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20 points

this is based on poore-nemecek 2018, a paper so fraught with methodological faux pas as to be a warning to anyone trying to do a metastudy.

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9 points

Following the trail of your comment: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets does indeed cite https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216, but I’d love it if you could provide more details on your criticisms of methodology.

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9 points
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this paper is over half a decade old, and i’ve been whining about it pretty much that whole time, but i don’t recall the last time i actually dug into the methodology. to my recollection, they call it a metastudy and they compare LCAs from disparate studies, but LCAs themselves are not transferable between studies. that’s just one point.

if i recall correctly, they also used some california water study as the basis of their water use claims, but the water use included things like cottonseed, which is not grown for cattle feed, and using it in cattle feed is actually a conservation of resources. cotton is a notoriously light and water-demanding crop, so using the heavy byproduct to add to the water use of california dairies is, to me, dishonest.

i have no doubt that if i were to slice up this paper citation-by-citation, every one of them would have some misrepresented facts or methodology being repackaged as, i don’t say this lightly, vegan propaganda.

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6 points

Dug up the paper in question for anyone curious: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq0216. At a cursory glance, I’m not seeing any of the referenced concerns. But, y’know, down vote away I guess.

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5 points
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So what’s a better study or metastudy? The actual results, aside from poultry being weirdly low-resource, seem about right when you consider the way energy usually moves through food webs.

That’s “Life Cycle Assessment”, for anyone else that’s wondering.

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2 points

Do you often feel attacked by vegans? What exactly is vegan propaganda? Everyone uses studies on both sides, that’s how unsettled science works. Are most of them wrong? Of course, because again its not settled.

Seems convenient to discount the other viewpoints studies as propaganda when the opposing side is funded just as precariously.

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