Do you trust your sources?

Impact of eating meat on climate change. November 2024

I don’t eat meat 🥩. To be precise, I mostly don’t eat meat. I explicitly and deliberately choose to not eat meat because I believe that reducing the amount of meat, mostly beef, we consume, has a positive impact on climate change. I believe that choosing a more plant-based diet means reducing the amount of greenhouse gases that get emitted to the environment which in turn helps to limit negative effects of global heating.

Rich information diet

When it comes to food I am for a more limited diet but when it comes to consuming information, I attempt to diversify. In today’s world it’s easy to get caught up in an information bubble. I have my favourite sources and I see how the same information gets repeated and amplified. I’m curious how information outlets that represent a different set of values approach presenting similar events or ideas. It’s not always easy though.

The main challenge with seeking out sources that represent a different set of values is not just about resisting established habits and accepting added friction. Confirmation bias leads us to naturally gravitate toward information that aligns with our existing beliefs, making alternative perspectives harder to engage with. Sources with differing values often use language and narratives that can come across as hurtful or derogatory, which adds to the discomfort and difficulty of engaging with them. Social media with their algorithms don’t make going out of your “echo chamber” any easier either.

As part of the broadening of the opinion palate I decided to listen to Joe Rogan’s #2223 conversation with Elon Musk. You can find it on Spotify¹ or YouTube².

Very quickly into the conversation they have made statements that I found directly challenge my belief. Here is (my own) transcript of the two statements:

• JR: “People dismiss this whole carnivore diet thing because in our heads there is a lot of propagandas which puts this thing out there that animal agriculture is the number one contributor to global warming. […] It’s hot bullshit.”

• EM: ”But it’s not going to make any difference to global warming or the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, really, if people eat fewer steaks. It doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant. Irrelevant. I want to just be super clear about that. Will not matter, we’ll not even be able to measure it. That’s how irrelevant it is. […] Unmeasurable irrelevant.”

Validating beliefs

These statements go directly against my current belief so I decided to “check the sources” and see what I can find out. One source that I tend to trust is “Our World In Data”³ which is: “a collaborative effort between researchers at the University of Oxford, who are the scientific editors of the website content; and the non-profit organization Global Change Data Lab (GCDL), who publishes and maintains the website and the data tools that make our work possible.”

They conveniently did a deep-dive into the topic at hand in an article called: “Environmental Impacts of Food Production”⁴.

Some statements lifted directly from that source:

• “Food production accounts for over a quarter (26%) of global greenhouse gas emissions.”
• “Meat and dairy products tend to emit more greenhouse gasses than plant-based foods.”
• “Adopting a more plant-based diet by reducing our consumption of carbon-intensive foods such as meat and dairy – especially beef and lamb – is an effective way for consumers to reduce their carbon footprint.”

I looked for some more sources and have also found the following statements:

• “According to one recent study, going vegetarian for a year would save the average American over one metric ton of CO2 emissions, the equivalent of driving 2475 fewer miles.”⁵
• “Global GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions from the production of food were found to be 17,318 ± 1,675 TgCO2eq yr−1 [approximately 17000 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year], of which 57% corresponds to the production of animal-based food (including livestock feed), 29% to plant-based foods and 14% to other utilizations.”⁶
• “People who eat a lot of meat can help fight the climate crisis by reducing or quitting meat consumption altogether. Even substituting other meat for beef would considerably reduce greenhouse gas emission.”⁷
• “Eating mostly plant-based foods while reducing the global consumption of animal products, especially ruminant livestock, can improve human health and significantly lower GHG emissions” ⁸
• “Based on a systematic review, Hallström et al. (7) have estimated that by changing current diets, GHGE [greenhouse gasses emission] from food could be reduced by up to 50%.” ⁹

Trustworthy sources

My conclusion is that Joe Rogan is right on one account: animal agriculture is not the number one contributor to global warming. However, I have found no way to substantiate the claim that what we eat doesn’t matter for greenhouse gases emissions. For now, I am going to remain with my personal belief that what we eat matters for the environment and will continue saving the planet one plant-based meal at a time.

I hope this story serves as a small example of the value of validating statements you hear “out there” especially when they relate directly to your own held beliefs and come from “high-profile” positions. I am not naive though, researching this one claim alone took a significant amount of time. It’s practically impossible to “go to the source” for every claim we face in our daily lives. We neither have the time nor, very often, the knowledge to do so. This is why it is essential to find sources we trust and also, every now and then, to be curious about our own convictions and put them to a test.

Engaging our brains and remaining critical to what we see and read is an essential skill today. 🧠

🧐 When was the last time you looked closer at one of your own beliefs?

References

1. Spotify, “#2223 - Elon Musk”, https://open.spotify.com/episode/3wUQy68EVwNjTb0yBOhYm9 ↩

2. YouTube, “Joe Rogan Experience #2223 - Elon Musk”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qZl_5xHoBw ↩

3. Our World In Data, https://ourworldindata.org/ ↩

4. Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2022) - “Environmental Impacts of Food Production” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food [Online Resource] ↩

5. Why have I heard that eating meat is bad for the climate? ↩

6. Xu, X., Sharma, P., Shu, S. et al. Global greenhouse gas emissions from animal-based foods are twice those of plant-based foods. Nat Food 2, 724–732 (2021). ↩

7. Fact check: How bad is eating meat for the climate? ↩

8. William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M Newsome, Phoebe Barnard, William R Moomaw, World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency, BioScience, Volume 70, Issue 1, January 2020, Pages 8–12 ↩

9. Rose D, Heller MC, Willits-Smith AM, Meyer RJ. Carbon footprint of self-selected US diets: nutritional, demographic, and behavioral correlates. Am J Clin Nutr. 2019;109(3):526-534. ↩