@canigooutyet yes I’m vegan and I’ve thought about and researched the environmental impact of this- it’s actually a lot lower than the environmental impact of a non vegan even if they are eating grass fed animals from local farms:
pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es702969f
“, “buying local” could achieve, at maximum, around a 4−5% reduction in GHG emissions due to large sources of both CO2 and non-CO2 emissions in the production of food. Shifting less than 1 day per week’s (i.e., 1/7 of total calories) consumption of red meat and/or dairy to other protein sources or a vegetable-based diet could have the same climate impact as buying all household food from local providers.”
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181023110627.htm
“A new study provides a more comprehensive accounting of the greenhouse gas emissions from EU diets. It shows that meat and dairy products are responsible for the lion's share of greenhouse emissions from the EU diet.”
“The study found that meat and dairy account for more than 75% of the impact from EU diets. That's because meat and dairy production causes not only direct emissions from animal production, but also contributes to deforestation from cropland expansion for feed, which is often produced outside of the EU.”
“People tend to think that consuming locally will be the solution to climate change, but it turns out that the type of product we eat is much more important for the overall impact," says IIASA researcher Hugo Valin, a study coauthor and Sandström's YSSP advisor. "Europeans are culturally attached to meat and dairy product consumption.”
science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987
“Today, and probably into the future, dietary change can deliver environmental benefits on a scale not achievable by producers. Moving from current diets to a diet that excludes animal products (table S13) (35) has transformative potential, reducing food’s land use by 3.1 (2.8 to 3.3) billion ha (a 76% reduction), including a 19% reduction in arable land; food’s GHG emissions by 6.6 (5.5 to 7.4) billion metric tons of CO2eq (a 49% reduction); acidification by 50% (45 to 54%); eutrophication by 49% (37 to 56%); and scarcity-weighted freshwater withdrawals by 19% (−5 to 32%) for a 2010 reference year.”
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.511.7351&rep=rep1&type=pdf
“Much of the estimated 35% of global greenhouse-gas emissions deriving from agriculture and land use35 comes from livestock production. Livestock production—including deforestation for grazing land and soy-feed production, soil carbon loss in grazing lands, the energy used in growing feed-grains and in processing and transporting grains and meat, nitrous oxide releases from the use of nitrogenous fertilisers, and gases from animal manure (especially methane) and enteric fermentation44—accounts for about 18% of global greenhouse-gas emissions (figure 2).42 This estimate consists of around 9% of global emissions of carbon dioxide, plus 35–40% of methane emissions and 65% of nitrous oxide, both of which have much greater near-term warming potential over several ensuing decades than does carbon doxide (although they have shorter half-lives in the atmosphere). Similar estimates exist of the contributions of UK farming, live-stock production, and the food chain overall, to national greenhouse-gas emissions.45
Health professionals warn that the use of antibiotics early on in the food chain, with farmers administering drugs to animals to promote growth rather than treat disease, is a particular problem.”
www.fcrn.org.uk/sites/default/files/project-files/fcrn_gnc_report.pdf
“But at an aggregate level the emissions generated by these grazing systems still outweigh the removals and even assuming improvements in productivity, they simply cannot supply us with all the animal protein we currently eat. They are even less able to provide us with the quantities of meat and milk that our growing and increasingly more affluent population apparently wants to consume. Significant expansion in overall numbers would cause catastrophic land use change and other environmental damage. This is especially the case if one adopts a very ‘pure’ definition of a grazing system, the sort that grazing advocates tend to portray, where livestock are reared year-round on grass that is not fertilised with mineral fertilisers, receiving no additional nutritional supplementation, and at stocking densities that support environmental goals.“