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Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

economist.com

101–110 of 344 posts

Re: Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

#101
post #85

> The simplest way to cut beef output is for people to eat other animals instead, or become vegetarians. That’s like, in 1900, saying “the simplest way to prevent road deaths is for everyone to drive slower.” That’s not simple at all - that’s an intractable group behavior problem. What you really need is for the government to come along and put up speed limits. Most people will push those rules, a few will flout them…

Remember to apply Gell-Man Amnesia[1] to all of The Economist's writings. It's self-parody at this point, or Mad Magazine for PPE[2] nerds.

1. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy,_politics_and_econo...

Re: Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

#102
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than being headed into a new medieval era because climate change caused civilization to collapse.

Climate change already caused civilization to collapse 20 years ago according to this article published in 1990: https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 >" UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would…

You misread the article. Climate change will cause those problems, but not by the year 2000. Carbon emissions have very long term effects that are hard to reverse. Twenty years ago we had already emitted enough CO2 to cause dramatic changes over the next couple of generations. That's why all IPCC scenarios with tolerable warming nowadays include magical atmospheric carbon scrubbing technology.

Re: Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

#103
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hysterical nonsense.

How many of your assumptions about food logistics do you expect to survive the collapse of the gulf stream?

I’ve seen that movie.

Re: Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

#104
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than being headed into a new medieval era because climate change caused civilization to collapse.

Sorry, can’t hear you over the sounds of the ice age they prophesied in the 1970s.

Global cooling was never a majority opinion among climate scientists. It existed almost exclusively in popsci magazines.

Re: Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

#105
post #46
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I doing get your point. Fungible means interchangeable. The average consumer doesn’t think twice about whether their electricity comes from coal or solar as long as the lights turn on when they flip the switch. If you try to give someone soy beans when they ordered a steak they’re going to care quite a lot. Food isn’t fungible for the average consumer. That has absolutely nothing to do with it being a commodi…

Soybeans are a fungible commodity. That means that it's fungible with other soybeans. Corn is a fungible commodity. Pork bellies are a fungible commodity. It's a mystery to me as to why you think I said soybeans and steak are the same.

A different and perhaps clearer way of putting what you're both getting at is flavor is not fungible. But more importantly when we're talking about changes in food production is sustenance is fungible. (This of course ignores a whole bunch of nuance such as flavor not encompassing the experience of eating and mere sustenance not including important nutritional discussion on diet)

It's important to determine which of those two things you're discussing and trying to maintain parity with in attempts to improve on the infrastructure we have built, both have very different and unique problems.

Re: Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

#106
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... The EPA site shows transportation and electricity as the main contributions to carbon. The grains are not the issue, the subsidies in the US are so strong that they are not a real factor. There is so much excess food produced they export it to other countries for instance. https://modernfarmer.com/2019/01/congress-finally-passed-a-n... https://abcnews.go…

Transportation and cooling of meat in particular is nothing compared to the land area of North America and South America combined that we devote to growing crops to feed livestock. https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture

Is it negligible that transportation of fresh meat, its cooling or freezing are not at all factors in carbon production? I would like to see how its calculated.

Re: Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

#108

I disagree, its a percentage of roughly 10% according to the EPA in 2019. Here are the EPA statistics. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... I am all for replacing them with native buffalo, but this is overemphasis on minute percentages, this information presented is much too technology based and not practical, it relies on assumptions about plant based foods and lab meat (farming crops is t…

10% is a smaller part of total emissions than transportation or electricity generation, but it's still pretty significant chunk. If we can reduce emissions related to beef somehow that would be a step forward.

I'm skeptical of that Dearman engine article. It doesn't really explain where the energy comes from. We already know how to do carbon neutral energy and transportation: use solar/wind/hydroelectric/nuclear and battery-electric vehicles. It's just that the infrastructure is expensive and takes time to build. It's also not treated as an urgent priority in many countries. Some because they can't afford it, and some (i.e. the United States) our political system makes it very easy for a minority to block things.

Re: Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Prices, not arbitrary bans, are the correct way to incorporate externalities in the costs of a product. People are far too happy to promote ad-hoc bans of all sorts of arbitrary things without creating any kind of general incentive structure that would automatically optimize the metrics of interest. The result is malinvestment, economic inefficiency, and global poverty. The problem is that the externality is s…

What bothers me most isn't the malinvestment (though that sucks) or a faliure to calculate costs and benefits, but the fact that they're moralizing zealots. A zealot can justify anything in the name of The Common Good (naturally, they are the ones who decide what The Common Good is)

Taxing and stopping externalities has nothing to do with the common good. It's very much about individual rights. You have no right to pollute in my backyard (including the air I breathe), just as you have no right to punch me in the face or give me brain damage with lead petrol usage. It's a justified use of government force to stop you if for some reason you think you are entitled to violate my rights.

  "moralizing zealots"
But I agree there's an elitism and power game aspect to it that I find revolting. Emotionally, I really want to put my middle finger up and take the compete opposite position just to spite the virtue signalling snobs. Rationally, though, it seems to be a real problem that we need to solve as a species, irrespective of how self-righteous and smug some of the activists are.

Re: Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

#110

I generally like the economist but this article is poor. The topic of deforestation is only whispered in at the end, almost a footnote. However, burning the Amazon for farmland to produce beef in Brazil should be part of the headline.

I thought the modern view was that the Amazon as the "lungs of the planet" was supposed to be totally bullshit and we could burn the whole thing down and be fine - but what we can't do is screw up the oceans, and it's already too late and we're all effectively doomed (walking ghost status) but we just don't realize it yet. I'm paraphrasing here.

It is easy to do carbon studies on trees, but not on grasslands and other carbon sinks. The carbon content of the world will not be the destroyer as much as the effect of human nature, the world has been very different at different times, but extinction isn't likely.

To screw up the oceans, there must be a standard, but there isn't. There are many problems such as lower native populations, corals, invasive species, stronger weather patterns, microplastics, but I am not sure what it is to "screw up the oceans".

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