The climate case against leather

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.

A cowhide is worth about a percent or so of the value of the meat.

Yes, it's an enormous industry and processing at scale is harmful. And leather requires chemicals. But reducing consumption of meat automagically makes leather less available. And don't use leather from cows raised for bougie leather.

this is the laziest warmover of hayek I've seen since his last no "research"