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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

I've run the numbers and it looks like all cattle on earth emit something like 150MT of methane per year. Multiplied by 20 (to get CO2 equivalent), that's 3GT. That's about 8% of the yearly total CO2 emissions (37GT). Certainly not negligible, but not earth shattering either. For comparison, per-capita CO2 emissions in the US are 16.5 metric tons. Per cow methane emissions are about 100kg per year or 2-3 tons in CO2 equivalent.

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In fact, that is a truly massive amount of emissions for something which could be completely eliminated through a change to 2% of the cows diet.

This is about as big of a win, with about the highest ROI, you could possibly hope for.

If ever there were a CO2 cap and trade, this seaweed, if it works as claimed, would be tremendously profitable.

And you think transporting the seaweed is a problem? The total CO2 saved by Tesla vehicles so far is 3.5 million tons. Eliminating cows emissions would be equivalent to 800x that... How do you think shipping cars around the world compares to shipping seaweed from the coast?

8% for the sake of what amounts to a flavour in your mouth is pretty earth shattering.

Consider: would you spend 8% of your entire financial budget on beef? On an income of $30K, say, you'd spend $2400 on beef, ignoring all other food and other expenses?

I'd even flip it around - take a random person off the street, in the UK, say, and tell them you'll give them 2 grand a year to stop eating beef. How many people do you think would take you up on that who don't even care about the environment?

It's stark raving bonkers.

I'd be spending about $15/day on beef at that rate on my salary, which isn't very far off from my fast food habits.

I'm a bit confused by this - are you saying that it'd end up being 100% of what you eat, or that it's actually a reasonable estimate of your beef consumption?

(as an aside - $15 on fast food a day! for your sake I hope it's relatively healthy stuff!)

I haven't been to the grocery store much lately, and a Wendy's and McDonald's are within bicycling distance. I'll go to them once or twice a day often nowadays. When I first moved out, eating out so much would have felt like an intolerable budget failure, but I've found myself caring less and less over time.

I try to stick to just the burgers, not soda or fries often. The jalapeno bacon fries at Wendy's have been an exception though.

I feel like it's not really that unhealthy considering fat's actually not bad for you and dietary cholesterol doesn't become blood cholesterol, which was surprisingly still good for me despite this diet last it was tested. Results vary depending on the genetic lottery.

You should probably aim for one visit to Wendy's or McD's a week... or one a month... or one a quarter. What you're doing now is like rationalizing vodka over beer.

This is wrong. A burger is bread, meat and vegetables, maybe with some cheese or another meat. Between carbohydrates, protein and some vegetables an all burger diet is unlikely to lead to any noticeable health effects compared to a normal Western diet. Fries are vastly worse for you than burgers or pizza, whether you’re looking at macronutrients alone or tracking vitamins and minerals as well.

http://www.businesspundit.com/the-mcdonalds-weight-loss-prog...

> A US woman claims to have lost 33 pounds by eating nothing but McDonald's for 90 days.

> Merab Morgan, of Henderson, North Carolina, began her diet because she found the Super Size Me film insulting.

> In the documentary, film maker Morgan Spurlock put on 25lbs after eating excusively at McDonald's for just one month.

> Ms Morgan, 35, memorised the calories in almost every menu item, and limits herself to 1,400 calories a day, reports the Detroit Free Press.

> "It's kind of like the poor man's diet," said Morgan, who has tried Weight Watchers and Atkins but failed because of the time and money those plans required.

A burger doesn't have enough veg for a healthy diet, I'd be amazed if its better than the average western diet.

I'm thinking a generic McDonalds burger here with a wilted piece of lettuce, a slice of tomato and some gherkins. You could probably construct a healthy veg burger, I have no idea where you'd buy one. Something like subway seems like a better bet.

I didn’t say it was better, I doubt it would be worse. You vastly overestimate how much variety, or vegetables, are necessary to maintain health. The following are nutritionally complete; if you eat them you will not get any deficiency diseases, potatoes and milk, rice and beans, peanut butter and bread. Note that they all include a source of carbs and protein, like burgers. Hell, as long as you eat fatty meat you can eat nothing but meat with no ill effects on health. Over the course of a day you’d get enough lettuce and tomato to stave off deficiency diseases, and that neglects ketchup, otherwise known as concentrated tomato.

The problem of a western diet isnt one of deficiencies though. No doubt if you have enough burgers you'd get enough nutrients but the amount of meat and carbs would be massive.

This [1] suggests vitamin C would be the big problem for a Big Mac (1% RDA) followed by vitamin A (4% RDA). 100 burgers a day sounds quite hard to stomach, so the question becomes how bad the western diet is.

[1] https://www.nutritionvalue.org/McDONALD%27S%2C_BIG_MAC_nutri...

Well, good luck.

I'd recommend you go and buy some real food. Regardless of macros, McDonalds is full of garbage, especially in the US.

If you are going to eat out all the time, try to make it places that use whole foods like real chicken breast in their burgers. At least you're not getting all the processing guff that ends up in processed meat blends. Also give Japanese, Korean or Thai cuisines a go. You can eat pretty healthy and still eat out constantly with a lot of East/South East Asian cuisines.

What is the "guff" that goes into a chain fast food burger?

>> you'll give them 2 grand a year to stop eating beef

I think the vast majority of people would turn down your offer. There's too little enjoyment in life as it is. Life without steaks and beer is not worth living for most people.

I bet this is unfortunately, uncomfortably true. There are major behavioral changes needed that can't be left to incentives or voluntary changes when survival is at stake. ICEs, meat agriculture, airline travel, unconfined clinker manufacturing and fossil fuel extraction must end if we're to survive this climate emergency. In addition, Be/CCS must happen, such as ferrous ocean seeding and seaweed extraction for contained burning with underground carbon emissions sequestration. Mexico is already dealing with an incredible volume of seaweed arriving daily on prime tourist beaches... which would be perfect for CCS if we were to burn it to generate power, reduce its volume and bury captured emissions very deep.

>> There are major behavioral changes needed that can't be left to incentives or voluntary changes when survival is at stake.

This was tried several times in different contexts (prohibition, war on drugs, etc), and it fails every time.

Make alternatives appealing and people will run to them in droves. That is the only feasible path forward if you're hoping any change will be adopted by a large majority of people.

Very few people will give up steaks or Hawaii vacations when all is said and done, unless you offer them a better alternative.

What's ICE, CCS, Be?

Internal Combustion Engine, cars.

Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Sequestration, most common type I've seen is burning wood or other biomass for energy, capturing the CO2 and pumping it underground so that it doesn't cause warming in the atmosphere.

We can afford steak a couple of times a year, but minced beef (which I think is what's called ground beef in USA) is a major source of protein for us.

I spend about 15-20% of my salary on food.Probably a little bit less than half of it goes towards buying meat, including beaf. So,yes,I would.Do I really need to consume that much meat? Well, that's a different questions,but most likely not.

Any method in scale of over 1% impact is earth shattering, as we need just 100 such things to save the world. Even 0.1% “market share” target would be awesome. It is a complex problem and it is resolvable by hudreds, maybe thousands small remedies, not one big bang.

I get this a lot at work too, especially around the subject of optimization. If we get into a long enough conversation about it I'll tend to bring this up as one of my 'secret weapons' that shouldn't be a fucking secret.

If you are making a budget, be it for CO2 emissions or network bandwidth or CPU seconds, it doesn't really matter what percent of your current spending each line item represents. It matters what percent of your goal it represents.

For instance, if you have a car that's too expensive for you, or you're eating out too much, it's great that you identified those problems and are addressing them, but at the end of the day no % of gain in those areas is going to make up for the fact that your house is 60% of your income.

So if we have to cut our emissions by 50% to sustain our existence, those cow burps are 16% of the budget, not 8%. For steaks and cheeseburgers, that's way too big.

If you go in trying to claim you don't have a budget, the same math ends up happening, with different words, and in slow motion. Reducing one element increases the fraction of everything that remains. 1% now may be 3% later, and harder to get to because you've already done work in that area and who wants to go in again for a 1% improvement?

True. Counterintuitively to some, 10 times 5% improvement is 63% improvement overall, not 50%, and 8% improvement on top of 50% improvement is 62% total, not 58%.

That said, 50% reduction is only doable with nuclear energy. Environmentalists who refuse to even discuss it (which, anecdotally, is most of them) aren't really environmentalists at all. They're the PR wing of the "renewables" lobby.

There's a lot of bad faith on both sides there.

The embodied carbon footprint of just the concrete for a conventional nuclear plant is truly breathtaking.

And there are designs that use bodies of water for cooling and cause thermal pollution problems. Clinton power plant, for example, made the lake unfit for recreation due to an amoeba that causes encephalitis. The locals tried for decades to block that getting built and it was a huge case of 'I told you so.'

Would the locals be OK with a gigantic coal or gas power plant nearby? One with equivalent output? That's (on a macro scale) the real question here. If we are to believe the world is going to pass the point of no return in "12 years", I'd say making a lake unsuitable for recreation ranks pretty low on the list of priorities.

>>Certainly not negligible, but not earth shattering either.

The irony is that this complex compound problem is exactly the kind of problem that tricks human thinking. We are really bad at instinctively comprehending the compounding of many small factors. Many serious industrial accidents like the Three Mile Island one did not ensue from one big error (as we would think) but a compounding of a lot of small bad things that just happened together.

There's not a direct multiple to get the CO2 equivalent. Methane is 100 times worse, but is slowly removed from the atmosphere by natural processes.

The 20 year multiple is commonly stated as 75, which is the average value of the curve that starts out at 100 and decays away with time. So it's 30% of our impact on that timeline.

Have a look at the numbers e.g. on drowdown.org to put the 8% in perspective.

Methane isn't stable in the atmosphere. It eventually converts to CO2 and H2O (within 10 years of emission). It's also an extremely miniscule portion of the Earth's atmosphere, at 1.7 parts per million. It is a negligible factor in global warming.

EDIT: Methane is .00017% of the Earth's atmosphere. It cannot be a major factor in retaining heat in the Earth's atmosphere, even though it may be 20 times more effective than wator vapor at retaining heat, it exists in such low concentrations that it can't have a significant effect. To be clear, wator vapor is up to 4% of the atmosphere at any time, so it exists in concentrations 20,000 times greater than Methane.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/5270/atmospheric-me...

EDIT 2: it doesn't matter how good methane is at retaining heat if it exists in the parts per billion range...it's negligible. It would be equivalent to eating a single additional calorie a day in your 2000 calorie diet. It would not cause you to gain weight. Equivalently, if you exercise 1.8 more seconds a day than you usually do, you're not going to gain more muscle or burn more fat.

EDIT 3: https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/atm_meth/ice_core_meth... ice cores showing variable methane rates over the last 800K years, a time in which we've swing in and out of ice ages several times over.

Also, humans killed off megafauna much larger than cows and taking up much more biomass towards the end of the Paleolithic era, in a time when the climate was rapidly warming. Despite plunging populations of megafauna and their supposedly toxic digestive systems, the climate continued to warm by 8 degrees around 12000 years BP, well before we discovered fossil fuels. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.201...

This is not how climate balance works.

There used to be a relatively stable equilibrium in the climate. There have always, and will always, be many mechanisms contributing to the overall total radiative forcing.

We can’t reduce how much water vapor is in the atmosphere very easily. But methane, we can.

It doesn’t matter that methane has low partial pressure. What matters is the total radiative forcing, and every molecule of uncombusted methane has a very high radiative forcing in the atmosphere.

It doesn't matter if it has a strong effect at the molecular level if it exists in miniscule quantities 4 orders of magnitude less than water vapor while not trapping any part of the light spectrum that is not already captured by H2O and CO2. It has negligible, near zero effect at present. Sorry, if you factor the 20x factor for methane heat retention times .00017 it's the equivalent of increasing the amount of water vapor from 4% to 4.004% of the Earth's atmosphere. It is negligible no matter which way you look at it. If a .004% difference in humidity made a dramatic effect on heat retention you'd feel it.

Well, here's an analogy: If you have $1000 salary and $900 of fixed expenses (+ $100 of disposable income), then a reduction of just 10% in your salary reduces your disposable income by 100%. A reduction of 20% in your salary puts you deep into the red and will eventually make you homeless.

Climate is like your budget. There's a lot of factors flowing into it, and even a very small change (e.g. 0.1% additional water vapor) can flip the sign on the total balance. Sorry, but your argument about the magnitude of the problem is just wrong.

That's a bad analogy because the climate is not a single variable, number one. Two, your percentages are off by orders of magnitude with regards to Methane. Methane, as I said above, is 0.00017% of the earth's atmosphere. Even if it is 20 times more effective at retaining heat than Water Vapor (4% of earth's atmosphere), it's the equivalent of increasing your fixed expenses by .004%, or 4 cents by your $1000 example. 4 cents is negligible. No accountant would even bother listing it.

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