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Comment by jplrssn | Hacker News Reader

Beef production (as well as meat produced from sheep and goats) is one of the most environmentally costly ways of producing food, because of methane emissions [0]. I don't imagine substituting bugs for grass would make much of a difference there.

I myself would quite happily try a bug-derived Beyond Meat burger or similar.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221214-what-is-the-lowe...

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I thought that this methane emission was easily counteracted by some food additive, was it seaweed?

EDIT: yes, it was:

https://www.qub.ac.uk/Research/case-studies/seaweed-suppleme...

Good point. But there are questions around the long-term safety of seaweed additives. And how many farmers would pay for seaweed while methane is free to emit?

Well, you can make it mandatory, the same way some countries require cattle vaccination, and other things. In the end it should be more acceptable to general public than just forbidding them to eat beef. And the seaweed shouldn't be too expensive, after all it is "weed".

And with more research they possibly could isolate that one tiny chemical substance from seaweed that does all the work here, and synthesize it, so we can produce it cheaply?

>easily counteracted

No, it's not easy.

This requires specific kinds of seaweeds to be effective, the species grows only in warm places(so not close to where we tend to keep cows) and it is not grown in large quantities yet, nor is the impact of doing that known.

We are quite some time away from doing this large scale.

All of these "beef is bad for the environment" articles are written by vegan activists, seventh day adventists, or other extremist groups who have a political agenda against meat.

The amount of methane emissions from all beef agriculture today is within a factor of like 3 of the natural methane emissions from American bison prior to colonization of the Americas.

All of these analyses completely ignore the base rate of methane emissions in the absence of cattle, whether from preexisting natural ruminants, from e.g. the fungal decomposition of plant matter that would have occurred on grasslands anyway, or from "meat substitutes".

Even if the methane emission was 10x the absurdly inflated figures that anti-meat extremists try to claim, it would still be overwhelmingly worth it for me to consume it for the health benefits. It would be better for society to spend Manhattan-Project-plus-NASA levels of our GDP on methane catalysis/capture technology, if it were actually necessary, than to stop eating ruminant meat.

The methane emissions from farming do not matter in the slightest anyway. They can only release what they already absorbed from their feed. We should stop adding more ghg to the atmosphere that hasn't been there for millions of years, allowing the carbon cycle to continue with that ghg currently in atmosphere does no harm.

The people crying about this are simply serving an agenda of people who want to force the average citizen to eat bugs to make literal pennies more in profit for them and their family. It's absurd. We won't do anything about climate change by stopping agriculture, it will simply ruin food supply.

But if the cows were not there, what they eat would not be cultivated in dire circumstances. Instead that place would sequester carbon. And even if it would not be allowed to sequester it would largely be emitted as co2 and not methane which is a lot less potent greenhouse gas.

None of that matters. Plants only sequester carbon that was already in the atmosphere and it goes right back into it when they die. Methane breaks down to CO2 in a number of months/years and has no effect on geologic timescales.

The only solution to climate change is to stop introducing carbon that was sequestered hundreds of millions of years ago. Championing causes like 'you need to eat the bugs' is not a productive use of time and does nothing to change the status quo in the end.

Ah yes, the famously extremist BBC and their vegan agenda.

Even ignoring the environmental issues, high consumption of red meat has been linked to a number of adverse health outcomes. Processed meats even more so. [0] But I imagine you'd call Harvard Medical School extremist too?

[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-bee...

If you think the BBC is apolitical, you are frankly a fool. The author of that piece is a specialist in churning out low-information articles on various progressive concerns for low-information readers. https://muckrack.com/isabelle-gerretsen/portfolio

> high consumption of red meat has been linked to a number of adverse health outcomes

The epistemic value of current nutrition "science" is less than garbage. It's one of the worst-replicating fields that claims to be scientific.

Did you even read the article you linked, or did you just do something like google "red meat bad" and copy/paste the first link? If you actually read it, you should be saying to yourself, "huh, sounds like they don't really have very strong evidence".

>All of these "beef is bad for the environment" articles are written by vegan activists, seventh day adventists, or other extremist groups who have a political agenda against meat.

[Citation needed]

Most soil for where nowadays cattle grace farm is not anaerobic so not sure how that could work with methane emissions. Also about 90 percent of the food that cattle eat doesn't come from there but from south America where conditions are clearly different. Animal farming is incredibly inefficiënt and the health claims are dubious at best.

> [Citation needed]

Why do you think posting something like this is a valuable use of anyone's time? What are you expecting here, an article that exactly restates my claim? If such an article existed, would you even read it or take it into account? There are only two possibilities here, neither of them good:

1. You are looking for an "authoritative" source making exactly the claim I'm making, so you can outsource your entire thought process to someone else. Besides being extremely risky, this also precludes you from ever absorbing a novel or semi-novel conclusion that isn't widely known enough to have an NYT article written about it or something.

2. You are arguing in bad faith, trying to waste my time finding a "citation" that inevitably you would find some excuse to ignore in any case.

The proper response here is to say "huh, that's interesting, maybe I should check on that claim next time I see something from the USDA, or maybe I could google it for 5 seconds".

Lucky for you, here is a convenient source so you can turn your brain off. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/9/9/251

You broke the site guidelines extremely badly with this post. We ban accounts that do this repeatedly, and we've already had to warn you many times. I don't want to ban you, but if you keep doing this, we'll eventually have to.

Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules going forward? We'd appreciate it.

(Btw, the parent comment also broke the site guidelines, which ask people to omit internet tropes such as "citation needed", and I've replied to them too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300759. But they didn't get aggressive the way your comment did, and that's a big difference.)

There if a third option: Namely, that extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence. If you cannot supply it you are simply doing unsubstantiated talk.

Furthermore I know a number of people who study Biogeomorphology who fall in none of the categories you listed and also have posted similar articles thereby disproving your claim.

>Lucky for you, here is a convenient source so you can turn your brain off. https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/9/9/251

That is not proof that all beef = bad for environment articles are written by vegan activists, seventh day adventists, or other extremist groups who have a political agenda against meat.

Just that the seventh-day advertist church has had influence on diet. Which is a much much smaller claim.

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