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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

#191

Post by crucialfelix »

quotemstr wrote: post #53
voldacar wrote: post #48

It feels like we are headed into a new medieval era of sumptuary laws and moral decrees promulgated by a decentralized international clerical-academic class. I don't think I like it very much

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…

OTOH 50% of emissions are due to the richest 1%. [1]

They are price insensitive for the most part. Their yachts and personal airplanes don't make a dent in their billions of assets.

I still support carbon taxes as a source of investment for sustainable transition.

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...

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

#192

Post by sdenton4 »

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?

(just to drop the links again... You can deploy untold millions of solar panels while waiting for a nuclear plant to come online, and they will be considerably cheaper as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy )

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

#193

Post by ayngg »

manquer wrote: post #137
ayngg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguments that meat take an excessive amount of resources are disingenuous because those resources cannot simply be translated to other uses, examples being that the water use example many tout uses rainwater would fall anyways, that livestock will eventually urinate meaning it isn't actually lost, and land used for livestock is mostly non arable land and therefore cant be used for producing crops anyways. Also there…

Some counter points: 1. The number is around 14.5% in direct global emissions [1] according to the FAO, I cannot find any reputable source saying anywhere as low as 2.5% 2. Beef has roughly ten times more carbon footprint as Chicken. Beef has by far the highest CO2 equivalent per KG of product among any food [2] at 99.8Kg CO2 Equivalent, lamb / mutton comes a distant second at around 40Kg and Pork / Poultry are aroun…

Keep in mind, what I wrote essentially was condensed version of what was said in the video, which itself was in response to several other videos so the points made are specifically targeting other claims, there is a lot of nuance in delivery that I discarded for the sake of brevity, for example, but point 1 was addressing a claim another popular video discussing domestic (American) emissions of livestock agriculture. Some of your points are discussed in the video but I was really just giving cliff notes to the original responder.

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

#194

Post by m0zg »

hncurious wrote: post #117
adrianN wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Revealed preferences don't match that rhetoric. - People are not migrating North in droves. They are not preparing in any way. - Nuclear energy, the only realistic solution to climate change, is not being supported. It's actually being retired early in many cases and replaced with coal of all things. - Property prices on the coastline are going up. President Obama, who has access to the best information and experts,…

Also: because climate has gotten a bit warmer, _a lot_ fewer people freeze to death.

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

#195

Post by axiolite »

wumpus wrote: post #185
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.

It was an identification of a sub-group, not an insult. But as far as I can recall, it has always been fair game to criticize public figures for their espoused opinions and public actions.

Being offended by everything, and making it everyone else's fault, is the part that is new these days.

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

#196

Post by robbrown451 »

tobtoh wrote: post #79

As someone in the Gen X demographic who has never smoked, I've watched the anti-smoking campaigns and shift in attitudes towards smoking with interest - particularly how resistant smokers were to initially giving up smoking. I feel like eating meat is going to be my generations equivalent of smoking. Intellectually, I agree that eating meat is bad for the environment, cruel to animals (esp industrial farming) etc ...…

I'm with you on your second paragraph, except that I can totally see myself giving up meat if there was a substitute that tasted just as good.

Fur coats is something that seems to be almost entirely given up, but part of it is that fake fur is quite good.

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

#197

Post by anovikov »

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…

No contradiction. It's 28x more heat trapping and turning into CO2, it becomes 1x.

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

#198

Post by mongol »

dnautics wrote: post #189
tasty_freeze wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Could it be something like how it is distributed in the atmosphere?

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

#199

Post by bserge »

adrianN wrote: post #183
allturtles wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Wouldn't be a bad idea tbh. Raise the tax on meat from industrial deathcamps but not from homegrown.

Yes, I realize it's still death and pollution but the scale of modern farms is simply mindboggling.

Grow and slaughter your own pigs and hens and then decide if you still want to do it for the meat (or the money from selling the meat).

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

#200

Post by adrianN »

wumpus wrote: post #187
adrianN wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that people don't act rationally outside of theories taught in Economics 101 classrooms is commonly known. I don't mean it in a derogatory way, being irrational is just part of human nature.
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