 Before we consider our personal impact on the environment, first we have to figure out, is there even anything to be concerned about? The truth about climate change is difficult to find, and there were certainly warmer periods of time even in recent years. The medieval warm period was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region that may have been related to other warming events in other regions during that time, especially in the past 12,000 years, the Earth has rapidly warmed and cooled even over a span of merely 20 to 40 years. Now from this perspective, there's no real discussion to be had because of the extreme variance of global temperatures without human interference, but that wouldn't be any fun. So let's understand how much of an impact a vegan diet would actually have on the environment if we used modern statistics. If you were to upgrade your light bulbs, hang dry your clothes, recycle, wash your clothes in cold water, that is the equivalent of eating a plant-based diet. Avoiding one transatlantic flight is twice as effective as eating a plant-based diet. Living car-free is three times more effective than following a plant-based diet. Having one fewer child is the equivalent of 60 plant-based dieters. So if you're a vegan and you drive a car, you take a couple flights a year, you have two to three kids, stop talking about the environmental benefits of a plant-based diet. One assumption that most people make is that cow farts or methane emission from cattle has one of the largest impacts on the environment, but this can be further from the truth. This is like saying a butterfly flapping its wings is going to cause a hurricane. Emissions from agriculture are at 9% in the United States. This includes all agriculture. Now where are people getting these statistics? Oh, 20, 30, 40% of greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced if we stopped eating meat. They are lying to you. The thing is, methane emissions have gone up sharply since 2006, and we have to shift the blame on something. But if cattle inventory has been going down substantially over the past 40 years, how is it possible that emissions from livestock production are the issue? Well, fortunately, NASA figured it out last year. 17 teragrams per year is from fossil fuels and 12 is from wetlands and rice farming. So much for blaming cow farts, but I guess everyone's still pretending that's what the issue is. I'm surprised these crazy liberals haven't suggested that we start shooting more deer because they are farting in the woods. Trying to say that having these animals on pasture in the environment is going to cause climate change is actually quite the opposite of what's true. Putting animals on pasture actually has a positive impact on the environment. As we can see by this chart, putting animals on pasture actually has a positive impact on the environment. At first glance on the left, we see consideration of carbon emissions without soil seaflux. Essentially, the amount of carbon stored in the soil. With seaflux on the right, we see that grass feeding on the left actually has negative carbon emissions benefiting the environment. Whereas grain feeding does not. This is achieved through adaptive multi-patic grazing. Essentially, forcing the animals to completely clear one pasture at a time to let the land recover in comparison to roaming freely. Not only does putting cows on pasture store more carbon in the soil and benefit the environment, it also reduces the amount of methane they produce. When you feed cows grain and corn, they produce a lot more methane, a lot more belching and farting than cows that are fed grass. Alan Savry, an ecologist, had a very famous TED talk on reversing desertification with the use of ruminant grazing animals. Here is an excerpt from that talk. There is only one option. I repeat to you, only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable and to use livestock, bunched and moving as a proxy for former herds and predators and mimic nature. There is no other alternative left to mankind. So let's do that. So on this bit of grassland, we'll do it, but just in the foreground, we'll impact it very heavily with cattle to mimic nature, and we've done so, and look at that. All of that grass is now covering the soil as done urine and litter or mulch as every one of the gardeners amongst you would understand, and that soil is ready to absorb and hold the rain to store carbon and to break down methane. And we did that without using fire to damage the soil, and the plants are free to grow. Let's take a look at another excerpt from Ray Arculeta, a soil scientist who presented this at the Noble Conference. Ladies and gentlemen, that's a cow pie in the desert, where the cow put that energy. Look what happens, and I get so frustrated to hear the argument, well, we got to eat less meat. No, we need more meat, but we need it to be raised like buffalo, not in the industrial complex that we have. Having this understanding of agriculture allows us to realize how misguided and wrong vegans are in their stance on the environment. Not only are they wrong on the environment, we know they're incorrect from a health and nutritional perspective. Unfortunately, the emotion that is driven from seeing a cute furry animal with eyes leads people to doing incredibly unreasonable things, such as having 15 foods flown in from around the world and convincing yourself that that is better for the environment than a local grass-fed hamburger. And be sure not to forget all the cow manure that was used to grow that food. But nah, they don't care about Kenya banning exports of avocados due to shortages, nor do they care about some of these fruits and vegetables actually requiring more resources per calories than meat, lettuce being three times as bad as bacon for the environment. Those algae oil supplements that they're taking? Not so sustainable either. It's also worth mentioning that algae oil and other supplements need to be extracted with hexane, a solvent that is not too good for you. What's so contradictory about vegans is that they are buying their food from the supermarket and supporting big agriculture. Most if not all of this food is grown on monocultures. The practice of growing single crops intensively on a very large scale, corn, soy, wheat, rice, some people would be inclined to say, Frank, all of these crops are being used to feed livestock, but that's simply not true. About 40% of the world's grain is being fed to livestock, but this does not consider the quality and the yield of the grain. Some of this grain is not suitable for human consumption whether it was a bad year and the quality of grain isn't high enough for human consumption or maybe even it's a cover crop that was grown to replenish the soil and they used it to feed the livestock as well. The problem with monocultures is that they destroy the nutrients in the soil by tilling it every year. This results in them relying heavily on chemical fertilizers. Cover crops are essentially nature's alternative to fertilizer. They preserve the soil with their roots acting as chemical, biological and physical soil amendments. Nutrient content is also greatly enhanced. Our main issue with these chemical fertilizers that are required in monocultures is that they only provide macronutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, NPK. But they don't provide micronutrients in the soil. This is also the same with the food we eat in general. We are being stuffed full of high calorie foods that are lacking micronutrients. What happens with desertification is when there's an absence of plants, soil temperatures rise so high that the nutrients in the soil get destroyed. This heat from the soil is also pushing rain clouds away. All of this is a result of tilling the soil. By not tilling the soil you preserve weeds and various cover crops, let's take a walk through the soil tilling process to understand how damaging it is to the environment. It kills and displaces wildlife, insects, rodents. Then they spray pesticides and herbicides to kill even more. After most of the wildlife has died off, the ecosystem is ruined, the crops start growing. And because of this rapid food growth, whatever animals were left, whatever insects were left rapidly regenerate because of their new food source. Then the cycle starts all over again. They harvest the crops, they kill everything, they spray again. It is a truly horrible process for both the environment and both from a moral and ethical perspective. If vegans understood how food was grown, they would likely be chowing down on a grass fed steak every day because the lives of billions to trillions of insects and rodents would probably be more compelling to them. Now we know from earlier that livestock can reverse desertification, so isn't it ironic that vegans are supporting monocultures that potentially destroy the environment but they are against even grass fed animals that can restore the environment. Shows how little these vegans actually look into understanding the aspects of why they're doing their diet. You can also only use certain land for certain things. Grazing land being more suitable for cattle, perennial cropland for multiple harvests of grains and cultivated cropland for fruits, vegetables and nuts. The pesticides and herbicides used to grow these crops also negatively affect the environment from the insects in the soil reducing aeration, it kills aquatic life in water systems, bees are susceptible to neurotoxins in these pesticides and people living near pesticide laden fields have dangerous levels of nitrates in their water. But we know vegans don't care about people. This is the moral dilemma of veganism. It's okay to kill trillions and billions of insects, rodents, all of these animals as long as you're not involved in the process, damaging the ecosystem, ruining the planet but it's not okay to buy some local grass fed beef. Buying plant foods from a supermarket is less vegan than slaughtering an animal in your backyard, whether you want to believe it or not. What's not spoken about a lot is the toxicity and the dangers of various pesticides and herbicides in humans. Glyphosate based herbicides are shown to be toxic below safety limits. They are demonstrated to alter gut microbiomes in mice and atrazine and herbicide has been shown to chemically castrate and feminize all vertebrates. Any animal they tested this on, it chemically castrated them essentially. Now what's the message to take away here? You might think to support local sustainable farm practices and that is certainly true. But the real thing here for most people is food waste. Almost 40% of all food grown, processed and transported in the United States will go to waste. And I consider vegans major proponents of food waste considering more than half of what they eat comes out the other end. Nevertheless, thank you guys for watching. If you guys would like to support the channel, please like, subscribe, share the video if you can. Down below is my Amazon shop where you will find some nutrient-dense foods, things like vitamin D3 that are essential for overall health. Down below is also my Patreon where you can get personalized question support. It's a great way to support me as well as get some dietary advice here and there. I'm on Instagram guys, I'm on Twitter. If you guys do want to reach out to me for one-on-one consultations in regards to improving your overall health, hey, any ex-vegans out there? You can shoot me an email frankatufanoatgmail.com. You can also reach out to me on my website frank-tufano.com. Everything is down below in the comments guys. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.