Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions
economist.com
economist.com
That’s like, in 1900, saying “the simplest way to prevent road deaths is for everyone to drive slower.” That’s not simple at all - that’s an intractable group behavior problem. What you really need is for the government to come along and put up speed limits. Most people will push those rules, a few will flout them, but things will be better.
So let’s have a carbon tax that includes all sources of greenhouse gas, including domesticated animals, and stop passing moral judgement on people who are stressed enough as it is figuring out how to navigate our challenging world.
We're either going to be limited by natural resources, climate issues or our own actions to limit ourself to avoid #1 and #2.
There is just no way around it, you can't keep on extracting more and more ressources from a closed system, you can't keep polluting more and more in a closed system, you can't target an exponential growth in a closed system.
Companies don't give a shit, because their sole purpose is to not care about these issues. That's how you get companies like apple shitting unrepairable products every 6 months, but it's ok because their offices are carbon neutral, right ?
Countries don't give a shit, because GDP is king and energy = GDP, https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/correlation-...
So it's a game of chicken, everyone knows about the problem, they all know the solutions, but no one is really taking action, because that would be a massive paradigm shift in virtually every aspect of our economy
Fishing boats are allowed to keep any fish or crustacean regardless of size or sex. In fact, they don’t even have daily catch limits they have to adhere too. We’re so lucky that all fishing companies voluntarily avoid over fishing. If there was some sort of “department of game and fish” in most states regulating what animals you can eat, it would probably be the beginning of the end for America. I would just up and move to Canada.
1. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy,_politics_and_econo...
Actually I work in academia so I'll start the ball rolling by telling you this isn't unrealistic.
You can find a lot of people who work in academia who find Stage of Fear (in particular) to be a thinly-veiled attempt to smear the entire climate science community. Because everyone is in lust with grant money.
Cattle only burn fossil fuels to the extent that transporting water and feed, fertilizing that feed, and manufacturing and transporting fencing materials, antibiotics, etc, use.
Guess what? Your dog has roughly the same impact making and transporting his food, his water, his veterinarian supplies, any bedding you've purchased, bags to dispose of his feces, collars, leashes, toys, etc.
I don't have hard numbers but intuitively I'd guess dogs and cattle have approximately the same climate impact on a pound-of-bodyweight basis.
Dogs probably have slightly more, since they live in much more luxurious digs than CAFO cattle, eat higher quality feed, get to ride in cars, etc.
Unlike older scientific topics that have esoteric terminology, usually from the Latin, this one is pretty straight forward... It is the energy lost due to pumping. Basically, the overhead of keeping an engine running no matter how much distance of roadway you cover, but more on point, the extra losses due to running an engine outside of its peak power/performance range:
https://www.cycleworld.com/2015/10/12/ask-kevin-what-is-pump...
Not "pumping" losses, no. There is no intake air or exhaust gas to pump.
EVs may experience an effect that is similar in practice, albeit much smaller... Things like headlights, HVAC, entertainment systems, etc., will draw more power the longer it takes you to get to your destination, so reducing your speed from 30 to 15 MPH might not be an efficiency win.
Which is why hybrids often switch from electric to gas past some determined speed.
So even with an engine designed to be most efficient when the car drives 65 mph, the efficiency of the system will quickly be controlled by drag forces as speed increases.
If not, then Germany has the upper hand with a miraculous ancient technology called sidewalks.
They also have bike lanes - no, not for motorcycles, but bicycles!
In practice, the classroom study usually isn't all that rigorous, and the testing is likely too easy.
But the requirements on paper aren't typically any easier in the US.
What's most needed is probably refresher quizzes for license renewals to remind drivers of commonly forgotten or new driving laws. Like who has right of way at a 4 way stop, or how to zipper merge.
https://www.statista.com/chart/25098/fatality-rate-and-speed... https://www.spiegel.de/auto/aktuell/tempolimit-koennte-jaehr... ( In German, should be the original source)
Would be interesting to know about accidents in general. It's quite obvious that higher speeds increase the likelihood of fatal accidents.
- Drivers are required to obtain an extensive education at a licensed driving school and pass a rigorous test before being allowed to drive.
- Driving rules such as "no passing on the right" are strictly enforced in Germany, creating a more predictable (and thus safer) driving environment. There is absolutely no way something like the following could be achieved in the US due to Americans' stubbornness and lack of driving discipline:
https://jalopnik.com/how-germans-make-way-for-emergency-vehi...
- German roads are designed to naturally encourage people to make good decisions by the use of roundabouts, narrower lanes (which naturally make people slow down and be more careful) and many similar "vision zero" initiatives.
- German roads are consistently maintained.
- When you're not on the autobahn, speed limits are generally lower than in the US and are more strictly enforced.
Not to say that Germany is perfect, but they are doing much more than the US to ensure road safety and are doing so more consistently.
Some US states have a looser policy on this.
And most include an emissions test, which reduces the need for complex mechanical inspections, and largely negates differences in inspection "quality".
The grains are not the issue, the subsidies in the US are so strong that they are not a real factor. There is so much excess food produced they export it to other countries for instance. https://modernfarmer.com/2019/01/congress-finally-passed-a-n... https://abcnews.go.com/US/dairy-farmers-dumping-milk-amid-co... https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/business/milk-dumping-cor... Fresh food is often wasted, and the dumping of milk is to prevent the prices from going too low. This was happening before corona as well, this paper is a pretty good summary from a marxist perspective on overproduction. https://www.e-ir.info/2016/07/07/agricultural-overproduction...
Nice reference to Marxism.
Deforesting the amazon to grow corn for cows is something I'm sure we can all agree is bad.
Should we use livestock to eat cover crops and waste products like corn husks and cobs? This way we reuse waste and produce high quality protein to supplement our diets.
Should we graze cattle on natural grasslands like the great plains? Especially in rotation with human foods, like the cover crops mentioned before?
So sure, go for 100%-grass-and-not-human-edible-food-fed beef, but that's not the current system.
While methane is 28-times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, methane’s lifespan is just a decade, while CO2 — known as a long-life pollutant — remains in the atmosphere for 1000 years.
After ten years, methane is broken down in a process called hydroxyl oxidation into CO2, entering a carbon cycle which sees the gas absorbed by plants, converted into cellulose, and eaten by livestock.
The next two paragraphs say that livestock accounts for 33% of the total methane released and blithely states that it all gets broken down and reused. If no additional animals are introduced, then net release equals net absorption. That is not very insightful -- eventually an equilibrium will be reached. This glosses over the real data that CO2 levels are rising, it is having measurable consequences, and is pushing control loops to new, worse states.
Citing one article written for the "Farm Business" trade publication isn't as conclusive as you seem to state.
When you burn oil, you take carbon from the ground and introduce it into the atmosphere. This increases the total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere.
When you grow plants, you take carbon out of the atmosphere. When you eat it, you release it back into the atmosphere. The total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere does not change.
Grass grows more vigorously when regularly pruned, for example by a grazing animal. Farms also make a point of planting thing which grow quickly and efficiently. Thus it's reasonable to expect that farming could increase the rate of carbon turnover in the atmosphere, which would create the appearance of increased carbon emissions without a corresponding increase in the amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere.
In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged. But the cow itself only causes a short lived, fixed increase in atmospheric methane and an increased rate of carbon turnover.
So the electricity and diesel that are involved in growing plants come from the atmosphere? That's new to me.
> In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged.
I cannot say anything wherever cows really are inconsequential wrt the warming effect, but it definitely goes against what's generally said by climate scientists.
To phrase it differently:
Climate scientists generally think that cows are an issue, but I do not have the qualification to judge wherever Dojis claim (that they don't matter) has any truth to it, as I'm not informed enough to form an opinion on the matter.
Doji did not claim that modern agriculture isn't harmful, they just addressed cows specifically.
Compare this to cars. Even if the number of cars remains constant, their contribution to the C02 pool grows every day.
So we should avoid increasing cattle population 100x, but we wouldn't want to do that anyway because we'd have nowhere to put them, and I certainly wouldn't support deforestation.
> fortunately if cattle population stays constant, their portion of the atmospheric resident methane will also remain constant
I have the impression (as a person uneducated in this topic) that current levels are already too high, and the world population is only going up.
Is there a way to produce more food with lower emissions or should the main target be a steady population? Or both?
I know some people who started eating insects and stopped planning for kids because of this. Me? I'm just confused.
1. Current consumer habits change.
2. Rapidly developing countries decide not to increase the animal proportion in their diet, which has happened in every single culture so far.
And producing food for cows causes more damage than making same food for humans. (Deforestation, Soy plants, etc emitting more carbon)
Most popular meat labels here would not even allow buying external food, if not absolutely necessary.
I was wrong, correction below
https://schweizerfleisch.ch/herkunft/facts-figures-schweizer...
Even if it was, grass-fed beef is about 1% of the supply in the US. It has also been shown that grass-fed beef on average causes more environmental degradation than conventionally fed beef, due to the deforestation required to create grazing areas
Deforestation is a real problem. How do you address this from a policy perspective? If you ban beef, that is only a temporary band-aid on the real problem of deforestation, which both fails to address deforestation properly, and which prevents beneficial uses of livestock such as for reuse of food waste products, grazing of natural grasslands, production of natural fertilizer, etc.
When measured over 10 years, it's more like 81 times.
So the "28 times" already allows for the fact that it's mostly only there for 10 years.
https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/methane-vs-c...
Am I missing something? How can methane be a more potent GHG if it has lower IR absorption AND a shorter lifespan?
Edit: found spectra here (not the data that i took, obviously):
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/methane_...
CO2 has a big fat band that blows out the absorption at 4.5 um in a region untouched by water (and one that is overwhelmed by water); methane has two spiky bands both of which are partially occluded by water.
What do you mean by a fairly developed country? McDonald's was selling hamburgers for 15 cents in 1955 (roughly the same as the price of a loaf of bread at the grocery store).
Catholics eating fish on Friday (instead of meat) I believe goes back many generations.
See also this article about historical meat consumption in the U.S.[0]:
"“These sources do give us some confidence in suggesting an average annual consumption of 150–200 pounds of meat per person in the nineteenth century.”
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-ameri...
Yes, I realize it's still death and pollution but the scale of modern farms is simply mindboggling.
Grow and slaughter your own pigs and hens and then decide if you still want to do it for the meat (or the money from selling the meat).
In this story the supermarkets say "We'll give consumers the choice", but for them that means choosing eco products that have ~40% higher price and they don't do that (~5% of sales is eco-friendly), so this doesn't work.
Once again it is politicians who need to take some tough measures, but they find powerful lobbies in their path plus they do not dare to take impopular measures that make products more expensive, for fear of losing votes. So for 50 years things got worse and worse.
One solution mentioned was what social enterprise True Price [0] is trying to establish: explicitly pricing the detrimental externalities that until now are shoved as costs to future generations. A pack of regular coffee with externalities priced in would go from, say, $5 to become $10, while a pack of eco-friendly coffee would go to $6.50. The surplus to the price should be reserved in a fund with which farmers can make the transition to sustainable agriculture.
It varies a lot by country, pretty sure there's a lot more overlap between pasture land and arable land in Europe, but for example in USA not so much.
Considerable amount of animal food also involves byproducts of food production for humans, or plants used in cycling the fields (that's made worse with preference to just put ton of artificial fertilizer)
Here's a quote from the Economist article citing two recent scientific studies: "It takes 33 plant calories to produce one calorie of beef."
The problem is that the externality is set arbitrarily by people who think beef in particular is bad --- it's a sin tax. If you're being honest about pricing emissions, you internalize externalities universally, uniformly, and transparently. An across-the-board carbon tax is defensible; such a tax would likely affect beef. A fee on beef by itself --- that's just disingenuous and moralistic nonsense.
(naturally, they are the ones who decide what The Common Good is)
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
A big problem is that the moral busybodies who propose laws banning random things are the same moral busybodies who censor internet discussion.
"moralizing zealots"
They are price insensitive for the most part. Their yachts and personal airplanes don't make a dent in their billions of assets.
I still support carbon taxes as a source of investment for sustainable transition.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...
That group is still pretty price sensitive. Maybe not enough to drop beef completely, but enough to at least partially move to pork or chicken.
[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/27/were-all-the-1-percent/
Oxfam press release:
> In 2015, around half the emissions of the richest 10 percent - people with net income over $38,000 - are linked to citizens in the US and the EU and around a fifth with citizens of China and India. Over a third of the emissions of the richest one percent – people with net income over $109,000 - are linked to citizens in the US, with the next biggest contributions from citizens of the Middle East and China. Net incomes are based on income thresholds for 2015 and represented in $ 2011 PPP (purchasing power parity).
From the paper they are linking to:
> The richest 10% of the world’s population (c.630 million people) were responsible for 52% of the cumulative carbon emissions – depleting the global carbon budget by nearly a third (31%) in those 25 years alone (see Figure 1); > The richest 1% (c.63 million people) alone were responsible for 15% of cumulative emissions, and 9% of the carbon budget – twice as much as the poorest half of the world’s population (see Figure 1);
https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
Additional data point: I don't have a yacht.
It might be a bear to administer, though...
The confidence of this statement reeks of arrogance. How can you even claim to know what the potential impacts of climate change do not include? It's not like modern humans have lived in any era that was remotely similar.
In case you’re wondering why he claims global warming will lead to mass migration, it is because the millions of miles of coastlines will change.
Climate hysteria is really something else.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/homeowners-insurance/why-is-h... Residents there that cannot afford the insurance that exists might as well mean that it doesn't exist the same way life saving surgery cannot be purchased by a person makes it nonexistant.
https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
>" UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control...Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded...UNEP is working toward forming a scientific plan of action by the end of 1990, and the adoption of a global climate treaty by 1992...
1. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nations-vanish-global-warm...
> if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000
The trend was not reversed, so now we wait to see if the prediction comes true. Given the low lying geography of some nations (esp pacific islands) I would bet money that this does indeed come true in the future.
Nowhere in the quote does it say, as you claim, that civilization would collapse in 2000.
Furthermore, those unspecific weasel words they were using back then to try and wriggle out of any predicitons they made back then, they are still using today when they say we will be past the point of no return in 10 years from now. Their wording was clearly meant to trick people into believing there would be mass destruction and climate refugees in 10 years, and people believed it back then, just like people today believe we will be seeing the same in 10 years from now.
- People are not migrating North in droves. They are not preparing in any way.
- Nuclear energy, the only realistic solution to climate change, is not being supported. It's actually being retired early in many cases and replaced with coal of all things.
- Property prices on the coastline are going up. President Obama, who has access to the best information and experts, bought a huge property on the Martha's Vineyard coast in 2019.
- There is little to no push to improve the water supply in preparation for droughts, not even in California.
encourages:
- more people to buy electric cars that can also act as a whole home battery
- even more research dollars in storage/battery tech
- distributed power grid
- resell electricity to grid (or maybe even local neighbours)
- short-term power outages are handled by design
- people think more about their electricity usage
- people may be more likely to generate power at home
- unnecessary extra cost to end users
- might be less efficient then centralization
- certain markets/peoples will not be able to easily access stored electricity?Do you really want to bet the future of earth on the chance that we find a solution to those problems before climate change really becomes a huge disaster? I wouldn't, I would build what we know works. And since many are saying that we are already heading for a disaster, we can say that your bet didn't pay off, the chase for viable solar and wind failed and nuclear was the only viable option.
The capital cost of any battery, flywheel or pumped storage is higher than the $30-50/MWh energy of a nuclear plant, without even having built any PV or wind generation.
So it might be possible that nuclear in the end is cheaper than renewables. Personally I'm not sure about that, but I'm not an expert in the field.
Solar on itself can only be a very small part of the solution. It needs storage most localities don't have the budget, place, technology to build.
Yes, because - you might be surprised to hear - people actually like to life where they are born and raised and require catastrophic hardship (such as the Syrian civil war) to actually start a migration.
So we already see direct effects on society from climate change.
Plant based meat substitutes will improve (via the production learning curve and competition) if there is enough demand.
(According to this article that attracted much comment[1] a few days ago, though, artificial meat is a non-starter.)
I feel like eating meat is going to be my generations equivalent of smoking. Intellectually, I agree that eating meat is bad for the environment, cruel to animals (esp industrial farming) etc ... but I can't see myself giving up eating meat.
1982 was the year that the US Surgeon General announced that second-hand smoke was dangerous. That was the beginning of the end. Then shortly after the lawsuits started.
Boomers and the generation before did not have much of that influence in their formative years, even though warning labels were put on cigarette packages in 1965, they were mostly ignored because… marketing.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/ti...
The cool factor goes out the window.
Fur coats is something that seems to be almost entirely given up, but part of it is that fake fur is quite good.
I haven't eaten any 4-legged animals with the exception of bacon and the odd burger here and there (a chicken burger just doesn't cut it) for 3-4 years.
I mostly eat fish and poultry and have been accidentally vegan a number of days.
I'd be completely fine paying 2x the price for beef if the animals were handled in a sustainable and humane way.
The topic of deforestation is only whispered in at the end, almost a footnote. However, burning the Amazon for farmland to produce beef in Brazil should be part of the headline.
I'm paraphrasing here.
To screw up the oceans, there must be a standard, but there isn't. There are many problems such as lower native populations, corals, invasive species, stronger weather patterns, microplastics, but I am not sure what it is to "screw up the oceans".
I live surrounded by cows, literally. The area has no good soil, so every farmer here has like 13 to whatever cows (13 is the magical number of cows you can have without studying agriculture or so, assuming you live in a relevant area). All these cows spend most of the time outside, in the summer they are in the Alps, spring and fall they chill in the fields and go to 'sleep' in their stall and winter they are mostly indoors, except on sunny days.
They eat ONLY what is growing around here in the more or less useless soil. Even in the winter.
90% of the farmers here are at least organic. So synthetic fertilizer & power food are out of the question too.
Many small farmers do what one or two people can and help each other on the busy days. And it works.
Literally every reason I've read is this thread about why cow meat is so bad does not apply as far as I can tell to the meat I eat.
I'm all for it, but in effect this is just the "massively reduce consumption" argument.
My neighbor's meat is way cheaper than organic meat in supermarkets. Still at least twice as much as 'cheap' meat.
The cheapest variants may are expensive comparingly, quality however isn't.
Here’s a 20 min video to show you why
In the grand scheme of things livestock produce an insignificant amount of ghg and that if all Americans stopped consuming beef, it would reduce the nations ghg emissions by ~2.5%, whereas transportation, power generation and construction contribute to the overwhelming amount of emissions (~80%).
If you want to look at reducing emissions from food, it is much easier to look at food waste, where ~40% of food in the US is wasted, and of that roughly 80% is produce like fruits, vegetables, tubers etc, meaning that even if there was a transformation to a purely vegan population, food waste would probably increase.
edit: I should reiterate that these are points in summary that are made in the video, not my personal opinion.
so what is it that they grow then cut and roll into those large objects? here they even grow corn for feed.
1. The number is around 14.5% in direct global emissions [1] according to the FAO, I cannot find any reputable source saying anywhere as low as 2.5%
2. Beef has roughly ten times more carbon footprint as Chicken. Beef has by far the highest CO2 equivalent per KG of product among any food [2] at 99.8Kg CO2 Equivalent, lamb / mutton comes a distant second at around 40Kg and Pork / Poultry are around 12/9 respectively [3] .
3. Looking at American consumption and emissions in isolation is disingenuous, USA alone exported 2.2 Billion pounds and imported 4.4 Billion pounds of beef and cattle in 2020.
4. Beef related food production is the leading cause of deforestation in many countries including Brazil [4] and a lot of it is export driven. There is additional secondary emissions due to this type of deforestation .
5. In addition there is substantial growth in amount of meat consumes as a country develops the impact of this industry is not just current emissions [5]
6. A lot the byproducts that become animal feed can also become fertilizer, if used in feed stock then likely it is organic and therefore contains fertilizer components such as Potassium , Nitrates etc that can be processed as fertilizer .
7. Even if there was zero emissions related to consumption, it is inherently a extremely cruel industry, the conditions in dairy/ cattle/ chicken/pig farms are horrifyingly bad to the animals, and use breeds that have little genetic variety, create potential outbreak zones for many diseases.
8. Pigs and Cattle are very intelligent species, it is especially cruel to breed species of higher intelligence just for food even if there were only humane farms.
[1] http://www.fao.org/3/i3437e/i3437e.pdf
[2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
[4] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/12/1...
[5] https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/133/11/3907S/4818041
1. How is this 14.5% number calculated? Does it include deforestation? Grass-fed is far different than deforesting for grazing land or crop land.
For instance from the FAO PDF you quoted: "extensive livestock are often kept in remote environments where deforestation and land degradation reflect weaknesses in institutions and policies". The headline then should read "deforestation and bad land policy causes climate change" not "stop eating cows".
2. Again, how are these 10x numbers calculated? Comparing e.g. industrialized agriculture to inefficient agriculture in a third-world country is not going to convince skeptics. If beef production is extremely inefficient somewhere, we should fix that.
3. If country A emits 100x the CO2 production of country B for the same end result, that needs to be noted. If my neighbor has a giant gas-guzzling monster truck spewing emissions, my neighborhood is not at fault, it's just him.
4. Agree 100%. We should be addressing the deforestation. Saying "stop eating meat" is not the solution. "Don't buy food from Brazil grown on land that had rain forest last year" is more nuanced and probably easier to follow. Matter of fact, don't buy products made by totalitarian regimes, slaves, child labor, etc. We should know where and how our products are made. I'm not advocating "don't buy sneakers" because some sneakers are made in unethical ways.
5. Humans love meat, that fact is not changing anytime soon. We should advocate for more efficient (and yet more ethical). If we need to, governments should pass laws to make production sustainable similar to what is done to prevent overfishing.
6. We have a perfect machine, well studied and used for millennia, for converting corn husks and other inedible things that would otherwise be thrown away into fertilizer: cows. Bonus, in addition to fertilizer, you get milk, hides, bones, highly nutritious meat, etc.
7/8. Totally agree. More laws need to be passed to regulate this industry, it's truly sickening. All meat products should be twice as expensive or more as they currently are to account for this.
So, how about we solve energy instead (build nuclear powerplants)? Yet they still blame meat!
Overproduction isn't ideal from that point of view, but on the other hand it is at least to some extent also a necessary hedge against bad harvests – if you don't overproduce compared to your average requirements, then any even just mildly bad harvest would immediately cause food shortages, and that's something you really really wouldn't want to happen.
Corn is a fungible commodity.
Pork bellies are a fungible commodity.
It's a mystery to me as to why you think I said soybeans and steak are the same.
It's important to determine which of those two things you're discussing and trying to maintain parity with in attempts to improve on the infrastructure we have built, both have very different and unique problems.
Fungible: Able to be substituted for something of equal value or utility;
The entire premise was that coal is fungible because you can replace it with solar, and nobody* cares as long as their lights still turn on. You can't do the same with food, you can't replace beef with soy beans - in fact for most people you can't replace beef with anything, they want beef.
*coal miners care, the vast majority of the public does not
There are many Americans in the Appalachian area of the United States that care more about where their power comes from than where their food comes from or contains. People in other parts of the world may have different priorities. But most households in West Virginia not only know what type of power is used to run their homes but know the name of the coal mine that it was dug out of.
Taste is not fungible, ingredients really are relatively changeable for most cooking.
When lab grown meet is cheap enough and tastes similar the market wouldn't even notice the change and real beef would become niche high end market for the customers who are ready to pay more because they believe it tastes better or it not GMO or Bill Gates injects 5G using artificial meat.
it’ll be like crimes that are punished by a fine - they just become the ‘fee’ that allows the propertied class to do whatever they want.
beef is deadly for humanity because of destructive water and land usage (Vice had a great video showing the Amazon deforestation due to beef production).
edit: my point is that the propertied class will lower wages and raise commodity prices to be able to pay to keep eating an unsustainable amount of beef. instead we should restrict or ban industrial animal agriculture, while investing in educational material to help society transition away from beef. that and regenerative agriculture, agro-forestry, etc.
Ernst Gotsch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
If it bothers you that the rich can afford to pay for the externalities, that's an argument against wealth inequality, not against pricing things correctly.
Ernst Gotsch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
i don’t want to give my children a dead planet either.
How is it more deadly than transportation in terms of emissions or deaths caused by it? https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
I question the focus on a beef, a percentage of 10% rather than 29% of the total, which is transportation, or 25% which is electricty.
We subsidize the meat industry directly, and indirectly by not pricing in negative externalities like it’s carbon expenditure.
But maybe we can still make a dent by increasing the price to include negative externalities like carbon emissions, or at least ending subsidies for meat so substitutes might be able to compete better.
I'm really getting suspicious of this drum-beat of "we have to stop eating beef." It's come from a number of places, like Bill Gates touting mass-produced synthetic meat from his industrial farming affiliations. He has substantial financial stake in controlling what people eat.
And there it is at the conclusion of the article:
> Fortunately, lab-grown meats are moving from Petri dishes to high-end restaurants (see Technology Quarterly).
Oil and coal that gets dug up gets burned. Law simply does not apply to all states that do this, so these sorts of measures are dead in the water. So the ONLY way to lower (eventual) greenhouse emissions is to leave coal and oil in the ground. Such measures can only ever change WHY fossil fuels get burned, bitcoins instead of steel production, not WHETHER or not coal gets burned ...
They can't leave oil in the ground. They can't leave coal in the ground.
Problem is that the real change we need can't be done with law, with political action, with any of that ... it can only be done by competing with oil. Outcompete oil and the problem is solved. No country will risk it's energy supply dropping by 0.1% for the climate, it's just not going to happen. Sure, they want to score points with the young political action crowd, but not where it poses actual risks to the economy. So this can only be done with science. You want to help the climate? Get a real education in chemistry and physics and figure out some small part of the problem.
There is really no better demonstration of this than the nuclear power situation. We have already discovered the source of 'limitless' energy but we refuse to capitalize on it for political reasons.
If you want more innovation you are going to have to fund it. Most of the smart people of this world are currently trying to figure out how to make Ads get clicks. Companies dont really fund the kinds of innovations you are suggesting because they will never see a return on that investment.
Ruminants eat plants, which contain carbon captured from the atmosphere. They then release most of that carbon back to the atmosphere, from where it will be eventually absorbed by plants again. So it’s a cycle where no new carbon is really being introduced (unlike burning fossil fuels that would otherwise stay in the ground).
Am I missing something or is the seriousness of this issue blown way out of proportion?
Have you travled outside the US? This is not true in most parts of the world, I wouldn't be suprised to see it only being a US practice.
Nice insult, btw. I had to send my passport to get more pages sewn in.
* Cow methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than co2, orders of magnitude worse
* Land that would capture a lot more CO2 and keep water in the environment is chopped down or otherwise destroyed to make pastures, the worst being rainforests.
* Orders of magnitude more water is used to raise cows vs the equivalent calories in plants.
But it's also released in much lower quantities, and has a much faster half life. Let's be clear: carbon dioxide, not methane, is responsible for the overwhelming majority of long term warming.
Methane being worse than CO2 doesn't change the fact that it's a cycle and thus it's not causing extra warming as long as the amount of animals is constant.
Alternative forests, etc, is equally a one off thing. Keeping the pastures doesn't make anything worse, and reverting them back would only be a one off improvement.
Empirically, most politicians don't support carbon taxes. Market-consistent pricing of climate-related externalities is broadly opposed by politicians on both sides of the aisle in the US. For example, look at the massive subsidies to dairy farms in my home state of Wisconsin - they get over 40% of their revenue from direct subsidies in a typical year, and if you exclude those subsidies the industry hasn't made a profit for at least several decades, but no one dares to even suggest reducing or eliminating them, let alone going the other way and taxing the negative externalities they create.
In the US, the vast majority are unwilling to do pretty much anything to fight climate change. ~70% oppose a $0.25/gallon gasoline tax; note that a true Pigouvian tax would be something like 20x higher than that based on the current cost of carbon removal. https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/climate-optimism-of-the-wi...
The poll cited in the article I linked explicitly mentioned that the revenue would be used for policies to support greenhouse gas reduction. I'm skeptical that the respondents cared that much about how the money would get spent, since the vast majority did support policies that would tax the wealthy and/or companies that produce greenhouse gas emissions - the only difference is where they perceive the money to be coming from, not how it would be spent.
Is that what the common price sensitive citizen cares about?
>Given that, I don't think it's that crazy to expect those same young people to pay for the negative externalities their own activities create instead of just paying it forward.
You don't think young people are capable of being hypocrites? Statistics such as low savings is proof that long term planning isn't deeply embedded.
Survey data is notoriously unreliable, on a if the rich subsidizes itself it would be circular wealth, but coming from them means that they are adversely affected. Policies and their actual effect are also not the same, would they not care when government trust is low and its possible to use the money to subsidize large companies that use a green label to play metric? I know the idea of carbon neutral is simply ofsetting carbon negatives to other companies, transportation is a huge contributor and globalized companies play with numbers to call themselves carbon neutral. https://www.dezeen.com/2021/07/30/carbon-neutrality-google-s...
BTW thanks for showing me that substack, I subscribed, hope is sorely needed today.
Another problem. Say a given crop might do better with increased CO2 given all other factors remain unchanged. But that boost of CO2 from 300 ppm to 420 ppm also came with changes to the environment, so all other factors are not unchanged. OK, CO2 levels have gone up 35%, but if the likelihood of experiencing a rain-free period of more than 30 days in that region has doubled, having more CO2 isn't worth the cost.
*I made up the claim as an illustrative example. I'm sure there are myriad co-factors that come with the increase in CO2.
Localized effects are easier to calculate, but there are many factor. For example soybeans grow better under less sunlight, so the effect of a darker sky is higher yields. You are correct that is isn't a single effect its very dynamic and has many effects.
This all (I mean basically every "progressive" restriction) just seems like a way to increase inequality and make sure the poor always stay very poor and the wealthy can do whatever they want.
I can drive my Posche plug-in hybrid in the carpool lane while the chump his old Corolla has to sit in traffic. Does that really do anything but increase inequality. (I dont really have Porsche, I can't imagine a more ridiculous choice, but I'm surrounded with people that do)
It goes back to one of my pet peeves that it is increasingly hard to find the kind of light bulbs I prefer, despite the fact that the electric supply to my home is powered by 100% renewable energy generated on site. I don't like that it was collateral damage of a grossly approximate attempt to lower residential fossil-generated energy consumption.
Ideally it would be a thermal budget rather than carbon.
And that kind of budget is just called a "budget". The resistance of a certain type of activist to using prices to allocate scarcity is going to doom us all if these activists end up setting policy. Prices force people to be honest about what's important and to make tiny trade-offs every day between disparate things. Ad-hoc bans are vulnerable to all sorts of political forces that all amount to people signaling false things about their preferences. Money doesn't have this problem.
There's a reason that there's this common phrase "put your money where your mouth is".
Have you looked at metal halide lights? They require specialized ballasts, so they aren't exactly a drop-in replacement for a standard bulb. The light quality is said to be pretty good, similar to incandescents, but they're more energy-efficient. I have an unfinished project to make an indoor artificial sun (basically, some bright lights projected through lenses to create parallel rays), which is how I started looking at metal halide lamps.
I know there are people where that doesn't work, but there may be many where it does too with minimal nudging.
After all, replacing all we eat with tasteless gruel and water is acceptable by this logic.
Electricty (such as that used for cooling), and transportation make up the most carbon emissions. This truck is one such solution for transportation and lower emmission, it uses compression rather than combustion for the engine, and "waste" is cold, so its used to cool the internals. The adoption of this would have a much better effect overall without human habits as resistance. https://atlasofthefuture.org/project/the-dearman-engine/
Improved infrastructure and improvements in efficiency in larger sector should be focused on rather than a nudged suggestion to change eating habits, the title is a pie in the sky, noit interested in practical applications.
Love the insult, I'm sure it helps the conversation along to a good conclusion.
The Dominican Republic had a very green dictatorship who was sadly assassinated but his trees have protected the country on there and island where Haiti was decimated.
Project Drawdown has a table of things we can do: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions
I'm skeptical of that Dearman engine article. It doesn't really explain where the energy comes from. We already know how to do carbon neutral energy and transportation: use solar/wind/hydroelectric/nuclear and battery-electric vehicles. It's just that the infrastructure is expensive and takes time to build. It's also not treated as an urgent priority in many countries. Some because they can't afford it, and some (i.e. the United States) our political system makes it very easy for a minority to block things.
Agriculture always had the lousiest lobby, thats why its discussed so much, while the car industry and industry in general happily gets ignored. My parents farm went almost broke, while the newspapers in germany discussed the dangerous climate and environmental factors of farming in great detail. Not a word about VW, BMW, Mercedes and many others.
I'm all for going vegan, but then in a combined deal. Full vegan, with full stop to petrol cars- at the same time. Everywhere on the planet. Tie it all together and watch the discussion distortion artists squirm.
Cattle is a bio-fuel. The methane/carbon they release was captured by the grains and grasses shortly before the cattle consumed it, and will continue growing after they've consumed it.
Cattle should be the trendy and expensive thing among the outspoken, virtue-signaling greens. It's plant-based. Contains all-natural ingredients. Isn't made in a lab/on an assembly line with a a bunch of chemicals with scary names. Old hippies should each buy a cow to keep their lawns mowed and fertilized without burning gasoline.
Fun how insulting people is OK these days.
Being offended by everything, and making it everyone else's fault, is the part that is new these days.
Indeed, it's fair game to insult other people. Sadly, it's prohibited by the rules of this forum. Disagree with them? Great. Accuse them of being hypocrites? Less great.
And just where did you look-up that definition? May I point you to a few:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/virtue-signaling
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/virtu...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-talk/202008/mo...
> Accuse them of being hypocrites? Less great
This seems to be a you problem, not a me problem.