this is a half-baked ‘solution‘ that just makes eating meat a luxury. a thing only for the rich.
it’ll be like crimes that are punished by a fine - they just become the ‘fee’ that allows the propertied class to do whatever they want.
beef is deadly for humanity because of destructive water and land usage (Vice had a great video showing the Amazon deforestation due to beef production).
edit: my point is that the propertied class will lower wages and raise commodity prices to be able to pay to keep eating an unsustainable amount of beef. instead we should restrict or ban industrial animal agriculture, while investing in educational material to help society transition away from beef. that and regenerative agriculture, agro-forestry, etc.
That's true of literally anything where the price reflects the externalities.
If it bothers you that the rich can afford to pay for the externalities, that's an argument against wealth inequality, not against pricing things correctly.
the point is that the propertied class will lower wages and raise commodity prices to pay to keep eating an unsustainable amount of beef. instead we should restrict or ban industrial animal agriculture, while investing in educational material to help society transition away from beef. that and regenerative agriculture, agro-forestry, etc.
Edgar: What does steak taste like again? I had it once, but I can't remember.
Curtis: If you can't remember then it's better to forget.
Edgar: What does it smell like when it's cooked? It must emanate around the place.”
Your point appears to be to claim that everything that is not most important is irrelevant. Which is a bad idea, because "we" can do more than one thing at a time.
If everyone had a private jet with jet fuel subsidized by the government it would also be bad for humanity. It’s currently tolerated as a luxury only for the rich. As an argument for subsidizing something, that doesn’t resonate with me by itself.
We subsidize the meat industry directly, and indirectly by not pricing in negative externalities like it’s carbon expenditure.
That’s true but I don’t know of any pitch that would convince “the masses”. It’s easier to argue why someone should not do more of something they aren’t already doing, rather than stop doing something they like and have been doing for generations.
But maybe we can still make a dent by increasing the price to include negative externalities like carbon emissions, or at least ending subsidies for meat so substitutes might be able to compete better.
I can’t view the whole article due to the paywall, but I have to ask - where does this line of thinking lead? Does every pleasurable activity we might voluntarily undertake get scrutinized, regulated, or banned? I certainly hope not, since such losses of freedom can make the tyranny of the majority very real. It’s important that any potential policies are applied in a fair manner. For example, priced externalities shouldn’t be limited to just carbon dioxide or only applied to some things like cars or cows. In particular, those who support regulation or bans should also have their own favored things regulated similarly.
There's nothing moralistic about a carbon tax - it's a Pigouvian tax, not a sin tax. The point of a Pigouvian tax isn't to say "I don't like that thing so let's tax it so other people do less of it," it's to say "Do what you want but don't make me or my children pay for the externalities it creates."
A decrease of carbon would many lower crop yields, could I sue for my lowered crop yields? The issue of a carbon tax is basically that politicians are only too happy to give more taxes, and would support carbon taxes regardless of it being good or bad.
Not sure about the potential for a private entity to sue another private entity for those damages - but sure, to the extent that beef production creates positive externalities, the value of those externalities should also be priced in. Though most of the warming potential from cattle farming comes from methane, not carbon dioxide, so I'd be surprised if it actually had a nonnegligible impact on crop yields, let alone an impact that came anywhere close to offsetting the negative externalities elsewhere.
Empirically, most politicians don't support carbon taxes. Market-consistent pricing of climate-related externalities is broadly opposed by politicians on both sides of the aisle in the US. For example, look at the massive subsidies to dairy farms in my home state of Wisconsin - they get over 40% of their revenue from direct subsidies in a typical year, and if you exclude those subsidies the industry hasn't made a profit for at least several decades, but no one dares to even suggest reducing or eliminating them, let alone going the other way and taxing the negative externalities they create.
Does the existance of a carbon tax in parts of Europe and usage of carbon credits show it is not that unpopular? California's electronics tax I always saw as a carbon tax in disguise. It would be labeled as moral code but in effect are taxes.
Not familiar with European politics but wasn’t a carbon tax one of the principal reasons for the yellow vest protests?
In the US, the vast majority are unwilling to do pretty much anything to fight climate change. ~70% oppose a $0.25/gallon gasoline tax; note that a true Pigouvian tax would be something like 20x higher than that based on the current cost of carbon removal. https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/climate-optimism-of-the-wi...
What kind of normal person wants to pay more for gas, especially when most of the population isn't in the upper income bracket in the US and mismanagement of tax funds is so common? I can't imagine why a teenage mother or person struggling with minimum wage desiring these extra costs or more taxes. The usage of the taxes is big issue, it is likely to just be pocketed by the politicians or as subsidies for large corporations that will have a disproportionate pollution effect.
Taxes should be properly utilized and be proven through proof or as a fund like social security for the environment, rather than pay more for less and let them decide how to use the money if even its implimented. Nothing stops them from subsidizing gas companies with the taxes.
It's not about wanting to pay more, it's about wanting to stop causing damage that future generations will have to pay for. Young people in the western world today are quick to (accurately) accuse older generations of severely messing up the environment (as well as housing markets, government budgets, etc.) to enrich themselves at the expense of future generations. Given that, I don't think it's that crazy to expect those same young people to pay for the negative externalities their own activities create instead of just paying it forward.
The poll cited in the article I linked explicitly mentioned that the revenue would be used for policies to support greenhouse gas reduction. I'm skeptical that the respondents cared that much about how the money would get spent, since the vast majority did support policies that would tax the wealthy and/or companies that produce greenhouse gas emissions - the only difference is where they perceive the money to be coming from, not how it would be spent.
>It's not about wanting to pay more, it's about wanting to stop causing damage that future generations will have to pay for.
Is that what the common price sensitive citizen cares about?
>Given that, I don't think it's that crazy to expect those same young people to pay for the negative externalities their own activities create instead of just paying it forward.
You don't think young people are capable of being hypocrites? Statistics such as low savings is proof that long term planning isn't deeply embedded.
Survey data is notoriously unreliable, on a if the rich subsidizes itself it would be circular wealth, but coming from them means that they are adversely affected. Policies and their actual effect are also not the same, would they not care when government trust is low and its possible to use the money to subsidize large companies that use a green label to play metric? I know the idea of carbon neutral is simply ofsetting carbon negatives to other companies, transportation is a huge contributor and globalized companies play with numbers to call themselves carbon neutral. https://www.dezeen.com/2021/07/30/carbon-neutrality-google-s...
BTW thanks for showing me that substack, I subscribed, hope is sorely needed today.
Lower it compared to when? CO2 levels are much higher now than they were even 100 years ago. If we somehow managed to move CO2 levels back to 1950 levels is that really a problem?
Another problem. Say a given crop might do better with increased CO2 given all other factors remain unchanged. But that boost of CO2 from 300 ppm to 420 ppm also came with changes to the environment, so all other factors are not unchanged. OK, CO2 levels have gone up 35%, but if the likelihood of experiencing a rain-free period of more than 30 days in that region has doubled, having more CO2 isn't worth the cost.
*I made up the claim as an illustrative example. I'm sure there are myriad co-factors that come with the increase in CO2.
If the carbon is much higher today, then could the conclusion be that they are not the factor, or that they are beneficial? Heres some stats, many factors make up the efficiency, but as plants are carbon sinks, it would be a bold claim to make that it has not helped crop yields. https://www.farmprogress.com/equipment/eight-major-factors-h...
Localized effects are easier to calculate, but there are many factor. For example soybeans grow better under less sunlight, so the effect of a darker sky is higher yields. You are correct that is isn't a single effect its very dynamic and has many effects.
I think totalitarians just like more rules so they can be used as needed against people they don't like. It seems like advocates for these kind of things are generally in a position of privilege where they won't be personally affected. In practice, as another poster pointed out, it just becomes a war on the poor. If the price of steak doubles (and it has already doubled in the last few years) I'll pay it and grumble but it won't materially effect me and I wont change my behavior. Poor people who can't afford $30 per person per meal will just have to eat a substitute, which I guess is what advocates want.
This all (I mean basically every "progressive" restriction) just seems like a way to increase inequality and make sure the poor always stay very poor and the wealthy can do whatever they want.
I can drive my Posche plug-in hybrid in the carpool lane while the chump his old Corolla has to sit in traffic. Does that really do anything but increase inequality. (I dont really have Porsche, I can't imagine a more ridiculous choice, but I'm surrounded with people that do)
It’s been my observation that progressives seem to measure success of any position they hold more by its degree of good intention rather than it’s actual effects or results.
The most straightforwardly fair way to do it is a carbon budget. If each person has some carbon budget and you want to spend yours on beef and I want to spend mine on motorcycle racing fuel, who is to argue we made the wrong choice?
It goes back to one of my pet peeves that it is increasingly hard to find the kind of light bulbs I prefer, despite the fact that the electric supply to my home is powered by 100% renewable energy generated on site. I don't like that it was collateral damage of a grossly approximate attempt to lower residential fossil-generated energy consumption.
Do you just see it as carbon? What of the refinement of lithium ion batteries, the production of solar arrays and the toxic waste that accumulates from the production of these devices?
Ideally it would be a thermal budget rather than carbon.
Solvents from semiconductor production do not amplify and trap energy from the terrifyingly powerful object in the sky, threatening to destroy the biosphere, so yes it is all about carbon.
Ideally it would be an accurate reflection of all externalities in the final price, but how about we do not try to prevent tackling one of the externalities with whataboutism on other externalities.
I think it is unfair to call this “whataboutism”. If there isn’t a fair accounting applied to all activities and externalities, then what you’ll see is that those with political power will regulate only activities that aren’t important to them, while what they value personally is allowed unabated. Put another way, unequal application will lead to oppression.
The political system is not perfect, it has never been. Climate change is threat to our standard of living, we need to address it quickly. The only tool we have is a flawed political system where people seek power and use it to oppress other people. There is no time to first fix politics and then try to reduce carbon emissions.
> The most straightforwardly fair way to do it is a carbon budget.
And that kind of budget is just called a "budget". The resistance of a certain type of activist to using prices to allocate scarcity is going to doom us all if these activists end up setting policy. Prices force people to be honest about what's important and to make tiny trade-offs every day between disparate things. Ad-hoc bans are vulnerable to all sorts of political forces that all amount to people signaling false things about their preferences. Money doesn't have this problem.
There's a reason that there's this common phrase "put your money where your mouth is".
For most people with solar, surplus energy gets fed back into the grid. So, from a policy point of view it kind of makes sense to not allow people to use inefficient lights, even if they're running a surplus. Inefficient lights can consume a lot of energy.
Have you looked at metal halide lights? They require specialized ballasts, so they aren't exactly a drop-in replacement for a standard bulb. The light quality is said to be pretty good, similar to incandescents, but they're more energy-efficient. I have an unfinished project to make an indoor artificial sun (basically, some bright lights projected through lenses to create parallel rays), which is how I started looking at metal halide lamps.
Interesting. Would people be able to “buy” more budget? And how would that work for complex activities that have a chain of carbon producing activities. For example let’s take something like a bar. People visiting the bar to share drinks with friends are buying alcohol, which has its own impacts. The building the bar is in might be made of concrete, which has a carbon impact. The high frequency with which dishwashers are run there have an impact. Do all of these get included into the price of a drink? Whose budget does it come out of?
I don’t think that a magazine has the power to ban or set global policy on anything. They do have the ability (or perhaps the responsibility, as a free press) to to research, describe, and suggest alternatives to “every pleasurable activity we might voluntarily undertake.” That results in an informed majority, not a tyrannical one.
Don't worry, it's already happening now by the looks of it, and by the downvotes. In a couple of years you will be called anti-science if you don't want to eat the Impossible Burger, which is probably more processed than the IKEA table that you are eating it on. We will keep on promoting these wars of we, the good guys, agains they, the bad guys, while the rich and privileged will keep all their rights, safe in their ivory towers, private islands and New Zealand.
power is fungible. Nobody cares where their electricity comes from. Coal is failing because it is not price competitive. Food is not fungible, so I am not sure what point this is making.
I'm not sure why you think I said a soybean is a steak, but I meant that a soybean is a soybean, corn is corn, and pork bellies are pork bellies, when we're talking about things traded on the commodities markets.
I guess I doing get your point. Fungible means interchangeable. The average consumer doesn’t think twice about whether their electricity comes from coal or solar as long as the lights turn on when they flip the switch. If you try to give someone soy beans when they ordered a steak they’re going to care quite a lot. Food isn’t fungible for the average consumer. That has absolutely nothing to do with it being a commodity or not.
A different and perhaps clearer way of putting what you're both getting at is flavor is not fungible. But more importantly when we're talking about changes in food production is sustenance is fungible. (This of course ignores a whole bunch of nuance such as flavor not encompassing the experience of eating and mere sustenance not including important nutritional discussion on diet)
It's important to determine which of those two things you're discussing and trying to maintain parity with in attempts to improve on the infrastructure we have built, both have very different and unique problems.
Fungible doesn't mean replacing one item with the exact same item in the way he's using it. It means you're replacing it with something else that serves the same purpose.
Fungible: Able to be substituted for something of equal value or utility;
The entire premise was that coal is fungible because you can replace it with solar, and nobody* cares as long as their lights still turn on. You can't do the same with food, you can't replace beef with soy beans - in fact for most people you can't replace beef with anything, they want beef.
*coal miners care, the vast majority of the public does not
This is any over generalization based on you personal experiences/beliefs.
There are many Americans in the Appalachian area of the United States that care more about where their power comes from than where their food comes from or contains. People in other parts of the world may have different priorities. But most households in West Virginia not only know what type of power is used to run their homes but know the name of the coal mine that it was dug out of.
You would be surprised much corn is used as base/key ingredient in so many food products.
Taste is not fungible, ingredients really are relatively changeable for most cooking.
When lab grown meet is cheap enough and tastes similar the market wouldn't even notice the change and real beef would become niche high end market for the customers who are ready to pay more because they believe it tastes better or it not GMO or Bill Gates injects 5G using artificial meat.
I disagree, its a percentage of roughly 10% according to the EPA in 2019. Here are the EPA statistics. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... I am all for replacing them with native buffalo, but this is overemphasis on minute percentages, this information presented is much too technology based and not practical, it relies on assumptions about plant based foods and lab meat (farming crops is the backbone of civilization, it is not a new idea, meat replacements like tofu, seitan, and even quorn of more reasonable price exists but we should ignore it for the fantasies of lab grown meat) the problem is that nobody will do it, and even with existing solutions you can't force people to eat the way the author wants them to.
Electricty (such as that used for cooling), and transportation make up the most carbon emissions. This truck is one such solution for transportation and lower emmission, it uses compression rather than combustion for the engine, and "waste" is cold, so its used to cool the internals. The adoption of this would have a much better effect overall without human habits as resistance. https://atlasofthefuture.org/project/the-dearman-engine/
Improved infrastructure and improvements in efficiency in larger sector should be focused on rather than a nudged suggestion to change eating habits, the title is a pie in the sky, noit interested in practical applications.
Ill omit that then, I am getting used to using HN. Objectively, we should look at the largest percentages that are causing carbon emissions if the goal was to lower it.
I'm pretty sure that you could talk about carbon emissions without accusing people of virtue signaling. Try it, maybe it will work better than your current approach?
How much resistance and effort for 100% of beef, which is a part of 10% are you willing to expend to push for elimination versus transportation at 29% and electicity usage at 25%? To put it into perspective, how would you focus energy on lowering output out of 100% of your personal energy? https://cfpub.epa.gov/ghgdata/inventoryexplorer/
I'd implement a high price on carbon(-equivalents) and let the market figure out where it is cheapest to reduce emissions first. I'd probably also get rid of many subsidies.
The question was about your personal energy expended on changing public opinion and making a greener environment, not if you are in power and have dictatorship powers, unless you have a path to that point. What do you think is the most efficient usage of your time to lower emissions?
The Dominican Republic had a very green dictatorship who was sadly assassinated but his trees have protected the country on there and island where Haiti was decimated.
The most efficient usage of my time to lower emissions is donating part of my income to lobby groups that try to convince politicians to enact meaningful policies wrt climate change.
Yes, which lobbying groups do you like? I myself just suggest more sustainable practices and do my best, haven't been on a plane in over a decade. You use your voice though, what would you tell others to lower carbon emissions?
10% is a smaller part of total emissions than transportation or electricity generation, but it's still pretty significant chunk. If we can reduce emissions related to beef somehow that would be a step forward.
I'm skeptical of that Dearman engine article. It doesn't really explain where the energy comes from. We already know how to do carbon neutral energy and transportation: use solar/wind/hydroelectric/nuclear and battery-electric vehicles. It's just that the infrastructure is expensive and takes time to build. It's also not treated as an urgent priority in many countries. Some because they can't afford it, and some (i.e. the United States) our political system makes it very easy for a minority to block things.
The energy is from compression, there are videos of it. Rather than small hot explosions that move pistons, the cold will pull rather than push the pistons as it does in combustion engines. Its main enemy will be cheap used diesel.
I generally like the economist but this article is poor.
The topic of deforestation is only whispered in at the end, almost a footnote. However, burning the Amazon for farmland to produce beef in Brazil should be part of the headline.
I thought the modern view was that the Amazon as the "lungs of the planet" was supposed to be totally bullshit and we could burn the whole thing down and be fine - but what we can't do is screw up the oceans, and it's already too late and we're all effectively doomed (walking ghost status) but we just don't realize it yet.
It is easy to do carbon studies on trees, but not on grasslands and other carbon sinks. The carbon content of the world will not be the destroyer as much as the effect of human nature, the world has been very different at different times, but extinction isn't likely.
To screw up the oceans, there must be a standard, but there isn't. There are many problems such as lower native populations, corals, invasive species, stronger weather patterns, microplastics, but I am not sure what it is to "screw up the oceans".
Arguments that meat take an excessive amount of resources are disingenuous because those resources cannot simply be translated to other uses, examples being that the water use example many tout uses rainwater would fall anyways, that livestock will eventually urinate meaning it isn't actually lost, and land used for livestock is mostly non arable land and therefore cant be used for producing crops anyways. Also there is a relationship between livestock, agriculture and human society where they all are able to use resources that each other cant, or provide benefit to each other. For example a huge amount of agriculture fertilizer comes from manure, and a huge amount of livestock feed comes from agricultural waste. Without livestock we now have to get fertilizer elsewhere, and all the byproducts that would become animal feed becomes waste.
In the grand scheme of things livestock produce an insignificant amount of ghg and that if all Americans stopped consuming beef, it would reduce the nations ghg emissions by ~2.5%, whereas transportation, power generation and construction contribute to the overwhelming amount of emissions (~80%).
If you want to look at reducing emissions from food, it is much easier to look at food waste, where ~40% of food in the US is wasted, and of that roughly 80% is produce like fruits, vegetables, tubers etc, meaning that even if there was a transformation to a purely vegan population, food waste would probably increase.
edit: I should reiterate that these are points in summary that are made in the video, not my personal opinion.
1. The number is around 14.5% in direct global emissions [1] according to the FAO, I cannot find any reputable source saying anywhere as low as 2.5%
2. Beef has roughly ten times more carbon footprint as Chicken. Beef has by far the highest CO2 equivalent per KG of product among any food [2] at 99.8Kg CO2 Equivalent, lamb / mutton comes a distant second at around 40Kg and Pork / Poultry are around 12/9 respectively [3] .
3. Looking at American consumption and emissions in isolation is disingenuous, USA alone exported 2.2 Billion pounds and imported 4.4 Billion pounds of beef and cattle in 2020.
4. Beef related food production is the leading cause of deforestation in many countries including Brazil [4] and a lot of it is export driven. There is additional secondary emissions due to this type of deforestation .
5. In addition there is substantial growth in amount of meat consumes as a country develops the impact of this industry is not just current emissions [5]
6. A lot the byproducts that become animal feed can also become fertilizer, if used in feed stock then likely it is organic and therefore contains fertilizer components such as Potassium , Nitrates etc that can be processed as fertilizer .
7. Even if there was zero emissions related to consumption, it is inherently a extremely cruel industry, the conditions in dairy/ cattle/ chicken/pig farms are horrifyingly bad to the animals, and use breeds that have little genetic variety, create potential outbreak zones for many diseases.
8. Pigs and Cattle are very intelligent species, it is especially cruel to breed species of higher intelligence just for food even if there were only humane farms.
Keep in mind, what I wrote essentially was condensed version of what was said in the video, which itself was in response to several other videos so the points made are specifically targeting other claims, there is a lot of nuance in delivery that I discarded for the sake of brevity, for example, but point 1 was addressing a claim another popular video discussing domestic (American) emissions of livestock agriculture. Some of your points are discussed in the video but I was really just giving cliff notes to the original responder.
1. How is this 14.5% number calculated? Does it include deforestation? Grass-fed is far different than deforesting for grazing land or crop land.
For instance from the FAO PDF you quoted: "extensive livestock are often kept in remote environments where deforestation and land degradation reflect weaknesses in institutions and policies". The headline then should read "deforestation and bad land policy causes climate change" not "stop eating cows".
2. Again, how are these 10x numbers calculated? Comparing e.g. industrialized agriculture to inefficient agriculture in a third-world country is not going to convince skeptics. If beef production is extremely inefficient somewhere, we should fix that.
3. If country A emits 100x the CO2 production of country B for the same end result, that needs to be noted. If my neighbor has a giant gas-guzzling monster truck spewing emissions, my neighborhood is not at fault, it's just him.
4. Agree 100%. We should be addressing the deforestation. Saying "stop eating meat" is not the solution. "Don't buy food from Brazil grown on land that had rain forest last year" is more nuanced and probably easier to follow. Matter of fact, don't buy products made by totalitarian regimes, slaves, child labor, etc. We should know where and how our products are made. I'm not advocating "don't buy sneakers" because some sneakers are made in unethical ways.
5. Humans love meat, that fact is not changing anytime soon. We should advocate for more efficient (and yet more ethical). If we need to, governments should pass laws to make production sustainable similar to what is done to prevent overfishing.
6. We have a perfect machine, well studied and used for millennia, for converting corn husks and other inedible things that would otherwise be thrown away into fertilizer: cows. Bonus, in addition to fertilizer, you get milk, hides, bones, highly nutritious meat, etc.
7/8. Totally agree. More laws need to be passed to regulate this industry, it's truly sickening. All meat products should be twice as expensive or more as they currently are to account for this.
How would reducing food waste reduce emissions? After all food is just condensed CO2, eating it releases that CO2 back into the atmosphere the same as rotting. It’s a closed cycle.
True for the C from food, but the production process is energy intensive. Fertilizer production, tractors, etc all burn oil C which would otherwise have been left in the ground.
Ah yeah, typical motte and bailey argument. First “meat is bad”, then you dismantle that, then “cattle feed is the problem”, then you dismantle that, then “food waste is the problem”, then you dismantle that, ultimately it always comes down to energy.
So, how about we solve energy instead (build nuclear powerplants)? Yet they still blame meat!
> If you want to look at reducing emissions from food, it is much easier to look at food waste, where ~40% of food in the US is wasted, and of that roughly 80% is produce like fruits, vegetables, tubers etc, meaning that even if there was a transformation to a purely vegan population, food waste would probably increase.
Overproduction isn't ideal from that point of view, but on the other hand it is at least to some extent also a necessary hedge against bad harvests – if you don't overproduce compared to your average requirements, then any even just mildly bad harvest would immediately cause food shortages, and that's something you really really wouldn't want to happen.
Hm, this seems to be missing the point that plant monocrops destroy the soil and are not nearly as efficient a source of food for the human body as fresh animal meat. Regenerative agriculture, which ideally requires both animal and plant cultivation, would be a better path forward if it could scale. If I remember correctly the papers that originally thought cattle were a big contributor to global warming turned out to be pretty incorrect when they were re-examined as well https://carolinestocks.medium.com/debunking-the-methane-myth...
Lets not forget the transportation of fresh meat is not negligible, the cooling and the fuel costs will add greatly to carbon emissions. Preserved foods and not relying on luxuries such as refrigeration would go a long way to sustainability and heath.
Transportation and cooling of meat in particular is nothing compared to the land area of North America and South America combined that we devote to growing crops to feed livestock.
Is it negligible that transportation of fresh meat, its cooling or freezing are not at all factors in carbon production? I would like to see how its calculated.
This implies that the land used to grow cow feed couldn't be used to instead grow human-consumable crops or left fallow as a carbon sink. I'm not aware of any studies showing that.
You make a strong argument. I think this is a case where we'll find the global optimum somewhere in the middle.
Deforesting the amazon to grow corn for cows is something I'm sure we can all agree is bad.
Should we use livestock to eat cover crops and waste products like corn husks and cobs? This way we reuse waste and produce high quality protein to supplement our diets.
Should we graze cattle on natural grasslands like the great plains? Especially in rotation with human foods, like the cover crops mentioned before?
I'm pretty sure that feedlot studies say that the usual situation in the US is that 1/2 of beef calories come from a 10:1 ratio of human edible calories.
So sure, go for 100%-grass-and-not-human-edible-food-fed beef, but that's not the current system.
That article seems highly motivated to marginalize the effects of livestock. Quoting a section:
While methane is 28-times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, methane’s lifespan is just a decade, while CO2 — known as a long-life pollutant — remains in the atmosphere for 1000 years.
After ten years, methane is broken down in a process called hydroxyl oxidation into CO2, entering a carbon cycle which sees the gas absorbed by plants, converted into cellulose, and eaten by livestock.
In the first paragraph, it says methane isn't so bad because it lasts only 10 years, unlike CO2 which lasts 1000 years. In the very next paragraph it says the methane is broken down into CO2 which is then absorbed by plants and recycled. Wait, you just said it lasts 1000 years.
The next two paragraphs say that livestock accounts for 33% of the total methane released and blithely states that it all gets broken down and reused. If no additional animals are introduced, then net release equals net absorption. That is not very insightful -- eventually an equilibrium will be reached. This glosses over the real data that CO2 levels are rising, it is having measurable consequences, and is pushing control loops to new, worse states.
Citing one article written for the "Farm Business" trade publication isn't as conclusive as you seem to state.
There is a certain amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and a certain amount of carbon in the ground.
When you burn oil, you take carbon from the ground and introduce it into the atmosphere. This increases the total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere.
When you grow plants, you take carbon out of the atmosphere. When you eat it, you release it back into the atmosphere. The total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere does not change.
Grass grows more vigorously when regularly pruned, for example by a grazing animal. Farms also make a point of planting thing which grow quickly and efficiently. Thus it's reasonable to expect that farming could increase the rate of carbon turnover in the atmosphere, which would create the appearance of increased carbon emissions without a corresponding increase in the amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere.
In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged. But the cow itself only causes a short lived, fixed increase in atmospheric methane and an increased rate of carbon turnover.
> In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged.
I cannot say anything wherever cows really are inconsequential wrt the warming effect, but it definitely goes against what's generally said by climate scientists.
I suppose you could grasp at that straw, but the reality is that grain farms always use diesel and electricity, not just "heavy, oil burning equipment", no matter how much you might think they don't, and that's multiplied by a factor of 10 when you feed that grain to a cow.
You're clearly misunderstanding what I wrote, which is likely because of my poor phrasing.
To phrase it differently:
Climate scientists generally think that cows are an issue, but I do not have the qualification to judge wherever Dojis claim (that they don't matter) has any truth to it, as I'm not informed enough to form an opinion on the matter.
Doji did not claim that modern agriculture isn't harmful, they just addressed cows specifically.
It's a concern, but fortunately if cattle population stays constant, their portion of the atmospheric resident methane will also remain constant, because methane degradation will keep pace with emissions.
Compare this to cars. Even if the number of cars remains constant, their contribution to the C02 pool grows every day.
So we should avoid increasing cattle population 100x, but we wouldn't want to do that anyway because we'd have nowhere to put them, and I certainly wouldn't support deforestation.
World population is largely a strayman, it's mostly about rising standards of living. Animal consumption per capita increases drastically as poverty dissipates, and sharply declines as people get educated about health and the environment. It's a race between those two pressures that determines the cattle population.
Projections are that it will increase very, very drastically as middle eastern and african countries soon escape the poverty line
Grass grows more vigorously but also consumes more nutrients when regularly pruned, other plants also "grow more vigorously" e.g get replanted when harvested by humans. This does not seem unique to grass or animal feeding.
Even if it was, grass-fed beef is about 1% of the supply in the US. It has also been shown that grass-fed beef on average causes more environmental degradation than conventionally fed beef, due to the deforestation required to create grazing areas
Buffalo is a very obvious harm reduction option that would create less harmful externalities but it’s not at all suggested, only lab grown meats and removing all meats from diet.
I never claimed the phenomena was unique to this situation - it's a general phenomena.
Deforestation is a real problem. How do you address this from a policy perspective? If you ban beef, that is only a temporary band-aid on the real problem of deforestation, which both fails to address deforestation properly, and which prevents beneficial uses of livestock such as for reuse of food waste products, grazing of natural grasslands, production of natural fertilizer, etc.
But it means that the meat we eat today just warms the earth for 10 years in the future. Global warming isn't a catastrophe in 10 years, so eating meat today is a non issue. When global warming becomes an issue we can kill all the cows and stop eating meat and that way quickly cool the earth.
Why was this downvoted? The 28 times figure only applies if you average for when the activity continues for 100 years. Meaning if we stop and most of the warming is in the first 10 years, we'd see a huge global cooling from stopping such a massive effect. This would serve as a great way to quickly reverse global climate change once it gets critical, and once it get critical people can no longer say that it isn't a problem so you'd have the whole world on your side, so not sure why we would waste that opportunity by using it now rather than when the whole world understands the problem?
I feel like I'm being gaslighted. In advanced physical chemistry we took IR spectroscopy of methane and CO2 and CO2 definitely had much, much more absorption than methane on account of the dipole difference between Carbon and oxygen (IR absorption depends on stretching modes between atoms of different electronegativity, carbon is very close to methane). At the time, it was explained to us young chemistry students that methane was more potent GHG because it lasted in the air longer (CO2 is scrubbed by plants).
Am I missing something? How can methane be a more potent GHG if it has lower IR absorption AND a shorter lifespan?
Edit: found spectra here (not the data that i took, obviously):
CO2 has a big fat band that blows out the absorption at 4.5 um in a region untouched by water (and one that is overwhelmed by water); methane has two spiky bands both of which are partially occluded by water.
I'm just guessing: a) We don't have enough water in the atmosphere that the overlap with Methane meaningfully reduces net absorption, b) in the bands Methane absorbs there is more radiation available to absorb than in the CO2 band. If both are true that would explain the bigger effect of Methane.
For the most part, the CO2 absorption bands are already saturated -- increasing CO2 concentration has much less effect on transmission spectrum than that for methane.
the greenhouse effect is about internal reflections basically.
its the same effect that makes cloth appear darker when its wet even though water is basically colorless.
greenhouse gases bend light slightly, making it more likely that a light ray will hit the ground multiple times.
Well, some meat production is obviously a sustainable part of agriculture. There will always be some areas where the soil is too poor for anything but grazing and you'll always have some waste that you can feed to chicken, pigs, and ruminants. But these sustainable levels of animal husbandry are so far removed from the industrialized meat production that we're currently doing that they might as well be zero. Recall that just a generation or two ago meat was something you ate once a week if you lived in a fairly developed country. Today Americans eat more than a 100kg of meat per year.
> Recall that just a generation or two ago meat was something you ate once a week if you lived in a fairly developed country.
What do you mean by a fairly developed country? McDonald's was selling hamburgers for 15 cents in 1955 (roughly the same as the price of a loaf of bread at the grocery store).
Catholics eating fish on Friday (instead of meat) I believe goes back many generations.
See also this article about historical meat consumption in the U.S.[0]:
"“These sources do give us some confidence in suggesting an average annual consumption of 150–200 pounds of meat per person in the nineteenth century.”
Huh, interesting. I was extrapolating from my parents and grandparents who definitely didn't eat meat every day and certainly not half a pound of meat each day. They didn't live in the US though. My grandparents still had to raise all the meat for the family themselves.
Yesterday in the investigative journalism program Zembla on Dutch TV they addressed how the entire agri sector was beholden in a vicious cycle of greed. Where in the supply chain from Monsanto to supermarkets huge profit margins were raked in. Large part of the blame is at the supermarkets. While farmers are left no choice but to apply extractive methods (furtilizers, pesticides) to farm their lands to keep their heads afloat. Even with their huge farms and professional production methods they are effectively exploited.
In this story the supermarkets say "We'll give consumers the choice", but for them that means choosing eco products that have ~40% higher price and they don't do that (~5% of sales is eco-friendly), so this doesn't work.
Once again it is politicians who need to take some tough measures, but they find powerful lobbies in their path plus they do not dare to take impopular measures that make products more expensive, for fear of losing votes. So for 50 years things got worse and worse.
One solution mentioned was what social enterprise True Price [0] is trying to establish: explicitly pricing the detrimental externalities that until now are shoved as costs to future generations. A pack of regular coffee with externalities priced in would go from, say, $5 to become $10, while a pack of eco-friendly coffee would go to $6.50. The surplus to the price should be reserved in a fund with which farmers can make the transition to sustainable agriculture.
The vast majority of agricultural land today are for feeding animals (between 70% and 80% depending of the studies). The end product meat is maybe more efficient, but compared to what was needed for its production it is not. It’s not humans that eat that much monocultured corn and soy.
It varies a lot by country, pretty sure there's a lot more overlap between pasture land and arable land in Europe, but for example in USA not so much.
Considerable amount of animal food also involves byproducts of food production for humans, or plants used in cycling the fields (that's made worse with preference to just put ton of artificial fertilizer)
Most plant monocrops are for feedstock. You can do regenerative agriculture with only plants. Feeding animals plant calories is terribly inneficient (~10-15% depending on the estimate)
true. the question is whether your body can deal with it. it knows how to deal with chemicals it has been exposed to for thousands of years. it doesn’t know very well how to deal with GMOs.
That is nonsense in this generalization and also mostly unrelated to meat-substitutes. Humans have been genetically modifying their food ever since they came up with agriculture and there are plenty of meat-substitutes without GMOs if you don't like them.
I can’t read the full article because of the paywall but the main argument seems to be that cows emit a lot of CO2.
Ruminants eat plants, which contain carbon captured from the atmosphere. They then release most of that carbon back to the atmosphere, from where it will be eventually absorbed by plants again. So it’s a cycle where no new carbon is really being introduced (unlike burning fossil fuels that would otherwise stay in the ground).
Am I missing something or is the seriousness of this issue blown way out of proportion?
>To be fair, that has nothing to do with the current economy, where almost all cows go to feed lots to be fed human food (corn) to double their weight.
Have you travled outside the US? This is not true in most parts of the world, I wouldn't be suprised to see it only being a US practice.
Yes, I've visited several dozen countries, and I assure you that the practice of using feedlots has spread to most developed countries, and is being spread to the less developed world as a way to increase incomes.
Nice insult, btw. I had to send my passport to get more pages sewn in.
* a lot of energy is used to farm the cows, e.g. growing their food, fertilizers, butchering, shipping, etc
* Cow methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than co2, orders of magnitude worse
* Land that would capture a lot more CO2 and keep water in the environment is chopped down or otherwise destroyed to make pastures, the worst being rainforests.
* Orders of magnitude more water is used to raise cows vs the equivalent calories in plants.
> Cow methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than co2, orders of magnitude worse
But it's also released in much lower quantities, and has a much faster half life. Let's be clear: carbon dioxide, not methane, is responsible for the overwhelming majority of long term warming.
The point about the extra energy is potentially valid, although it would need data.
Methane being worse than CO2 doesn't change the fact that it's a cycle and thus it's not causing extra warming as long as the amount of animals is constant.
Alternative forests, etc, is equally a one off thing. Keeping the pastures doesn't make anything worse, and reverting them back would only be a one off improvement.
It feels like we are headed into a new medieval era of sumptuary laws and moral decrees promulgated by a decentralized international clerical-academic class. I don't think I like it very much
Right. Prices, not arbitrary bans, are the correct way to incorporate externalities in the costs of a product. People are far too happy to promote ad-hoc bans of all sorts of arbitrary things without creating any kind of general incentive structure that would automatically optimize the metrics of interest. The result is malinvestment, economic inefficiency, and global poverty.
The problem is that the externality is set arbitrarily by people who think beef in particular is bad --- it's a sin tax. If you're being honest about pricing emissions, you internalize externalities universally, uniformly, and transparently. An across-the-board carbon tax is defensible; such a tax would likely affect beef. A fee on beef by itself --- that's just disingenuous and moralistic nonsense.
What bothers me most isn't the malinvestment (though that sucks) or a faliure to calculate costs and benefits, but the fact that they're moralizing zealots. A zealot can justify anything in the name of The Common Good
(naturally, they are the ones who decide what The Common Good is)
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
A big problem is that the moral busybodies who propose laws banning random things are the same moral busybodies who censor internet discussion.
Taxing and stopping externalities has nothing to do with the common good. It's very much about individual rights. You have no right to pollute in my backyard (including the air I breathe), just as you have no right to punch me in the face or give me brain damage with lead petrol usage. It's a justified use of government force to stop you if for some reason you think you are entitled to violate my rights.
"moralizing zealots"
But I agree there's an elitism and power game aspect to it that I find revolting. Emotionally,
I really want to put my middle finger up and take the compete opposite position just to spite the virtue signalling snobs. Rationally, though, it seems to be a real problem that we need to solve as a species, irrespective of how self-righteous and smug some of the activists are.
Yes, good point. And we aren't going to finger-point our way out of this.
Oxfam press release:
> In 2015, around half the emissions of the richest 10 percent - people with net income over $38,000 - are linked to citizens in the US and the EU and around a fifth with citizens of China and India. Over a third of the emissions of the richest one percent – people with net income over $109,000 - are linked to citizens in the US, with the next biggest contributions from citizens of the Middle East and China. Net incomes are based on income thresholds for 2015 and represented in $ 2011 PPP (purchasing power parity).
From the paper they are linking to:
> The richest 10% of the world’s population (c.630 million people)
were responsible for 52% of the cumulative carbon emissions –
depleting the global carbon budget by nearly a third (31%) in
those 25 years alone (see Figure 1);
> The richest 1% (c.63 million people) alone were responsible for
15% of cumulative emissions, and 9% of the carbon budget –
twice as much as the poorest half of the world’s population (see
Figure 1);
The gulf stream is predicted to collapse in about 40 years. You won't catch me making strong predictions about what happens that far in the future, but the gulf stream is responsible for keeping North America's farm belt temperate, aka, farmable. The North is expected to cool dramatically, and closer to the equator is expected to warm dramatically -- perhaps inhospitably so. Additionally, the oxygen levels in the ocean may deplete to produce mass extinction in another major food source. I'm not sure what all is implied by "medieval era" to you, but all together, it looks pretty damned bleak. Evolution doesn't turn on a dime, but the weather might.
"Medieval era" implies a regression to subsistence farming and the end of today's technological civilization. Even a severe disruption to food production would result in substitution of foods, not a destruction of civilization.
There is no universe where climate change causes the literal collapse of civilization. Exaggerating the risks of something just destroys the credibility of the people doing the exaggerating: consider DARE and drugs.
>> There is no universe where climate change causes the literal collapse of civilization.
The confidence of this statement reeks of arrogance. How can you even claim to know what the potential impacts of climate change do not include? It's not like modern humans have lived in any era that was remotely similar.
If it indirectly triggers nuclear war, it's plausible. Even just India vs Pakistan will lead to about a billion starvation deaths due to crop failures around the world as an externality. We were close to nuclear war in the 20th century despite no exogenous disturbances. What do you think will happen when there's mass migration and other stresses on the global order?
Florida has already so unsustainable that only the US government will insure the structures and buildings. The Netherlands and Venice are also another artificial human livable area. Frozen regions of the world will become habitable so livable landmass will actually increase in northern tundras.
Tons? https://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/fl-bz-hurricane-season...
>“In Orlando if a house predates 2010 and is worth less than $300,000, no company is going to write [insurance for] you,” warned Locke Burt, CEO of Security First Insurance Co. in a June 2020 Sun Sentinel article.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/homeowners-insurance/why-is-h...
Residents there that cannot afford the insurance that exists might as well mean that it doesn't exist the same way life saving surgery cannot be purchased by a person makes it nonexistant.
>" UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control...Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded...UNEP is working toward forming a scientific plan of action by the end of 1990, and the adoption of a global climate treaty by 1992...
You misread the article. Climate change will cause those problems, but not by the year 2000. Carbon emissions have very long term effects that are hard to reverse. Twenty years ago we had already emitted enough CO2 to cause dramatic changes over the next couple of generations. That's why all IPCC scenarios with tolerable warming nowadays include magical atmospheric carbon scrubbing technology.
> if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000
The trend was not reversed, so now we wait to see if the prediction comes true. Given the low lying geography of some nations (esp pacific islands) I would bet money that this does indeed come true in the future.
Nowhere in the quote does it say, as you claim, that civilization would collapse in 2000.
I'm sorry but this is such an poor attempt to nit pick the obviously false claims made by the UN back then. It's been 20 years since they said we would be past the point of no return and almost no one today believes we are past the point of no return.
Furthermore, those unspecific weasel words they were using back then to try and wriggle out of any predicitons they made back then, they are still using today when they say we will be past the point of no return in 10 years from now. Their wording was clearly meant to trick people into believing there would be mass destruction and climate refugees in 10 years, and people believed it back then, just like people today believe we will be seeing the same in 10 years from now.
The goal posts have moved significantly since the early nineties. Back then we had a realistic chance of limiting warming to well below one degree. We're now far past the point of no return for that. Today we talk about approaching the point of no return for 2° warming. Chances are good that we'll still talk about approaching the point of no return in another decade, only this time we'll talk about 3°.
Global cooling was a specific reference to cooling caused by particles emitted in areas with no air pollution laws. Oddly enough, it faded away when standards were raised.
- People are not migrating North in droves. They are not preparing in any way.
- Nuclear energy, the only realistic solution to climate change, is not being supported. It's actually being retired early in many cases and replaced with coal of all things.
- Property prices on the coastline are going up. President Obama, who has access to the best information and experts, bought a huge property on the Martha's Vineyard coast in 2019.
- There is little to no push to improve the water supply in preparation for droughts, not even in California.
People don't act rationally, that should come as a surprise to no one. Look at the number of people who are overweight, sedentary and/or smoke even though they don't want to die of cancer or heart disease.
I think that people don't act rationally outside of theories taught in Economics 101 classrooms is commonly known. I don't mean it in a derogatory way, being irrational is just part of human nature.
To me it seems it's the only realistic solution ( more realistic than the grid scale storage required to make renewables only work for most countries). What does cost have to do with it? We either want to fix the problem before it renders a big chunk of the planet inhospitable and who knows what else ( e.g. the heat dome in the Pacific Northwest this summer ), or not. Money shouldn't be part of the conversation, like it wasn't in Chernobyl ( though to be fair, it did nearly bankrupt the Soviet Union and being about its downfall).
If you're right that it's the only solution then of course cost is not that important. Many people don't think that it's the only solution, so cost is important.
Well another completely wild solution would be to make end users responsible for storing electricity during non-generation hours. I.e. "each home having a battery device." I just made this up now but thinking about what the end result might be...
encourages:
- more people to buy electric cars that can also act as a whole home battery
- even more research dollars in storage/battery tech
- distributed power grid
- resell electricity to grid (or maybe even local neighbours)
- short-term power outages are handled by design
- people think more about their electricity usage
- people may be more likely to generate power at home
downsides:
- unnecessary extra cost to end users
- might be less efficient then centralization
- certain markets/peoples will not be able to easily access stored electricity?
If we continued to build nuclear rather than retire them then we wouldn't have any issues today except cars and air. What do you mean "not most cost efficient", there are no other options we know of today. They are all based on future tech we don't have, like being able to store wind or solar etc.
Do you really want to bet the future of earth on the chance that we find a solution to those problems before climate change really becomes a huge disaster? I wouldn't, I would build what we know works. And since many are saying that we are already heading for a disaster, we can say that your bet didn't pay off, the chase for viable solar and wind failed and nuclear was the only viable option.
We have the technology to store wind and solar: batteries for very short durations, electrolysis (optionally followed by a Sabatier reaction to make Methane) for longer duration. Both are quite expensive, but so is nuclear. I don't know which option is cheaper overall.
Nuclear is massively cheaper as long as you build it in scale 20 reactors at a time, like France did in the 1970s or China has been doing for the last decade.
The capital cost of any battery, flywheel or pumped storage is higher than the $30-50/MWh energy of a nuclear plant, without even having built any PV or wind generation.
Depends on the kind of nuclear doesn’t it? Thorium isn’t popular because it’s not useful for uranium enrichment. Efficient solar would be ideal, but the mining and harmful externalities would be best done away from the earth.
(just to drop the links again... You can deploy untold millions of solar panels while waiting for a nuclear plant to come online, and they will be considerably cheaper as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy )
I think the steelman pro-nuclear argument is that if we seriously wanted to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear, we'd have to build so many reactors that they become faster and cheaper to build. They also don't require expensive seasonal storage like solar panels and wind would in most of the world or expensive HVDC lines from always-sunny areas of the world to the areas requiring seasonal storage.
So it might be possible that nuclear in the end is cheaper than renewables. Personally I'm not sure about that, but I'm not an expert in the field.
I would expect that companies that sell electricity are the experts in this field, and they don’t appear to be jumping on the nuclear bandwagon. I don’t have anything against nuclear, personally.
And then during the night we do... ? (We should also probably mention the fact that unlike nuclear, decommissioning and recycling costs are not included upfront, so you should budget for those too).
Solar on itself can only be a very small part of the solution. It needs storage most localities don't have the budget, place, technology to build.
"The differences in outcomes for different assumed discount rates are dramatic — for example, NEA LCOE calculation for residential PV at 3% discount rate produces $150/MWh, while at 10% it produces $250/MWh.[15] LCOE estimate prepared by Lazard (2020) for nuclear power based on unspecified methodology produced $164/MWh, while LCOE calculated by the investor for an actual Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant in Finland came out to be below 30 EUR/MWh.[16]"
Yes, because - you might be surprised to hear - people actually like to life where they are born and raised and require catastrophic hardship (such as the Syrian civil war) to actually start a migration.
Many other countries don't produce their own food and don't have that issue, it is a small reason that I have never heard of as a factor, do you have information on its impact on the current situation?
Slavery took a civil war to be abolished in the USA. Child labour only ended following massive strikes that were violently repressed at first in Europe.
Not sure what you mean here by “modern feminism”. The idea that people should be treated as individuals regardless of their gender seems like a huge societal win.
As someone in the Gen X demographic who has never smoked, I've watched the anti-smoking campaigns and shift in attitudes towards smoking with interest - particularly how resistant smokers were to initially giving up smoking.
I feel like eating meat is going to be my generations equivalent of smoking. Intellectually, I agree that eating meat is bad for the environment, cruel to animals (esp industrial farming) etc ... but I can't see myself giving up eating meat.
Well, in my country (where tax in cigarettes etc was already very high; no one cared) it was not being allowed to smoke almost anywhere anymore, then, when that became normal (many people did it anyway for a few years until the fines got too high), people who used to smoke and everyone else found it smelly and then, way way way way behind that somewhere, something with health.
Partly, it was generational. Gen X grew up hearing the evils of smoking in the 70s (TV and radio ads were banned as early as 1971), then with great admonition in the 1980s.
1982 was the year that the US Surgeon General announced that second-hand smoke was dangerous. That was the beginning of the end. Then shortly after the lawsuits started.
Boomers and the generation before did not have much of that influence in their formative years, even though warning labels were put on cigarette packages in 1965, they were mostly ignored because… marketing.
The difference between stopping smoking and stopping eating meat is that it's perfectly possible to eat meat in moderation than it is to smoke just a few.
I haven't eaten any 4-legged animals with the exception of bacon and the odd burger here and there (a chicken burger just doesn't cut it) for 3-4 years.
I mostly eat fish and poultry and have been accidentally vegan a number of days.
I'd be completely fine paying 2x the price for beef if the animals were handled in a sustainable and humane way.
> The simplest way to cut beef output is for people to eat other animals instead, or become vegetarians.
That’s like, in 1900, saying “the simplest way to prevent road deaths is for everyone to drive slower.” That’s not simple at all - that’s an intractable group behavior problem. What you really need is for the government to come along and put up speed limits. Most people will push those rules, a few will flout them, but things will be better.
So let’s have a carbon tax that includes all sources of greenhouse gas, including domesticated animals, and stop passing moral judgement on people who are stressed enough as it is figuring out how to navigate our challenging world.
That's where we'll be in 50-100 years if we want to have a future that doesn't suck too much, and not just about what you eat. We're definitely living in the golden age of consumerism in every aspects: energy, food, travel, electronic gadgets, &c. We're producing and consuming so much useless shit and well aware that we're heading for disaster.
We're either going to be limited by natural resources, climate issues or our own actions to limit ourself to avoid #1 and #2.
There is just no way around it, you can't keep on extracting more and more ressources from a closed system, you can't keep polluting more and more in a closed system, you can't target an exponential growth in a closed system.
Companies don't give a shit, because their sole purpose is to not care about these issues. That's how you get companies like apple shitting unrepairable products every 6 months, but it's ok because their offices are carbon neutral, right ?
So it's a game of chicken, everyone knows about the problem, they all know the solutions, but no one is really taking action, because that would be a massive paradigm shift in virtually every aspect of our economy
Fishing boats are allowed to keep any fish or crustacean regardless of size or sex. In fact, they don’t even have daily catch limits they have to adhere too. We’re so lucky that all fishing companies voluntarily avoid over fishing. If there was some sort of “department of game and fish” in most states regulating what animals you can eat, it would probably be the beginning of the end for America. I would just up and move to Canada.
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
You can find a lot of people who work in academia who find Stage of Fear (in particular) to be a thinly-veiled attempt to smear the entire climate science community. Because everyone is in lust with grant money.
Unless your dog burns fossil fuels you most likely only need to pay carbon tax on the dog products you use that were made using fossil fuels. Dogs don't produce a lot of Methane either, because they're not ruminants.
Cattle only burn fossil fuels to the extent that transporting water and feed, fertilizing that feed, and manufacturing and transporting fencing materials, antibiotics, etc, use.
Guess what? Your dog has roughly the same impact making and transporting his food, his water, his veterinarian supplies, any bedding you've purchased, bags to dispose of his feces, collars, leashes, toys, etc.
I don't have hard numbers but intuitively I'd guess dogs and cattle have approximately the same climate impact on a pound-of-bodyweight basis.
Dogs probably have slightly more, since they live in much more luxurious digs than CAFO cattle, eat higher quality feed, get to ride in cars, etc.
I would be fine with paying a carbon tax on my cat, the meat he eats (all chicken, at least, and not that much) has some footprint (pawprint?) after all. I do pay for some extra offsets via Wren, so maybe he's covered.
A mid-sized conventional gasoline car is more fuel efficient at 55MPH than at 45MPH. Pumping losses work that way. With improved aerodynamics, you could get that even higher.
Unlike older scientific topics that have esoteric terminology, usually from the Latin, this one is pretty straight forward... It is the energy lost due to pumping. Basically, the overhead of keeping an engine running no matter how much distance of roadway you cover, but more on point, the extra losses due to running an engine outside of its peak power/performance range:
Not "pumping" losses, no. There is no intake air or exhaust gas to pump.
EVs may experience an effect that is similar in practice, albeit much smaller... Things like headlights, HVAC, entertainment systems, etc., will draw more power the longer it takes you to get to your destination, so reducing your speed from 30 to 15 MPH might not be an efficiency win.
No- those losses (less the engine idle speed) are relatively larger for electric, because alternator loss is already baked into the efficiency for ice engines.
I believe due to motor efficiency and losses from AC, media system, etc., the most efficient speed for most EVs and hybrids is around 25 mph. I’ve heard 10 and 35 suggested as well.
Would be very interesting to see some of the ideas that they wanted to base improved infrastructure on with older ideas of the future of technology. The convoys always fascinated me, and the entrenchment of older technology makes progression much harder when the existing infrastructure is heavily depended on and long term planning has never been a strength of the US.
For an engine rpm yes, for a moving body, not so much. Energy in a vacuum is proportional to velocity squared, and energy required with wind drag is iirc 4th power of velocity.
So even with an engine designed to be most efficient when the car drives 65 mph, the efficiency of the system will quickly be controlled by drag forces as speed increases.
As mentioned earlier, methane breaks down after 10 years into CO2 which makes livestock more part of the cycle rather than a producer. Applying the tax to any process that directly removes carbon sinks (eg. drilling/forest clearing) should take care of any downstream processes that rely on it.
did speed limits really make things better though? germany has the autobahn and sections with no speed limit, yet their roadways are much safer than the US.
Most US states require more than 20 hours in the classroom (usually a week or two), plus 8+ hours of actual driving with a driver's education teacher, plus some number of years with a learner's permit, where driving is only allowed during the day with a licensed driver 21 or older supervising in the vehicle. Then written and driving tests by the DMV must be passed to get licensed.
In practice, the classroom study usually isn't all that rigorous, and the testing is likely too easy.
But the requirements on paper aren't typically any easier in the US.
What's most needed is probably refresher quizzes for license renewals to remind drivers of commonly forgotten or new driving laws. Like who has right of way at a 4 way stop, or how to zipper merge.
"Taking a closer look at Germany, federal and state statistics reported by Der Spiegel show that there 0.95 fatal accidents per billion kilometres driven on German autobahn sections with speed limits. When it comes the parts without a speed limit, however, there are 1.67 fatal accidents - 75 percent more than on stretches with a speed limit."
The flaw in logic here is to assume that Germany and the US are otherwise identical in policy. But of course that's not remotely true. Germany roads are safer because
- Drivers are required to obtain an extensive education at a licensed driving school and pass a rigorous test before being allowed to drive.
- Driving rules such as "no passing on the right" are strictly enforced in Germany, creating a more predictable (and thus safer) driving environment. There is absolutely no way something like the following could be achieved in the US due to Americans' stubbornness and lack of driving discipline:
- German roads are designed to naturally encourage people to make good decisions by the use of roundabouts, narrower lanes (which naturally make people slow down and be more careful) and many similar "vision zero" initiatives.
- German roads are consistently maintained.
- When you're not on the autobahn, speed limits are generally lower than in the US and are more strictly enforced.
Not to say that Germany is perfect, but they are doing much more than the US to ensure road safety and are doing so more consistently.
- Moreover, German vehicles (meaning vehicles registered in Germany, not vehicles from German brands/factories) must pass strict tests every two years (for vehicles less than 10 years) or yearly (10 years or more).
The inspections might differ, but most states that require vehicle inspections do so yearly.
And most include an emissions test, which reduces the need for complex mechanical inspections, and largely negates differences in inspection "quality".
I'll be honest, it seems reasonable to me in a lot of cases. I'm not enamored with steak, and chicken/pork can work just as well as beef for a lot of other dishes. A chicken sandwich is just as good as a burger to me.
I know there are people where that doesn't work, but there may be many where it does too with minimal nudging.
So now people see the nuances of why they still want to eat beef
... Not like when they claim that it's ridiculous for the developing countries to burn coals, oil, woods, etc.
I can't see how lab grown meats would enable the use of the land that animals use. Animals take up land that is unusable for crops and make it productive. What land would the labs use?
If we start banning certain foods like beef. We should do it equally. Only allow those crops with lowest CO2 per calorie/nutrient output. As clearly taste is secondary.
After all, replacing all we eat with tasteless gruel and water is acceptable by this logic.
But they have little nutrional importance. As such producing them cause substantial extra CO2 load relatively. I think ban of them in such scenario is absolutely justified. As we clearly then want to do everything to combat climate change.
You clearly know shit about nutrition :)
Spices are rich in vitamins, antioxidants, minerals. They don't produce extra CO2, to the contrary, they remove CO2.
Enjoy your beef.
Coal is a fossil fuel. Returning ancient carbon to the atmosphere.
Cattle is a bio-fuel. The methane/carbon they release was captured by the grains and grasses shortly before the cattle consumed it, and will continue growing after they've consumed it.
Cattle should be the trendy and expensive thing among the outspoken, virtue-signaling greens. It's plant-based. Contains all-natural ingredients. Isn't made in a lab/on an assembly line with a a bunch of chemicals with scary names. Old hippies should each buy a cow to keep their lawns mowed and fertilized without burning gasoline.
It was an identification of a sub-group, not an insult. But as far as I can recall, it has always been fair game to criticize public figures for their espoused opinions and public actions.
Being offended by everything, and making it everyone else's fault, is the part that is new these days.
It wasn't an insult? Funny, I thought it was the same as calling someone a hypocrite.
Indeed, it's fair game to insult other people. Sadly, it's prohibited by the rules of this forum. Disagree with them? Great. Accuse them of being hypocrites? Less great.
He is extremely rude to me, to appease him I edited my comment and he just angrily attacks every point I make without reading any information. Because he just attacks me so I don't see any reasonable communication with a purely ad hominem poster. Internet bullies will only be affected by lack of attention to their trolling.
I wouldn't assume that -- one of my roommates in grad school was a nurse from China who was older because her education had been interrupted by the Cultural Revolution, and she was the biggest beef fan I've ever met.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadit’ll be like crimes that are punished by a fine - they just become the ‘fee’ that allows the propertied class to do whatever they want.
beef is deadly for humanity because of destructive water and land usage (Vice had a great video showing the Amazon deforestation due to beef production).
edit: my point is that the propertied class will lower wages and raise commodity prices to be able to pay to keep eating an unsustainable amount of beef. instead we should restrict or ban industrial animal agriculture, while investing in educational material to help society transition away from beef. that and regenerative agriculture, agro-forestry, etc.
Ernst Gotsch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
If it bothers you that the rich can afford to pay for the externalities, that's an argument against wealth inequality, not against pricing things correctly.
Start with using 1040's.
Yes--their will be guys whom try to game the system, but many will eventually get caught.
For example, a a patent fee to a poor man is nothing.
A wealthy man pays current rates.
A poor man drives through a red light; the fine might get the last straw, or rent.
A wealthy guy drives through a red light, he casually mentions it over dinner to Clair.
I have never felt it was fair, even when I had money.
Ernst Gotsch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
i don’t want to give my children a dead planet either.
How is it more deadly than transportation in terms of emissions or deaths caused by it? https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
I question the focus on a beef, a percentage of 10% rather than 29% of the total, which is transportation, or 25% which is electricty.
Thanks, for a second I thought you might have to be serious but now I can be certain you can be laughed at in perpetuity.
We subsidize the meat industry directly, and indirectly by not pricing in negative externalities like it’s carbon expenditure.
But maybe we can still make a dent by increasing the price to include negative externalities like carbon emissions, or at least ending subsidies for meat so substitutes might be able to compete better.
Empirically, most politicians don't support carbon taxes. Market-consistent pricing of climate-related externalities is broadly opposed by politicians on both sides of the aisle in the US. For example, look at the massive subsidies to dairy farms in my home state of Wisconsin - they get over 40% of their revenue from direct subsidies in a typical year, and if you exclude those subsidies the industry hasn't made a profit for at least several decades, but no one dares to even suggest reducing or eliminating them, let alone going the other way and taxing the negative externalities they create.
In the US, the vast majority are unwilling to do pretty much anything to fight climate change. ~70% oppose a $0.25/gallon gasoline tax; note that a true Pigouvian tax would be something like 20x higher than that based on the current cost of carbon removal. https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/climate-optimism-of-the-wi...
The poll cited in the article I linked explicitly mentioned that the revenue would be used for policies to support greenhouse gas reduction. I'm skeptical that the respondents cared that much about how the money would get spent, since the vast majority did support policies that would tax the wealthy and/or companies that produce greenhouse gas emissions - the only difference is where they perceive the money to be coming from, not how it would be spent.
Is that what the common price sensitive citizen cares about?
>Given that, I don't think it's that crazy to expect those same young people to pay for the negative externalities their own activities create instead of just paying it forward.
You don't think young people are capable of being hypocrites? Statistics such as low savings is proof that long term planning isn't deeply embedded.
Survey data is notoriously unreliable, on a if the rich subsidizes itself it would be circular wealth, but coming from them means that they are adversely affected. Policies and their actual effect are also not the same, would they not care when government trust is low and its possible to use the money to subsidize large companies that use a green label to play metric? I know the idea of carbon neutral is simply ofsetting carbon negatives to other companies, transportation is a huge contributor and globalized companies play with numbers to call themselves carbon neutral. https://www.dezeen.com/2021/07/30/carbon-neutrality-google-s...
BTW thanks for showing me that substack, I subscribed, hope is sorely needed today.
Another problem. Say a given crop might do better with increased CO2 given all other factors remain unchanged. But that boost of CO2 from 300 ppm to 420 ppm also came with changes to the environment, so all other factors are not unchanged. OK, CO2 levels have gone up 35%, but if the likelihood of experiencing a rain-free period of more than 30 days in that region has doubled, having more CO2 isn't worth the cost.
*I made up the claim as an illustrative example. I'm sure there are myriad co-factors that come with the increase in CO2.
Localized effects are easier to calculate, but there are many factor. For example soybeans grow better under less sunlight, so the effect of a darker sky is higher yields. You are correct that is isn't a single effect its very dynamic and has many effects.
This all (I mean basically every "progressive" restriction) just seems like a way to increase inequality and make sure the poor always stay very poor and the wealthy can do whatever they want.
I can drive my Posche plug-in hybrid in the carpool lane while the chump his old Corolla has to sit in traffic. Does that really do anything but increase inequality. (I dont really have Porsche, I can't imagine a more ridiculous choice, but I'm surrounded with people that do)
It goes back to one of my pet peeves that it is increasingly hard to find the kind of light bulbs I prefer, despite the fact that the electric supply to my home is powered by 100% renewable energy generated on site. I don't like that it was collateral damage of a grossly approximate attempt to lower residential fossil-generated energy consumption.
Ideally it would be a thermal budget rather than carbon.
And that kind of budget is just called a "budget". The resistance of a certain type of activist to using prices to allocate scarcity is going to doom us all if these activists end up setting policy. Prices force people to be honest about what's important and to make tiny trade-offs every day between disparate things. Ad-hoc bans are vulnerable to all sorts of political forces that all amount to people signaling false things about their preferences. Money doesn't have this problem.
There's a reason that there's this common phrase "put your money where your mouth is".
Have you looked at metal halide lights? They require specialized ballasts, so they aren't exactly a drop-in replacement for a standard bulb. The light quality is said to be pretty good, similar to incandescents, but they're more energy-efficient. I have an unfinished project to make an indoor artificial sun (basically, some bright lights projected through lenses to create parallel rays), which is how I started looking at metal halide lamps.
Corn is a fungible commodity.
Pork bellies are a fungible commodity.
It's a mystery to me as to why you think I said soybeans and steak are the same.
It's important to determine which of those two things you're discussing and trying to maintain parity with in attempts to improve on the infrastructure we have built, both have very different and unique problems.
Fungible: Able to be substituted for something of equal value or utility;
The entire premise was that coal is fungible because you can replace it with solar, and nobody* cares as long as their lights still turn on. You can't do the same with food, you can't replace beef with soy beans - in fact for most people you can't replace beef with anything, they want beef.
*coal miners care, the vast majority of the public does not
There are many Americans in the Appalachian area of the United States that care more about where their power comes from than where their food comes from or contains. People in other parts of the world may have different priorities. But most households in West Virginia not only know what type of power is used to run their homes but know the name of the coal mine that it was dug out of.
Taste is not fungible, ingredients really are relatively changeable for most cooking.
When lab grown meet is cheap enough and tastes similar the market wouldn't even notice the change and real beef would become niche high end market for the customers who are ready to pay more because they believe it tastes better or it not GMO or Bill Gates injects 5G using artificial meat.
Electricty (such as that used for cooling), and transportation make up the most carbon emissions. This truck is one such solution for transportation and lower emmission, it uses compression rather than combustion for the engine, and "waste" is cold, so its used to cool the internals. The adoption of this would have a much better effect overall without human habits as resistance. https://atlasofthefuture.org/project/the-dearman-engine/
Improved infrastructure and improvements in efficiency in larger sector should be focused on rather than a nudged suggestion to change eating habits, the title is a pie in the sky, noit interested in practical applications.
Love the insult, I'm sure it helps the conversation along to a good conclusion.
The Dominican Republic had a very green dictatorship who was sadly assassinated but his trees have protected the country on there and island where Haiti was decimated.
Project Drawdown has a table of things we can do: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions
I'm skeptical of that Dearman engine article. It doesn't really explain where the energy comes from. We already know how to do carbon neutral energy and transportation: use solar/wind/hydroelectric/nuclear and battery-electric vehicles. It's just that the infrastructure is expensive and takes time to build. It's also not treated as an urgent priority in many countries. Some because they can't afford it, and some (i.e. the United States) our political system makes it very easy for a minority to block things.
The topic of deforestation is only whispered in at the end, almost a footnote. However, burning the Amazon for farmland to produce beef in Brazil should be part of the headline.
I'm paraphrasing here.
To screw up the oceans, there must be a standard, but there isn't. There are many problems such as lower native populations, corals, invasive species, stronger weather patterns, microplastics, but I am not sure what it is to "screw up the oceans".
Here’s a 20 min video to show you why
https://youtu.be/sGG-A80Tl5g
In the grand scheme of things livestock produce an insignificant amount of ghg and that if all Americans stopped consuming beef, it would reduce the nations ghg emissions by ~2.5%, whereas transportation, power generation and construction contribute to the overwhelming amount of emissions (~80%).
If you want to look at reducing emissions from food, it is much easier to look at food waste, where ~40% of food in the US is wasted, and of that roughly 80% is produce like fruits, vegetables, tubers etc, meaning that even if there was a transformation to a purely vegan population, food waste would probably increase.
edit: I should reiterate that these are points in summary that are made in the video, not my personal opinion.
so what is it that they grow then cut and roll into those large objects? here they even grow corn for feed.
1. The number is around 14.5% in direct global emissions [1] according to the FAO, I cannot find any reputable source saying anywhere as low as 2.5%
2. Beef has roughly ten times more carbon footprint as Chicken. Beef has by far the highest CO2 equivalent per KG of product among any food [2] at 99.8Kg CO2 Equivalent, lamb / mutton comes a distant second at around 40Kg and Pork / Poultry are around 12/9 respectively [3] .
3. Looking at American consumption and emissions in isolation is disingenuous, USA alone exported 2.2 Billion pounds and imported 4.4 Billion pounds of beef and cattle in 2020.
4. Beef related food production is the leading cause of deforestation in many countries including Brazil [4] and a lot of it is export driven. There is additional secondary emissions due to this type of deforestation .
5. In addition there is substantial growth in amount of meat consumes as a country develops the impact of this industry is not just current emissions [5]
6. A lot the byproducts that become animal feed can also become fertilizer, if used in feed stock then likely it is organic and therefore contains fertilizer components such as Potassium , Nitrates etc that can be processed as fertilizer .
7. Even if there was zero emissions related to consumption, it is inherently a extremely cruel industry, the conditions in dairy/ cattle/ chicken/pig farms are horrifyingly bad to the animals, and use breeds that have little genetic variety, create potential outbreak zones for many diseases.
8. Pigs and Cattle are very intelligent species, it is especially cruel to breed species of higher intelligence just for food even if there were only humane farms.
[1] http://www.fao.org/3/i3437e/i3437e.pdf
[2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
[4] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/12/1...
[5] https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/133/11/3907S/4818041
1. How is this 14.5% number calculated? Does it include deforestation? Grass-fed is far different than deforesting for grazing land or crop land.
For instance from the FAO PDF you quoted: "extensive livestock are often kept in remote environments where deforestation and land degradation reflect weaknesses in institutions and policies". The headline then should read "deforestation and bad land policy causes climate change" not "stop eating cows".
2. Again, how are these 10x numbers calculated? Comparing e.g. industrialized agriculture to inefficient agriculture in a third-world country is not going to convince skeptics. If beef production is extremely inefficient somewhere, we should fix that.
3. If country A emits 100x the CO2 production of country B for the same end result, that needs to be noted. If my neighbor has a giant gas-guzzling monster truck spewing emissions, my neighborhood is not at fault, it's just him.
4. Agree 100%. We should be addressing the deforestation. Saying "stop eating meat" is not the solution. "Don't buy food from Brazil grown on land that had rain forest last year" is more nuanced and probably easier to follow. Matter of fact, don't buy products made by totalitarian regimes, slaves, child labor, etc. We should know where and how our products are made. I'm not advocating "don't buy sneakers" because some sneakers are made in unethical ways.
5. Humans love meat, that fact is not changing anytime soon. We should advocate for more efficient (and yet more ethical). If we need to, governments should pass laws to make production sustainable similar to what is done to prevent overfishing.
6. We have a perfect machine, well studied and used for millennia, for converting corn husks and other inedible things that would otherwise be thrown away into fertilizer: cows. Bonus, in addition to fertilizer, you get milk, hides, bones, highly nutritious meat, etc.
7/8. Totally agree. More laws need to be passed to regulate this industry, it's truly sickening. All meat products should be twice as expensive or more as they currently are to account for this.
So, how about we solve energy instead (build nuclear powerplants)? Yet they still blame meat!
Overproduction isn't ideal from that point of view, but on the other hand it is at least to some extent also a necessary hedge against bad harvests – if you don't overproduce compared to your average requirements, then any even just mildly bad harvest would immediately cause food shortages, and that's something you really really wouldn't want to happen.
The grains are not the issue, the subsidies in the US are so strong that they are not a real factor. There is so much excess food produced they export it to other countries for instance. https://modernfarmer.com/2019/01/congress-finally-passed-a-n... https://abcnews.go.com/US/dairy-farmers-dumping-milk-amid-co... https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/business/milk-dumping-cor... Fresh food is often wasted, and the dumping of milk is to prevent the prices from going too low. This was happening before corona as well, this paper is a pretty good summary from a marxist perspective on overproduction. https://www.e-ir.info/2016/07/07/agricultural-overproduction...
Nice reference to Marxism.
https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
Deforesting the amazon to grow corn for cows is something I'm sure we can all agree is bad.
Should we use livestock to eat cover crops and waste products like corn husks and cobs? This way we reuse waste and produce high quality protein to supplement our diets.
Should we graze cattle on natural grasslands like the great plains? Especially in rotation with human foods, like the cover crops mentioned before?
So sure, go for 100%-grass-and-not-human-edible-food-fed beef, but that's not the current system.
The next two paragraphs say that livestock accounts for 33% of the total methane released and blithely states that it all gets broken down and reused. If no additional animals are introduced, then net release equals net absorption. That is not very insightful -- eventually an equilibrium will be reached. This glosses over the real data that CO2 levels are rising, it is having measurable consequences, and is pushing control loops to new, worse states.
Citing one article written for the "Farm Business" trade publication isn't as conclusive as you seem to state.
When you burn oil, you take carbon from the ground and introduce it into the atmosphere. This increases the total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere.
When you grow plants, you take carbon out of the atmosphere. When you eat it, you release it back into the atmosphere. The total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere does not change.
Grass grows more vigorously when regularly pruned, for example by a grazing animal. Farms also make a point of planting thing which grow quickly and efficiently. Thus it's reasonable to expect that farming could increase the rate of carbon turnover in the atmosphere, which would create the appearance of increased carbon emissions without a corresponding increase in the amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere.
In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged. But the cow itself only causes a short lived, fixed increase in atmospheric methane and an increased rate of carbon turnover.
So the electricity and diesel that are involved in growing plants come from the atmosphere? That's new to me.
> In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged.
I cannot say anything wherever cows really are inconsequential wrt the warming effect, but it definitely goes against what's generally said by climate scientists.
To phrase it differently:
Climate scientists generally think that cows are an issue, but I do not have the qualification to judge wherever Dojis claim (that they don't matter) has any truth to it, as I'm not informed enough to form an opinion on the matter.
Doji did not claim that modern agriculture isn't harmful, they just addressed cows specifically.
Compare this to cars. Even if the number of cars remains constant, their contribution to the C02 pool grows every day.
So we should avoid increasing cattle population 100x, but we wouldn't want to do that anyway because we'd have nowhere to put them, and I certainly wouldn't support deforestation.
> fortunately if cattle population stays constant, their portion of the atmospheric resident methane will also remain constant
I have the impression (as a person uneducated in this topic) that current levels are already too high, and the world population is only going up.
Is there a way to produce more food with lower emissions or should the main target be a steady population? Or both?
I know some people who started eating insects and stopped planning for kids because of this. Me? I'm just confused.
1. Current consumer habits change.
2. Rapidly developing countries decide not to increase the animal proportion in their diet, which has happened in every single culture so far.
And producing food for cows causes more damage than making same food for humans. (Deforestation, Soy plants, etc emitting more carbon)
Most popular meat labels here would not even allow buying external food, if not absolutely necessary.
I was wrong, correction below
https://schweizerfleisch.ch/herkunft/facts-figures-schweizer...
Even if it was, grass-fed beef is about 1% of the supply in the US. It has also been shown that grass-fed beef on average causes more environmental degradation than conventionally fed beef, due to the deforestation required to create grazing areas
Deforestation is a real problem. How do you address this from a policy perspective? If you ban beef, that is only a temporary band-aid on the real problem of deforestation, which both fails to address deforestation properly, and which prevents beneficial uses of livestock such as for reuse of food waste products, grazing of natural grasslands, production of natural fertilizer, etc.
When measured over 10 years, it's more like 81 times.
So the "28 times" already allows for the fact that it's mostly only there for 10 years.
https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/methane-vs-c...
Am I missing something? How can methane be a more potent GHG if it has lower IR absorption AND a shorter lifespan?
Edit: found spectra here (not the data that i took, obviously):
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/methane_...
CO2 has a big fat band that blows out the absorption at 4.5 um in a region untouched by water (and one that is overwhelmed by water); methane has two spiky bands both of which are partially occluded by water.
What do you mean by a fairly developed country? McDonald's was selling hamburgers for 15 cents in 1955 (roughly the same as the price of a loaf of bread at the grocery store).
Catholics eating fish on Friday (instead of meat) I believe goes back many generations.
See also this article about historical meat consumption in the U.S.[0]:
"“These sources do give us some confidence in suggesting an average annual consumption of 150–200 pounds of meat per person in the nineteenth century.”
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-ameri...
Yes, I realize it's still death and pollution but the scale of modern farms is simply mindboggling.
Grow and slaughter your own pigs and hens and then decide if you still want to do it for the meat (or the money from selling the meat).
In this story the supermarkets say "We'll give consumers the choice", but for them that means choosing eco products that have ~40% higher price and they don't do that (~5% of sales is eco-friendly), so this doesn't work.
Once again it is politicians who need to take some tough measures, but they find powerful lobbies in their path plus they do not dare to take impopular measures that make products more expensive, for fear of losing votes. So for 50 years things got worse and worse.
One solution mentioned was what social enterprise True Price [0] is trying to establish: explicitly pricing the detrimental externalities that until now are shoved as costs to future generations. A pack of regular coffee with externalities priced in would go from, say, $5 to become $10, while a pack of eco-friendly coffee would go to $6.50. The surplus to the price should be reserved in a fund with which farmers can make the transition to sustainable agriculture.
[0] https://trueprice.org/
It varies a lot by country, pretty sure there's a lot more overlap between pasture land and arable land in Europe, but for example in USA not so much.
Considerable amount of animal food also involves byproducts of food production for humans, or plants used in cycling the fields (that's made worse with preference to just put ton of artificial fertilizer)
Here's a quote from the Economist article citing two recent scientific studies: "It takes 33 plant calories to produce one calorie of beef."
Ruminants eat plants, which contain carbon captured from the atmosphere. They then release most of that carbon back to the atmosphere, from where it will be eventually absorbed by plants again. So it’s a cycle where no new carbon is really being introduced (unlike burning fossil fuels that would otherwise stay in the ground).
Am I missing something or is the seriousness of this issue blown way out of proportion?
Have you travled outside the US? This is not true in most parts of the world, I wouldn't be suprised to see it only being a US practice.
Nice insult, btw. I had to send my passport to get more pages sewn in.
* Cow methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than co2, orders of magnitude worse
* Land that would capture a lot more CO2 and keep water in the environment is chopped down or otherwise destroyed to make pastures, the worst being rainforests.
* Orders of magnitude more water is used to raise cows vs the equivalent calories in plants.
But it's also released in much lower quantities, and has a much faster half life. Let's be clear: carbon dioxide, not methane, is responsible for the overwhelming majority of long term warming.
Methane being worse than CO2 doesn't change the fact that it's a cycle and thus it's not causing extra warming as long as the amount of animals is constant.
Alternative forests, etc, is equally a one off thing. Keeping the pastures doesn't make anything worse, and reverting them back would only be a one off improvement.
The problem is that the externality is set arbitrarily by people who think beef in particular is bad --- it's a sin tax. If you're being honest about pricing emissions, you internalize externalities universally, uniformly, and transparently. An across-the-board carbon tax is defensible; such a tax would likely affect beef. A fee on beef by itself --- that's just disingenuous and moralistic nonsense.
(naturally, they are the ones who decide what The Common Good is)
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
A big problem is that the moral busybodies who propose laws banning random things are the same moral busybodies who censor internet discussion.
They are price insensitive for the most part. Their yachts and personal airplanes don't make a dent in their billions of assets.
I still support carbon taxes as a source of investment for sustainable transition.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...
That group is still pretty price sensitive. Maybe not enough to drop beef completely, but enough to at least partially move to pork or chicken.
[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/27/were-all-the-1-percent/
Oxfam press release:
> In 2015, around half the emissions of the richest 10 percent - people with net income over $38,000 - are linked to citizens in the US and the EU and around a fifth with citizens of China and India. Over a third of the emissions of the richest one percent – people with net income over $109,000 - are linked to citizens in the US, with the next biggest contributions from citizens of the Middle East and China. Net incomes are based on income thresholds for 2015 and represented in $ 2011 PPP (purchasing power parity).
From the paper they are linking to:
> The richest 10% of the world’s population (c.630 million people) were responsible for 52% of the cumulative carbon emissions – depleting the global carbon budget by nearly a third (31%) in those 25 years alone (see Figure 1); > The richest 1% (c.63 million people) alone were responsible for 15% of cumulative emissions, and 9% of the carbon budget – twice as much as the poorest half of the world’s population (see Figure 1);
https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
Additional data point: I don't have a yacht.
It might be a bear to administer, though...
The confidence of this statement reeks of arrogance. How can you even claim to know what the potential impacts of climate change do not include? It's not like modern humans have lived in any era that was remotely similar.
In case you’re wondering why he claims global warming will lead to mass migration, it is because the millions of miles of coastlines will change.
Climate hysteria is really something else.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/homeowners-insurance/why-is-h... Residents there that cannot afford the insurance that exists might as well mean that it doesn't exist the same way life saving surgery cannot be purchased by a person makes it nonexistant.
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
>" UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control...Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded...UNEP is working toward forming a scientific plan of action by the end of 1990, and the adoption of a global climate treaty by 1992...
1. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nations-vanish-global-warm...
> if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000
The trend was not reversed, so now we wait to see if the prediction comes true. Given the low lying geography of some nations (esp pacific islands) I would bet money that this does indeed come true in the future.
Nowhere in the quote does it say, as you claim, that civilization would collapse in 2000.
Furthermore, those unspecific weasel words they were using back then to try and wriggle out of any predicitons they made back then, they are still using today when they say we will be past the point of no return in 10 years from now. Their wording was clearly meant to trick people into believing there would be mass destruction and climate refugees in 10 years, and people believed it back then, just like people today believe we will be seeing the same in 10 years from now.
- People are not migrating North in droves. They are not preparing in any way.
- Nuclear energy, the only realistic solution to climate change, is not being supported. It's actually being retired early in many cases and replaced with coal of all things.
- Property prices on the coastline are going up. President Obama, who has access to the best information and experts, bought a huge property on the Martha's Vineyard coast in 2019.
- There is little to no push to improve the water supply in preparation for droughts, not even in California.
encourages:
downsides:Do you really want to bet the future of earth on the chance that we find a solution to those problems before climate change really becomes a huge disaster? I wouldn't, I would build what we know works. And since many are saying that we are already heading for a disaster, we can say that your bet didn't pay off, the chase for viable solar and wind failed and nuclear was the only viable option.
The capital cost of any battery, flywheel or pumped storage is higher than the $30-50/MWh energy of a nuclear plant, without even having built any PV or wind generation.
So it might be possible that nuclear in the end is cheaper than renewables. Personally I'm not sure about that, but I'm not an expert in the field.
Solar on itself can only be a very small part of the solution. It needs storage most localities don't have the budget, place, technology to build.
Yes, because - you might be surprised to hear - people actually like to life where they are born and raised and require catastrophic hardship (such as the Syrian civil war) to actually start a migration.
So we already see direct effects on society from climate change.
Plant based meat substitutes will improve (via the production learning curve and competition) if there is enough demand.
(According to this article that attracted much comment[1] a few days ago, though, artificial meat is a non-starter.)
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28621288
I feel like eating meat is going to be my generations equivalent of smoking. Intellectually, I agree that eating meat is bad for the environment, cruel to animals (esp industrial farming) etc ... but I can't see myself giving up eating meat.
1982 was the year that the US Surgeon General announced that second-hand smoke was dangerous. That was the beginning of the end. Then shortly after the lawsuits started.
Boomers and the generation before did not have much of that influence in their formative years, even though warning labels were put on cigarette packages in 1965, they were mostly ignored because… marketing.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/ti...
The cool factor goes out the window.
Fur coats is something that seems to be almost entirely given up, but part of it is that fake fur is quite good.
I haven't eaten any 4-legged animals with the exception of bacon and the odd burger here and there (a chicken burger just doesn't cut it) for 3-4 years.
I mostly eat fish and poultry and have been accidentally vegan a number of days.
I'd be completely fine paying 2x the price for beef if the animals were handled in a sustainable and humane way.
That’s like, in 1900, saying “the simplest way to prevent road deaths is for everyone to drive slower.” That’s not simple at all - that’s an intractable group behavior problem. What you really need is for the government to come along and put up speed limits. Most people will push those rules, a few will flout them, but things will be better.
So let’s have a carbon tax that includes all sources of greenhouse gas, including domesticated animals, and stop passing moral judgement on people who are stressed enough as it is figuring out how to navigate our challenging world.
We're either going to be limited by natural resources, climate issues or our own actions to limit ourself to avoid #1 and #2.
There is just no way around it, you can't keep on extracting more and more ressources from a closed system, you can't keep polluting more and more in a closed system, you can't target an exponential growth in a closed system.
Companies don't give a shit, because their sole purpose is to not care about these issues. That's how you get companies like apple shitting unrepairable products every 6 months, but it's ok because their offices are carbon neutral, right ?
Countries don't give a shit, because GDP is king and energy = GDP, https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/correlation-...
So it's a game of chicken, everyone knows about the problem, they all know the solutions, but no one is really taking action, because that would be a massive paradigm shift in virtually every aspect of our economy
Fishing boats are allowed to keep any fish or crustacean regardless of size or sex. In fact, they don’t even have daily catch limits they have to adhere too. We’re so lucky that all fishing companies voluntarily avoid over fishing. If there was some sort of “department of game and fish” in most states regulating what animals you can eat, it would probably be the beginning of the end for America. I would just up and move to Canada.
1. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy,_politics_and_econo...
Actually I work in academia so I'll start the ball rolling by telling you this isn't unrealistic.
You can find a lot of people who work in academia who find Stage of Fear (in particular) to be a thinly-veiled attempt to smear the entire climate science community. Because everyone is in lust with grant money.
Cattle only burn fossil fuels to the extent that transporting water and feed, fertilizing that feed, and manufacturing and transporting fencing materials, antibiotics, etc, use.
Guess what? Your dog has roughly the same impact making and transporting his food, his water, his veterinarian supplies, any bedding you've purchased, bags to dispose of his feces, collars, leashes, toys, etc.
I don't have hard numbers but intuitively I'd guess dogs and cattle have approximately the same climate impact on a pound-of-bodyweight basis.
Dogs probably have slightly more, since they live in much more luxurious digs than CAFO cattle, eat higher quality feed, get to ride in cars, etc.
https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10312
Unlike older scientific topics that have esoteric terminology, usually from the Latin, this one is pretty straight forward... It is the energy lost due to pumping. Basically, the overhead of keeping an engine running no matter how much distance of roadway you cover, but more on point, the extra losses due to running an engine outside of its peak power/performance range:
https://www.cycleworld.com/2015/10/12/ask-kevin-what-is-pump...
Not "pumping" losses, no. There is no intake air or exhaust gas to pump.
EVs may experience an effect that is similar in practice, albeit much smaller... Things like headlights, HVAC, entertainment systems, etc., will draw more power the longer it takes you to get to your destination, so reducing your speed from 30 to 15 MPH might not be an efficiency win.
Which is why hybrids often switch from electric to gas past some determined speed.
So even with an engine designed to be most efficient when the car drives 65 mph, the efficiency of the system will quickly be controlled by drag forces as speed increases.
If not, then Germany has the upper hand with a miraculous ancient technology called sidewalks.
They also have bike lanes - no, not for motorcycles, but bicycles!
In practice, the classroom study usually isn't all that rigorous, and the testing is likely too easy.
But the requirements on paper aren't typically any easier in the US.
What's most needed is probably refresher quizzes for license renewals to remind drivers of commonly forgotten or new driving laws. Like who has right of way at a 4 way stop, or how to zipper merge.
https://www.statista.com/chart/25098/fatality-rate-and-speed... https://www.spiegel.de/auto/aktuell/tempolimit-koennte-jaehr... ( In German, should be the original source)
Would be interesting to know about accidents in general. It's quite obvious that higher speeds increase the likelihood of fatal accidents.
- Drivers are required to obtain an extensive education at a licensed driving school and pass a rigorous test before being allowed to drive.
- Driving rules such as "no passing on the right" are strictly enforced in Germany, creating a more predictable (and thus safer) driving environment. There is absolutely no way something like the following could be achieved in the US due to Americans' stubbornness and lack of driving discipline:
https://jalopnik.com/how-germans-make-way-for-emergency-vehi...
- German roads are designed to naturally encourage people to make good decisions by the use of roundabouts, narrower lanes (which naturally make people slow down and be more careful) and many similar "vision zero" initiatives.
- German roads are consistently maintained.
- When you're not on the autobahn, speed limits are generally lower than in the US and are more strictly enforced.
Not to say that Germany is perfect, but they are doing much more than the US to ensure road safety and are doing so more consistently.
Some US states have a looser policy on this.
And most include an emissions test, which reduces the need for complex mechanical inspections, and largely negates differences in inspection "quality".
I know there are people where that doesn't work, but there may be many where it does too with minimal nudging.
After all, replacing all we eat with tasteless gruel and water is acceptable by this logic.
Cattle is a bio-fuel. The methane/carbon they release was captured by the grains and grasses shortly before the cattle consumed it, and will continue growing after they've consumed it.
Cattle should be the trendy and expensive thing among the outspoken, virtue-signaling greens. It's plant-based. Contains all-natural ingredients. Isn't made in a lab/on an assembly line with a a bunch of chemicals with scary names. Old hippies should each buy a cow to keep their lawns mowed and fertilized without burning gasoline.
Fun how insulting people is OK these days.
Being offended by everything, and making it everyone else's fault, is the part that is new these days.
Indeed, it's fair game to insult other people. Sadly, it's prohibited by the rules of this forum. Disagree with them? Great. Accuse them of being hypocrites? Less great.
And just where did you look-up that definition? May I point you to a few:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/virtue-signaling
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/virtu...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-talk/202008/mo...
> Accuse them of being hypocrites? Less great
This seems to be a you problem, not a me problem.
Treating the Economist like a NWO propaganda tool would make a big dent in fascist onslaught on our freedoms.