Customers shun red meat after carbon footprint added to weekly shop receipts | Hacker News Reader

Customers shun red meat after carbon footprint added to weekly shop receipts

independent.co.uk

16 pointsmatsemann8 comments

If it's true that red meat sales are dropping then I'd expect prices to follow. That'd be very good news for me. Yum!

Does the receipt actually give a number for how much CO2 emission was caused by each item? It would be interesting for customers to be able to compare that to something like the CO2 emitted by their car on their journey to and from the shop (assuming their car is at least partially/indirectly powered by fossil fuels).

Also I wonder if the amounts should be net of some minimum amount of CO2 per calorie. Assuming people aren't going to opt to not consume enough calories to live, and given that there is a minimum carbon footprint necessary to provide those calories, then I think that should be counted as a baseline or "allowance".

There is always a danger with gimmicky policies that they exploit the brain's "availability bias" and make us think we are having a big impact on a problem while actually distracting us from less obvious but higher priority (and higher impact) solutions.

As far as I understand it, it isn't a number shown or a total. Instead each basket gets a bar with green-orange-red zones, and the sizes of those chunks on the bar is what's changing. This makes it possible to see your ratio of high vs low footprint items, without being too much influenced by the size of the basket, such that one can follow their own trend over time.

Generally high methane emissions are what make meat look really bad.

In other news, grocery store receipts are still printed on thermal paper which is the primary source of human consumption of the endocrine disrupter BPA. Speaking of shunning, maybe we should add that to the list.

This is an online grocery store, though, so no printed receipts.

Eating less meat won't save the planet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g

This makes statements like "Eating less meat won't save the Planet" (obviously true) and debunks obviously false straw-man hyperbolic claims like "cows are polluting the air with their methane rich burps, they're eating all our food, drinking all our water, and taking all our land that we could be using to grow human food on" (0:15).. At the end (19:28) they even say that reducing meat is a smokescreen to deflect from reducing fossil fuels - whereas of course hardly any environmental advocate deflects from fossil fuels (though of course a short cherry-picked clip of some animal rights activist not mentioning the systemic issue of fossil fuels was found & used).

It also states that going vegan won't make much of a difference (even if true you could argue that almost all necessary actions won't make "much" of a difference by themselves), cherry-picks examples of "bad" plant-based foods, doesn't seem to account for crops being fed to animals (including for "finishing" cows), and states that methane emissions are part of a natural cycle that's been happening historically (perhaps true for US but we'd still have less warming if this methane was much reduced!).

Some of his points seem valid though - e.g. ruminants making use of "marginal" land where mostly grass grows, but this is specific to ruminants whereas the video title just says "Meat". I agree that in many situations beef is indeed environmentally better than chicken & pigs, whereas in other situations, like when the Amazon gets destroyed, it's worse. So he could have written "Eating less Beef won't save the planet". (BTW, since cows are large beef also results in less killing per pound of flesh)

So how about both Meatless Mondays and No-Food-Waste Wednesdays (22:37)... Food Waste is certainly terrible & should have much more focus.

PS:

There's also a "debunking" video from Earthling Ed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkMOQ9X76UU

And the subsequent response: https://www.patreon.com/posts/51285771

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