Why vegan is the fastest growing food movement in the world

It's not "that guy" at John Hopkins, it's signed by a team of at least 8 researchers.

I know about long and short cycles and if humans were not on the planet then the short cycles would be happening and the only long cycles would be planetary catastrophes like flood basalts and impacts of very large 10km meteors causing the release of very large amounts of greenhouse gases.

The criticism they are making is that industrial agriculture is not part of that natural short cycle and is indeed a substantial part of the long cycle of digging various fossil fuels out of the ground and burning it.

Indeed you can include in that all the activity involved in moving out of season fruit and veg all over the world as well as the costs in transporting packaged meat.

Industrial agriculture is not a zero sum game from a climate standpoint.

Human use of fossil fuels in industrial activity is the problem of course it is.

Short carbon cyclicity is a closed system over a period of time, the earth deals with it, the numbers of ruminants at any historic period does not matter if it's all happening in natural cycles.

However cows can't cut down forests, drive tractors, sail refrigerated container ships, operate animal feed manufacturing plants, operate fertilizer plants, they can't build power plants to power industry that manufactures milking machines and then later provides the power to run those milking machines then pump the milk into milk transport lorries to get to pasteurising and bottling plants and meat packing plants which use packaging that is manufactured from oil i.e. meat packing plastics and plastic or paper based milk cartons and on an on an on.

The contribution of the cost of providing Industrial agricultural infrastructure and production is huge.

I am a meat eater I will never ever be vegan, I am not making these points out of some anti meat philosophical position but simply because I believe it to be the basic reality of the provision of red meat to a world that wants red meat and dairy products.

Humans and human behaviour are the problem and if we want meat for everyone then we have to accept that.

Human numbers are ultimately the problem, only a fairly small proportion of the current seven billion+ humans on the planet get to enjoy a lot of red meat protein and to expand that will cost even more in terms of energy input, I don't care where it comes from be it oil, solar, wind, geothermal or nuclear but that energy has to come from somewhere and without it you won't have that meat and dairy industry.

If we had a tiny world population of a few hundred million we could easily fix climate change, but we don't.

I love technology, I love the modern world and everything it bought me personally living in a time of wonder like this but it would not have happened without all that fossil sunlight, in reality I would not even exist if it were not for the human race exploiting the natural resources of the planet.

We have three basic choices,

1) deal with the energy input requirements of our existing growing population, somehow decarbonising energy use.
2) reduce that population
3) let nature deal with it

Once again John we are in a thermodynamics argument, right now this exact technological civilisation that we are living in is physically impossible without the current level of energy usage, and right now the supply of that energy relies utterly on fossil fuels.

Personally I don't believe we will solve this, the scale of investment required to move from fossil fuels to renewables is I think beyond us, without a miracle like Fusion plants appearing tomorrow we are stuffed and even if they did we could not build them fast enough to get the entire world economy off fossil fuel before irreversible climate damage has happened.

And the token gestures like Elon Musk's Tesla Lithium battery cars will fail, Lithium is the wrong material to base the future on, there is not enough accessible Lithium and dealing with the inevitable end of life battery disposal problem is going to be horrific, we should have gone the hydrogen route as that has a photoelectric cycle that is elegant and easily sustainable but once again short term thinking is leading us down the wrong road.

Reduction of red meat consumption would help the planet but the reality is that it won't happen voluntarily we need a revolution in so many areas now that I doubt enough will change in time.

Veganism on its own won't save the planet but honestly the issue of human health and T2 diabetes is irrelevant here, these are the kinds of things that a society which imagines it is living in a safe and improvable world worries about, when you scale things up and start thinking about the long term human future on this rock T2 diabetes and a whole load of other illnesses are pretty irrelevant to the majority of the human race who will likely die through war, famine and disease resulting from climate change as things get worse.

On the hydrogen thing the UK, I think, recently took a very short sighted view that hydrogen was not worth investing in because Lithium offered better storage technology now, but Lithium will not scale, I know there are massive amounts in sea water but getting it out of the water in the quantities that will be needed is not simple, the Japs are still investing in hydrogen and I think they are right to do so.

John all health issues are irrelevant when talking about death of 95% of humanity over the next 100 odd years due to climate change, T2 diabetes is meaningless in that context.

Orange carrots emerged in the 17th century early domesticated carrots were apparently probably purple

Kale, Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and more all derived from a single ancient species.