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A vegan diet "can" be dangerous. In my 20s, I decided to try it. I ended up in the ER with a distended stomach full of trapped gas. Too much undigested cellulose. Doctor called it "nuclear gastritis". They had to put a tube down my nose and ease the gas out. Not fun.
I hate to think before modern medicine, what would have happened....
So, just a word of caution. IMO, humans are not designed for veggie diets. We are omnivores. But, to each his own.
I think you're the one off on the science here buddy. Veganism isn't inefficient. It just has less protein by weight. Your six ounce portion of beef will still require you to consume other nutrients as it doesn't get a person anywhere near their daily needs for calories or specific nutrients like carbohydrates.
But "efficiency" here ought to mean the ratio of inputs to outputs. Feeding corn to cows so we can get calories through meat is far, far less efficient than consuming plants ourselves.
But we aren't talking about the calories in the whole plant. We're talking about the calories in the plant food consumed by humans. Vegans aren't eating bark; they're eating fruit. In the plant-based food we eat, calories from cellulose are nowhere close to the majority of calories (and that fiber has human health benefits, even if it isn't nutritive).
The inefficiencies of meat don't happen inside the human. They happen in the process of turning those plants into meat. Using plants to make animals is far less efficient than eating plants. Even cattle, which are incredible meat producers, waste almost half of their bodyweight on non-meat. More importantly, the energy expenditure for non-mass producing activities (walking around, digestion, etc.) is wasted in the process.
Ha, you have shown yourself to have a poor handle on several scientific and similar concepts in my interactions with you, including your bizarre claim that combining independently-correlated factors doesn't increase risk (in the other thread). So save the "I don't get my science from NPR" comments for when you aren't so grossly misusing concepts that are taught in freshman-level statistics.
The idea that methane emitted by cows is carbon neutral because it isn't sourced from sequestered carbon is 100% bogus. A few points on this:
1. You're probably understating the gap in warming potential for methane and CO2. Methane is about an 80x stronger greenhouse gas during the first two decades of emission, but it's perturbation time is much shorter. Yes, on a hundred year timeline, which is typically the comparison timeline, most calculations put it at 20-30x more powerful than CO2 (not 10x, as you claim here). But in the real world, where near-term carbon emissions are of greater importance, this 80x increase over CO2 in the next decade or two is a really, really big deal. On a simple ppm basis, CH4 is about 25x more powerful in terms of warming potential than CO2, and that increase to about 45x when indirect effects of methane are included. On a mass basis, methane is 70x more powerful.
2. You are right that, on paper anyway, corn should absorb CO2 from the atmosphere during its growth and then release it as the corn is broken down, either in the form of biofuel or cattle production. But the outsized effect of methane due to its chemical structure means that it is producing greater warming effect per carbon atom than CO2. This is really the gist of this discussion. The simple fact that the carbon is already active in the carbon cycle doesn't mean its conversion to CH4 rather than CO2 in cattle doesn't represent a real increase in warming.
3. The relatie concentrations of CH4 and CO2 in the atmosphere are irrelevant for the purposes we're discussing here. What's relevant is the effect of marginal changes in these gases in the atmosphere.
Point #2 above is really the bottom line and the source of your error. Yes, the carbon is always active, but much more warming per carbon atom is produced when it's in methane form.
For those who still move their lips when they read, methane is 80x stronger than co2 on a MASS (weight, to non-scientists) basis but only 10x stronger on a MOLAR basis, and gases behave on a MOLAR basis, not mass . The 80 figure is another of the ways the WaterMelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) lie to the partially educated.
Plants are not nearly as nutrient dense as meat. That's why 10 portions of fruits & veggies are recommended each day-- you need only one portion of meat to give the same amount of vits & mins, and younstill wouldn't get enough protein from the plants.
As I oulined before, more ac and more passes of fuel hungry tractors would be required to raise the fruits & veggies required to replace the nutrition supplied by eating meat than is used to just raise the meat animals.
Making meat an important part of your diet is better for your body and better for the environment...OTOH-- eating less meat is apparently better for the mental health of some more naive people.
For those who still move their lips when they read, methane is 80x stronger than co2 on a MASS (weight, to non-scientists) basis but only 10x stronger on a MOLAR basis, and gases behave on a MOLAR basis, not mass . The 80 figure is another of the ways the WaterMelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) lie to the partially educated.
Plants are not nearly as nutrient dense as meat. That's why 10 portions of fruits & veggies are recommended each day-- you need only one portion of meat to give the same amount of vits & mins, and younstill wouldn't get enough protein from the plants.
As I oulined before, more ac and more passes of fuel hungry tractors would be required to raise the fruits & veggies required to replace the nutrition supplied by eating meat than is used to just raise the meat animals.
Making meat an important part of your diet is better for your body and better for the environment...OTOH-- eating less meat is apparently better for the mental health of some more naive people.
So I guess you just wanted to dodge the actual issue I raised and move on to the personal insults? Please tell me how taking carbon and putting it in the form of methane, a significantly more powerful fossil fuel than CO2, for roughly twelve years results in a neural action from a warming standpoint? Yes, that carbon is already in the carbon cycle, but it isn't in the form of methane.
Perhaps you should have moved your lips while reading?
And the issue regarding efficiency is about whether it's more efficient to feed plants to cattle and eat meat than it is to just eat plants. Plenty of forms of meat are incredibly nutrient-dense, but if you aren't counting the plants that went into producing that meat, you aren't doing an honest accounting.
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