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The environmental math of being vegan

Hello, weather coach. My question is: Does living a vegan lifestyle make any difference, especially since so few people live that way? Thanks. — Sal Garcia on PostReports podcast

Let’s start with the big picture: people have a tendency to jump to extremes. It’s vegan or bust. And given that most Americans aren’t vegan or vegetarian — only 5 percent, Gallup estimates — it’s not that helpful to do so at all.

The 80:20 rule applies here: you can get about 80 percent of the results for about 20 percent of the effort. In this case, even a small change in diet can lead to a large reduction in emissions.

This is not to minimize what vegans do. It’s just to say that when you use the numbers, you can make a huge impact with a little effort.

To give you an example, when you look at the sources of greenhouse gases in the average American’s diet, they are primarily meat and dairy. About 57 percent, give or take, comes from meat and 18 percent from dairy. So that’s 75 percent of your dietary emissions right there.

And from a climate perspective, not all meat is created equal. Beef is almost seven times more emissions intensive than chicken, for example.

As an aside, if you think there isn’t much positive climate impact without a vegan or vegetarian diet, it’s not true. What’s more accurate is to think about the small changes you can make to make a substantial impact.

There are some mind-blowing numbers that have come out of a 2021 study in the magazine Feeding nature. Researchers at the University of Michigan compiled data from a broad set of epidemiological studies on the global burden of disease.

The question they asked was: What is the health and environmental burden of individual foods? They looked at the impact of about 6,000 types of foods common in the US diet. When they ran the numbers, they found a remarkable effect. Replacing just 10 percent of the daily caloric intake of beef and processed meats with fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, or even seafood had more than profound health effects. It also reduced the average American’s carbon footprint by about a third.

So you have a massive impact from a very small change.

As for the impact of being vegan, see the Climate Coach column for more details on that.

The environmental impact of electric vehicle batteries

I’m in the market for a new car and have been thinking about electric/hybrid options. I wonder about the cradle-to-grave environmental impact of electric vehicle batteries. I read once that people were excited about the “environmentally clean” benefit of switching to carriage cars/horse drawn carriages as there had been a problem with horse poo on the streets. We know how that worked: many negative and unintended environmental impacts of cars in the long term. Are we being misled about the true impact of batteries? — Hilary on The Post Live Chat

You’re right: New York City leaders once worried that the city would be up to its ears in horse manure as its population swelled in the early 1900s, only to be “rescued” by automobiles (many of which were electric). Cars have created many of their own lethal and unintended consequences.

So we shouldn’t expect electric vehicles to be be different if we don’t make an effort to avoid them unintentionally problems Here are the main issues to consider:

• The impact of mining and extraction of lithium, cobalt, nickel and other metals, on people and ecosystems. We already see water problems from lithium mining in Chile and cobalt worker problems in the Congo. A recent Post investigation looks at what happens to your electric vehicle’s battery and its effect on the people who are in the way of mining in countries like Guinea.
• Emissions generated by the mining, transport, assembly and disposal of electric vehicle materials, which account for a significant portion of global electric car emissions.
• The environmental hazards of processing, recovering or disposing of all such material.
• Other harmful consequences that we are not yet aware of.

If we did nothing to manage these risks, we would be in real trouble. But briefly, this is the goal: a nearly closed system in which all batteries are reused, for example, as stationary batteries to back up the power grid, or recovered and renewed for use- them in new cars.

The good news is most battery materials retain its value. I’ve talked to battery companies that are already designing their products to be recycled and reused. The economy isn’t quite there yet and regulations are lagging behind. But we are going in the right direction.

We have yet to see much more progress in the mining and extraction stage. It is an international dilemma that is far from being resolved.

Making a difference in college

Hello, I am 19 years old. As a college student living in the dorms, how can I live sustainably and have a bigger impact than doing things like turning off the lights or taking shorter showers? — Giselle Korn on the PostReports podcast

We often fall into the trap of doing a lot of small things instead of thinking about doing fewer things that have more impact. You mentioned actions like turning off the lights and recycling. Both are good for the environment and there is plenty of evidence to support this. In general, they have a positive effect.

But let’s take the lights for a moment: LEDs use 90 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs. While lighting used to be about 10 percent of our home energy bill, today it’s basically a rounding error. Does this mean you should waste energy? No, but turn off the lights rise to the top of the list? it doesn’t

There are a couple of buckets to think about when trying to reduce your emissions. On average, housing, transport and things you buy each represents about a third of your emissions, while food accounts for about 15 percent, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

But as a college student, you’re probably living in one of the least consumed periods of your life. Where can you get the most money?

There are two things you can do instead of thinking too much about your precise emissions: one is to focus on creating habits and practices that will serve you for the rest of your life. This will have a more lasting impact than trying to reduce your fuel consumption by driving around town with your friends.

Ask yourself: Are you comfortable biking around campus? Is it easy to test a plant?–first diet? Are you really happy with the relatively small amount of stuff you have?

There’s no better time to experiment with the kind of life you want to lead than now. You’ll discover things you probably don’t expect. This can change your priorities in a way that can reduce your emissions in the future.

As you get older, it becomes harder to change habits or find the time to try new things. Trust me.

And if you let them, there are a lot of energy-consuming things that will shape your life by default, like big cars, which may not make you healthier or happier. I wish, for example, that I hadn’t given up using my bike as a regular way of commuting to college. It took me a few years to rediscover cycling as one of the best ways to get around my city.

In ten years, what you do will probably have a huge impact compared to the college life of sleeping in a dorm, eating from the buffet, and traveling around campus. By adopting low-carbon habits now, or at least experimenting with them, you can have more impact in the future.

The second thing is to do it becoming what social scientists call “normative entrepreneurs.” Think of yourself as a walking billboard of how the world could be. Humans are very good at copying each other, but often need permission or social support to do something different. Ride a bike to class it doesn’t have that much of an impact on its own. You are saving a few liters of petrol, at most. However, hundreds of students watching you commute by bike every day is really powerful. And when people join you, even if it’s just a handful, that starts to build momentum not just for riding, but for creating safe infrastructure for cycling. which encourages even more people to ride, etc.

There are many examples of how changing the norms allows others to continue to say, “This is desirable, cool, or acceptable.”

It can be hard work or fun. But if you’re in college, it’s probably one of the most impactful things you can do.