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Comment by tpxl | Hacker News Reader

> Cattle are such a big part of greenhouse emissions that if this really had legs without some underlying problem it would be funded like a war effort.

According to a brief search, cattle represent about 3.3% of greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation is 29%, electricity is 25%.

Seems to me better logistics (not transporting stuff that needn't be transported) and better electricity generation is worth more trillions than cows burping.

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3.3% of greenhouse emissions seems too low. Global livestock overall may contribute to about 14% of greenhouse gas emissions[1]. There are also other forms of pollution including farm runoff (ocean dead zones , zoonotic disease), land use (forest destruction), soil degradation, etc.

[1] http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/

correction: removed N2O nitrous oxide is also a greenhouse gas which is included.

My source only looked at the US so numbers differ from global[0]. Your source also says 14.5% is all livestock, of which 9.4% is cattle (so about 3x globally compared to the US).

There are of course other forms of pollution, a big one we could easily tackle I think is water pollution by the textile industry [1]. So much clothing today is of garbage quality and completely unmendable (the fabric is too thin to be repaired ):, I tried).

[0] https://www.ars.usda.gov/news-events/news/research-news/2019...

[1] https://www.textiletoday.com.bd/water-pollution-due-textile-...

Good point.

Random thought experiment - how much should the global 'fund' be to attack greenhouse gas emissions. Not that it should be spent in proportion to % of total emissions, but I wonder what 3.3% of that number would be.

Say you spent 1T on cows, and spent it proportionally. That's a 30T fund overall. So around half from memory of what the US spent on the post 9/11 wars.

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