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markstos

Animal agriculture is a key driver of climate change: https://sentientmedia.org/how-does-livestock-affect-climate-...

Along with the high price, that's one more reason to not buy it.

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Beef is particularly egregious.

Poultry and even pork are about an order of magnitude more efficient.

It's interesting how long the market was wildly subsidized to hide the true cost of beef.

In a recent Ezra Klein podcast about data center backlash he mentions being vegetarian and says something along the lines of "being anti data center because of water consumption is hypocritical if people eat meat"

Eh, that's pretty specious reasoning. If I start a business selling space water cannons that anyone can use to spray water at the ISS as it flies by. If these cannons are consuming whole farms worth of water in use and just blasting it out into space, you can still be mad at the water waste because you think that water could be put to better uses like growing animals for hot dogs and chicken nuggets, and not fleeting entertainment for people to have interplanetary water fights.

Respectfully, that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Skipping the analogy and going straight for the point then, it is possible to be against something because you view it to be a waste of a resource, but to be for something else that someone else views as a waste of a resource. "Waste of a resource" is relative to what you think that resource should be used for.

There’s research now that high density rotational grazing does the opposite.

Link?

You have to cut out feedlot finishing to get those benefits on a macro scale, which would drastically reduce beef output. It's the same problem organic has, but maybe even worse since 99%? of cows are feedlot-finished.

Which isn't really a negative to me, but I think people should be honest about what is actually necessary to get the benefits of this form of beef production.

A person eating one single hamburger uses more water than an entire year of LLM use for the same person. Yet we are very concerned about water use in data centers, but nobody cares about McDonalds.

Respectfully, I would like to see a source or at least the math for that.

Here it is:

[The water footprint of a single hamburger is *significantly higher than* that of using a large language model (LLM) for a year. For example, the water used for one hamburger is primarily due to the irrigation of cattle feed crops, while data centers like xAI's Colossus 2 consume much less water overall.](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=A+person+eating+one+single+hamburg...)

States that it's significantly higher but the breakdown shows a 660gal vs 1000gal (Single Burger vs 1yr LLM Usage) water usage...

Item Water Footprint (Gallons)

Single Hamburger Approximately 660 gallons

Year of LLM Usage Approximately 1,000 gallons

Results also contain an important disclaimer: "Auto-generated based on listed sources. May contain inaccuracies."

You be the judge ;)

All economic activity is a key driver to climate change. Why single out one thing? You're clearly imposing a self-serving moral judgement on other people.

> All economic activity is a key driver to climate change

what a pointless thought-terminating cliché

> You're clearly imposing a self-serving moral judgement on other people.

Just because you are the wrong side of morality does not mean they are incorrect

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