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Comment by DoingIsLearning | Hacker News Reader

There needs to be an informed decision pollution breakdown, industry by industry of the climate change impact.

Cows are the latest media exposed industry but I have no intuition on how they compare with other industries? Coal power plants? ICEs in auto industry? Petro-Chemical industry?

If the meat industry collapsed would we eliminate 20% of the world's pollution or 0.2%? I have no idea and haven't found any clear cut data on this?

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There's a good chart with a short text summary at Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

This is really really cool.

So looking at the world data the global warming effect of the whole world livestock production is 5.8% which is aproximately the same as the methane emissions of accidental leaks in the Energy sector industries.

It seems logistically much easier to solve the problem of coal mining leaks and Oil and Gas methane leaks created by a few multinational conglomerates, than to try and curb a fractured meat industry spread through multiple (often developing) countries.

Or if people drive 33% less.

Or heated their home 50% less.

But why not stop the accidental leaks while eating less meat while driving less while using energy efficient houses?

It’s a lot easier to blame an industry you can’t control than make a few decisions at home.

Tell your politicians to hold the mega corps accountable while proving you care by avoiding beef and driving less and turning the AC on less.

Indeed wholeheartedly agree, it was not my intention to single out a particular industry and participation is key since like you said transportation and energy are two main causes for which we do have control over.

It was just interesting that the percent contributions where really similar between the two when intuitively I would expect Oil/Gas/Coal methane leaks to have a marginal climate impact.

I'm not sure if I'm missing something but right now the global goal is 0 co2 by 2050 which already means hitting 1-2 degrees increase.

Every measure right now, which doesn't hurt us, doesn't do anything right now to solve the problem.

Mexiko has a drought strongest of the last 30 years, permafrost is unfreezing, etc.

Maybe? Why wouldn't you try both?

You think repairing literally millions of abandoned leaking natural gas wells is easier?

I don't really know but my gut feeling is that you can sit down with the 99.9% of those well owners at a single OPEC or IOGP meeting.

However, you would struggle to enforce any meat industry curbing measure with the millions of meat producers spread across many developing countries.

If you think it's easier to focus on developed countries, North America and Europe are responsible for 1/3 of the global meat production (~110 million tons/year). China is another 80 million tons.

On the consumption side, and leaving aside the micro-nation of Hong Kong, the US lead the per capita meat consumption charts with 124 kg/year, with other high-wealth countries close behind. (China: 61 kg/year.)

The developing countries don't have to be a particular priority, at this point.

https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production

They don’t have owners, they are abandoned.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-drilling-abandoned-sp...

TIL. But even after insolvency there must be a way to enforce personal liability on whoever was in charge of the company that drilled the well in the first place.

be interesting to see what the predicyions would be if another World War broke out and we pretended that nukes wouldn't get used.

I'm guessing that the 73% of GHG from industry and energy production would jump to 90% during war 0.o

edit: Holy snapping duck crap. a quick google search bought up some really horrifying links:

https://www.wri.org/data/greenhouse-gas-emissions-over-165-y...

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

I'm no human hating greeny but this makes me feel sick about us in general

> Grants from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Among many other grants, sponsors, donors and contributors such as the UK government and the WHO. What's your point?

This is the biggest problem with climate change in my opinion. Public education is abysmal and as someone that fully believes in it I still have the exact same issue - I have no clear understanding of the problem in order to make a clear decision as to where I could focus my efforts.

Industry by industry doesn't reward good actors or innovation within an industry. Ideally we would just directly tax polluters and let the price reflect the pollution.

And what about forest-killing soy and avocado plantations? What about water-guzzling fields?

The “environmental” story of vegetarianism is such hypocritical bullshit.

Your examples are still much better then beef.

Beef creates the pressure for forest killing soy btw.

What about grass-fed beef like we have more of here in Europe?

It seems the data doesn’t back up this assertion (based on studies linked elsewhere in this post).

PS. What-about-ism is not a sound argument.

What about them?

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