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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

'A reduction' isn't the same as 'a big effect'. Meat is marginally more expensive, ecologically. But the other alternatives are not free either. So the total benefit of 'not eating meat' isn't realized to the bottom line. Its marginal.

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It is a dishonest way of representing it IMO.

The headline suggests meat production is not a significant emission source, but it actually argues that it has around the same emissions of the average bought goods of a particular society. Then saying it therefore does not matter is quite the stretch.

Bingo. Not much gain to be had here when you look at the actual sources of emissions by category. Tackling electricity production and transportation should be #1 and #2, since they are (more) easily influenced by the state and could be brought down to near-zero emissions within, say, 25 years. Railing at people to stop eating meat because “it’s causing global warming” is at best ineffective and at worst disingenuous.

>Railing at people to stop eating meat because “it’s causing global warming” is at best ineffective and at worst disingenuous

Right, but one of the biggest annoyances I have with right-wing blogs like Reason is that 95% of their content is just reactionary "Actually, liberals aren't quite right about X" crap while offering no alternatives/solutions. At least "stop eating meat" is something with a net positive.

That's the argument that helps people give up doing something important instead? "At least I'm doing something". When that something is insignificant when there are better ways to contribute.

Look at either side of the political spectrum and you'll see clickbait garbage. They shouldn't be a barometer for correctness.

There are basically only two things that are going to slow/stop the rise in CO2 emissions: shift to low/no-carbon sources of energy, including natural gas and nuclear, and retool transportation networks to favour electric wherever possible. Obviously planes will be running on kerosene for the foreseeable future, but cars, trucks, and ships could all be electric within a quarter century.

Eating less/no meat is a perfectly acceptable ethical choice, but it should be divorced form serious discussion of the root causes of carbon emissions.

What is a net positive about "stop eating meat" unless you're livestock? From a nutrition perspective it's not a positive thing to "stop eating meat".

Besides changing your diet there are hundreds of other net positive (yet virtually inconsequenial) steps you can take to reduce your carbon footprint.

- Wash laundry with cold water - Hang your laundry on a clothes line to dry - Not manage and maintain a grass lawn - Get healthy enough to get off/reduce perscription meds - Drive a hybrid or an EV - Have no/fewer offspring - Don't have pets - Don't work out or exercise (you'll expend more energy, eat more and breathe more co2) - Don't drink alcohol (wine, beer, spirits) - Don't eat chocolate (if meat is somehow uneccessary, certainly chocolate, wine, palm oil and tons of other nutritionally high GHG foods) - Don't play or support activities which waste land, e.g., golf, football, soccer, graveyards, etc.

If you subscribe to the theory that people have some amount of maximum hardship they're willing to undergo for the environment, then we should focus on maximum impact, minimum hardship actions. Things like "no meat", then, which have significant hardship and insignificant benefits, displace other, more beneficial changes. A similar argument could be made for plastic straw bans.

Basically - if the choice isn't "nothing OR stop eating meat" + "nothing OR switch to more fuel efficient cars" but instead "nothing OR stop eating meat OR switch to more fuel efficient cars", then encouraging "stop eating meat" and not an actually significant change is suboptimal.

Marginally? Beef, for example, takes many times the amount of energy and water to produce equivalent calories to vegan foods. Based on any measure, beef is significantly more expensive than vegan food sources, “marginally” is far from an accurate comparison.

Then there's transportation, refrigeration, distribution, point of sales... all with their cost. Are we still so sure the 'savings' is significant?

The cost of transporting a hundred thousand burgers is dwarfed by the cost of creating a hundred thousand burgers. The primary costs associated with meat are in the production, not the transport: compared to, say, Beyond Meat, a single beef burger is 15x more ecologically expensive _before_ transport -- which is the same, and inconsequential in comparison.

How about cooking them? Refrigerating them? Selling them?

I see the idea of marginal cost is getting through. But consider all the costs to get a real sense of how the origination marginal cost contributes.

And don't dismiss transportation. It has to get home from the grocery store, in that 10-burger one-person vehicular trip through city traffic. That's a marginal cost too.

You can make the same point repeatedly if you like but, as I've explained, the costs you're referring to are a very small part of the total cost and certainly do not come close to offsetting the gains made by cutting out livestock from the equation.

Citation? I suspect you made that up, to score imaginary internet points.

Here's some data I just Googled:

  Car trips:  0.34 metric tonnes of CO2 / 1000 miles

  Burgers:    0.5 metric tonnes / year of burgers (150)

Producing meat is very-much commensurate with other marginal activities associated with procuring meat, like trips to the grocery store.

I'm done here.

Ok, but considering that you very likely would continue to eat in the absence of meat, the replacement foods usually need cooking, refrigeration, and distribution. These things are not particular to meat and shouldn't factor into a comparison.

That's the opposite of the correct conclusion. Because the meat ecological component is dwarfed by the other activities, it becomes (ecologically) insignificant to stop eating meat.

I think the point is that while giving up meat might have a significant effect on your carbon footprint from food consumption, it will have a small effect on your overall carbon footprint. A carnivore who never take an airplane and bikes everywhere is going to have a smaller carbon footprint than a vegan who drives an SUV to work every day and jet sets around the world.

That being said, none of this is a good argument for not giving up meat.

You need to be more specific. Beef is more expensive to produce than grains. But leafy greens are way more expensive to produce than beef. Non-meat food has a 50x range in cost to produce a calorie. You have to be specific about which non-meat foods you’re replacing meat consumption with. If you’re eating a bunch of kale and avocado instead of meat, then your change probably has no net environmental benefit. If you switch to mostly grains and legumes, then that’s a different story.

this fact:

> requiring 5x agricultural land and fertiliser

can certainly not be paraphrased as:

> marginally more expensive, ecologically

That origination cost is added to the cost of harvest, transportation, refrigeration, distribution etc. Is it then so significant? That's the interesting question.

Because its one cost in a whole column of costs, reducing that entry is what makes it 'marginal'. Meaning, one part of a large total.

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