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

economist.com

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

#181

Post by adrianN »

throwawaysea wrote: post #172
adrianN wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally it would be an accurate reflection of all externalities in the final price, but how about we do not try to prevent tackling one of the externalities with whataboutism on other externalities.

I think it is unfair to call this “whataboutism”. If there isn’t a fair accounting applied to all activities and externalities, then what you’ll see is that those with political power will regulate only activities that aren’t important to them, while what they value personally is allowed unabated. Put another way, unequal application will lead to oppression.

The political system is not perfect, it has never been. Climate change is threat to our standard of living, we need to address it quickly. The only tool we have is a flawed political system where people seek power and use it to oppress other people. There is no time to first fix politics and then try to reduce carbon emissions.

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

#182

Post by adrianN »

wumpus wrote: post #179
adrianN wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't act rationally, that should come as a surprise to no one. Look at the number of people who are overweight, sedentary and/or smoke even though they don't want to die of cancer or heart disease.

Alternately, you could consider all of the people who don't think nuclear is the solution to climate change. Are they irrational?

Probably they are. Although I'm not convinced that nuclear is the cheapest solution to climate change.

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

#183

Post by adrianN »

allturtles wrote: post #169
adrianN wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, some meat production is obviously a sustainable part of agriculture. There will always be some areas where the soil is too poor for anything but grazing and you'll always have some waste that you can feed to chicken, pigs, and ruminants. But these sustainable levels of animal husbandry are so far removed from the industrialized meat production that we're currently doing that they might as well be zero. Recall t…

> Recall that just a generation or two ago meat was something you ate once a week if you lived in a fairly developed country. What do you mean by a fairly developed country? McDonald's was selling hamburgers for 15 cents in 1955 (roughly the same as the price of a loaf of bread at the grocery store). Catholics eating fish on Friday (instead of meat) I believe goes back many generations. See also this article about hi…

Huh, interesting. I was extrapolating from my parents and grandparents who definitely didn't eat meat every day and certainly not half a pound of meat each day. They didn't live in the US though. My grandparents still had to raise all the meat for the family themselves.

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

#184

Post by kart23 »

elil17 wrote: 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…

did speed limits really make things better though? germany has the autobahn and sections with no speed limit, yet their roadways are much safer than the US.

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

#185

Post by wumpus »

axiolite wrote: post #177

Coal is a fossil fuel. Returning ancient carbon to the atmosphere. Cattle is a bio-fuel. The methane/carbon they release was captured by the grains and grasses shortly before the cattle consumed it, and will continue growing after they've consumed it. Cattle should be the trendy and expensive thing among the outspoken, virtue-signaling greens. It's plant-based. Contains all-natural ingredients. Isn't made in a lab/on…

> virtue-signaling greens

Fun how insulting people is OK these days.

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

#186

Post by axiolite »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #175
axiolite wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A mid-sized conventional gasoline car is more fuel efficient at 55MPH than at 45MPH. Pumping losses work that way. With improved aerodynamics, you could get that even higher. https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10312

Incredible. Thanks for sharing. I had no idea. What is “pumping loss “?

> What is “pumping loss “?

Unlike older scientific topics that have esoteric terminology, usually from the Latin, this one is pretty straight forward... It is the energy lost due to pumping. Basically, the overhead of keeping an engine running no matter how much distance of roadway you cover, but more on point, the extra losses due to running an engine outside of its peak power/performance range:

https://www.cycleworld.com/2015/10/12/ask-kevin-what-is-pump...

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

#187

Post by wumpus »

adrianN wrote: post #182
wumpus wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternately, you could consider all of the people who don't think nuclear is the solution to climate change. Are they irrational?

Probably they are. Although I'm not convinced that nuclear is the cheapest solution to climate change.

Cool. I wonder how you think calling people names advances a civil discussion? Good that you're open-minded on the topic.

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

#189

Post by dnautics »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #51
fidgetspinner wrote: post #18

Hm, this seems to be missing the point that plant monocrops destroy the soil and are not nearly as efficient a source of food for the human body as fresh animal meat. Regenerative agriculture, which ideally requires both animal and plant cultivation, would be a better path forward if it could scale. If I remember correctly the papers that originally thought cattle were a big contributor to global warming turned out t…

That article seems highly motivated to marginalize the effects of livestock. Quoting a section: While methane is 28-times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, methane’s lifespan is just a decade, while CO2 — known as a long-life pollutant — remains in the atmosphere for 1000 years. After ten years, methane is broken down in a process called hydroxyl oxidation into CO2, entering a carbon cycle which sees the gas ab…

I feel like I'm being gaslighted. In advanced physical chemistry we took IR spectroscopy of methane and CO2 and CO2 definitely had much, much more absorption than methane on account of the dipole difference between Carbon and oxygen (IR absorption depends on stretching modes between atoms of different electronegativity, carbon is very close to methane). At the time, it was explained to us young chemistry students that methane was more potent GHG because it lasted in the air longer (CO2 is scrubbed by plants).

Am I missing something? How can methane be a more potent GHG if it has lower IR absorption AND a shorter lifespan?

Edit: found spectra here (not the data that i took, obviously):

https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/methane_...

CO2 has a big fat band that blows out the absorption at 4.5 um in a region untouched by water (and one that is overwhelmed by water); methane has two spiky bands both of which are partially occluded by water.

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