I'm sorry but I simply don't believe some of those numbers.
Who eats 36 steaks a year ? I consider myself a meat eater, I like a steak but I never eat anything like that many in a year which means someone else is eating more steaks to account for the steaks I'm not eating, then you have the vegetarians and the vegans share as well so someone somewhere must be eating steak everyday for the numbers to balance.
Why pick on the beef industry when the automotive industry is a much better target given bikes and cars are both forms of transport ?
You got me, it's not quite 36. The UK population eats 2.4 billion steaks:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/british-meateaters-eat-2-5-billion-beef-burgers-b1946149.html
Divide by 67m which is the approx UK population at the time:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...tins/annualmidyearpopulationestimates/mid2021
and you get 35.8. And yeah, as a vegetarian for 35+ years, someone's eating my share of them. Vegetarianism is a minority sport though (roughly 10% of the population are either vegan or vegetarian. They just feel more prevalent because they'll tell you ):
https://www.finder.com/uk/stats-facts/uk-diet-trends
Someone eating a bit less than steak a week doesn't feel widely off the mark outside of my fellow hippy plant eating friends, family and colleagues.
I choose steaks because that's the comparison the video I linked to earlier made - and it does demonstrate the carbon impact of some of the foods we eat (posters were previously sceptical that human + extra food + bike was more emissions than human + less food + ebike). . I have no axe to grind re: meat eating. My missus would be an obligate carnivore given the chance and imo some people cannot thrive without some meat consumption perhaps due to genetics etc. She is positively crawling up the walls with cravings after two weeks without it. Personally, I cannot tolerate many of the meat substitutes or most dairy products so could never become vegan.
I hear you re: bike maintenance costs, but the Trek report cited in the video does talk about lifecycle emissions which presumably has a figure for maintenance emissions - and they are also assuming a bike (of either kind) lasts approx 20K km. That doesn't feel wildly off the mark. At my peak, I was probably doing 10K km per year - and a heavily used bike might be pretty much done in 2-3 years. I have to believe that manufacturing replacement brake pads, chains etc is rather less than the 100+ kg of CO2 it takes to make a brand new bike. I'd be surprised if it was more than 10kg per 10K miles, but have no stats to back that up. Eating one less steak per 10K miles probably more than covers them.
But yes, cars are pretty bad CO2 wise and humans eat a lot, and meat is a big part of the footprint. Regarding population, it's is beginning to peak or is on a downward trend in many countries. IIRC (and I'll let you google those stats if you find it similarly incredulous), China looks to have peaked already - about 7 years ahead of schedule. Many western countries are already below replacement rate in terms of births.
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