except for the fact that cows exist within the carbon cycle.
And the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases is that we feed them oil that we dig from the ground.
Cows are extremely convenient scapegoat but truthfully they exist in a closed system that we keep feeding carbon into. Methane itself is very very harmful but lives almost no time and atmosphere experts all agree on this.
Coal and renewables output the exact same thing (electricity), beef and alternatives don't. Unless they make money from coal, people don't want coal, they want electricity and they won't even know the source. But in this case people want beef. Almost every beef replacement failed so far. So it's not as straight forward as "treating it the same" because at least one generation of people will always know what they lose. The hill is steeper for this battle.
From a systems perspective, civilization is the greatest pollutant. Whether it's Mesopotamia, Rome, industrial Britain, or the modern global economy, each civilization is a complex machine that extracts resources, generates waste and disrupts ecosystems. There’s no version of it that’s truly sustainable long-term, just degrees of delay or harm reduction.
There is absolutely nothing special about beef. We could replace beef with palm oil, lithium, air travel, or even data centers. The same system logic applies: convert energy and resources into power, growth, and order, while displacing entropy elsewhere.
A clean planet is a planet without civilization. This is a factual observation, not nihilism.
All "haha, but it's tasty!!!!" jokes aside, and even ethics and morality aside (which is tough, because we cause a LOT of suffering here), growing meat is just incredibly inefficient. We have to sustain so much additional biological machinery just to chop off some muscle tissue at the end, even if we assume everything of the cow will be used eventually, it's just incredibly wasteful.
Pricing people out of things means only rich people can afford those things. The same rich people that on an individual level generate a lot more emissions than the average person.
My wife and I area treating beef (and pork, lamb, and other mammalian meats) like peanuts, because she got the alpha-gal allergy from a lonestar tick bite.
PSA: check for ticks
ps: the loss of beef/pork/lamb in our diets hasn't really been a loss.
16 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] threadAnd the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases is that we feed them oil that we dig from the ground.
Cows are extremely convenient scapegoat but truthfully they exist in a closed system that we keep feeding carbon into. Methane itself is very very harmful but lives almost no time and atmosphere experts all agree on this.
You'll just ruin it, nobody likes burnt beef.
Coal and renewables output the exact same thing (electricity), beef and alternatives don't. Unless they make money from coal, people don't want coal, they want electricity and they won't even know the source. But in this case people want beef. Almost every beef replacement failed so far. So it's not as straight forward as "treating it the same" because at least one generation of people will always know what they lose. The hill is steeper for this battle.
There is absolutely nothing special about beef. We could replace beef with palm oil, lithium, air travel, or even data centers. The same system logic applies: convert energy and resources into power, growth, and order, while displacing entropy elsewhere.
A clean planet is a planet without civilization. This is a factual observation, not nihilism.
- eat meat, and accept the impact to the environment, health risks, and mass unethical treatment of livestock
- stop eating meat, and accept that some of the foods you grew up eating, you can't eat any more
Tough sell.
Hey HN moderators and users, why shouldn't this discussion be allowed? what possible reason there is to ban it from the site?
i promise, we're all adults here, we can handle a controversial topic, no need to coddle us
PSA: check for ticks
ps: the loss of beef/pork/lamb in our diets hasn't really been a loss.