video probably won't get as much visibility as the original. Good job nonetheless Ed!
👋
Because it’s ideological claptrap
@@Combinationlock the original?
@@Combinationlock ah yeah because it is so smart to believe that humans would eat all the animal feed if we stop farming animals, selfishness really makes people dumb
Just comment the link to this video
so more can watch it
Grazing land =/= farmable land. This is addressed in the video you are critiquing and you just ignore it. You frequently repeat "lets grow food on grazing land" assuming that is possible to just swap out land for any use case.
I noticed that too. However, what if the land used for growing crops for animals, double that of the land used for humans in the US, was used for human crops? That could work.
@@mattruscoe4353 There are no economic incentives to do so. We don't have a shortage of carbs, in fact we have a very huge surplus of them. Theoretically, we have a lot of land that can be turned into flourishing forests using our industrial capacity. There's a proposal to plant 1 trillion trees that costs like $300 billion, the problem is no one is willing to pay for it.
But I think we don't need to be carbon-negative to solve climate change although it certainly helps, and more biodiverse forests would certainly make earth green again. Still, we don't *need* to turn grasslands to forests. We only need to be carbon-neutral and stop using fossil fuels.
He doesn’t say to swap out grazing land. He talks about swapping out the farmable land we use to produce food for animals.
Am I wrong here? Compare the graph from 3:53 to the one from 10:59. This illustrates the difference right?
He actually did address this, he stated that not all land used in animal agriculture can be used for farming. But it does not have to be, estimates show that if the US went vegan we could reduce our agricultural land usage by around 70%. Some of that 70% will be that land that is unsuitable for farming, and that 70% can be restored and rewilded to help sequester carbon.
Wow. I'm extremely impressed Ed. I'm a bit disappointed in myself for thinking the video was fine
Same
I've been told the original video has nice graphics. That's a good thing, isn't it? :-)
Wooow same
What did Ed impressively debunk in the video?
@@Combinationlock He pointed out several mistakes and also how some of the stuff WIL said can easily be misleading, and selectively went against some of his own points without us noticing. Obviously there's too much to mention in a short comment (the video is after all 26 minutes long). The study that WIL and the guy he interviewed refer to, saying that if everyone in the US stopped eating animal products, then it will only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2.6%, that's very wrong, and they make crazy assumptions, such as humans needing to eat all the food we currently give to animals and that everyone would eat 4700 calories a day. Even then there are other mistakes as well.
Then there's the thing about the land that "would go to waste" if we don't use it for grazing livestock, since that is also wrong. It wouldn't go to waste, and we could in fact make a big, positive environmental impact if we did use that land better.
There was also the stuff about how much water is used to make beef, and even if we use the numbers that WIL refer to himself, then it is very clear that animal products use much more water than crops for human consumption. WIL use the example of nuts as the only outlier, but even considering that case, then in California (I think it was that state, but I might be wrong), there is still much more water being used on animal products. WIL tried to justify some of the extra water use for beef by saying it is much more nutrient dense than white rice, which is also an incredibly bad example to use. It was easy to put together vegan food for the same amount of water use as the beef, and it being more nutrient dense.
There were also a whole lot of other smaller points (and maybe bigger ones I missed too) that he mentioned as well, so I'd recommend watching it.
Okay... Remember the book Animal Farm, where the two pigs are trying to convince the rest of the farm animals of their own point, and the animals are always convinced by whoever is speaking at the time?
I feel like the farm animals.
How does one solve this conundrum, without being any good at researching?
same buddy same XD
you don't have to be good at researching to accurately inform yourself. There's plenty of academic research that you can find and read without needed a background in research.
That book is about communism my guy, doesn’t quite apply here, but I guess I get it a little, when watching videos like this, don’t trust what anyone says, science as a whole is biased, you are taught fair tests at school but in life it is extremely hard to make a fair test, so in other words, your mind makes your own opinions, if you can’t decide who to trust, trust neither
@@joshsmith2075 Claiming George Orwell's Animal Farm is about communism is somewhat disingenuous..
This is one of the reasons why economic power breaks democratic systems. You can use money to create a false standpoint between which and reality people start looking for the middle ground to believe in.
In a democracy, all power has to root in the voters. Every one of the voters has to have an equal share of power. There is no power left over which could be distributed according to capital. In a well functioning democracy, all channels in which money can be turned into political power have to be closed. That reaches from examples like influence on the voters directly to corruption and economically rooted lobbyism to unequal political advertisement.
I haven't seen this much destruction since Thanos snapped his fingers
Lmaooo 😭 BYE ✋
.
😩😩😩😂
lmao
400th like for your comment
Interesting video, but I want to point out couple of thing. It would be great to see more details on them:
1. It's vary common that studies and research is funded by the companies, that have direct interest and investment in that area. Who should be funding the "meat studies" the soybean producers? Or maybe fishing industry? There always be a problem of who funded the studies, but by itself it's not the proof it was correct or wrong. Also the fact one scholar made bad research, does not mean automatically the others do. You need to prove the certain research is incorrect. Sorry, but this is not an argument.
2. You say the metrics are important and we should use calories instead of weight, but then you say it is irrelevant. It's very confusing.
3. The main rule of research is that you study one factor only at a time and assume everything else stays the same - ceteris paribus. So it means that research, that only accounts the direct emissions of meat is correct. If it would try to calculate the changes in other productions in chain, it would make it very inaccurate. Also you say it like, the change from farming for animals to farming for humans automatically means that farming will be emitting less greenhouse gasses.
4. The Lifecycle approach to product is very problematic, which was shown in many studies, including the ones that say meat is responsible for over 10% of emissions. The lifecycle approach includes energy, water, transport, labor, secondary emissions. But those will be there if you switch from meat to soy, corn or other products. It's also problematic, because one truck can transport multiple types of goods. They still need to be there, in other proportions, but it's impossible to accurately say how they will change. And if the transport sector and energy sector changes, that will decrease the emissions of lifecycle of all products. Taking this, we should use direct emissions for comparison.
5. Point on blue water consumption - I think in both videos it presented in wrong way. You state that it is important how much blue water is used in total and that calories matter. So you should use how much water per calorie is used. In case of beef it's 0.36, so twice as much as in case of vegetables (0.18 l/kcal), but eggs use 0.17 and pig meat uses 0.16 l/kcal, so it's not that all good for plant based farming. (not only nuts are using a lot of water per kcal 0.55 but also fruits use 0.32 l/kcal almost the same as beef). So the question you should really answer is, how much water would be used when we would switch to plant based food, but maintaining the same caloric production.
Great comment. That would be awesome to hear. For me it would be the first time to hear a cost benefit analysis before making drastic changes to society.
1. But how it is that research funded by the meat industry always favours meat industry, and at the same time is completely opposite to the rest of the research?
5. Why do you average the amount of water for every vegetable and compare it to the amount only for one type of meat? Of course lettuce is going to have more water per calorie, as it has barely any calories. Compare meat to the soy as it is the main source of protein and calories in plant based diet.
Also, did you took into account the proportions of certain meats and vegetables in an average diet? Which diet uses less blue water per calorie?
Just leaving a comment to get a notification of the responses here :3
In response to your third point, I think that's fair for a study to do that, and the results are interesting - but the results are absolutely being misinterpreted now they've made it into the real world to fit people's agenda. Many people won't understand that all other variables are being kept the same so It should be made clear that it is a scenario that would never exist if people were to switch to a plant based diet. The inefficiencies that would lead to us eating 4700kcal per day of mainly cereals and soy, could be cut out leading to far better outcomes. That's not what is presented when people refer to the numbers in that study so it's important to point out it's not representative of any real change that would occur.
You know, there's always the ethical point, that shouldn't be ignored. I very unfortunately ended up in farming animals, not my choice. I was horrendous
when you realize that thanos could have easily solved the resource problem by making everyone go vegan
Your onto something lmao
Disney would never allow it
That solution is like saying we can create world peace; just stop fighting. Or world poverty: just stop being poor.
@@aristotlespupil136 Eh? The OP post is not talking about the underlying process of going vegan - therefore what you're saying is not analogous. The impracticality of convincing everyone to stop fighting to achieve world peace is irrelevant when there is a power invoked to instantly make it happen.
Haaaaa, if everyone is vegan the world would be screwed😂😂😂
Never clicked so fast.
SAME
Omg, SAME!
Exact same
imagine being on the net for your pleasure at the cost of harm to sentient life
disgusting D:
Saaaame bro
WIL loves telling his followers that they shouldn´t feel guilty about their lifestyile. That is what gets him most likes. And I would even say he should have written "paid promotion" as caption in his video.
Well said! I totally agree!
He provides excuses for those who want them. The video was clearly tailored for them. The false choice fallacy between almonds and beef instantly gave it away.
Since more crops are farmed in order to feed livestock, it is still much preferable.
Omg. Really, just read, or watch the video. Go to the statistics of how many calories livestock need for raising and how much comes from grain. I have no time to endlessly discuss with anyone who is unable to challenge its own beliefs.
It is so ludicrous when meat eaters criticize vegans as if they held a dogma. When vegans are the ones who challenged their own preconceptions about the way we treat animals and decided to change, regardless of how much they could miss eating chesse, etc. Really, how much more intellectual honesty can you ask for to someone who already changed a lifestyle after realizing it was a mistake.
@Shane Rutherford ruclips.net/video/0QTNgKpV_K4/видео.html
When we speak about food efficiency I would love to know which way is the most efficient at providing all the 4 essentials: 1) amino acids. 2) fatty acids. 3) vitamins. 4) minerals. Only debating about macros and calories doesn’t do the discussion about sustainable health justice
It's dunked on for various reasons. I think some rather sinister, but the oil palm- palm oil,is incredible in the amount of oil it produces.
cows
that's the answer
it's well studied by science
the scientific consensus is that it's complicated and depends on many factors, but the overall top, if any one thing can be said to be, is cows
1: humans need much less protein than they think thanks to marketing. Resistance training makes a bigger difference than anything else. Human milk is only 5-6% protein calories. Plus legumes are plentiful in protein, lentils are 40% calories from it.
Fatty acids are more complex but omega 6 isn't a worry for sure and omega 3 we probably already don't get enough of. Eating greens and other plants gets us closer and algea supplements exist for those worries about it. Notable most animals don't need to supplement it. Vitamins much the same if you're eating a varies diet, and for B12 we even have to inject that into animals because their diet is deficient in it. And minerals aren't so difficult in practice.
@@mikafoxx2717 Marketing isn't pushing the idea that people need a lot of protein. Vegans and bodybuilders are trying to get more protein, and we hear about it by word of mouth. Pretty much nobody is trying to get less protein, so the community consensus in most peoples' minds is that protein is something we ought to have more of if anything. Marketing just brags about anything people think is good ("our product contains protein!" "our product is gluten free!" "our product has low sodium!").
People don't need very much protein if they have a significant amount of animal products in their diet. Vegetarian diets require much greater amounts of protein because the types of protein and amino acids from plants are not right for the human body. The amount of protein in high-protein plants like rice or potatoes seems high enough if you look at how much beef or chicken a person needs to meet their protein requirements, but when you check how much protein a person needs when all of their protein comes from plants, suddenly the amount in rice and potatoes seems like barely enough.
@@TheReaverOfDarkness You have some good points. Most people do get enough protein, short of eating processed stuff like just sugar wheat and oil. And exercise is too rare. Makes sense that bodybuilders want to get more protein, though it's inversely related to longevity to eat a high protein diet. Up to 1.6g/kg lean bodyweight is about the maximum protein that can be utilized, even under huge desire to use it. But even a kilo of muscle mass is only 230g of actual proteins over maintenance need. One could build a lot of muscle on just 80g a day of protein from any source. Prisoners gain a whole lot on even less than that.
I actually used to like that channel :(. The amount of ignorance and misinformation in that meat video kind of changed my mind about the channel.
Make a video telling people that they don’t have to change their behavior and they‘ll eat it up :/
So, so sad.... but true.
It's the 100 companies or whatever that make all the bad things. That means I can do no wrong. I'll just burn my trash in a garden because veganism is classist or racist or sexist I forgot. But its definitely bad. Fishing is awesome tho. It definitely helps the oceans by killing everything in it. The oceans are overpopulated anyways. Or was it the world overpopulated
he is saying that we should focus on bigger problems, meat consumption is not going to make the planet so hot we cant live here anymre but burning fossil fuels will
I mean that's just psychological bias that we are all privy to. I bet every person owns or uses something that directly harms the environment that they wouldn't want to give up, such as cars, cellphones, most forms of clothing, etc. My biggest gripe with the vegan community is how they demonize people who eat meat, and claim that non vegans are evil people who hate the environment, while they drive off to work in a fossil fueled car. I do agree that vegetarianism is an effective way to reduce carbon emissions, but there are other ways as well.
Edited for grammar
@@collamus6901 ed always says nomvegans are not evil. He often tells the story of how he became vegan. And concludes I wasnt evil when I wasnt vegan. I dont know what vegans you are talking about. This guy is someone that most vegans agree with and he doesn't act in the way you described
Let's get this recommended on the sidebar for all who watch the original vid :) Pump the algorithm!!!!
Yaaaass
Yes!
!
yes
Bahahahahah thinking RUclips'll help out vegans with attention...
The biggest lie the industry is telling us is that *we’re* the ones who should change our ways and go green
I always find it funny when they talk about methane production..
and yet they never bring up the fact that the Earth used to have far more bullvine running around and it does today.
For instance the massive herds of Buffalo across America.
Or the reality that 1 dairy cow today produces four times the milk of one in the 1960s.
Or the factor that they've discovered that by feeding seaweed to cows. Even only 1% of it they're getting 40% less methane per animal.
overall though I kind of think would be kind of cool if people start eating more fish.
Way easier to raise.
@@skeletorrocks2452 I mean these are good points but I'm pretty certain that there have never been more cattle than now, there's literally over a billion cows on earth rn, even the bison herds in NA at their peak wouldn't even come close to that number. And even if they did it wouldn't matter because the Earth naturally needs SOME greenhouse gases to maintain its climate but human industrialization is really what threw this entire thing out of balance with us dumping an unimaginable amount of carbon into the atmosphere
@@Dell-ol6hb You do have a point. But then add on all the other grass eating animals that used to exist in large numbers in the wild.
So ultimately we replaced a large number of wild animals with domestic ones. Domestic ones that can literally be bred over time to produce less methane.
Along with better feed options. It's a problem that will probably be solved in our lifetime. I mean consider that they've bred milk cows that produce four times the milk then the average cow 70 years ago.
If anything the people shouldn't be so worried about cow methane..
Really they should be concerned about if the climate does warm. All the methane trapped in the tundra and under it. There's a documentary on Tundra sinkholes.
If you consider all the Ancients ancient stored methane that could be slowly released from the Tundra melt.
It kind of makes the cow thing look like a joke.
@@skeletorrocks2452 you're right, I'm not disagreeing that there are other more pressing issues, we need to tackle this issue on every front we possibly can which includes domesticated animals and the industrialization of livestock as well as all other aspects of our lives. Ultimately the easiest way to vastly reduce our fossil fuel consumption (and by extension our excess c02 production) is by transitioning to fully renewable energy production
@Road Hobbit Start with yourself ☠️🤭
But on a serious note. Most of the problems that people claim are the problem could easily be slowly changed.
And if you want to reduce the population. Stop giving food to the third world. And stop giving tax benefits for morons pumping out children in the first world.
And simply slowly change over to better technology.
But realistically. All these common-borns always talking about humans are the problem.
I happen to take up the George Carlin outlook on this. When this planet wants to it will shake us off with a meteor or something.
"What I Learned" deleted all my rebuttal comments from 3 different YT accounts I used (I didn't use links)---- seems like a really shady dude. He's spewing dangerous misinformation and disinformation, and seems intellectually dishonest. Shame on him.....
More like: What I want to be true
He did exactly that with my comments.
@@ab-td7gq oh wow, not surprised, he knows his arguments are crap and has no shame and doesn't want rebuttals shown
@@veganfortheanimals6994 Yes its sad but also kinda funny to know how dishonest that guy is and I'm happy with the response by Ed, take care!
@@ab-td7gq agree, sounds good my friend !
In other news, the Wood Product Manufacturers sponsored a study to support the claim that buying less wood products won't save the forests
There were people claiming in the '90s that there were more trees in the US at that time than in the 1800s. Not sure where that claim came from, but yeah, that's about the size of it.
first of all the wood manufacturers are more or less safe in this because they replant them
Like any video on this topic, bias to counter bias. There are no neutral comparisons when it comes to this topic sadly
TRUE
sadly
I agree. I do like MicTheVegan, but I realise he is also biased. However, he does present the science for each of his claims. Kurzgesagt is pretty unbiased imo, but they only have one or two videos on the subject.
what? that is not true, the way to go about not being biased is using objective data, it is just that because it is an economy based subject people have a hard time being objective , and unfortunately a lot of average people do not understand or know if the data presented is correct or not so they decide that it is ultimately an ethic or moral choice , when it should just be a logical one based on the fact that if we do not take better decisions we will all die
Ed doesn't get any money from anyone. Cattle farmers are worried and will therefore say anything to continue to stay in business.
Bc bias is the motivation on why they do it
For those interested, What I've Learned responded to this video. You can see the response by going over to What I've Learned's video - Eating less meat won't save the planet. The link to the response is in the video's description.
And what do you think of the response?
Yeah he made a response on Patreon so only he's fans can comment and blindly agree with he's claims :)
And Joseph is still dead wrong.
yeah a bad response
@@anonb0 Did you actually read the full response in the PDF? He does address it near the end.
I'm one of the people who messaged you to do this video!! So happy, lol.
Good job, Tane!
@@ChrisGaultHealthyLiving Thanks! 😃
Same!!
The worst thing about the video is that it has made such a large impact on a lot of omnivores. So many people in the comment saying " finnally and unbiased video on meat" meanwhile the video is insaly biased towards meat. Tons of conformation for their bias.
am an omnivore, can confirm that was my reaction
@Vegan Vamshi Krishnan not feasible for me right now. Would like to in the future.
@Vegan Vamshi Krishnan i live in a third world country with 40% annual inflation and I'm a student. It would bankrupt me to go vegan while getting my nutritional needs met.
@@everflores9484 Sorry if this is ignorant but isnt plants like beans and rice quite cheap? I see meat as something expensive, at least thats how its been historically and currently in first world countries.
@@Freakyjohnsson1 white rice? Yeah. Beans not so much. I practice a very intensive sport and are on my feet for most of the day.
Meat here is not as expensive tbh and it covers my caloric and nutritional needs very well. I don't even eat that much but according to my nutritionist, it wouldn't do me any good to go veggie right. Not on my budget at least lol
*I WAS WAITING FOR THIS*
imagine being on the net for your pleasure at the cost of harm to sentient life
disgusting D:
@@jedex4645 blah blah
@@mumofmany7589 you just caused suffering to say blah blah, well done vegan XD
One of the main and less talked about problems when it comes to environmental impact of meat/crop is the use of fertilizers. It is scientifically proven that synthetic fertilizers contain much more nitrous oxide and phosphates than organic ones leading to much more environmental pollution (increase in N20 air emissions and groundwater pollution) while reducing soil quality. Cutting meat production to zero, as this video suggests, will lead to greater synthetic fertilizer usage to offset the loss of organic fertilizer production. This in turn will reduce the impact of removing animal agriculture land on emissions.
My point being that being extremist and advocating for total elimination of meat production is largely unbeneficial. Optimizing parts of the production chain (balance of meat vs crop production) is in my opinion a much better way forward than altogether removing the production of one food group.
Humans have evolved as omnivores and eating both meat and plants alike constitutes a balanced diet.
Only sane person here. Ppl will believe what they want
This is misleading because nobody can eat what cows and animals eat. It's not edible. Unless you are saying we should start eating crop residue
Organic fertilizers can be made from plant-based materials. It's known as veganic agriculture.
I don't know a lot about fertilizers. I will take for granted for this argument that animal-sourced fertilizers may be superior to synthetic fertilizers in terms of environmental impact, as you say.
I want to point out though that in the US about 2/3 of all crops are used to feed animals. We would need only a fraction of these crops to make up for the lost calories. Not having to feed the animals with crops in the first place would therefore massively cut the overall amount of fertilizer needed for crops. Does that make sense to you or am I missing something? Let me know, happy to learn!
Even if there wasn't such a thing as vegan organic fertilizers, currently we produce 20x the animal waste than can be used in manure. It's actually an ecological disaster, so another reason to stop relying on animals for food. We can keep them around in diminished populations if necessary, but to get to the point where there is even a problem 95%+ of current meat eaters would have to go vegan.
everyone's an environmentalist until you ask them to give up sausage rolls smh
but there are ve-GAN sausage rolls??
everyone is an environmentalist till you tell them to move to the countryside and become self sufficient
Or just ask them to eat vegan sausage rolls that taste basically the same anyway.
@@cynicalidealist11Honestly, they're better half the time.
Yeah that silly video really needed to be debunked by someone with a platform.
You can't ever trust someone that takes the fact of just one source, especially if that source it's compromised.
Yeah, plant based research is never compromised. But when the meat industry has to fund research (for there to be actual meat research) then it's compromised. The sign of a true vegan is that you denounce the meat industry for doing the exact same thing that the plant industry is doing. Never mind that the meat industry is doing it far less.
@@wtfronsson do you really believe that all studies done in favour of plant based diets are driven by some desire to make everyone vegan?! Surely no one would want to fund that, large majorities of plant based product is bought for animals to eat, almost every industry should be against this movement.
Another alternative is perhaps there is truth to the papers in favour of plant based diets and the agriculture industry are throwing their toys out the pram. It all sounds very much like big Tobacco, you think the meat industries wouldn’t put up a fight?
@@jenuism8506 Yes, anything that says you should eat a diet mainly consisting of plants is BS. This is my stance on the matter, and many doctors and other experts are also trying to bring light to this. Actual comparative studies to a carnivore diet barely exist. You have to look at how many carnivore studies exist vs plant based studies. And this tells you a whole lot about which diet the establishment is trying to hide.
Yes I know you disagree, but that's fine. Let's disagree. You can call the meat industry out for acting like Big Tobacco, and I will call out the plant based cult for the same.
There's also the matter of organ meats not being promoted, and pretty much all meat being cooked instead of raw. Our bodies evolved with raw meat, including lots of organ meat. So it's just clear what we should be eating. Organ meats have incredible nutrition to weight ratios. Even if you did everything else wrong, you'd be quite healthy just eating a pound of raw beef liver every week. And maybe some fat from another source.
@@wtfronsson I was going to laugh and call out the fibre deficiency backing up into your brain space, but now I am genuinely scared. Eat raw organs? Are you a movie monster or an terror from some legend? Windigo? Chupacabra? Do you drink the blood of infants as well?
@@wtfronsson "And this tells you a whole lot about which diet the establishment is trying to hide." You sound an awful lot like a conspiracy theorist
0:29 Earthling Ed: "Joseph ... makes so many ridiculous and anti-scientific points, and I'm going to go through and debunk each and every one of them"
0:47 poisoning the well, ad hominem (he explains that Dr. Frank Mittloehner is paid by the agricultural industry)
1:27 Earthling Ed claims that Dr. Mittloehner's points go against the scientific consensus but never demonstrates this. He also claims that Dr. Mittloehner has been criticized by experts and shows four quotes on screen criticizing him, but the quotes aren't labeled and no sources are given for them. They also appear to be lacking important context, but it's pretty difficult to find out for sure when he doesn't even say where the quotes are from.
1:51 red herring, motte and bailey (he points out that the weight of the food isn't necessarily the best metric, which is dodging the actual point being made which is that many of these crops aren't edible to humans in the first place)
3:01 he claims that foods being inedible to humans is not relevant, that it's all about how the land is used (ignoring the point made in the video that not all land can be used to grow human food crops)
3:19 Earthling Ed: "Now to give you a sense of perspective, in the US, animal farming uses ten times more land than plant-based farming for human consumption." completely ignoring that this point is addressed in the video in-depth and preferring to just toss it out there as one of the vegan favorite go-to quips that sounds like a good argument against meat despite it having been debunked so many times.
3:33 lie, Earthling Ed says that What I've Learned "conveniently glosses over" the following point that land which is used to grow animal feed could be used to grow human food. This is false. What I've Learned does indeed talk about this point, and demonstrates that much of this land cannot in fact be used to grow human food.
There's nothing of value in this video. I'm four minutes in and have yet to see anything which isn't logically fallacious or an outright lie.
People embrace anything that says I can continue my Bad ways
*natural ways, the ways our species always had. Yeah, I'm gonna continue those ways. Have fun starving.
@@wtfronsson i'm sorry but killing 70 billion animals in a year is not natural nor sustainable for the planet. Besides, the living conditions of those animals are far from "natural".
@@wtfronsson
Humans have always tried to distance themselves from nature through scientific discoveries and cultural development.
Something that is natural is not automatically ideal
@@laranipic3606 Plant agriculture is killing animals too. Smaller animals, but I don't believe the principle of minimizing harm says anything about the size of the harmed animal. Rodents and insects are dying because of your soy and grain fields. Cows on a pasture are not killing anything, unless maybe they step on something. The cows don't need to die until they stop milking, which is a healthy age. This is already the standard in my country. We have no beef cattle, only milk cattle that becomes beef once the milk stops. 97% grass fed. No problems here. If some other country can't do the same, don't blame us.
There is plenty of room on Earth for free range meat, dairy and eggs for all who want it. Of course there is, look at all the empty room! And also, the only effective way of reversing desertification is to make it a cow pasture, and let the cows keep dumping there for a while. Presto, desert is turned into land you can even use for farming your precious plants. Isn't that something?
@@oivanurminen8946 Science doesn't have to be distancing from nature. Discoveries and advancements can be used to be more in line with nature instead of less.
Something that is unnatural is by default more likely to harm your body. Because that body was not evolved eating _anything_ unnatural, only natural. There is no natural culture that made it this far without heavy emphasis on meat. India figured out they can enforce the cast system more effectively, if the low cast thinks meat isn't good for them. So they were probably the first veggie propagandists, starting thousands of years ago.
Plato said don't feed your slaves meat, and they will be easier to control.
I was waiting for Ed and his team to address this. The channel "Veganism Unspun" did a particularly good job of debunking the What I Learned video too....
Thanks! I'll check that out.
@@MukulVyas5 yes definitely
@@veganfortheanimals6994 I already watched it, and agree with you - the video from „Veganism Unspun” was very informative and revealing. I find it very expressive that both Ed’s and Veganism Unspun’s video manage to debunk Joseph’s video with both studies and incredible humor and funny comparisons.
@@veganfortheanimals6994 Dr. Gil Carvalho from "Nutrition Made Simple!" did a review of the video too and explained the flawed studies that WIL cites and even mentioned that the study about 2.6% GHG reduction had received major kickback from a lot of peers when it was published and he basically said that it's a very misleading video but he was very polite about it. And he's not even vegan! WIL even responded in the comments and was literally grasping at straws.
@@MukulVyas5 yes, I saw that video too and called out WIL for deleting my rebuttal comments....the WIL guy seems really intellectually dishonest with his video and with rebuttal comments disappearing
I'm glad you have a platform to speak.
* ~.FACT CHECK.~ *
4:16 Not all the land used for growing food for animals is suitable for people food agriculture use.
5:01 Ethanol based fuel doesnt have a net positive impact on carbon emissions. And just a little percentage of crops are usable for this.
5:06 If it isnt proffitable to make paper this way, who is going to pay for that labor? unreallistic. Again, a dream where maybe a couple crops could be used.
Basically, most of the residues of the crops arent nearly as profitable or useable as he preaches. That would be amazing, but thats not the reallity and the research for those kind of technologies were that system could be used is just a wild dream
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now about the carbon emissions:
5:27 Again, not all the farmland used to grow food for cattle is suitable for any use, including gigantic forests full of life and secluders of carbon. Thats not reallistic at all, indeed maximizing the margin for unreallistic values. The owners of those farmlands wont be happy to give up their properties and stop producing anything at all. People are conducted by profits, and so that wont happen unless the Federal govmt stops the "freedom" of civils. No
Give me a real number please!
14:00 Perfectly fine for the most part, but the comprenhension of this topic is highly biased.
All that explanation ultimatly means is that ALL the carbon that cattle produce by eating grass, is the net amount produced by the cattle consumption of plants for the past 12 years. Yes, 12 years is the average lifespan of methane. TWELVE. Not 10 nor 20. Afterwards that carbon dioxide is the same as what the plants used to grow to feed the cattle, cancelling each other. Not all the livestock has the same carbon cycle neither. Cows are the worst on this regard, but this doesnt mean all livestock are the same.
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Thanks for your attention.
Hope this could prove some facts.
IMO on a climate change perspective, the effect of cattle is highly lower than the rest of factors in our lifestyle. If you trully want to save the planet, eating vegan isnt even a tenth as usefull as using a bycycle, lower your energetic consumption, etc. And all that is thanks to the carbon cycle. People are used to separate those two (emissions vs carbon capture) which shouldnt be the case, at least on this matter.
*You dont feed cows with fossil fuels, just your car.*
You forgot one important time stamp: 21:20 Oat milk latte > almond milk latte.
100% true.
Scientifically based from my own anecdotal evidence.
Now I have no choice but to try it!! LOL Cannot argue with science.
Have you tried soy milk? It also tastes pretty good imo. Its emissions are a little bit higher, but water use and land use are both lower. Especially water use, almost half the footprint. (Poore & Nemecek, 2018)
You guys, I know hazelnut is expensive outside of Turkey but it's so good in coffee
@@goji5887 soy milk is so good!!!! Yessss
I don't drink coffee, but I agree that oat milk and soy milk are both better than almond milk.
Stuff like this makes me wonder how wrong that channel is about everything else they post
He must realize that it will eventually call his general credibility into question.
Agreed
Yeah the whole channel is sus. It’s one thing to get some facts wrong but this seems deliberate
Here early from discord! Thanks for everything you do Ed!
i am not sure that comparing calories is very good analogy when you are comparing two different digestive systems, please correct me if I am wrong, but due to the cow's different digestive system they can actually get more "energy" out of pasture grass because they can break it down more. Human's can't eat grass and gain a lot of energy out of it bc our bodies can't break it down so it makes sense that we'd "lower" the amount of calories it provides to us, bc we simply can't access most of it like a cow can. However i do agree with the latter argument that the amount of land used is WAY more important. If we have terraformed the land for agriculture by reducing or replacing natives species that are efficient at GHG sequestering, then that is a BIG issue.
You're correct: cows are polygastrics (several stochas, literally) and their digestive system is capable of extracting nutrients from raw grass while monogastrics (like us) can't. ~70% of the agricultural lands are permanents pastures. Those surfaces are used for animal agriculture since they can't be used for crops for various reasons and in general they are pretty efficient at GHG sequestration.
You're very right at posing the issue toward the croplands: no matter the destination (animal or humans), the improvement of the cultivation methods in order to sequester more carbon on those surfaces (no till, permanent cover, etc.) is key, in my opinion, to improve the agricultural GHG balance. Very good view on the situation imo 👍
We do get nutrients from raw plants
Humans are herbivores, and thus have the digestive system of one
We are mongastric herbivores,.while cows are multi chambered herbivores
You said humans can't eat grass. But we do. Wheat is a type of grass
@@antioxidantfool7362 ik we can get nutrients from raw plants, but when it comes to some things like prairie grass, which cows eat, cooking it isn't goin to help much. Humans can choose to be herbivores, or omnivores, i mean since we have access to supplements and pills we can pretty much eat watever we want within reason
@@okidoxb4846
I don't think you understand.
Being an herbivore does not mean that animal can eat literally any plant on earth.
And you are making a false comparison.
A cow can eat praise grass, but a human can't, so that means we aren't herbivores?
Humans and cows are both herbivores, but are still different species.
Humans are anatomically herbivores. We have no business eating animals unless in a starvation situation
@@antioxidantfool7362 _"Humans are herbivores"_ No they're not. Gary Yourofsky is a pathological liar. It's important to avoid propagating this bs because some people could believe that and that could cause health issues to some.
_"We are monogastric herbivores"_ No we're not. Horses, rabbits are. In any case their are way less effective at extracting effective nutriments from the grass than polygastrics. Most of them need to address this with different strategies: the rabbit eats its droppings back (don't try it). The horse has specific bacteria's in its digestive tube (we don't). Bottom line: you can eat grass but you can't digest it, you'd get almost nothing from it but undigested fibers.
_"Wheat is a type of grass"_ And since we're not herbivorous, we eat the grain, not the straw.
I love how Ed at the end is like "If you've been sent this video by a vegan friend..." because that is exactly what I'll do if anyone sends me that WIL video
Some people will really go out of their way to feel like they’re in the right and that veganism is a wasted effort. And I really don’t understand why.
@A P I know where meat comes from, I consume it regularly, and I don't feel guilty at all.
@@georgewashingtom6516 have you watched any slaughterhouse footage? It's one thing knowing your food is a dead body when we've been raised to believe it's normal, it's another to watch it die before eating it.
@@therockingvolbeat3630 wow you would hate any aspect of the natural world if you don’t like the fact that animals eat other animals
@@graystone2802 wooosh what other animals do is irrelevant to humans killing sentient beings without any need for it. We have moral agency and we can generally live perfectly fine without animal products.
@@graystone2802 I think Angela explained it pretty well. Meat isn't a requirement so the mass genocide we commit is purely recreational. We have moral agency, we understand that killing is wrong and feel empathy for the victims whilst actually predatory animals don't.
What I've learned should rename his channel to What I learned According To My Confirmation Bias
He doesn't really want to learn. He wants to establish what he thought he knows with "science" and fallacious logic so that he really doesn't have to change anything about himself when it comes to hid diet. 🤣
no one has to change their diet
@@lux_ye13 ('Academic philosophy answer' warning). There are two ways in which your statement can be correct: (1) under error theory - then ok but cringe; (2) Humean rejection of an ought - basically, there are some moral philosophers who would deny the sensical nature of "an ought" but still claim that moral statements are truth-apt and that some are in fact true. So in this view nothing changes that much because even though they can't say "someone has to (ought to) do smth" they still say "it would be better is sb did smth" and it's well-replicating psychological knowledge that if we have reasons to act (eg to not buy meat) and no overriding reasons to the contrary, then a mentally healthy human being would almost always act in this way. So if "What I've Learned" guy were to agree on everything with Ed (and with implications of matters agreed upon) then it would be very likely that he would take some actions to ameliorate the cognitive dissonance between those reasons and his action (maybe not being full vegan but at least limit or decrease animal products). // There's some chance that this comment is useful or smth so here you go.
@@mateusztgorak i just mean even if it would be better tp change it for the environment one still doesnt HAVE to. right?
@@lux_ye13 In formal ethics - see my previous comment (if smth would be better, but it's not true that sb has to do something that's the position "(2)" I mentioned), additionally, in human right ethics it's more complicated eg bc by contributing to climate change you don't *directly* harm anyone, just indirectly it's probable that you do harm some people in the future, so it's not so clear. In law - prohibiting eating anything would be ridiculous. It's not even illegal to eat sand (and eating humans is rarely *directly* illegal, in most countries acts of cannibalism are commonly charged not for eating but for murder or desecration of corpses). BUT I think one could make a good case for taxing more on things that have super high carbon emissions (like meat). And if we were in extremely bad situation like: meat industry causing global pandemic every 5 years bc of higher mutation rates or/and antibiotics resistance started to happen THEN I think it would be justifiable to make some legal restrictions on selling it (but not eating it).
Table of contents:
Claim: We shouldn’t measure edible and inedible feed in terms of weight, but calories.
・Disagree, but I can see where he’s coming from. We should measure in weight as calorie content isn’t particularly useful for farmers when talking about amounts of livestock feed. However, I suppose knowing how many calories of human-edible feed livestock are eating would be useful to know for these types of discussions.
2. Claim: Animal farming uses a lot of land, and that land that should be used in other ways.
・Misleading. Animal farming may use plenty of land, but you can’t grow crops on most of that land.
3. Claim: 127M acres is used to grow food exclusively for animals.
・False. Land is used to grow crops. The crops that take up the majority of the acreage (corn and soy) are not grown “exclusively” for feeding animals.
4. Claim: We could take cropland used for animals and grow food for 350M people.
・Data provided does not support this claim. The suggested replacements for beef, pork, chicken and eggs in the study cited would not be adequately nourishing.
5. Claim: Grazing land would be better suited for something else.
・Unrealistic. The current use of grazing land is very likely the best use for reasons explained in detail below.
6. Claim: We could compost 43 billion kgs of crop residues instead of feeding them to animals.
・Unrealistic, overly optimistic scenario. This drastically underestimates how massive of an undertaking this would be. It would require 8,600 new large scale composting operations.
7. Claim: Authors of a study Joseph cited assumed an overly grain-rich diet for Americans in their simulation and this calls into question their credibility.
・Irrelevant. Nutrient adequacy was not discussed in my original video. Misses the objective of the study. While this may seem odd at first, there was a reason this assumption was made in the study.
8. Claim: We could grow something else with the land in Hall and White’s scenario.
・Feasibility remains to be proved. How much of that land is actually suitable for growing other things is debatable and irrigation limitations need to be considered as is explained in Hall and White’s paper.
9. Claim: Hall and White assuming a very high calorie diet for Americans in their simulation calls into question the credibility of the study.
・Irrelevant. Misses the objective of the study. The large calorie consumption actually reflects the objective of the study. Explained below.
10. Claim: Hall and White’s assumption that crop residues would be burned in their simulation is nonsensical.
・Gerald misses important information. See point #6 above. What are we to do with 43 million tons of residues per year? There is sound reasoning behind the incineration scenario.
11. Claim: Cattle emissions are too large considering the amount of calories they provide.
・Misleading. Beef is not prized for its calorie content but for a wide variety of key nutrients.
12. Claim: A scenario where Americans obtain 100% of their calories from beef would be environmentally damaging.
・Irrelevant. While many are discussing the environmental benefits of an entirely plant-based diet these days, no one is suggesting environmental benefits from a 100% beef diet.
13. Claim: Half of all agricultural land is used for beef production.
・Misleading. Most agricultural land is not suitable for crops, but is for animal agriculture.
14. Claim: A scenario where Americans obtain 100% of their calories from beef would require far too much land.
・Irrelevant. For similar reasons as point #12.
15. Claim: Beef-related emissions aren’t 2% they’re 3.7% according to life cycle analysis.
・Very nuanced topic that requires more discussion. This is discussed in detail in section C titled “Poore and Nemecek study Flaws and the difficulties with life cycle analyses.”
16. Claim: Methane emissions from animal agriculture may be higher than official data suggests.
・Speculation. Top-down models for measuring methane are not yet sophisticated enough to pinpoint the reason for the discrepancy with bottom-up models, this is an unresolved question.
17. Claim: Agricultural emissions could be reduced 61 to 73% by a plant-based food system.
・Insufficient evidence for this statement considering the many flaws listed in point #21
18. Claim: We can expect a 6.4 to 7.7% reduction in emissions if everyone went vegan.
・Insufficient evidence. See section C
19. Claim: We can discontinue animal agriculture and “rewild” the freed-up land; we don’t need it for food production.
・Doesn’t consider the magnitude of the challenge of feeding an expected 9.5 billion people.
・Well-managed cattle can provide food while improving soil health and the soil’s carbon sequestration ability. This will be invaluable going forward. Explained in detail in section C.
20. Claim: We could sequester 8.1 billion metric tons of CO2 - 15% of our emissions if we went plant based globally.
・Insufficient evidence. See section C.
21. (14:58) - Says a plant-based food system would address 21.4 to 22.7% of emissions.
・Insufficient evidence for this statement considering the many flaws listed in section C.
22. Claim: Because the amount of agricultural land per person in the U.S. is double the world average, the carbon capture potential of rewilding U.S. agricultural land may be higher than other areas.
・Non sequitur. More agricultural land per person doesn’t mean more agricultural land…
23. Claim: Joseph’s description of the carbon cycle is wrong.
・It's not. After saying the explanation in my video is wrong, he goes on to explain pretty much exactly what was described and showed on-screen.
24. Claim: Methane is 86 times more potent over a 20-year period, therefore we must therefore scrap animal agriculture ASAP.
・Technically correct if looking at “in vitro” data, but atmospheric methane’s effect on actual warming depends on many factors. Methane is discussed in detail in section D.
25. Claim: Joseph did not explain that the reason ruminants are bad is because they take carbon dioxide and turn it into methane, a gas with a higher warming potential.
・Misrepresents my video as this information was indeed presented. You can find it at 16:48 in my video.
26. Claim: Joseph’s food waste discussion proves his understanding of the carbon cycle is questionable because food also decays and releases methane.
・Misrepresents that section of the video, misses important information and claims something was said in the video that was not.
27. (19:21) - Says: I’m sure Joseph and I will agree that food waste is something that needs addressing.
・I do agree.
28. Claim: Joseph created a false dichotomy by saying you can’t care about food waste and be plant based.
・Misrepresentation. I did not say this.
29. Claim: Joseph didn’t discuss the blue water consumption of beef.
・Misrepresentation. I did in fact discuss the blue and gray water consumption of beef which is a less flattering presentation of beef than if I just mentioned blue water consumption.
30. He agrees that almonds are water intensive and that we should drink oat milk.
・Nice to agree on the almonds. I’ve never had oat milk. Maybe I’ll try it.
31. Discusses: irrigation of hay production in California, similar to another video I made a post about.
・I discuss this in another post. You can find that one here.
32. Says: Where 80% of the world’s almonds come from California, only 20% of the U.S.’s milk comes from California.
・Point unclear. If his point is that people drink a lot of milk, he’d be right.
33. Explains: Why plant-based foods are actually more efficient
・Misrepresentation, exaggerates my point. My point wasn’t that beef is less resource-intensive than plants, just that the claims against cattle are way overblown.
34. Says: Joseph justifies blue water usage of beef by saying beef is more nutritious than rice.
・Misrepresents my point (and apparently assumes I don’t respect the audience’s intelligence.)
35. Says: Plants are actually better from a water perspective.
・Misrepresents (exaggerates) my point.
36. Claims: my video said you get 200g of liver with 200g of beef.
・Misrepresents (blatantly) what was said in my video to make conclusions about my intentions.
Is amazing how people this pdf reply actually achieves anything in debunking this debunk. Most of the replies are like "misinterpret" without saying anything lol.
Guys, please read the science. Don’t even trust Ed or Joseph, the data doesn’t lie and there can’t be two opposite ways to look at it.
Let’s talk about the first response about calories vs weight.
WIL says that 80% of the food that are fed to livestock are non-edible for humans. 80% in weight. Which is true.
But this is mostly grass and leaves right ? Food that are extremely poor in calories. So yeah, to meet a daily caloric need, you’ll need way more grass than anything else.
If you wanted to eat 2000 calories of salad in a day, that would be 13kg (28 pounds) of it. It becomes irrelevant to say that most of what cows eat is grass because thats absolutely not a good representation of what keeps them alive.
You might then say "then we just eat grass fes cows", yes that would be better. But this would become event more unsustainable since we’ll need way more grass. OR, we would have to eat beef once every six months or something, for it to have a respectable impact.
We can’t expect to change the world. But we can be an example of a better world for anyone we come in contact with 💚
Yes, be the example!
imagine being on the net for your pleasure at the cost of harm to sentient life
disgusting D:
The world is changing! It is changing!
@@Ali-xj8cc 💚🤣
❤️❤️❤️
The algorithm needs to recommend this in the side bar for the WIL vid! Like, comment share!
Talking, talking, talking... yo this is good video ai.
Yess
Watch time also till the end
@@miketaiwanwalkcity6355 does that help? I usually let it play while i do chores
@@stehplatzb.4310 yeah I think watch time is a big factor in the algorithm
EDIT : I had misread and the numbers are actually correct, but will leave my mistake so the comments make sense (and in case someone else had a similar interrogation).
At 13:51, the amount of carbon dioxyde that could be removed from the air is not 8.1 billion tons every year, but 8.1 billion tons in total over 100 years, so 81 million tons every year. It's still a huge amount, but 8.1 billion every year would be more than what the US currently emit every year, at around one sixth or 15% of worldwide emissions (Which is physically impossible given the rate at which carbon is released at the moment.)
It makes all the following argument inaccurate, as 81 million tons per year is far from accounting for an additional 15% percent of the emissions removed, at least from the data evoked in the video.
Apart from that, thank you very much for this video, I can only aspire to make writing as clear and relevant as you did here. I was a bit skeptical after seeing the "original" one, I hope it reaches as many people as possible !
No its not, read again, that is a global figure, which he said it after he quoted (he does not imply only the animal agriculture land in the US is rewilded, it is the whole globe). Global land net sink every year is for certain at the order of magnitude of billion tons (or gigatonnes/petagrams commonly reported in scientific papers). 15% offset (and some estimated even higher) of global emission by land means is not impossible in many hypothetical "best-case" scenarios, I read this kind of papers every day. However, that figure is of course a big exaggeration if extrapolated to 100 years, regenerated/rewild land will have at most 2 to 3 decades of high C sequestration until it reaches a near steady-state.
@@y37chung You're right thank you ! For some reason I was convinced that the sentence covered US land only, which made it unrealistic to reach such an amount of captured CO2, but re-reading it and listening to the whole part made it clearer it makes sense. (Plausible at least, haven't dug further).
I agree about the limited potential "re-naturing" has since it will mostly capture during the growth, but we can imagine/hope that if it is indeed done, by 2100 we will be consuming/producing/polluting much less in general, and we will be part of the cycle so that most of our emissions are quickly reaobsorbed by the younger plants.
Most of what you say is correct, however, all that pasture land will never be used or farmed for anything else. If that pasture land was viable for crop farming, then we would be farming it right now just to add to our feed for beef and with that higher yield, we would have plenty of area left to farm bio-fuel crops.
Presumably you're responding to the bit at 2:35 where he compares how many calories you can get from oats to how many you can get from the equivalent weight of pasture grass. That's the only bit I can find where he refers to pastureland. But the point he's making is not that you could simply convert from pastureland to oat or other crop farming, he's debunking a point of WIL's that's based on a simplistic comparison of crop weights.
He immediately goes on to say that 10 times more land is used for animal agriculture than growing crops for human consumption and that a great deal of that could be put to better use. But given that animals - even so-called grass-feed cattle - are not for the most part being put out to pasture, the majority of that land is currently already crop land being used to produce animal feed and could be used for different crops. And while some pastureland might not be suitable for growing crops, a lot of it could, as Ed's comments suggest, be rewilded and reforested, providing habitats for diverse species and better carbons sinks.
@@JohnMoseley As someone who worked in wildlife conservation and even as a ranch hand on occasion. A vast majority of cattle are on land unsuitable for large scale farming and that is why it is mentioned that in the US 2/3rds of the land is not arable while 1/3 is mostly farmland if it hasn't been taken over by human settlement. Usually ranchers will grow crops but only as a nutritional boost to animals and it is usually in small patches that wouldn't be useful for distribution. Most of them don't even do more than plow and plant(not even fertilizing) . They also tend to have their own gardens for their own vegetables. However most of them still buy produce because not everything is sustainable or even growable in their climate. Something like 98% of cattle spend most of their lives on pasture before they are sent for fattening in a feedlot for a few months, where most of the food is remnant waste from human food farming.
Cattle do NOT typically need massive deforestation as they work in natural pastures and are moved from one to another as needed. The idea the reforestation is needed in the US is a joke too because we have programs where every tree cut down usually involves 2 to 3 new trees cut. On average we gain forestland by 1 million acres each year. The funny thing is that agriculture for farming does need massive deforestation as the machines used and the land use increases dramatically.
Pretty early, and honestly I was hoping to see this!
Typical, one side say something, the other side say another thing. We can't exclusively go plant-based. We humans want perfect looking food, and for that we will use the shit out of pesticides to get perfect looking fruit and veggies = bad for environment. We also can't go fully meat-based, that won't solve any of the current problems, let alone the questionable "health benefits" of going full on meat. I rest my case, a balanced diet that doesn't include meat every single day is the best choice. Eat responsibly. And let's shift our attention to fossil fuel usage. Because that's a real problem...
I’d add that encouraging local producers have far more positive repercussions on ecological, economical and social aspects.
Many people are finding a carnivore or high saturated fat diet very beneficial. To say that eating meat is the culprit for diseases in the western diet is Simply unverifiable given the amounts of sugar and carbs that are present in the diet. Both of which causes inflammation. Meat does not cause inflammation.
I was trying to be more heathy i started lifting weights and i was seeing results and i had energy to do it but when I stopped eating 2 chicken breasts a day i became tired and didn't have the energy to lift
@@baleful941 And that is the problem with the lies that have erupted because of the war on animal agriculture and animal products. The reality: meat and animal fats are healthy.
Thanks, Ed! The creator of that video said he might make a response to you. I wonder if it would be worth it to reach out for a live debate or discussion with them.
He did, a PDF response yesterday, invite him to debate please!
A Debate would be great, because both sides seem to be picking and choosing and glosing over a bunch of things acording to.... well... both sides.
@@cualquierwea1 could you link the PDF response? I cant seem to find it
@@joshuamartinez8990 go to the original video and follow a link in the description
I read the entire PDF that WIL responded with and I have to say it was actually incredibly well put together. I hope that Ed does respond to the PDF because as of now WIL's responses to Ed leave me questioning a lot. This isn't to say i'll stop being vegan. At the end of the day I could not contribute to animal suffering, but WIL's PDF response makes me question whether Ed jumps the gun a bit with his responses before doing adequate research and leaning heavily on creating suspicion over the individual doing the research, rather than the research itself. Really hoping Ed does a response to the PDF.
Calories are not important. It's about the nutrients that are provided. Mass in mass out! Calories mean nothing to any animal. We cannot consume calories, as calories are heat. Calories are mass less and only pertain to the energy released in a bomb calorimeter on a sample of food. Humans are not bomb calorimeter. Look at India for eg. Over 305 million cows, yet in the US their are 9 mill. Yet in the US , 1 cow produces as much milk as 11 Indian cows. This is called efficiency. This reduces so much resources. India and Brazil have over 80 per cent of the total cow population in the world. The problem with methane emissions is largely with developing countries. Developed countries have very efficient and maximize yields using the least resources. India is basically a vegan country. Pasture grass is upcycled to high quality protein and fat not to mention vast amounts of minerals and vitamins. Vegan food is all carbs, which no human actually needs. Yes food is grown exclusively for animals, on land animals which include cows dogs, cats, horses, pigs, chickens. These animals include pets. Yes pets. Pets do not upcycle or give back anything. It's obvious that you need larger areas of land. What would you do with grazing land Ed? Its hilly, very difficult terrain, very hard to irrigate. Machines could not operate in these conditions. You merely state something else with? Tell us. Compost...that is what cows and ruminants do every day. They poo and urinate wherever they go. This is some of the best natural fertilizer you can have. Organic farming which vegans support can only be organic if natural fertilizer like manure is used. Yes biogas. That is methane. The stuff that nearly every household using natural gas uses to cook with. This is what Prof Frank is doing in California now. By 2027 they will be in a negative warming scenario. Methane is sequestered meaning it's in a cycle. Reusing it does not add more to the environment. Yet fossil fuels which is the real problem here constantly adds to the environment. Wetlands for eg produces more methane worldwide than any other source by a large margin. Never hear you complain of that. Crop residues given to ruminants would go to feed people not make paper. The environment needs ruminants. They have existed on earth for millions of years contributing in huge ways. They have been emitting methane for millions of years. Global warming has become a big issue only in the last 50 years ed! 50 years. Yet you are blaming ruminants that have occupied earth for about 40 million years for our pollution problems today. Not once have you mentioned electricity, heat, transportation or manufacturing. You want to wipe them out of existence. It's like wiping out bees, or any species just for your agenda. If the environment is so important. Let's stop electricity, heat, transport and manufacturing. That will wipe out 80 per cent of the worlds greenhouse gases. What about fish. It's by far the largest of all slaughter of sentient animals many times over. They produce negligible emissions, yet they provide food for even the poorest nations in the world with essential omega 3s something which plant food cannot in meaningful quantities that can sustain life. Where did you get that figure of feeding 350 mill people ed? That would also increase deaths of more animals, indirectly or directly, more fertilizer, meaning more nitrous oxide emissions, herbicides the list goes on and on. Yes ed in the production of vegan food. Look at the amount of processing involved in making vegetable oil, cereals, meatless burgers, the rest of your vegan mush. Meat doesn't require much processing. That table of emissions shows nitrous oxide to be even more of a problem. This is even more potent than methane. Look at those numbers. Food Waste is proof that all those resources used for food was for nothing. Most were vegetables and fruits. Animals also urinate. They give back water to the land and it comes with added benefits. Compare beef to any legume. It beats it hands down. Remember when eating ruminants you never need vitamins or minerals. Facts are the facts. A vegan diet cannot sustain life without supplements. Humans do not require plant food, nor do they need carbs.
What I've learned is the type of guy who would make a video titled " Why ending slavery won't make black lives better".
@Emmit G chill, slavery was abolished a long time ago so what’s the harm? He didn’t say he supported slavery or anything.
You compared beef to veg in the form of weight when being grown under blue water sources, however earlier you claimed weight it not a good metric to compare by when energy provided by the food is what really matters.
the table he showed also had caloric values, as well as the water footprint per unit of nutritional value (calories/litre) and his point very much holds true.
@@RandomPerson-mn4lf if only human nutrition could be summed up in calories...
@@russochypriota If you think that meat is in any way a better source of nutrition than plants you have brain rot
@@samuelx5466 well it's obviously a vastly inferior source of smug 😬
@@russochypriota well it's obviously a vastly inferior source of glucose considering you had to edit your comment to spell "well" right lol
What’s wrong with comparing the vegetation by volume? I feel like it was demonstrating the ratio of how many crops go to live stock, which is an overwhelming majority, and criticizing the use of weight doesn’t further your argument IMO.
Another thought; if the overwhelming majority of plants go to animals and human beings have food waste that’s 82% plants, then wouldn’t it be a better idea to allocate the current farmland that we have now to not be excessive and replace it with trees? Also, What do you think we should do about those millions of cattle in third world countries?
Your own data about the gas emissions of agriculture and meat shows that a theoretical drop would occur if everybody switched to plant based. But I think that’s really not a realistic goal or expectation. I don’t believe that humans are natural herbivores, I think humans were omnivores from the beginning of time. I don’t think going meatless is the main way we should think about climate change. That’s too ambitious and unrealistic of a goal.
The overall contribution of cattle to the amount of methane isn’t very large. I forgot WIT’s statistic, but entirely getting rid of animal agriculture doesn’t seem like it’ll make that big of a dent or give us a significant amount of more time. I may be wrong tho.
I’m not anti vegan, I’m not someone who doesn’t believe in climate change, and I’m not trying to trigger any vegans. I thought your last point about almonds and water and plant based stuff being better in nutrients was well made. Love your accent too. I just had a few doubts about some points you made.
Agreed
Where does your "82 % plants food waste" figure come from? Does or does it not include food waste in animal feed production? Does it take into account the fact that 75 % of the animal feed crops' calories consumed by farm animals are wasted, due to poor conversion efficiency?
Does it take into account that "wasted" plant food is compostable, and the main issue we have is that much of it ends up on landfills due to poor waste management?
Methane production is one of the smaller factors when it comes to cattle farming. There are other factors, such as deforestation, and missed potentials in reforestation. And climate change isn't the only issue.
No, the world going plant based alone won't be enough to mitigate the worst effects of climate change (and other environmental damage). But it's the most impactful (and not the only) thing you and I as individuals can do.
www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0594-0
Just want to add a note on your comment. Initially humans were mainly herbivore and occasionally scavengers. At the beginning, they were quite a weak species trying to find their way through the wild nature. It s only later by socializing and helping each other that they were able to chase down animals (big ones like in Australia where they wiped out most of them) . Moreover, your digestive system is closer to a herbivore than a carnivore. We have the capability to eat/digest meat, that's different. Beyond that, everything is about macro and micro you bring to your body and the way you absorb these nutrients. It is not a question of "I think". There are quite some scientific topics to read on that :)
@@phenix4590 when you say mainly herbivores, are you implying that there were also humans who ate meat?
@@phenix4590 Humans are omnivores in the end. If they couldn't hunt big get at first they went for weaker, smaller animals.
medium nitpick,
What the US uses for agricultural land is naturally pairie and steppe land, not forests. Returning it to nature would not have any significant tree growth and carbon reduction. It is mostly useless for anything but farming or city development, and both of those require massive abuse of water
Another issue I have with this video is that if we DID switch to 100% Veganism, things like Nuts would need to be produced in a much larger quantity as they are one of the best sources of protein (as well as other nutrients) among plants. Since nuts consume a HUGE amount of water, this may change the equations for how water intensive each diet is.
I dont know what the numbers would show, but if your goal is to remove all meat, you HAVE to account for what the new diets people will eat to replace that meat would actually look like.
Also, another factor is, Cows also produce Milk. Milk is mostly water that is drinkable. This means while cows do consume a lot of water, they also PRODUCE drinkable water. Some plants also contain a lot of water in them as well. Meat as well contains quite a bit of water. I wonder what those charts of Blue water consumption would look like if you actually accounted for the water that ends up in the final product.
There are quite a few things in this video that I feel could be expanded upon more.
Grasslands actually sequester a lot of carbon. This is usually less than forests, but is more resistant to wildfire.
@@user-ci5it7gw1d this is carbon that naturally exists in nature/atmosphere and would end up back in nature/atmosphere if all humans died literally tomorrow. Because eventually it will be eaten, burnt or just rot and turn back into a greenhouse gas before being absorbed back into the earth in a new plant.
@@eragon78 Beef cattle is not producing any milk that people consume. And dairy cattle has an atrocious water to milk conversion, 628 liters of water are required to produce one liter of cow milk. While just 28 liters of water are used to produce soy milk.
Also nuts are NOT the main source of protein for vegans, beans are. And if you want to eat nuts, you can skip almonds and pistachios to really lower your water footprint.
@@aenab.4596 Again, you also have to consider how much of that water is actually wasted though.
Cows peeing that water back out means its not wasted. Pee will get filtered and enter back into the water system.
I mean Humans consume vastly more water than cows do, but its not an issue because the water we excrete goes back into the water cycle. This has been the case for all life on earth pretty much.
And my point was stuff like this still wasnt BEING considered. 28 liters out of 628 liters is still a significant portion. Thats nearly 5% still from just that alone.
This also isnt considering again the usage of where that water comes from. Green vs Blue vs Grey.
Most of the water cows consume comes from their feed. Its "green" water. This is water that already wasnt being used by humans. It was water that was already being used by plants in the water cycle and not water we added into the system from elsewhere.
Blue water is the water you dont want, because this is human consumable water that we are taking out of the system of things like aquafers and providing to animals.
So if you compare the BLUE water usage to milk production, im sure the numbers are much closer and its a much larger percentage.
Green water usage is hardly a concern because its just part of the natural water cycle. This is the stuff that basically most wild animals consume as well.
So when this stuff is actually all taken into account, im sure the numbers look far less extreme than theyre trying to portray it as. It may still not be great, idk what they are. But people acting like we're dumping hundreds of gallons of water from our water supplies like aquafers for each cow over its lifetime isnt accurate. Most of their water is coming from the food they eat, it returns to the water cycle, and they also for SOME cows at least, they also produce fluid back into the system.
You are right that dairy cows and beef cows are different, but dairy cows still make up a sizable portion of the cow population which is why its still something to consider.
Well i think you might have gotten this part wrong when you showed the graphic at 3:45 where 77.3M acres of land is being used for us to eat but 21.5M acres of land is also used for wheat exports that also feeds people and some amount of the 68.6M acres of land is used for other grain that is also used for human consumption. Plus out of the 51M acres of land that is kept fallow, that land is also necessary to grow crops since crops are cycled on different pieces of land throughout the year, which ultimately means that crops for human consumption are taking up more land than livestock feed
T h i s
I wan gone make a similar comment to this becouse the stats used is agriculture land and not crop land. Grasland used for animals is also in this. Graslands are generally graslands becouse they are bad for crops. Only in some rare occasions you see cropland used as grasland but most of that is close to farms so the cows can go outside or the chickens can go out side with free range eggs and (weide melk). If that data said crop land i would have thought wauw that is a lot of land being used for animals but it is agricultural. On a second note look at the biofuel that is all cropland.
And becouse of these mistakes at this point already two i still can’t get to watch this video
@@marcroelse9517 I believe the video he's trying to debunk mentioned that. How Farm animals are also grazing on land that CAN'T be used to grow crops.
Now, now. Don't start using inconvenient facts now.
You might hurt his feelings.
Most of the arguments in this video are him getting things wrong. Also check his 'sources'. most of them are not scientific for the least and even the scientific ones are questionable at best.
Unproblematic King 🌍
ngl...I didnt want to like this vid because it goes against my bias, but I do, and its very informative.
Both his and Josephs VIdeo are informative, they both have very valid points and they both have cases of terrible interpretation of Data, somewhere in the middle lies the truth
Give the PDF debunking this debunk videon in the original WIL video! The more information and perspective we have, the better. :) (Not advocating or going against any certain perspectives, FYI.)
@@whitelotusmember8664 one example, Ed completely disregards capitalism, when he said that we could “give the land back to the nature, this would reduce emissions etc.” it’s an empty argument. Just because companies Or farmers don’t hold animals anymore, they wouldn’t give agricultural land away for free, most of them would grow crops and Pestizide the hell out of it (I come from Germany and over here that’s a huge problem in many regions)
@@whitelotusmember8664 bu far the biggest issue tho is that Ed doesn’t even acknowledge (maybe in 1 sentence idk but not in the structure of his video) that Joseph’s point was “Growing meat hurts the environment, but not as bad as people make it out to be, it’s neither the biggest nor the easiest to fix problem when it comes to environment” and that is 100% true
To prove that let’s look at Ed’s stats for “Global Agricultural emissions”, in the US animals make up a few percent because cars and industries are way worse, the global number ist misleading because Malaysia emission are obviously 90% animals cause there isn’t much else, the global emission percentage is therefore a completely useless number to talk about.
And while this doesn’t mean animal impact isn’t high in e.g. the us, it proves that the impact is quite less dramatic than Ed makes it out to be (so exactly Joseph’s point)
Last point is that Ed says “their numbers are wrong cause they come from meat companies” while his numbers are right cause they come from pro vegan companies?
Just watch a video on how statistics are falsified then you know that most of the numbers are rigged in a way that fits ones agenda
(Like with gender pay gap that exists but is pushed quite a few percent through convenient focus)
The fact that Dr. Frank Mitloehner works for the agriculture industry is not a secret. The original video clearly mentions it. Yet you choose to present this as some sort of a revelation and use innuendo and insinuations to engage in ad hominem attacks without addressing the actual arguments he makes. I'm sorry, this by itself has reduced the credibility of this video.
Spoiler alert: Earthling Ed is not objective either. After deep investigation, I discovered he's vegan.
Why should someone who works for the meat industry be taken as a legitimate source at all? He's 1000% biased, he clearly isn't getting that double chin from plant-burgers. He's a beef boy for life. It's called food-preference bias.
@@Powsimian _"He's a beef boy for life."_ Wow, quitting meat was THAT hard for you? I guess you grasp motivation wherever you find it, including being judgmental. Speaking of biases...
@@ginabean9434 I'm biased, yeah once you know the truth and you realize how easy it is to live your life aligned with your own values. I'm sure you cringe at the thought of kicking a dog, well I cringe at the thought of giving myself a heart attack or cancer by killing animals. You have cognitive dissonance if you draw a line of distinction between the two. Motivation?
@@Powsimian The motivation seems obvious: lecturing others. If the motivation was to save animal, there'd be no need to brag about it. Note that a dog is not raised to get kicked, while a farm animal purpose is to feed us. While refusing it you ensures it never gets born, so you don't save any live anyway. But again, it's not the motivation.
"But almonds" is one of the dumbest gotchas against vegans. Like we just spend all day munching almonds and downing almond milk. I haven't had almond milk even once this year.
I hate almond milk, it’s so watery. Give me oat or soy any day 😊 I might eat a handful of almonds now and then like any other person, vegan or not.
@@CeravvvEgan Same, it is the worst plant milk. Weird that it's the most ubiquitous considering it has the worst taste/texture, isn't the cheapest, and is the worst one environmentally. Soy and oat are sooo much better.
"But almonds" also is very funny because almonds are calculated to be the most nutritious food on our planet. So if we could afford to eat one food that's bad water-consumtion-wise, almonds would literally be the best choice. Meanwhile, beef isn't even on the list. And besides, who uses almonds (nuts or milk) as their only alternative to meat or cow milk? If we were to average what almonds can be an alternative to with other alternatives, we would again be in the realm of low numbers. Source: www.bbc.com/future/article/20180126-the-100-most-nutritious-foods
So what do You eat for Any of Your multiple meals per day that killed less sentient beings or brutally?
More Protein deficient "vegan" brains needing strawmen. Then yall throw a hissy fit tantrum and run off.
Meat eaters dont spend all day munching Meat nor does it kill as much
@@ValseInstrumentalistI think more the argument is that why would we consider almonds vegan as well as other large scale plant ag that causes so much damage.
A large percentage of agricultural land is pasture, which lends perfectly to grazing. In areas with light brown soils, and little rain where mostly only grasses grow, livestock is common. You can't just swap out pasture land and start growing tomatoes. In Alberta where we farm the south eastern part of the province and much of Saskatchewan is semi arid desert and large tracks of land are pasture because there's no irrigation, the soil sucks, and the rainfall is minimal. In agriculture you produce what the confines of your area allow. This is why agriculture is so varied around the world, in a single area the agriculture only 100 miles away can be vastly different.
That’s why we create fertilizer out of all the plants that don’t get fed to animals.
@@papascorch5215 or just feed it to animals. We have enough fertilizer . Our plants are also efficient with GMOs aiding them
He talks about this around min 13:10
There are many things we can do with that land, that aren't suitable for growing vegetables, f.ex. let them get back to their natural state, grow trees,...
Aggree, it seems the only way to make those lands fruitfull is with lots of chemicals. And yes we can wipeout all animal live and live purely on chemicals, but do we really want that? I prefer my cows eating natural grass and not some soja or what else.
Pasture land for ruminant grazing is amazing and more rotational grazing should be done as it can be a net carbon sink! Problem is most people buy cheap beef and that’s where the demand is. cheap beef is finished in a feedlot on feed that has been grown using damaging agriculture practices and dedicated to livestock. This is the problem, not beef production in general. We definitely can grow grass-finished beef 100% on pasture land but that is not what most producers do since you can’t pump out as much volume. With livestock you need a lot of volume to make money off cheap beef which the world loves.
Missed you ❤️
Hmm in 18:50 it sounded as if you didn't understood the food waste part.
The reason for methane of animals was (if I remember correctly), that the total number is nearly constant over the decades. So he just claims that there is no significant increase compared to 10 or 20 years ago.
The stated reason why food waste is a "bigger" Probleme with plants is that a much bigger percentage of plants ends up in the trash bin. An study which I found stated : Only 15% of wasted food comes from animals. So by following this logic. If you increase veganism and keep the food waste as it is, you will end up increasing food waste by a lot. BIG BUT . This study also says that only 26% of our total food comes from animals. So while it is true, we waste less animal produced food than plant based food, I doubt that there would be a gigantic increase in food waste. Maybe 10% to 20%
2:35 I'm surprised you don't know how the digestion of herbivores works. The majority of their calories doesn't come from the strict caloric content of grass food as humans calculate it, it comes from from their bacteria manufacturing fatty acids in their guts, therefore the argument of strict calories is irrelevant.
Conservation of energy. Where do the bacteria get their calories from?
@@o11k the matter that goes through the bovine's intestines 🤨
@@jom1409-r9g which would be the grass…
@@lukemunro363 🤦♂️ok let me sum it up again. The cow eats grass which has a certain caloric content in itself but it's irrelevant because it is not enough at all. Grass cellulose goes through cow intestine and bacteria munch on that and produce fatty acids that feeds the cow the true caloric needs.
Is it crystal clear for the ones in the back
@@jom1409-r9g but the caloric intake that the cow can digest from the grass will never be more than the figure in the video which shows 100% of the calories in a kg of grass (I think it was roughly 530 calories). What is your point here? The cow doesn’t make energy
Ooof yes
i feel this video is as biased as the other if not more. i feel this video response is missing several important points but then again, im not an expert on the subject and this subject is waaaay too complicated to be glossed over without misinterpreting important data.
I feel you're completely dead on.
I "feel" people want to believe one thing or another, and will seek out information that supports their feelings. I feel it's wrong to eat animals if we don't have to. It's not for the environment, it's not even for my health (though I FEEL great), it's for the animals, most of whom FEEL as we do, to some degree.
@@HunterBelkiran the main point being both videos could be biased and could be unfairly judging/misrepresenting one thing or another.
at some point i'd argue the same for plants after spending so much time on the internet. i've seen many reseach on how plants work and on some level they aren't that different from other living beings.
at the end of the day, i eat not out of spite but so that i dont starve or get malnutrition. i am thankful for the food i can get and don't have to starve while my home area is going into lockdown. but that is a different story.
I have some questions about a point that, in my opinion, wasn't addressed enough in this response, and that is about Marginal land. A lot of the points made in this video are heavily US-centric, and the problem is that the same conditions that exist in the US don't necessarily apply to other countries.
Take tropical countries for instance. Brazil is the 2nd largest producer of livestock but ranks 18th when it comes to vegetables. This is due to the fact that, being a tropical country, it contains heavily weathered soil, and thus growing a large and varied amount of vegetables is rendered near impossible. A shift from meat and plant-based produce to just plant-based produce would imply a drastic decrease in local products with an increase of imports would it not?
Another example is Greece. 70% of the land cannot be used for agriculture, due to it being forested or incapable of bearing agricultural plants. And even in that third of the total landmass that can be used for agriculture, not everything can be grown there, thus we see Greece producing mostly maize, wheat and barley as well as cotton and tobacco leaving the rest of the essential plant products to be imports. Additionally, being a country with a Mediterranean climate, almost no plant-based products can be produced during the colder months thus further increasing the need for imports. And Greece is not the only country that is like this, which begs the question: Can the main exporters of fruit and vegetables, such as Argentina, supply a drastically expanding demand for plant-based products?
The vast majority of evidence is concluding the same around the world.
The largest and most comprehensive study on the environmental impacts of our food system to date.
University of Oxford found that by ditching animal products your dietary carbon footprint can be eliminated by 73%
-reviewing data from nearly 38,700 factory farms in 119 countries.
-In addition to greatly reducing your carbon footprint, researchers found that if everyone went vegan, global land use could be reduced by 75%.
- 40 products representing ~90% of global protein ad calories consumption.
-the study confirmed that a vegan world would save countless animals, including wildlife, since factory farming is one of the main causes of wildlife extinction.
-Lead author of the study Joseph Poore explains:
"A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use. It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car." Joseph went vegan based on found evidence.
Article
www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-and-dairy-is-single-biggest-way-to-reduce-your-impact-on-earth
"Biodiversity conservation: THE KEY IS REDUCING Meat Consumption. Consumption of animal-sourced food products by humans is one of the most powerful negative forces affecting the conservation of terrestrial ecosystems & biological diversity. Livestock production is the single largest driver of habitat loss, & both livestock & feedstock production are increasing in developing tropical countries where the majority of biological diversity resides."
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969715303697
Written by a 100 scientists of over 100 countries, International Panel on Climate Change --> Vegan diet is the single best way to save the environment.
www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2019/08/4.-SPM_Approved_Microsite_FINAL.pdf
www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2019/08/2f.-Chapter-5_FINAL.pdf
You gloss over the huge point that you cannot grow all crops everywhere. It is ridiculous to assume that you can grow high value human edible food in all of the lands used currently to grow animal feed.
I really like your point that returning farming land to nature can aid by recapturing C02 in the form of trees and other vegetation. One issue I see with this is that much of the farming land in the US was never forested but globally, this is probably something that we really need to consider. Not just with the case of meat farming, but plant farming too. Also, it likely takes a very long time to grow a forest to the scale that absorbs the amount of C02 that you cited there.
The statement that we could just compost the material that animals currently eat is kind of confusing to me, because by having the animals eat the food, they compost it for us. I don't know the difference in emissions of the two, but I'd be willing to bet that composting that feed would release a similar amount of methane.
Finally, I would have liked to hear what you think about the point being made in Joseph's video that not eating meat won't have as much of an impact on helping the environment than other means of going green like installing solar panels or something. Whether you or he are right about this, I think its clear that reducing emissions in other industries like the power industry would have a greater impact than not eating meat.
To add onto that first point: countries like Saudi Arabia and Australia are terrible for farming food. They’d have to rely on the rest of the world to pick up the slack if the world goes meatless
@@General_Fuck_Yeah_AnimeTitties Eh, us Australians actually have an area in the Great Dividing Range where we grow a lot of crops, however we don’t grow enough elsewhere and we’d most likely full short as you said. We have lots of droughts that would make it difficult for crops to stay alive without an overuse in human supplied water, which even then wouldn’t be able to balance out with the extreme humidity and sun, so they’d all die. Our meat farms struggle if there’s droughts, so we have no choice but to bring in human supplied water, which probably adds massively to the statistic of “water being used too much”.
@@mrhaz8939 aye. So the situation is even worse when you factor all that in, not to mention we’d have to deliver more food out to the outback (as opposed to what we already do. Much more non meat products would be needed)
I think what vegans need to focus on first is eliminating food and drinks like lollies and soft drink from our diet as well as the vast majority of vast foods. That’s far more harmful to both ourselves and the planet than meat farming
People seem to get confused by the whole "70 % of agricultural land is grassland" and "you can't grow human-quality crops on most of that land" statements.
According to the FAO, 70 % of agricultural land is grassland, but that includes land where you have maybe 0.1 cows per acre. The Everglades, parts of the Sahara, etc. make up about 30 % of that grassland. Of the remaining 70 %, just over half could be used to grow crops. So only about 24 % of agricultural land is grassland that can be used for animal farming, but not for high quality human crops.
Hardly any of that land is suitable for feeding animals all year round (even Swiss farmers import hay from Eritrea).
On top of that, there's the 70-80 % of non-grass-agricultural land currently used to grow animal feed, much of which could be used to grow human grade crops (though we would only actually need about a third of it, if I remember correctly - don't take that exact number as a fact, as I'm recalling it from memory).
Finally, many people don't realise that even if we can't grow high quality human crops everywhere, we don't need to. Processed food (for example pea protein extract) does not need to be made from high quality crops.
So no, not even in Australia would getting rid of animal farming be even a minor issue.
Source: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
@@General_Fuck_Yeah_AnimeTitties "ban fuzzy drinks that are someone else's addiction, but don't interfere with my addiction to meat"
Ok, Karen.
as an Agro specialist i want to make some comments on your video, there is no farmer that would rather plant livestock feed other than proper crops, since the price per acre of animal feed is 5-8x less. the thing you gotta consider is much deeper than simply area of land, most crops only grow on certain types of soil, landscape, weather and many other variants, the size of the crop also depends on those variables and many others on top of that. simply come out with a number that an area would produce this much food to feed this much people then is impossible and completely absurd. Second, live stock feed is nothing more than weed. weed that grow anywhere but is used as a crop in commercial farming because it needs almost zero care, grows pretty much anywhere and it's hardly affected by plagues since it kinda is one, also consider this data, the area of human feed crops did not grow since the 70's you know why? you never considered one factor, efficiency, certain crops deliver 25x more per acre today than in the 70's because of technology, better crop handling, new techniques and so on, so there is no need to go after perfect farming grounds that usually means removing woods of a forest from where it is. second, composting has not even a fraction of the effectiveness that manure has in fertilizing crops, there is no organic crops without manure, and no organic vegetables for vegans to eat. there are only two kinds of effective ways of fertilizing commercial crops. manure blended with the soil by a truck that dumps it on a way and a tractor comes behind with a big rake and blends it with the soil. that is how 99% of commercial organic products are produced, with cow manure. the other alternatives are chemical fertilizers, what you think is best? in the end, all of this is hypocrisy, if all of you really wanted do help with the green gas concern we would not be discussing the 5% or 10% impact of cattle or agriculture, but the 65% impact of fossil fuels and energy production. for me this is all a smoke curtain. farming and livestock production never been as sustainable and green as it is today, and it will be much more in the future, this is not the problem that needs to be removed from the root to fix climate change, please stop being so naive. People need to eat. and if they want to eat meat they should, the same way if you want to be vegan you should, both productions impact the environment in their own bad ways, never think that your morning avocado is "green" it's as harmful as the cattle is. but we need to eat, and the processes are getting better and better, and it will be perfect someday. lets focus on the real stuff, thank you for the video, you guys keep eating and we will keep producing.
Thank you for the viewpoint!
I looked up "Dr Frank Mittloehner" on google, the first image is of him with cows on a farm and I knew he was shady immediately
I as a cannibal have found out cannibalism is ethical. This is really legit. Definitely tru
Aside from me having any opinion in the discussion at hand, your argument is really stupid (sorry).
The guy studies the effect of gaz such as methane in the atmosphere, measures it, and takes into account many different sources, such as, yes, cattles.
You seeing a picture of the guy in a field with cows was an indicator, for you, to estimate he was shaddy? When he probably was doing his job and measuring things where he has to measure them?
That's a terribly skewed and biased view of the world.
For all of what is said here, if you're unserious about Nuclear power, you're unserious about the whole thing. After all, only 10% energy total consumed is for food production.
Also, do you want to reforest or change the animal agriculture to human agriculture. What do you pick? What proportion should it be split?
If you're doing lifecycle analysis, I encourage the electric car enthusiasts to do the same.
I love that the whole video is basically a self-own. He says the biggest contributor is food waste with animal products being a smaller share than fruits and vegetables which means eating a plant based diet would ultimately reduce both types of food waste by decreasing demand for animal products and increasing consumption of fruits and vegetables.
Uh no. Grass is never wasted.
What if it's about people eating more animal products which are less likely to be wasted?
Thank you, Ed.
One thing you didn't address: isn't some of the land these cows are grazing on already in its natural state? (grassland)
Feels very helpful to get this perspective. I'd be interested to see a response from WIL.
There is.
But you have alot to read xD
www.patreon.com/posts/51285771
i get your point but almost no grassland is at its natural state anymore because of fertilizer etc, whenever you see grassland with just 2-3 types of flowers it is probably fertilized and thus not in its natural state :) because of the fertilizer there is a lack of biodiversity when it comes to the grass/flowers/herbs and thus also in all the insects etc, plus (too much) fertilizer an destroy the soil, groundwater nearby swamplands, forests and more. i hope this answers your question😊
@@debcress6718 "but almost no grassland is at its natural state anymore because of fertilizer etc"
Absolute nonsense. I have zero clue what you are talking about with "2-3 types of flowers" but you sound like someone who's from a large city, and doesn't go outside often.
This is my own personal opinion of course, but when an argument is as weak as yours I don't really need to spend my day trying to disprove all the nonsensical anecdotes you are pulling out of your ass. 😊
If you think the growing of natural grasses, and legumes for cattle feed degrades soil quality more than the highly competitive, chemical pesticide sprayed, and genetically modified fruit and vegtable markets, you are delusional.
And I really don't blame you for assuming that pastures are some kind of industrial horror to the environment, because the only resources on the topic of fertilization of pastures you find on the internet are extremely dry scientific analysis, or ones that debate the nesscesity, and cost efficiency of nitrogen/potassium fertilizers on pastures.
Just understand that for the most part, these large industrial scale cattle ranches, and dairy operations don't actually have the ability to spray a bunch of chicken/pig/cow shit over hundreds of square miles of grazing pastures, and they don't really need to regardless. for the most part, it's sun/rain grown grass and clover. Just as it was 60,000 years ago, before the humans showed up.
Here you go: ucmp.berkeley.edu/exhibits/biomes/grasslands.php
"A third type of savanna, known as derived savanna, is the result of people clearing forest land for cultivation."
"Overgrazing, plowing, and excess salts left behind by irrigation waters have harmed some steppes..."
Not all grasslands are natural and cattle farming is often not beneficial to natural grasslands.
@@ericbuzard349 Some common sense among the mongs ;)
I raise cattle on strictly grass. I’ve had salesmen call on me to try and sell me on their feed to boost my production; it’s a waste product and can’t be eaten by humans FULL STOP. And at the price they sell it there’s no way in hell it’s human edible. I couldn’t afford to feed my cattle human foods, it’s just not feasible. But the waste product they sell for cattle feed is so dirt cheap I’d come out financially better using it. It’s only for ethical reasons I stick with strictly grass because I could raise a lot more cattle on the same land if I fed them the trash that’s for sale.
Water consumption is a dumb argument also. The water where I live is dirt cheap, my bill is $20 a month with sewage and trash in that price for my home. But even here, I’d go broke very quickly providing my cattle water out of the tap to drink. The only tap water used for my farm is to wash off the side-by-side I use to travel the property. Ranchers build ponds and utilize that water, not because of some environmental reason, but strictly financial reason; we can’t afford it. On my place I don’t even use mechanical means to move the water, I’ve built ponds at elevation and gravity feeds it into pipes. When the ponds are full I’ll even use it to hose down my cattle on a hot day. Beef is artificially cheap right now because ranchers are selling a lot of cattle because of draughts in the west. Why would they be doing that if they can just get water out of a tap, or get it trucked in? Because cattle ranchers can’t afford to spend money like that, we’re in a low profit industry where we have to wait 3 years for return on investment.
I don’t have diesel equipment blowing, planting and harvesting my product. I have a tractor that I occasionally use to pull the cattle trailer around the property and a side-by-side to travel on.
I don’t spray pesticides. Which is also a big deal because we (humans) have killed half the earth’s insect population through pesticide use.
I don’t spray fertilizer, there’s no need. My crop is the grass that naturally grows, the cattle provide all the fertilizer I need.
I don’t kill herbivores to protect my product like farmers do. When I was a young man I hunted deer in Alabama with friends. On 3 occasions farmers saw our hunting gear and requested we hunt their property to protect their crops.
I don’t lose soil when it rains.
I don’t feed mega corporations money for patent protected goods.
The same can’t be said for farmers.
Another thing, ranchers generally don’t buy land that can be farmed because it’s too damn expensive; big agriculture has chased us out into land that can’t be farmed due to hills, rocks or low production soils. I’m on some nice flat land that would make good farming, but I inherited. If I had to purchase it the cattle business could not have paid it off.
It's so abundently clear you have no real counter-argument with any real life data supporting your claims, when your move is a direct, personal attack. I mean, the title says everything about your credibility. I honestly think you should have a sit down with Joseph, so we could hear both sides at the same time. Maybe read his response to this video.
Ho-Ly-Shit.
Your argument at 18:40. Did you even care to read the other numbers in the statistics you put on screen? Because I did.
And your argument right after about foodwaste. The point isn't that the CH4 was already a part of the plant, but that we spent RESOURCES transporting it, cooling it, packing it and then throwing it out. Imagine if that food was never produced, but instead used for growing trees! Wauw-e.
agreed 2:30 says 7billin vegans will be enough big assumption that everyone in the world will help sorry ppl are to greedy for that
There's no sit down, there's no strawman, there's no character assassination. The majority of plant produce goes to animal livestock. End of story. Go live in your Jordan Peterson echo chamber where you can argue yourself out of facts.
@@biggiesmol And that is why I buy free range, grass fed. No need for produce from farming if the cows just eat grass. But maybe your plant lifestyle had made your brain fact repellent. Do not try to insult me on a personal level, that is just childish. Grow up. And look at the report from the ICCP about cows and GHG. They say, that it has been overstated by a factor of 3-4. Besides, regenerative agriculture does not introduce new carbon into the atmosphere, like ..hmmm let's see.. oh right, like unsustainable agriculture that requires manure from, you guessed it, livestock to keep the soil at a gold enough quality to be used for plant produce. Besides that, your argument is completely invalid if you have thrown out any food in the past 5 months, because I have not, since i portion everything I eat.
Go live in your turd-throwing ignorant bubble of vegans, believing that they are the solution. 84% revert back anyway, when they realise they get sick from eating wrong. Go put your focus into something that doesn't mean humans dying out, something that actually puts out NEW carbon, instead of being part of a cycle.
And no, I will not reply when you think you come back with a brilliant answer, because you won't ever change your mind, because you only want to believe what makes sense to your incredibly deficient knowledge.
Didn't seem like a personal attack. I agree though that they should debate. The back and forth is pretty pointless
Yay, another video from vegan Jesus!
Just watched Joseph’s video before coming here.
And it really really annoys me when you are truly trying to be educated on sometime.
There should be no left or right, this group or the other group.
There needs to be only research and the product of those facts.
However, research is never finished.
For some reason, RUclips recommends me Joseph's videos and then this video. Both videos are like the different sides of magnet
@@garydabelza But its better like that isn't it. Making us consider both points 🤔.
I don't want to consider nothing, I just want the truth.
@@Roman-gy7pr The truth is that the meat industries make billions and use that money to create disinformation against plant based diets bc they don't want to lose money from people going vegan.
@@Roman-gy7pr human language will never allow the existence of 'objective truth', so no matter where you go you will always be met with biases and opinions. It's sadly just a matter of which biases you want to believe and how far you're willing to lean into those biases.
Why does the assumption get made that the crop residues get burned?
Because All the food that gets wasted, more then 80 of it, is plantbased food.
Why is that waste not used already?
How can anything else get assumed? Cus right now there's already not being done a really good job
Grab the popcorn fam, Ed is coming in hot with this one 🍿
No thanks, watching a metaphorical bloodbath isn't particularly apetizing for me
@@iwankozowski5621 what??
@@dimana_b (I rather not eat while watching Ed slaughter WIL, figuratively speaking)
@@iwankozowski5621 lolol sorry for being dumb 😂😂😂😂
@@iwankozowski5621 Just an FYI, WIL made a 55 page rebuttal (can be found in his community tab). Cheers.
Clicking on a video Any% speedrun
Don't mind me, just helping this video reach the RUclips algorithm 👍🏻
Wait @4:09 you say the land is is used for growing food for livestock but in his video, he said that the food livestock eat can’t be eaten by humans such as corn stalks and grass… so this argument is invalid
The argument still isn't invalid lol. Deforestation gives room for crop growth that is fed to cattle, and then humans eat the cattle. Humans cause the deforestation/natural land destruction to make room for cattle feed in the first place. Just because we can't eat cattle feed doesn't mean we should eat cows instead.
They don't just eat corn stalks though. There is feed corn for cattle, not just the stalks. And cattle feed has soy, not just stalks. If he said they only eat stalks, he lied. Some use barley as well. And beets.
1. Whether a study was paid by someone, does not imply the study itself is incorrect or fake. There are a lot of pro-vegan studies for example sponsored by beyond meat etc., which you don't question.
2. Organic animal foods are a magnitude more nutritient dense, so you're not comparing apples to apples.
3. Water usage is only relevant while comparing all output nutrients, including all micronutrients. Beef for example has a wide range of micronutrients, that corn does not have.
4. There are no doubt inarable lands, where you cannot grow anything you want, but it's fine for goats for example. So these lands should be excluded from all comparisons accordingly.
5. We should talk about green water usage as a global problem and not cherry-picking the meat industry. The food industry altogether uses significantly less green water than other industries, so I'd completely exclude this topic and get to the points where the most difference is made.
6. To the comment section: I firmly believe that eating meat is way healthier than not eating meat. And my belief is based on scientific data and personal experiences. What's good for someone might not be good for someone else though. We all have different microbiomes. Don't be a cult.
Yet all of the studies he mentioned weren't paid by vegan corporations. Facts don't care about your feelings.
What I'd also recommend to the author of this video is to move his gay butt over to the countryside and see that composting capacities are very limited and people actually do burn residues seasonally
Cults do unfounded things out of a state of no necessity. for example choosing products with victims included when there's an option without direct victims.
But what do I know with my Journal sience puplished "Reducing food's env impacts through producers and consumers" with 1530 studies included in the meta-analysis by J.Poore et al.
Dont look it up if you want to keep gaslighting yourself with pseudo arguments like
-land usage that could be used for reforestation
-or coping that nutrient dense animal products are still not nearly as efficient when understanding that animal products always need to factor in their meat production too as seen in the graphs of to newest big science mag published "Levelling foods for priority micronutrient value can provide more meaningful environmental footprint comparisons" by Ryan Katz-Rosene et al for example.
-or comparing water consumption of enjoyment products to base animal products while actually ignoring the actual base foods
cough cough legumes in the worst comparison more than twice as efficient, up too 100+ times more efficient -> peas with pmv score of 0.9 to dairy 100+ (17+81+x[milk])
how is clinging to taste not extremist and ideologic cult behavior?
Commenting to boost the algorithm 😎
Good idea
@@Peaceable Indeed
Absolutely brilliant!
Grazie.
Thank you Ed
Playing devils advocate. I agree with most of your points, this might get lost in the sea of comments but here we go.
9:26 Crop residues when used for any other purpose will be carbon neutral, much like burning them. This is unless you have some kind of carbon capture mechanism in place. Yes a decent amount of carbon may get taken up by the plants you are growing, but cycle that a few times and it is obvious that it is more or less carbon neutral whichever way you look at it.
14:40 Reforesting only captures carbon for the lifetime of the plants in that system. Even if it is well maintained it has a limited carbon capture potential in short time scales. I would posite that using some of that land for some forms of CCS cycling (Like growing fast growing plant mass, burning it in some form of power station, capturing carbon and using the ashes as a fertilizer base) would be better use of that land. Of course this will take some time to develop and I don't think this is in place anywhere yet.
Provide evidence-based, peer-reviewed sources to back up your claims because you sound like a livestock industry propagandist.
Both of these videos have serious flaws. So here are the flaws in this debunking video.
1) calories are not the only essential nutrient, protein is as well. So when measuring water usage and green house gas emmisions you need to look at both the calorie and protein requirements of the average diet and calculate water usage and green house gas emmisions when compared to various diet choices eg, vegan, vegetarian, low meat, high meat. You also made a false comparison of meat calories to plant based calories as if people that eat meat ONLY aquire their calories from meat, which is absolutely false, people that eat meat are omnivores and also get calories from plants.
2) Land usage is complex. Marginal land cannot be used for crops that is a fact but crop land is and can be used to grow animal feed. What this video is neglecting is the grading system used to sort crops. Most crop farmers seek to produce the best quality crop for human consumption because that crop get the highest returns. However, the quality of the crops are graded, for example a crop of wheat high in protein is typically graded for human consumption while low protein wheat crops get down graded as animal feed. Rarely do farmers want to grow crops for animals because they have lower returns, but that seasons weather conditions as well as market forces means they will sell what they can to whomever is buying.
3) Crop residues can be used for compost, but then you need to get it to the place where the composting is done at scale, compost it for up to 6months and then distribute it to the relevant crop farms. On the other hand crop farmers typically don't just crop, they rest their field with a rotation of grazing. By delivery the crop residues straight to the animal, the animals then process and distribute the 'waste' across the field at no cost and prepare the soil for the next crop. This dramatically cut transport and CO2 emissions and returns vital nutrients to the soil, something that using it for paper or other uses wouldn't do.
4) Neglecting to site sources was wrong but let's not forget the cereal industry i.e. kelloges has it's own scientific propaganda arm. and the AHA take sponsorship from not only the cereal industry but also the pharmecutical industry too, which have a vested interest in selling pharmaceuticals to people with poor diets that are high in calories and low in nutrition.
5) We probably would have to consume what is grown for animals or watch the farmers whose very livelyhood depends on growing these crops fall into poverty and forced to sell their land at record low prices because it has no value anymore. So unless you have a profitable alternative for the land for these farmers (and the communities they support) then under current economic conditions you are left with consuming the crops or seeing a good segment of rural communities destroyed. (oh the alternative of growing fruits and vegetables that have incredibly short shelf is utter insanity, any benefits made would be eaten up by transporting perishables to the market of another 350 million people, that is assuming that the land is suitable for fruits and vegetables which need access to large amounts of water). And yes crop residues would be burnt, because the cost of transportation to a composting facility will probably be more than the residues will be worth under the current economic system.
6) Beef may make up only 3% of the calories but yet again protein requirements is ignored.(and yet again extremely few humans would be completely carnivore) Full life cycle green house gas emmisions must be taken into account, but if we compare protein requirements met by a meat based or vegan diet which will have the greatest life cycle greenhouse gases, especially when you consider the high levels of processing needed for 'alternative meat'. I want to see the study on that.
7) 20% land mass for beef production in US...let not forget this is primarily marginal land not suited to crops
8) the major thing you need to understand about meta analysis is that they can only compare like with like. As such they would only compare one conventional farming systems with other conventional farming systems. Alternative farming grazing systems by default would not be included in the study. A comparison of conventional farming systems to regenerative agriculture /grazing systems would be much more informative.
9) Alternative uses of this agricultural land is indeed rewilding, but let's not forget that is land is already marginal (not suited to crops) and typically not suited to forests, which leave grassland which would require the reintroduction of bison, deer, elk etc which are guess what... ruminates. That's right ruminates that can sequester CO2. Something that regenerative grazing practices actually mimics.
10) the average US citizen may have the most 'agricultural land per capita' but I bet you bottom dollar they are not eating all the food that comes from their 'allocation' how much of that is exported food I wonder.
11) Both videos have the carbon cycle very wrong. Both neglect how ruminate animals manure actually sequester carbon into the soil. Grasses that are not grazed oxidise returning all the CO2 to the atmosphere. It's interesting that Ed previously said that rewilding this land (with ruminates) can sequester CO2 but apparently using ruminates in agriculture will just add to greenhouse gases.
12) The methane from the food waste is a problem because it's not being offset but carbon being put into the soil by the ruminate carbon cycle. Nor is the carbon that makes it into the food waste dumps where it needs to be which is on the grassland where it can help build a spongy soil profile that absorbs and stores water.
13) So let's go back to protein, what is the blue water consumption of vegan protein sources and what is the blue water consumption of meat based protein. Last I heard vegans still need protein in their diet and I bet a lot of it comes from nuts.
In Conclusion...no human strictly eats only meat as this video implys, and Ed doesn't in anyway understand agricultural economics and natural systems. And finally the blame for greenhouse gas emissions is not with having any particular diet but in an economic system that priorities profit over the environment and the wellbeing of people.
Ouuhouuhouhh ohh slow down.Your conclusion just sounds as if you wanted comunism.That terrain is steepyyyy.and if i continue like this my brain is going to BUM!!🤯🤯
@@Testtew hard for vegans to understand I see
Well presented points, you covered everything and more of what I wanted to discuss.
You’re curling the curl here! Both parts might have missed a few details, as you pointed out, but it seems Ed is presenting more scientifically proven facts. He can’t possibly cover all the details in a 30 minutes long video.
I do want to touch base on your fifht point though . You mention farmers might lose their jobs if we go vegan. These farmers could still grow crops for human consumption (if we switch to a plant based demand will inevitably grow). Besides, it wouldn’t be the first time an industry has to adapt to new societal changes. As an example: there have already been several cheese production firms which have switched successfully to soy or cashew cheese productions.
I any case, while the environmental benefits of a plant based diet might be debatable (to some
extent) there is no argument to defend the cruelty we inflict to farm animals. That alone, should be argument enough to change to a vegan lifestyle. Thanks for sharing your views btw!
these are good counter-arguments, but don't address what i think was the most important argument: that arguments over food choice and other consumer-end choices are very often a smokescreen for fossil fuel use. obviously climate change has multiple causes, but politicians and executives especially love to narrow the focus to any cause that can be pushed onto the end consumer, instead of the larger-scale decisions they are responsible for.
What I've Learned just posted a 55-page response to this video in the community tab of his channel.
@@RexBuyeo His most recent post is about this video. He doesn't like drama so he wrote the response without mentioning the video by name and even gave Ed a fake name. If you read the document however, it's clear that he's responding to all the points in this video. For example, he addresses Ed's claim that we should measure how much human food cows eat by calories rather than weight, which as far as I know is an argument only Ed made.
@@Justin49499 he has linked this exact video in the comments section of his patreon pdf link so yes, we can be absolutely certain it is a response to this video. And boy what a response.
It's this one www.patreon.com/posts/response-to-of-51285771 (pdf attached)
Haven't read it yet myself
Edit: After reading most of it, it seems very clear he doesn't actually touch the core of most points made in this video, only the presentation. A good example of this is the false dichotomy one. Quote from the document:
"Claim: Joseph created a false dichotomy by saying you can’t care about food waste and be plant based.
・Misrepresentation. I did not say this."
Joseph indeed did not literally say this. However, the claim was never that he said it's a dichotomy, but that he created one. By arguing that we should focus on food waste instead of reduced meet production he act's like we can't do both (like we should).
Also of course it links to his Patreon again, what a coincidence... 🙄
@@afwasborstel112 I agree with your point.
Although, I fail to understand why linking it to his patreon is a topic of controversy. It's still freely available on the internet, he isn't asking anyone to pay for it, how does it make a difference ?
@@afwasborstel112 i dont think he implies that we can't do both. It's similar to black lives matter, like obviously all lives matter but we emphasize the ones who are suffering the most rn. (sorry not the best analogy but couldn't think of a better one) Veganism and reducing food waste both help the planet but the latter is a much bigger problem and its effects are less controversial imo so that's why we should focus on that more.
My dad sent me Joseph’s video I’m about to send him this let’s see what he says
Please post an update comment!
@@tamcon72 he has said he will watch it but he’s really busy at work atm so I have to remind him in a week or two haha
@@Louise.fraser your father better go vegan after watching ED
Ed, this is off topic but I’d love to hear your opinion regarding veganism and abortion, especially when people disregard veganism as hypocritical when a vegan is pro-choice. Or really anyone else reading this comment, I’d like to read some more opinions on it.
Veganism and abortion are, to me at least, two totally different topics. Veganism is about no longer using animals for our own gain/benefit. This can include food, clothing, entertainment, ect. Abortion rights is about ensuring that women have the right to terminate a pregnancy. A woman may need an abortion for many reasons. Her health//life might be in danger if she goes through with it, the childs health/life might be in danger, the pregnancy might have been the result of rape and is traumatic for the woman, the woman in question might have become pregnant at a young age (teenage pregnancies), or a woman may recognize that she isn't responsible enough or isn't able to care for a child. Animal rights is about ensuring that animals, wild or in our care, have certain rights that they have been denied. In the eyes of the law an animal is a thing to be bought and sold like a chair or a car and welfare laws are quite lacking and full of loopholes.
I don't associate with other people who call themselves "pro-life." Most pro-lifers aren't vegan, and don't even care about the lives of humans once they're born.
I do, however, consider myself to be strictly "pro-life" in the truest meaning of the word.
Yeah, it is hypocritical to be vegan and pro-choice.
One of the reasons vegans don't eat eggs is because baby chickens are killed at birth. But then they think it's okay to kill a baby human who is in the womb. It makes no sense to pick and choose which one to kill. Just don't kill either of them.
"My body, my choice" isn't a valid argument for killing a baby because the baby's body is not your body. A meat eater will try to argue that eating meat is a personal choice, but that isn't a valid argument either since an animal's body isn't their body.
There are plenty of ways to prevent pregnancy. Either A) Don't have sex. B) Use a condom. C) If all else fails, use a morning-after pill.
I'm vegan and pro-choice as well, and I've actually participated in the abortion debate quite a fair amount, although mostly I'm just interested in learning more about people's perspectives. I don't see why there should be any issue between being vegan and pro-choice. I'd love to share my perspective and also hear what your own opinion is.
I don't think it's bad to abort before sentience is possible to have, because it's exactly the same as preventing that person's existence before they ever existed. It would be impossible for me to tell the difference between me being aborted as an early stage fetus and me never being conceived to begin with, because in both cases, my perspective never existed. So how could one of these cases possibly be worse for me than the other?
I also don't think it makes sense to say that a person is the same as their human organism. If I was brain-dead, then even if all of my body was kept alive, it would still be exactly the same as if I don't exist anymore. Similarly, if my brain was moved and now fully functioned in another body, then I would continue to live on in that body, because that's where my consciousness is. In short, I am not my body, and just because my body started growing at the moment of conception, it doesn't mean that I began my existence at that point.
Again this also leads to my opinion that an early abortion is actually just preventing the potential person's existence before they ever existed.
But what is your opinion regarding all of this?
@Robert C wow you have memories of being a fetus? What's that like?
@Satansatan Satan its selfish to eat a living being just for taste
You didn't get the point in many areas. for example when explaining green vs blue water you want to still point out that beef consumes more blue water than Vegetables. Unfortunately the same chart you shown show that in term of nutrient per liter of blue water consumed the stats are all in favour of meat.
Un italiano!
Yes! So glad you made this video, My first thought after watching the original video was I hope Ed debunks this haha. Thank you!
Commenting so it will be recommended to more people. Thank you, I was just waiting for this
Here's the debunking to Ed numerous problematic claims, from Joseph himself : www.patreon.com/posts/51285771
I'm not part of any of these 'sides' of the argument, I'm just a bored guy interested in the topic looking for info, these were some of my conclusions on this matter for you to read if you don't want to spend hours on this:
-Most of the viewers are in favor of someone they like supporting their side instead of finding better answers for everyone, this is why they use words as "destroy" and "pawn". It's not a victory to annihilate a different take on the matter, it's a victory when you learn something from the opposing side and improve yourself with it.
-The anti-meat narrative on the mainstream media is insanely blown out of proportions, farm animals don't need a gazillion liters of reserve water, neither they generate an insane amount of carbon emissions. However the livestock does in fact create carbon and it does in fact drain water from the reserves, basically it's a problem but it's way smaller than the other emission generators, and we do need to work on it.
-The Pro-meat narrative used a lot of underhand tricks, misleading charts, ignoring issues, contradicting arguments, and more stuff just as ignoring main lentils, they blame all in almond (they are a problem, but a Californian problem because they produce mostly for exporting, not for USA consuming). So basically the pro meat guys did a very nice presentation but it has lots of flaws when you put it under the microscope.
-Most of these views and arguments are all centered in the USA, and they have insanely egocentric views on the world, which is very different from them. The USA folk wastes horrendously huge amounts of food (even when adjusted per capita), they also package the heck out of everything in lots of plastic for some reason, and they pretty much ignore the fact that in order for them to buy lettuce they have to purchase it with thick layers of plastic on it.
The laws and policies did this to them, food places are required to dump food after X amount of time, they are required to package it in a certain way, and it's SO dumb when you look it from an outsider's perspective. Most meat and veggies on sale in other countries aren't packaged like that, they don't use so much chemicals on them, and they don't have to be thrown out so abruptly.
Finally I'd say this is a complex argument. I don't have the answers and neither will you after hours of reading about it. Most media out there is meant for someone to watch it, they aren't really sources of real information. You need to go into technical data, you need to read scientific papers, and judge them by yourself with the proper tools and knowledge. Also reminder that the so called 'scientific community' has both great researchers, and it also has ton of simply bad professionals, so giving credibility to something 'scientific' without being properly peer reviewed by organizations from different countries it's just dumb.
no one cares about the truth, just about reinforcing their beliefs.
You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep. It’s pretty much impossible to make a man understand something if his paycheck depends on him not understanding.