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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

except for the fact that cows exist within the carbon cycle.

And the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases is that we feed them oil that we dig from the ground.

Cows are extremely convenient scapegoat but truthfully they exist in a closed system that we keep feeding carbon into. Methane itself is very very harmful but lives almost no time and atmosphere experts all agree on this.

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It is my understanding that land use (eg cutting down rain forest, draining wetlands) for pasture and soy are a big contributor to the carbon footprint of meat.

Could be true, in the countries I am most faniliar with (UK, Sweden) there’s no rainforest and a good chunk of the land used for rearing cattle couldn’t be used for farming Soy.

Where does the feed come from? What other uses could the land have? Here in Germany drained wetlands are a huge contributor to GHG emissions.

Largely grass (and oil based feed, as mentioned)

There is rainforest in the UK... it's just temperate rainforest, not tropical.

(And it is as under threat as tropical - https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/ha... )

Yes, and there was a lot more and could be again.

Yes, absolutely!

The cattle doesn't have to _be_ on the same wasted land that is used to feed it. Soy is imported from other countries to feed cattle in the UK (around 2M tons of soy per year[0]).

It is a common and convenient misconception that raising cattle is not bad for the environment because it is raised on non-arable land -- the cattle still gets fed imported soy.

0: https://www.efeca.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/UK-RT-on-Su...

But now we're returning to the assumption that everything thats fit for cows is fit for human edible crops.

Cows aren't often eating the "human grade" crops, to my understanding.

I'm not making an argument that we shouldn't scale back cattle-rearing, if anything my personal preference would be to eliminate all oil-based feed and see how sustainable we can make things; I just think we've got a real convenient scapegoat here when the largest polluter is definitely car dependence as it's adding carbon to the carbon cycle.

Cows arent a scapegoat, they're just a significant part of the puzzle. It's nuts to think only co2 or only methane is the issue. They're both issues

But they exist in a closed system.

They don't emit CO2 or Methane in any way that can run out of control unless we pour carbon into the system externally (by digging up oil and feeding it to them for example, or transporting them using cars that run on fossil fuels, or heating them with fossil fuels).

They are a scapegoat, because they can't by themselves emit anything that can't be captured and returned and reused by cattle for essentially perpetuity, yet we as humans are doing things that are not sustainable and contribute to tipping the scales.

Thanks for flagging me btw.

FWIW I don't think your points are totally invalid, and it is not me (and maybe not GP) that is flagging you.

That aside, your primary argument if I understand it right is that there is no (or at least diminished) cost to cattle raising because the emitted carbon came from food that was sequestered as part of a cycle.

The problem I would call attention to is that the planet's carbon capacity is simultaneously nerfed by the land required for feed. About 40% [0] of arable crop land is used to feed cattle, a process which faces huge caloric efficiency losses (consider that the caloric output of meat cannot be higher than the input).

It is pretty well understood at this stage that meat consumption is a gigantic contributor to climate change. Anyway, I _also_ agree about cars. We don't need to rely on whataboutism here: we have a common objective. And, by the way, I still eat meat, but much much less than I used to, so I don't mean any of this as an attack on meat eaters.

0: https://fefac.eu/newsroom/news/a-few-facts-about-livestock-a...

> They don't emit CO2 or Methane in any way that can run out of control unless we pour carbon into the system externally (by digging up oil and feeding it to them for example, or transporting them using cars that run on fossil fuels, or heating them with fossil fuels).

The economic incentives combined with political corruption will continue FF extraction. The root problems are human nature and political in origin and require leadership to pull back on grain subsidies, tax CAFO-grown meat, tax fossil fuels (none of this "carbon offsets" in Africa fraud), and pass on the real future decline in GDP from climate change-driven floods, famines, and wars.

The cows aren't the scapegoat (no pun intended), it's the human entitlement of expecting cheap hamburgers without paying for the externalities of using the sky as a sewer.

Cows eat "cow corn" (yellow dent corn). 5% of every bit of America is used to grow the stuff; only a tiny fraction is used to grow sweet corn. That's an absurd amount of overproduction thanks to subsidies. It gets inefficiently turned into ethanol and steaks. Instead, in most areas, that land could be used to grow healthier human crops like quinoa, lentils, or sorghum. Commercial sorghum is grown about 2 blocks from where I live.

Then the solution is fairly simple. Make the soy more costly than a lesser emission heavy alternative. Cows only need imported soy in order to be marginally cheaper.

Where land is converted there can be an increase. But for an existing farm with stable herd numbers the emission produced around (Methane > Carbon Dioxide > Grass > Methane > etc.).

When you drain wetlands they emit GHGs essentially forever.

What's "funny" is that rain forest land being destroyed for pastures has terrible yield. We would be better off paying the people using them to keep the forest intact.

There's industrial beef and there's grass fed beef. Grass feed one preserves pastures which are amazing and rich ecosystems, much more valuable than soya monocultures.

Now what is the proportion of grass fed beef from the total beef? Does it move the needle? Here, for the USA it's just about 1% (one percent, yes) according to https://extension.sdstate.edu/grass-fed-beef-market-share-gr...

Methane also traps at least 100 times as much heat as CO2. It causes significant near-term warming, and cutting methane gives fast climate benefits. Cutting down on methane emmisions can have considerable more effect on global warming over the next 20 years, compared to CO2 (which we also have to reduce), Atmosphere experts all agree on this.

And "[cows] exist in a closed system" assumes we’re not expanding herds, clearing forests, or using fossil inputs.

> Methane itself is very very harmful but lives almost no time and atmosphere

https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-methane-is-sho...

Long term damage is reasoned by looking at consequences of the short term effects (such as the death of plants and livestock due to extremes).

The beef with beef is that meat production, and espcially from cows, is extremely energy inefficient. You need 15-20kgs of plants for 1kg of beef, when we could just eat the plants directly and avoid everything needed to seed, grow, reap and haul all that feeding mass, which massively contributes to global warming and consumes ludicrous amounts of water.

Everything you mentioned exists in a cycle, its not “lost” energy, its just converted and returned.

Just like water, the consumption of water doesn’t mean it is eliminated from the water cycle.

Saying "its all part of a cycle" misses the point. Yes, energy and water aren’t destroyed but using 15-20x more plant matter, energy, and water for 1kg of beef compared to plant based food is still incredibly wasteful. Nature’s cycles have limits, and industrial meat production pushes them far beyond whats sustainable.

Inefficiency doesn't particularly matter if it's a closed system, it only effects how much we can get out of a thing.

If we need 100% efficiency yields because humans are so numerous that there can no longer by any inefficiency in the conversion of sun rays into energy fit for human consumption: then you have a point.

But we're not there, so the inefficiency of food production is not particularly relevant.

Where you and I will agree is that the scale of meat production is unsustainable, as evidenced by the fact that we are feeding cows fucking oil from the ground. If we could sustain a population of cattle and enough energy for human population then I don't see a problem, but that is obviously significantly lower than the scale we currently see cattle-rearing.

Saying "inefficiency only matters if we reach system collapse" is like saying you don’t need brakes until you’re already flying off the cliff.

How can inefficiency lead to systemic collapse in a way that cannot be reversed inside of a year?

We're not talking about contributing to the carbon cycle anymore, we're talking specifically about converting rays from the sun into human consumable matter.

I think you've come into a reasoned conversation with an idealised take that meat consumption is inherently stupid, and this doesn't not necessarily make sense because inefficiency is totally acceptable as long as the needs of the system are met.

People use python for making websites, after all, one of the least efficient languages available. People move to higher efficiency languages when the system begins to demand it.

You have heard climate scientists talk about tipping points, right? Methane is short lived but extremely potent. Its warming effect can push systems (ice melt, permafrost thaw, ocean circulation) past irreversible thresholds. Deforestation to support meat production isn’t easily undone. Regrowing forests takes decades to centuries.

Ok, so you're continuing to push the topic in a direction of methane and not inefficiency as we were discussing.

I think I'll conclude the conversation here as it's clear you're just conversing from an ideological point of view.

Methane is a problem, as discussed elsewhere in the thread, but the largest issue continues to be the fact we're digging up oil and feeding it to herds, you've not convinced me that this is not the largest issue, or not a larger issue than: air travel, cars etc;

Enjoy your ad hominems

By that logic, no human activities are problematic since everything needed to sustain them comes from nature and eventually goes back to it. That's ignoring the tons of wastes generated by the beef industry, the ravaged ecosystems to make room for pastures and farms, the fuel needed to build and power the machinery to manage it all: from tractors to cargo boats to factories to trucks...

The issue is that all that carbon and other mineral resources we dug up to power all of this ends up rapidly upsetting the balance the Earth settled in over the last million years. My point is that we could eat the same amount of calories by generating much less waste and needing much less space and energy.

If we weren't digging carbon out of the ground then a lot of human activities would indeed not be a problem.

I'm sure we can make things uninhabitable without doing that, but, largely when talking about climate change: it's the mere fact that we're unleashing significant amounts of stored energy into a closed loop ecosystem that cannot handle it.

I think we're saying the same thing here.

This is overly simplified to the point of being wrong.

Water usage spent on watering crops used to then raise livestock (eg. alfalfa, soy) account for some 70% or more of total water usage in regions where this type of farming is done.

In arid regions (MENA, Saudi Arabia, Iran, California etc), a lot of that water is aquifer water. Aquifers take centuries, sometimes millennia to fill up.

The consequences of emptying these are rivers drying up, native flora dying off, topsoil being eroded and so on. In some cases, Tehran and Mexico City being prime examples, the depletion is sufficient to cause structural changes in the ground leading to literal collapses of land.

Growing food with an order of magnitude less inefficiencies means an order of magnitude less of these consequences.

Soy in particular is a huge water consumer, however that is often the proposed alternative to meat consumption.

I'm not sure how you wouldn't agree with me that cows are a scapegoat based on this fact alone.

Because you can eat the soy directly and remove the additional land loss, water use, soil compaction, acidification, storage cost, transport cost, cooling cost, butchering cost, shipping cost etc. that comes with introducing another link in the food chain.

Feed conversion ratio for beef is something like 1:6-10, and that's ignoring everything above.

Because the numbers are an order of magnitude different? [0]

Water needed to produce 4 oz of soy beans: 64 gallons

Water needed to produce 4 oz of beef: 463 gallons

Your points about the carbon cycle are well-taken but you're ignoring the trophic pyramid for some reason. [1] Or at least I find it hard to believe you could know about one without knowing about the other.

[0] https://watercalculator.org/water-footprint-of-food-guide/

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

To be fair, ruminants can digest the parts of the plant that we can’t digest. A small number of ruminants are part of good agriculture. Of course we’re ridiculously beyond „a small number“

If we just ended agricultural subsidies that artificially lower the price of meat (and fossil fuel subsidies) while taxing fossil fuels at the point of extraction to correct for their negative externalities, this would solve a lot.

Politically untenable, though.

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