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Comment by iso1337 | Hacker News Reader

I’m skeptical about the conspiracy claims about how livestock were THE leading cause of GHG and looked up my own sources.

The EPA doesn’t place livestock as the leading cause of GHG.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Livestock are an important source (just not the most important). Documentaries with an obvious angle also purposely edit their footage to cast their villains in an unflattering light.

There’s also a good blog post by the Union of Concerned Scientists about this very claim.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/doug-boucher/cowspiracy-movie-review

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Your link mentions how it's all about whether or not you count the CO2 from cattle respiration.

They say cattle respiration should not be counted because what CO2 comes from cattle respiration would have come from soil respiration.

But it seems to me that the two operate on vastly different timescales : according to wikipedia, "Carbon stored in soil can remain there for up to thousands of years before being washed into rivers by erosion or released into the atmosphere through soil respiration."

So it would seem to make sense to count cattle respiration as added CO2.

The issue is not the CO2 but the methane that cattle produce during digestion. While its lifetime is shorter than that of CO2, its warming potential is 34 times that of CO2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

They're both an issue. And methane might have a shorter lifetime than CO2, it degrades as CO2…

Only 1 report lists it like that. Looking at China GHG emissions, food production isn't even in top 10.

Although, environmental destruction and pollution, water use, pretty high. So it was funny to see a major face of Sierra Club being totally oblivious to it.

I agree that environmental costs of beef production are quite high.

For me, personally, what also matters is the relative ranking of impacts. I did some research into this and here are the top personal contributors to GHG emissions (presumably for a person living in a developed country).

(All figures in tons CO2 per year)

Have one fewer child: 58.6

Live car free: 2.4

One less transatlantic flight: 1.6

Buy green energy: 1.47

EV to car free: 1.15

Plant-based diet: 0.82

etc...

The interesting thing is that based on this analysis, on average our transportation usage far dominates the plant-based diet aspect.

Popular press (with some interesting follow-on thoughts about how most of the emissions are produced by the wealthy). https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/7/14/1596354...

original paper here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/...

There's a nice book, Without Hot Air https://www.withouthotair.com/ and yes, a first world individual probably uses a bunch of the GHG "budget" on heating the home, water + transatlantic flights. Even cars are not that bad.

58.6 tons CO2 / year per child? isn't that a bit too much?

I guess they are rolling up the child's entire lifetime of Carbon usage including all flights ever taken etc.

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