Article touched on this but with no depth or insights at all, but leather is a much more durable good than food. They equate a leather wallet as having the carbon impact of four burgers; I’ll accept that uncritically for the moment, but four burgers will sustain me for maybe 2 days, whereas my leather wallet has lasted over 10 years of daily use. Maybe that doesn’t matter from an overall emissions standpoint, if the leather industry produces 8% of the emissions of the meat industry, but I think it does bear out that replacing beef in my diet will have a far greater impact than replacing leather just by volume of consumption.
They also show that leather alternatives have a lower carbon cost of manufacture, which I’ll also buy, but what matters for durable goods is lifetime cost, which is only vaguely alluded to without citations. Annectodally I’m still wearing a leather bomber jacket my father bought at a thrift store when he was young, whereas a pleather jacket from a nice brand fell apart after less than 10 years of less frequent wearing. That means the leather would have to be more than 5x more damaging to be a worse climate decision, which their chart doesn’t appear to show, though again it’s all fairly wishy-washy.
I also recently discovered this website through a different site. One criticism I noticed and have seen possibly verified is that many (all?) of the articles are at least AI edited, and possibly whole-cloth written. Also, the author works for Palantir.
I haven’t had enough time to go through any of the articles and follow up on the sources to see if they’re still factually accurate or not, has anyone else verified any of the articles or their recommendations?