There are cow backpacks. We can harness the energy from cows and we have an alternative clean energy source. We'd be tackling an electricity problem and the cattle issue.
The power required to track the entire human industrial supply chain using a block-chain algorithm would be so incredible that it would quickly dwarf any possible gains. It would in fact be a significant percentage of all total power consumption in the world.
That's an absurd claim. It doesn't have to be incentivized through block rewards, but rather through multiple governments passing laws that they submit a certain amount of mining power. The hash rate could be orders of magnitude less than the current Bitcoin hash rate and still be secure against transactional fraud.
In fact it doesn't even need to be proof of work based, as long as all entities permitted to operate on the chain are known.
If the authority for verifying and authenticating entities is centralized, you don't need a blockchain. A centralized, publicly-readable database is the same thing.
Just because a single entity boots up a blockchain doesn't make it centralized. Satoshi set the initial rules for Bitcoin - does that make it centralized?
If there are 196 countries in the world they could all be registered as valid entities using their respective public keys. New entities could be added is through a soft fork of mining/processing nodes that add public keys to the list, and thus would be distributed consensus like other blockchains.
> where does their carbon come from? Eating plants
For Betty the cow on a small homestead sure.
Unfortunately modern agriculture is so fubar that it's hard to claim that as true. There are huge fossil fuel energy inputs from everything from chemical fertilisers, herbicides, transportation and processing. Not to mention the damage to the ecosystem that the massive mono-cultures this drives.
I live in the midwest, home of the most sophisticated factory farming operations in the world. Chicken and hog factories are way more FUBAR than large cattle operations. Cattle are range animals; they need to move around, so they're usually in pasture for at least part of their diet. In Wisconsin dairy farm country, you see pastures full of cows all the time. And I recently drove through the giant beef farm areas of western Nebraska, which was enlightening. It's dry, arid, sandy land, generally unsuitable for farming. Nothing but scrub grass. Cattle are fine with that. So while the herds are large, the areas they live in are large as well.
Chickens and hogs, on the other hand, those are gross. They're kept in confinement, and fed mostly grain. They can't really graze the way cattle do, not at scale.
Being "green" is not enough. You also have to be a conscious consumer of electricity. If 40% of the online green electricity is going to heating and lighting the empty houses of the rich, that is still not good. Excessive consumerism is still bad even if the entire process uses entirely green energy.
Actually, they're not increasing. I looked it up. The number of cattle in the world has held steady (about one billion) since the 1970s. Given that the population has from about 4B to 7B in that time, and incomes have increased substantially as well, it suggests that beef consumption is level (which means per-capita consumption is shrinking).
And given a 9 year lifespan for methane, it's probably been stable for a long time.
Now, if you're taking the position that "net zero emissions isn't enough" as justification for a carbon tax, you need to focus on the goal. Is it carbon reduction, or puritanical punishment? Need to ask that, because there's a lot of people who want the latter but claim the former.
If the goal is carbon reduction, then a carbon tax is only a means to an end, and we have to ask if it will be effective. Can we carbon-tax beef enough to see a major reduction in its consumption, leading to a major reduction in the number of cattle? (Oh, and you'd better carbon-tax dairy while you're at it.) Does this seem like a reasonable conclusion? And if people aren't eating beef, what else will they eat instead, and what are its carbon costs?
I'm not rejecting the position, but I'm trying to think it through.
For estimating emissions, a better proxy is probably the mass of all the cattle in the world.
There might not be more individual cattle, but they've been engineered to grow bigger - and, by extension, eat bigger meals, poop bigger poops, and fart bigger farts.
Imagine a collection of average households, not much different from one another. Each household could spend 10 thousand dollars improving insulation, and with the cap and div scheme it would be paid back in 5 years. After 5 years you are net ahead, so that seems reasonable, right?
Except that with the improvements the money they make back is now less, because the total amount of money that gets paid into the cap-and-div is less, so they have essentially lost money, even though the system is supposed to the revenue neutral.
Granted in the real world it would be more complicated because not every household is the same, but the system would still not give us a free lunch.
The linked article indicates that only a small amount of seaweed needs to be added to their diet to be effective and that seaweed is easy to grow, so it doesn’t sound like it would take long to scale.
Not that it would eliminate the gains, but cows and seaweed are generally far apart geographically. Therefore you would need to ship the seaweed product to where the cows are.
OK, but the carbon in that methane (CH4) comes from plant sources, which comes from the air. So that is net carbon neutral (except to the degree that methane is a stronger greehouse gas than the carbon and hydrogen it is composed of).
When it was realized that some politicians thought that global warming would imply that every place on earth is becoming strictly warmer all the time, and so the fact that we still get snow or cold snaps proves that global warming is not happening.
Yes, they did! Although both terms have been used frequently for over 50 years, Frank Lutz, Republican strategist, noted that " It’s time for us to start talking
about “climate change” insteud of global warming and “conservation ” instead of preservation."
1. “Climate change’’ is less frightening than “global warming; ” As one focus group participant
noted, climate change “sounds like you’re going fkom Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.” While
global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more
controllable and less emotional challenge. "
From what we can see, it looks like Republicans adopted his recommendations.
I would rephrase it as "the price is so much higher, suppliers are forced to develop alternative products to satisfy demand". Energy suppliers have been given massive subsidies for decades because they don't have to factor in the negative externalities. A carbon cost should be a part of the balance sheet in the way raw materials are. Given that, suppliers will have to innovate their way to bring price back down to equilibrium, or go out of business.
Option one: build solar panels. Option two: poor people no longer drive, and their standard of living falls. Capitalism, if given a pricing signal to "reduce emissions," will pick a completely merciless combination of the two.
Option three: improve mass transit, to move more people per fuel unit.
Option four: reduce need to drive around by bringing services closer to people and promoting remote working etc.
Option five: remove need to drive for shopping and such by creating "bus for stuff", you order things and get them delivered (near) home.
Option six: convert existing vehicles to electric (probably needs some form of battery innovation and might not be cheap even if price is offset by the raw metals salvaged from the engine).
Just a few examples of the obvious options. The truly clever smart options take more analysis (and a smarter mind than mine) to figure out.
The point: the search space for "reduce emissions (driving) because price of gas is insane" is very large, going full solar or poor don't drive are not really the only options.
Not only remote work but also just working less in general. I don’t see why we as a sosciety can’t go to working 4 or even 3 days a week and still maintain the same standards of living. Or even improving those standards.
Because wages for most people are tied to labor and time, and when you decrease the amount of time worked, you produce less labor. Convincing people with money to pay you more for less work is futile.
Why the hell would I pay more money to a contractor to work on my home for half the time? I don't understand this thinking. Believe it or not, there are people in the world that want to get shit done.
Paying per hour is a great way to increase hours on something. If your really into the free market you should understand the incentive structure. Many workers have different intensities of working.
Further, this fact sheet should be accessible through an API, rolled up per company, person, and family, and exposed through easy to use applications so anyone could easily know the environmental footprint of any entity.
Awareness is the first step to solving any problem, and measurement and reporting would facilitate this. Perhaps we need more draconian laws that would force this on all corporations and individuals, considering the dire consequences.
It doesn’t matter where a tax is actually applied - it’ll be split between the seller and purchaser regardless (the exact split depends on the elasticity of the market).
Well if it's going to take several trillion dollars to deal with effects of climate change, then however much money we thought we had saved by going with fossil fuels over cleaner but more expensive energy sources was actually overstated by several trillion dollars. I don't think that covers all economic growth though. And if a manufacturer pollutes the crap out of a river and gets people sick, I would deduct the costs borne by the people downstream from the profits of the company, at least when counting "economic growth". I suspect in terms of GDP it's a positive, because of the business created for doctors and lawyers.
You get the benefit of the product, otherwise you wouldn't be paying for it. You should pay the rest of the world for the damage that was done to it for your benefit.
> Legit question, though - are cattle actually carbon-neutral?
The vast majority of beef produced is not carbon neutral. From the Beef Cattle Research Council [1] of Canada (not exactly an anti-beef organization):
"Presently, the economic conditions are favorable for the production of beef from grain in many regions of the world, largely because of the availability of inexpensive fossil fuels"
The plants you are referring to are produced with massive amounts of fossil fuel. By one estimate, each steer "consumes" 284 gallons of oil via feed during its lifetime [2]
On top of this, cows are one of the most inefficient ways to turn energy inputs into protein (10x less efficient than other types of meat, 100x less efficient than grain protein), primarily due to large size of the animals must be grown to before slaughter, which uses wastes a lot of energy. [3]
There is a large variance between the ratio of input energy to protein output of various types of meat, with lamb (57:1) and beef (40:1) being the least efficient, and broiler chickens (4:1) being the most efficient [4]
These are really great links, thanks! This put me on a different solution path - reducing the amount of corn-feeding and making cattle feed (especially beef cattle) primarily natural pasture. Get fuel and fertilizer out of the chain.
Glad you found them informative. A solution would have to figure out how to get off the fossil fuels without sending the price of the end product through the ceiling.
That is part of the rationale for the current endeavors into creating lab grown meat and passable plant-based meat alternatives.
Food is cheaper now than it's ever been in history. I'm not too horrified about the idea that the price of beef might rise a bit. (As an aside, for a while I used a CSA that raised heritage breed turkeys in addition to the regular old white turkeys that are 99.9% of the market. Heritage turkey cost twice as much, because it's literally twice as expensive to raise, per pound. Delicious, though.)
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the anti-meat push is the sort of hairshirt puritanism that is part of the American cultural heritage. Enjoying things is sin.
I am wary of all this talk about breakthroughs. It diverts attention from the hard choices we have to make. Namely change diet, drastically reduce consumption, emphasise circular economy etc. Those breakthroughs may never come.
The UK had an escalating fuel tax in the late 90s, early 00s. At some point when petrol was around 99p a litre there were demonstrations and rolling go-slows on motorways. I think the demos may have also blockaded refineries. Stupidly, government caved and the escalator tax was neutered. Now fuel is around £1.30 a litre.
It was subtle at first, but by the time of the demos there was a noticeable effect on the roads. For the first time in living memory (mine anyway) they were getting quieter. Most people in my circle didn't seem that fussed by it, they just drove a bit less.
No idea if there was "someone" like an oil company was behind the initial idea of or organising of the demos.
If people would make rational choices based on knowledge there would be no obesity (you have amount of calories on product labels).
People are aware that catastrophe is coming but they are in denial. It's just better to not think about it, like with death, you know it will come but you don't think about it, just carry with your life. And I can see the same exact thing with global warming when I talk to different people. It's better to think that I can't do nothing than think I can do something but I will need to change my style of life.
There are things one can do to live longer but they require sacrifices, do not eat bad stuff, exercise etc. For a lot of people price is too high. The problem is that in case of global warming those people are making choices for other people also.
There is no political will to change things, as every politician knows that the costs for that would be too high today. So that's why they think it's better to postpone this decisions, automatically making the cost a lot higher. There is also believe that someone will figure out a way to stop global warming in his basement and will save the humanity from itself. The problem is a lot more complex than just CO2, it's about the current economic model of the modern society in which we live. Constant growth and resource exploitation are not sustainable for long term.
Did you read the post? He's part of a project putting up £100 million for climate change research and action. It's not just another post communicating how bad the situation is.
From wikipedia. How long will it take to recoup his $28 billion in donations?
"In 2007, its founders were ranked as the second most generous philanthropists in the US, and Warren Buffett the first. As of May 16, 2013, Bill Gates had donated US$28 billion to the foundation."
> It's incredible that someone could donate billions of dollars and do unequivocally great things, and people like you still think it's bad.
He did a lot of bad things as well. Microsoft the Monopoly set back computing by many years and was one of the most destructive forces for the past 30 years.
Gates must be spending a lot of money on PR to get his sainthood.
I'm sure zuckerburg and bezos are going to set up their own family charity to avoid taxes and "do good" too. Doesn't make them saints.
Isn’t it fantastic to be lectured from up on high by the hypocritical elite? Us dirty, common, poor people are the problem, and people like Gates could be assured of living in utopia for eternity if only we’d listen to their “Do as I say, not as I do” platitudes.
EDIT: His house is much larger than his and Melinda's needs. His blog easily uses 20x more energy than it needs (uBlock origin counts 19 attempted connections). He doesn't need to fly anywhere for conferences/meetings with the power of the Internet and teleconferencing. Is he a vegetarian/vegan again, or was that just something he tried in his 20s? He doesn't need to eat meat. He wants everyone else to sacrifice while he himself isn't willing to give up his lavish lifestyle. It's gross, hypocritical, and no amount of cashy-money donations make up for him not following his own preachings.
Right. I’m not saying climate change isn’t happening. But it’s clear that most celebrities don’t act as if they believe it is themselves. No compromises in their own lifestyles. My own carbon footprint probably isn’t 1% of 1% of 1% of the average super rich jetsetter like Gates or Bono or Al Gore. Leaders lead by example.
So, let it all burn, just to spite all those snubbing elites, right?
It's like people who live beyond their means are offended when some multimillionaire tells them to spend less and save more, "I don't see you doing that on your yacht!" Sure, but he doesn't need to.
Or maybe the people berating an overweight dietitian advising healthy diet. "Didn't work for you, did it?" Sure, doesn't mean it doesn't work in general.
Gates will be fine whatever happens. It is us, "dirty common poor people", who will suffer the consequences. The dirtier and commoner, the worse is the effect. Resenting him for trying to save you from yourself is childish, petty and disgusting.
I can't see any politician (at least in the majority party) going for this due to the initial impact it would have on the economy by driving prices up significantly on everything.
Maybe if a very left-wing Democratic party was the majority & the Republicans were in the minority this could work. Huge incentive for those that care enough about global pollution to make it more important than the economy. That seems to be the Democrats at this time. I'm not even sure if 100% of them would get behind it.
Since most of the Republican party doesn't take climate change as serious as their Democrats, they could get behind it by knowing the economy would suffer for a while & they could use it as political ammo.
Would be curious to hear if anyone thinks this could work politically, especially truly independent minds in-tuned to "both sides".
136 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadIn fact it doesn't even need to be proof of work based, as long as all entities permitted to operate on the chain are known.
Who does the permitting?
If there are 196 countries in the world they could all be registered as valid entities using their respective public keys. New entities could be added is through a soft fork of mining/processing nodes that add public keys to the list, and thus would be distributed consensus like other blockchains.
For Betty the cow on a small homestead sure.
Unfortunately modern agriculture is so fubar that it's hard to claim that as true. There are huge fossil fuel energy inputs from everything from chemical fertilisers, herbicides, transportation and processing. Not to mention the damage to the ecosystem that the massive mono-cultures this drives.
Chickens and hogs, on the other hand, those are gross. They're kept in confinement, and fed mostly grain. They can't really graze the way cattle do, not at scale.
And given a 9 year lifespan for methane, it's probably been stable for a long time.
Now, if you're taking the position that "net zero emissions isn't enough" as justification for a carbon tax, you need to focus on the goal. Is it carbon reduction, or puritanical punishment? Need to ask that, because there's a lot of people who want the latter but claim the former.
If the goal is carbon reduction, then a carbon tax is only a means to an end, and we have to ask if it will be effective. Can we carbon-tax beef enough to see a major reduction in its consumption, leading to a major reduction in the number of cattle? (Oh, and you'd better carbon-tax dairy while you're at it.) Does this seem like a reasonable conclusion? And if people aren't eating beef, what else will they eat instead, and what are its carbon costs?
I'm not rejecting the position, but I'm trying to think it through.
> And given a 9 year lifespan for methane
Can you please provide your sources? If this is true, it's not that worrying...
For cattle, got the numbers from the industry, which doesn't seem to have a particular agenda in this link... http://beef2live.com/story-world-cattle-inventory-year-0-111...
[1]https://phys.org/tags/methane/
There might not be more individual cattle, but they've been engineered to grow bigger - and, by extension, eat bigger meals, poop bigger poops, and fart bigger farts.
https://www.beefmagazine.com/genetics/0201-increased-beef-co...
Imagine a collection of average households, not much different from one another. Each household could spend 10 thousand dollars improving insulation, and with the cap and div scheme it would be paid back in 5 years. After 5 years you are net ahead, so that seems reasonable, right?
Except that with the improvements the money they make back is now less, because the total amount of money that gets paid into the cap-and-div is less, so they have essentially lost money, even though the system is supposed to the revenue neutral.
Granted in the real world it would be more complicated because not every household is the same, but the system would still not give us a free lunch.
1. “Climate change’’ is less frightening than “global warming; ” As one focus group participant noted, climate change “sounds like you’re going fkom Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.” While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge. "
From what we can see, it looks like Republicans adopted his recommendations.
http://web.archive.org/web/20121030085144/http://www.ewg.org...
If you don’t want it to hit poor people specifically you can subsidize the tax for them.
Option four: reduce need to drive around by bringing services closer to people and promoting remote working etc.
Option five: remove need to drive for shopping and such by creating "bus for stuff", you order things and get them delivered (near) home.
Option six: convert existing vehicles to electric (probably needs some form of battery innovation and might not be cheap even if price is offset by the raw metals salvaged from the engine).
Just a few examples of the obvious options. The truly clever smart options take more analysis (and a smarter mind than mine) to figure out.
The point: the search space for "reduce emissions (driving) because price of gas is insane" is very large, going full solar or poor don't drive are not really the only options.
Why the hell would I pay more money to a contractor to work on my home for half the time? I don't understand this thinking. Believe it or not, there are people in the world that want to get shit done.
I lost you hear. Isn't it how it works actually? You usually pay premium if you want something to be done faster.
Awareness is the first step to solving any problem, and measurement and reporting would facilitate this. Perhaps we need more draconian laws that would force this on all corporations and individuals, considering the dire consequences.
The vast majority of beef produced is not carbon neutral. From the Beef Cattle Research Council [1] of Canada (not exactly an anti-beef organization):
"Presently, the economic conditions are favorable for the production of beef from grain in many regions of the world, largely because of the availability of inexpensive fossil fuels"
The plants you are referring to are produced with massive amounts of fossil fuel. By one estimate, each steer "consumes" 284 gallons of oil via feed during its lifetime [2]
On top of this, cows are one of the most inefficient ways to turn energy inputs into protein (10x less efficient than other types of meat, 100x less efficient than grain protein), primarily due to large size of the animals must be grown to before slaughter, which uses wastes a lot of energy. [3]
There is a large variance between the ratio of input energy to protein output of various types of meat, with lamb (57:1) and beef (40:1) being the least efficient, and broiler chickens (4:1) being the most efficient [4]
1. http://www.beefresearch.ca/research-topic.cfm/environmental-...
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/power-steer.html
3. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/beef-uses-ten-...
4. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/660S/4690010
That is part of the rationale for the current endeavors into creating lab grown meat and passable plant-based meat alternatives.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the anti-meat push is the sort of hairshirt puritanism that is part of the American cultural heritage. Enjoying things is sin.
The UK had an escalating fuel tax in the late 90s, early 00s. At some point when petrol was around 99p a litre there were demonstrations and rolling go-slows on motorways. I think the demos may have also blockaded refineries. Stupidly, government caved and the escalator tax was neutered. Now fuel is around £1.30 a litre.
It was subtle at first, but by the time of the demos there was a noticeable effect on the roads. For the first time in living memory (mine anyway) they were getting quieter. Most people in my circle didn't seem that fussed by it, they just drove a bit less.
No idea if there was "someone" like an oil company was behind the initial idea of or organising of the demos.
People are aware that catastrophe is coming but they are in denial. It's just better to not think about it, like with death, you know it will come but you don't think about it, just carry with your life. And I can see the same exact thing with global warming when I talk to different people. It's better to think that I can't do nothing than think I can do something but I will need to change my style of life.
There are things one can do to live longer but they require sacrifices, do not eat bad stuff, exercise etc. For a lot of people price is too high. The problem is that in case of global warming those people are making choices for other people also.
There is no political will to change things, as every politician knows that the costs for that would be too high today. So that's why they think it's better to postpone this decisions, automatically making the cost a lot higher. There is also believe that someone will figure out a way to stop global warming in his basement and will save the humanity from itself. The problem is a lot more complex than just CO2, it's about the current economic model of the modern society in which we live. Constant growth and resource exploitation are not sustainable for long term.
Bill Gates flies in a private jet.
Bill Gates has a lot of work to do just to get his carbon footprint in line with the average multimillionaire let alone the national average.
Bill Gates should realize that the fundamental challenge is getting people to consume less than they can.
Maybe his net blog post should detail his personal impact relative to the average citizen and what he is doing to make his impact below average.
We don't need more blog posts. We already know everything we need to know to plot a course of action.
In any case I can tell him what needs to be done for $0 - consume less
No change will come unless everyone sacrifices.
"In 2007, its founders were ranked as the second most generous philanthropists in the US, and Warren Buffett the first. As of May 16, 2013, Bill Gates had donated US$28 billion to the foundation."
He "donated" to his own charity which he and his wife controls.
But since you asked, about 5 years. His net worth was about $67 billion in 2013. Now it's about $95 billion.
He did a lot of bad things as well. Microsoft the Monopoly set back computing by many years and was one of the most destructive forces for the past 30 years.
Gates must be spending a lot of money on PR to get his sainthood.
I'm sure zuckerburg and bezos are going to set up their own family charity to avoid taxes and "do good" too. Doesn't make them saints.
EDIT: His house is much larger than his and Melinda's needs. His blog easily uses 20x more energy than it needs (uBlock origin counts 19 attempted connections). He doesn't need to fly anywhere for conferences/meetings with the power of the Internet and teleconferencing. Is he a vegetarian/vegan again, or was that just something he tried in his 20s? He doesn't need to eat meat. He wants everyone else to sacrifice while he himself isn't willing to give up his lavish lifestyle. It's gross, hypocritical, and no amount of cashy-money donations make up for him not following his own preachings.
It's like people who live beyond their means are offended when some multimillionaire tells them to spend less and save more, "I don't see you doing that on your yacht!" Sure, but he doesn't need to.
Or maybe the people berating an overweight dietitian advising healthy diet. "Didn't work for you, did it?" Sure, doesn't mean it doesn't work in general.
Gates will be fine whatever happens. It is us, "dirty common poor people", who will suffer the consequences. The dirtier and commoner, the worse is the effect. Resenting him for trying to save you from yourself is childish, petty and disgusting.
Maybe if a very left-wing Democratic party was the majority & the Republicans were in the minority this could work. Huge incentive for those that care enough about global pollution to make it more important than the economy. That seems to be the Democrats at this time. I'm not even sure if 100% of them would get behind it.
Since most of the Republican party doesn't take climate change as serious as their Democrats, they could get behind it by knowing the economy would suffer for a while & they could use it as political ammo.
Would be curious to hear if anyone thinks this could work politically, especially truly independent minds in-tuned to "both sides".