Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

> Each kilogram of fish sticks produces about 1.3 kilograms of carbon dioxide, which “rivals the climate impact of tofu,” she says. Beef, by comparison, produces over 100 times that amount of carbon dioxide per kilogram.

That's fascinating. I wish they'd explain why.

View on HN

I've mostly seen statistics about water usage for dairy milk production, but it takes a lot of water and food to raise a cow to maturity. Fish (if harvested sustainably) care for themselves until caught, so it makes some sense to me that planting, growing, harvesting, and processing soybeans into tofu would have similar impact to fleets of ships traveling the ocean catching fish.

A few years ago I read and enjoyed the book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan. The author follows three different meals from farm to table as completely as possible given the nature of modern food production. It's a great read for someone who wants to know more about where food comes from and how it gets here, and it's definitely made me think about what I'm eating.

But presumably the fish still does need to eat, which you'd need to keep in mind for the calculation?

Not for the purpose of making a carbon footprint calculation I believe.

I don't think so, unless there is a significant amount of carbon released due to the way the fish's food grows. It's certainly not the same as running all of the machinery required to process and transport livestock feed. There has been some interesting back-and-forth about the role of the fish themselves as a natural carbon sink[1][2]. I don't pretend to understand the science or math involved in these calculations though.

[1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/44/eabb4848 [2] https://sustainablefisheries-uw.org/big-fish-sink-blue-carbo...

That beef number is going to vary widely. The low end might be grass-fed beef on rotational grazing regenerative grassland fed a methane suppressing supplement versus beef raised on factory farmed corn grown on land created by burning down the rain forest.

I thought the methane from decomposing grass was net generated whether it passed through the cow or not?

You are correct. It's one of many sleight of hand tricks used to exaggerate the impact of beef. For some reason, certain parties don't want harm reduction policies on these issues, they want you to stop eating Beef altogether.

Sure you can argue about the specifics and how bad eating beef is for the environment and whether it's 10x worse or 100x worse than something else. But it's hard to argue that it's not causing an environmental problem that other foods simply wouldn't create. Monoculture, water poisoning, carbon footprint, animal cruelty, health and we haven't even considered the ethics of it yet. I get that it's part of our lifestyle but why is it so difficult to move on?

It's difficult to move away from because it's part of our lifestyle.

Most beef aren't fed grass, they're fed corn or barley or other grains.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com