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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

> Was also surprised to read that Montana emits as much ghg’s as Ireland.

Does Ireland have much industry to speak of? I was under the impression that most of Ireland's "industrial" output was effectively tax services. Montana is heavily weighted towards agri-industrial production, so it's not surprising to me that net energy usage per person is ~5x higher.

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While agriculture makes up a larger percentage of Montana‘a economy industry overall is significantly lower as is the GDP per capita.

In terms of total GDP for each, Agriculture really doesn’t explain the discrepancy. What does is mostly transportation and heavy use of coal (44% vs 7%). Montana for example see a lot of out of state trucks cross the state. America is often praised for its rail network but it’s underutilized when you consider our geography and transportation needs.

Ireland is not some PO box tax haven, despite what folks like to say on HN... ;-)

We have significant pharma and agri-business, plus we make microchips (see Intel, Pfizer etc...)

      Pop  Land Cows/Herd Sheep
  ie 5.1M  7Mha 7.4M 2.5M 5.9M
  MT 1.1M 38Mha 2.2M 1.3M 200k
          without calves^

The intuition most people have is that CO2 is a people scale problem and Ireland has 5x Montana’s population, even though Montana is 5x more spacious. The cows are significant — methane is awful.

[edit: my Irish cow number was out by a factor of 3x, and I’ve separated cows-inc-calves from the adult herd.]

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-clsjp/cro...

They have a large amount of cattle. Just read an article in the FT (would link but on mobile) about Ireland looking to cull 200k cows to help balance their methane emissions.

“They have a large amount of cattle”

Montana has more cows than humans.

Montana has more than twice as many cows as humans.

1.1 million residents and 2.6 million head of cattle.

Ireland has 7.5m head of cattle[1] - I think that qualifies as a "large amount". And you can add 6m head of sheep and over 1.5m pigs. About 40% of Ireland's CO2 equivalent comes from agriculture/agri-business.

[1] https://ahdb.org.uk/news/irish-cattle-and-sheep-numbers-rise...

Montana doesn’t even make the top ten list for cattle per state. It’s more that there is nobody there except cattle, not that it is a cattle dense location. That’s only about 3% of the cows in the US.

That's nothing.

At New Zealand's peak we had a 22 sheep to person ratio, now it's still 5 to 1.

New Zealand also has >2 to 1 ratio of cows to humans as well.

Ireland has over four and a half times the population of Montana, so the intensity should be higher.

My very-ignorant assumption would have been peat, although IDK whether the emissions are counted at source or burning site (also, IDK whether peat is still an export...)

The last peat burning plant shut down two years ago[1]. Industrial peat harvesting has ceased. A limited amount of peat harvesting is allowed but just at traditional/family/domestic scales.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lough_Ree_Power_Station

Montana also has a lot of coal reserves, which I assume they use some in state for power production. It’s funny because Montana also has lots of hydro.

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