Our comment in @NatureFoodJnl was picked up by the Guardian. @FAO's 1.5 °C roadmap lacks methods/data & omits findings that plant-rich diets in richer countries are needed to reach climate targets. Their response to our critique is even more perplexing 🧵 theguardian.com/environment/20… Here's a great explainer thread by @jan_dutkiewicz on what the Nature Food comment covers, and how FAO dropped the ball on their climate report. He and I coauthored the comment, which was led by @cleoverk.

https://twitter.com/jan_dutkiewicz/status/1769721627648864465

The @UNFAO roadmap to 1.5C is a detailed guide containing a lot of good science. But it’s notable for what it emits. And, their press around it has been troubling and contradictory, even undermining key aims of the full report 🧵 1/fao.org/interactive/sd… Globally, we need to be producing & consuming a lot more *healthy* plant-based foods: legumes, nuts and seeds, fruit, veg. This key, strong message was missing from a report that was supposed to adddress climate & nutrition. And there's no better way. 2/

California is one of the top methane-emitting regions in the US, thanks to its dairy and other livestock. But real GHG impacts could be even worse. 🧵 1/ insideclimatenews.org/news/18082023/… Methane from dairy and beef production exceeds oil and gas in many regions, including California. And these livestock methane estimates are based on bottom-up inventory-based models that have large uncertainties associated with them 2/

Part 2 of the blitz on “healthy meat”. Did you hear the UN now says meat is “crucial” & offers better nutrition than plant foods? Again, they come from a report w/ industry meddling, self-citing, deceptive and contradictory press releases & takeaways 🧵 1/ news.un.org/en/story/2023/… The report is in four parts the first of which is a review of evidence of nutritional value of animal foods, based on more than 500 peer-reviewed sources. Sounds pretty fair. 2/

Have you seen recent headlines that scientists changed their mind on meat, and it's now "crucial for health"? Behind them is a big, coordinated strategy involving conflicts of interest, a biased journal, industry capture, & selective framing devices 🧵1/N telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/2… Behind much of the push was the"Animal Frontiers" journal, which represents Animal Science societies (a discipline of making farm animals more productive for meat+dairy). This field is comfortable w/ close industry collaboration. 2/

A lot of fuss over a new article with a familiar chorus "fake meat is dead!" Supporters saying vegans are in denial, denigrators saying it's an opinion hack job. I think opinion & investigation both have merits as long as they bring new evidence. I just couldn't find much 1/ The entire article focuses on its 2 biggest players. For Beyond, sales & stocks are down. Impossible private trades are down but sales are up. This doesn't seem like death, it seems like a bump. And it could have reasons that have nothing to do w/ death of an entire sector. 2/

“The infectious disease trap of animal agriculture” is out in Science Advances. Outbreaks of “zoonotic” diseases that spillover from animals to humans are likely to increase, unless we can reduce demand for animal-based foods. 🧵 1/ science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… Can we stem diseases from animal agriculture without changing meat consumption? And why am I, an environmental scientist, publishing in epidemiology? The answers to both of these questions are related. 2/

Great article by @BrianKateman gets this right: stop invoking impoverished countries as a counterargument to meat reduction for rich ones. While it also summarizes some important points about meat & development, it glosses over others 🧵1/n fastcompany.com/90723170/in-lo… This article correctly cautions against industrial US-style Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations(CAFOs) being funded abroad. I've conducted research about how the benefits of these systems for efficiency & GHG mitigation are possibly being oversold 2/n iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108…

What's the best protein for the planet?

Beans, duh. But lots of people still don't know how to make them taste great.

So plant-based meat is a 2nd best mass-marketable option.

And we know it's still way lower-impact than conventional meat. Here's why 🧵
vox.com/22787178/beyon… This started when @jan_dutkiewicz noticed a trend of food writers & researchers speaking out against plant-based meat, claiming that environmental impacts are unknown or negative. We're setting the record straight: these claims ignore or even contradict ample scientific evidence

Cattle aren't a part of the climate solution in the way this person suggests. Certain myths spread because they're dressed up in legitimate facts and concerns. But the story here doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny 🧵

https://twitter.com/ArizonaMuse/status/1457688485649858572

Her core premise is that cows belch more because we put them in a factory. And industrial cattle farming causes a lot of pollution. But it *decreases* GHG emissions (relative to pasture-raising them). Per the US EPA (last row):

UK and US foodies: stop writing this same article over and over spectator.co.uk/article/giving… No, vegan diets don't rely on monocultures more than meat diets do. What do you think chickens and pigs eat?

Plant-based meat companies could certainly be more transparent. But this article is an exercise in hand-wringing that misleads readers into thinking the impacts of meat vs. plant burgers are opaque. That's not true. Thread: nytimes.com/2021/10/15/bus… Detractors of plant based meat in this article are not a coalition of "Environmental Advocates". Rather, they are a small group of niche professional ESG analysts. This is an important and growing space, but corporate ESG has major problems that are on display here.

There are important urgent findings about methane in the new @IPCC report. Methane (from food production & gas extraction) is an important driver of our current global warming, and will continue to drive further warming in a business-as-usual future. Plenty of other folks on twitter & traditional media have summarized the @IPCC's wider findings well: global warming is real, unprecedented, and caused by us - primarily because of burning fossil fuels for energy. Land use & food production's contributions are are substantial too

"100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions" has become a rallying cry for why efforts to reduce one's personal emissions don't matter. But...that premise and the conclusion are both untrue. That wasn't the finding of the Carbon Majors report. What they found was that 100 companies produce 71% of *industrial carbon emissions*, mostly from fossil sources. But that leaves out gigatons of *non-industrial* GHG emissions.

This terrible meme has been making the rounds on twitter and instagram, and @Greenpeace even shared it on their channels with the caption "the problem with our food system in one picture".

There are lots of problems with it 1. The first and biggest warning is the lack of attribution. Who took the photo? And how do we know it corresponds with the map on the bottom. Photo could have been taken in SE Asia, but the meme creator assumes & implies it's an American-sold product.

Theoretically, I'm all for meat companies learning how to make plant based meat! BUT, here's a thread on why meat companies getting into the plant-based game is NOT a good thing...yet
1/n New plant-based meat startups are working aggressively to replicate the meat-eating experience with *no* compromises. The reasons why are obvious: meat eaters are skeptical of substitutes. How can some pulverized beans compare to *real* meat on every level? 2/n

THREAD on the impacts of clothing: I’ve seen a lot of blanket assertions that leather is better than synthetic fabric and vice versa. The reality behind these two and ALL materials is really more complicated. 1/11 Each side tends to only point out the merits of their preferred material and the the demerits of the other (as with most issues). In this case, sometimes opposing sides ignore that the two have a number of the same problems! 2/11