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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

We are not powerless against this.

We eat more meat than ever. We subsidize meat production at every level so that all taxpayers pay for cheap meat, even vegetarians and vegans.

We can reduce subsidies, or even reverse them to accurately account for the externalities of pollution and global heating.

While population growth rate is lowering, humans are still increasing in population. We can make contraception and education more available globally.

The United States' science education has declined for generations so people don't understand nature and how we affect it. We can improve science education.

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I wonder if the opposite is really the cause.

With the meat packaging plant closures and the "shortage" of beef, the cattle herds are probably growing in numbers, which could cause the spike of methane.

That would be an extremely short-term effect if demand actually fell.

Meanwhile... global population is expected to peak and then decrease.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23840670

And authorities still recommending 2.0 children for some reason. Global logistics still not optimized.

> And authorities still recommending 2.0

What do you mean? I never heard any official recommendations.

They accompany such articles about projected population decline, at least in Europe. It's a local optimization thing (politics)!

Children die occasionally. So 2.0 already is slightly below replacement rate.

Meat is not the problem. Long before people there was more animals alive on this planet and they pooped, farted and ate each other at a scale that we can't imagine. Just think about the bison, or passenger pigeons.

Absolutely this as a native American one of my biggest dreams is to view America before all of the forest was completely removed from the entire country and to see all of mega herds of whitetail deer and bison roam free. Carrier pigeon phlox so large they block out the sky for half a day

Interestingly, much of the current young woodland would have been gone, replaced by prairie and oak savanna.

Citation needed? They ate grass instead of corn, and spread their waste over vast areas of wilderness, ready to be incorporated back into the plantlife.

Also, a quick Google search says there were 30-60 million bison roaming the plains. Today, there are 95 million cows, and another 70 some million pigs.

Not all cows are used for meat. Bison, and pigeons are just two examples, but as you can imagine, all over planet there were billions of animals that are not either extinct or close to being extinct. How about european bison, aurochs, wild pigs, and many many more. Cows are just one example of the bovine family.

I don't claim that farmed meat does not contribute anything, but it's not the only, or even main problem of the climate change. Start a garden, and see for yourself how much resources it takes to grow enough plant food to feed your family,and compare that to a number calories you can get from one cow.

No offense, but you appear to be just making up your numbers and inventing the conclusions from whole cloth. Nobody would dispute that the biosphere was richer and more diverse in the past, but all of those animals were part of a global equilibrium (at least on the order of 10s of thousands of years, nothing is permanent).

Currently, the animals in our food system are not. I do garden extensively, and I know how difficult it is to produce food for a whole year. I also know that feeding carbon intensive corn to cows to eat is a thermodynamically loosing game calorie-wise. If you want to pay for regeneratively raised, grass fed beef from farms with integrated waste management, good for you. If you think your 99c hamburger at a fast food restaurant isn’t part of a climate and ethical catastrophe, I think you’re being willfully ignorant.

Personally I’m a vegetarian, but the main thing I care about is that people eat less meat, which was more sustainably and ethically raised.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C16&q=cow...

>all over planet there were billions of animals that are not either extinct or close to being extinct There used to be more diversity amongst animals but that doesn't change the fact that there is 3 times more cattle in North America now than there used to live in the wild.

>I don't claim that farmed meat does not contribute anything, but it's not the only, or even main problem of the climate change. Climate change does not have a "main problem", it's multiple minor causes that each need to be addressed (and agriculture is a big one).

>Start a garden, and see for yourself how much resources it takes to grow enough plant food to feed your family,and compare that to a number calories you can get from one cow. Are you implying the cow doesn't need to be fed? Cows need a lot more water and land per gram of protein or per calorie than fish, poultry or legumes. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014Natur.515..518T/abstra... https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987

contemporary cows are fed a homogenous diet that make their burps and farts a lot worse than wild foraging animals.

Yes, but that's not problem of meat, just farming.

If we were farming sustainably (only grass fed etc.) we wouldn't be able to produce as much meat as we do today. Which implies that on average everybody would eat less meat. Much less.

Grasses that have been developed for pastoral farming still lead to more methane burps. Current research seems to be focused on breading grasses / other pasture crops, and breading animals that produce less methane, Vaccines that could be given to animals, Inhibitors that could be added to their diet[1], and modeling of the methane formation process. But yes, the simplest way to reduce it would be to reduce the number of animals, by eating less meat.

[1] https://www.pggrc.co.nz/files/1501479614891.pdf

As a vegetarian I am still expected to subsidize, even receive meat on the dish, with a smile. Yet, just eating my food, this is an affront to most people around me. We fought for 20 years, but people still just don't give a fuck!

Because people unsurprisingly love meat.

And most chefs can't make good veg dishes.

Actually I'm kinda surprised. Try to cook meat without salt and herbs. It's dreadful. Lots of other stuff has much more attractive innate flavors.

Enteric fermentation only accounts for 30% of emissions, while emissions from fertilizer for plants is highly underestimated:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...

I'm glad that I can eat a meat-and-dairy-based diet and am not forced to fill my calories with garbage plant-based substitutes.

If you want to work on reducing enteric fermentation emissions with technology, I'm all for it.

If you want me to cut my consumption of meat to save a few percent of methane that will do next to nothing for climate change, then get off my lawn.

"I'm glad that I can eat a meat-and-dairy-based diet and am not forced to fill my calories with garbage plant-based substitutes."

Must they be garbage substitutes? Must your vegetabilic food look and taste like a meat facsimile? I hear this perspective often from meat-eaters when they contrast their diet to a vegetarian diet, and I cannot understand it.

You can't understand that people like meat, eggs and dairy and that they don't want to miss out on them?

I certainly understand it, but surely you have more on your plate than just eggs, cheese and steaks to provide calories. For what it's worth I've come across several excellent meat facsimiles. I don't worry about any potential harm coming from a smaller portion of a proper cooked meal being a processed product.

Keep in mind that it takes much more fertilizer to feed a cow that is then converted to food than it would to just grow the food. The 30% likely doesn't take into account the gigantic portion of fertilizer emissions that wouldn't exist if we weren't feeding so many cows, etc.

I'm aware of that, but beef is a vastly superior food than the produce that is fed to the cows. If it was just about calories, you could just drink HFCS all day.

Even with the inefficiency of nutrient variety to support a healthy diet, it would be so.

I don't believe there's such a thing as a healthy plant-based diet. That's just me speculating though, nobody even knows what a healthy diet is.

From a nutritional perspective however, animals can do things for us that we can't even do in the lab, let alone at industrial scale.

It might be possible to create some sort of fortified plant-based diet that has all the nutrients in a form that the body can actually absorb, but even then, that doesn't mean this is the route free people will go.

Even if you could change western food culture to make people to stop eating animal-based-food in favor of that plant-based Frankenfood, you will not change the food culture of rest of the world, which is shaking its head at white saviorism.

Are you of the impression that if everyone just ate beef, chicken, cheese and milk that we would cut emissions drastically? You know that animals eat food, and the food they eat is grown in crops, and the crops use fertilizer ... right? Even if emissions associated with growing crops are higher than expected, if the number of people that they feed is higher than the number that can be fed through meat, then reducing meat consumption is a win. If 30 percent of methane comes from industrial meat farming and 20 percent comes from industrial rice farming but our industrial meat feeds 1 billion people and our industrial rice feeds 2 billion people, I don't understand how that's an irrelevant concern. It's very convenient to form opinions in such a way so that no personal changes in consumption are ever required.

> Are you of the impression that if everyone just ate beef, chicken, cheese and milk that we would cut emissions drastically?

No.

> You know that animals eat food, and the food they eat is grown in crops, and the crops use fertilizer ... right?

Yes.

> Even if emissions associated with growing crops are higher than expected, if the number of people that they feed is higher than the number that can be fed through meat, then reducing meat consumption is a win.

I disagree, because plant-based food is inferior, therefore it is a loss. From a pure nutrition perspective, meat and dairy isn't as inefficient as you might think.

You could probably cut down on some emissions by feeding people Soylent or some other food that had better been served to livestock instead, perhaps you can even brainwash people into doing that voluntarily. That doesn't mean it is a better outcome.

> If 30 percent of methane comes from industrial meat farming and 20 percent comes from industrial rice farming but our industrial meat feeds 1 billion people and our industrial rice feeds 2 billion people, I don't understand how that's an irrelevant concern.

It's not just about feeding people, but feeding them well. White rice is probably responsible for the huge rates of Diabetes in Asia. Brown rice is poorly digestible. Altogether, it is not very nutritious either.

> It's very convenient to form opinions in such a way so that no personal changes in consumption are ever required.

Don't get me wrong, my opinion is borne out of self-interest, it's not about moral grandstanding.

Even if a meat-based diet was better for no other reason than being more delicious, it wouldn't change my position fundamentally.

You're very welcome to change your consumption, just don't force it on me.

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