Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

esafak·

Lamb had the highest carbon footprint of all animals last I checked. Now I took another look and beef is back on top!

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha...

View on HN

I think it depends on if you include shipping from Australia to North America in the footprint calculation.

It doesn't, because shipping 1 tonne of food by sea costs about 0.02kg of CO2, and it's already part of the calculation (under "transportation").

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/emission-factors-food-tra...

... per kilometer ... and it's about 8000 km from Australia to New York

Wouldn't this depend on location and source? I used to live in Scotland, where sheep graze on grass in fields that don't really take away space for vegetables (unless you want to survive on potatoes and cabbage), and they're local. So I assumed they're not that bad.

Most of the sheep grazing land in the UK isn't natural - natural trees and vegetation were cleared to make way for more sheep. It's had a large impact on the biodiversity here.

https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2020/05/11/biodiversity-impact-...

Sheep grazing also strips the land bare of deep and complex vegetation upending whole ecosystems. Perhaps in a futile or misguided gesture I try to keep my consumption of lamb to an occasional treat rather than a regular thing.

It probably depends highly on what you feed them...

Ruminants inherently have large methane output that drives up climate impact. There are only very early efforts to reduce methane output through diet change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com