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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

#241

Post by MagnumOpus »

adrianN wrote: post #233
Jensson wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we continued to build nuclear rather than retire them then we wouldn't have any issues today except cars and air. What do you mean "not most cost efficient", there are no other options we know of today. They are all based on future tech we don't have, like being able to store wind or solar etc. Do you really want to bet the future of earth on the chance that we find a solution to those problems before climate chan…

We have the technology to store wind and solar: batteries for very short durations, electrolysis (optionally followed by a Sabatier reaction to make Methane) for longer duration. Both are quite expensive, but so is nuclear. I don't know which option is cheaper overall.

Nuclear is massively cheaper as long as you build it in scale 20 reactors at a time, like France did in the 1970s or China has been doing for the last decade.

The capital cost of any battery, flywheel or pumped storage is higher than the $30-50/MWh energy of a nuclear plant, without even having built any PV or wind generation.

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

#242

Post by quantum_magpie »

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…

For the most part, the CO2 absorption bands are already saturated -- increasing CO2 concentration has much less effect on transmission spectrum than that for methane.

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

#243

Post by mrjangles »

beachy wrote: post #131
mrjangles wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That quote doesn't support your hot take at all. > if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000 The trend was not reversed, so now we wait to see if the prediction comes true. Given the low lying geography of some nations (esp pacific islands) I would bet money that this does indeed come true in the future. Nowhere in the quote does it say, as you claim, that civilization would collapse in 2000.

I'm sorry but this is such an poor attempt to nit pick the obviously false claims made by the UN back then. It's been 20 years since they said we would be past the point of no return and almost no one today believes we are past the point of no return.

Furthermore, those unspecific weasel words they were using back then to try and wriggle out of any predicitons they made back then, they are still using today when they say we will be past the point of no return in 10 years from now. Their wording was clearly meant to trick people into believing there would be mass destruction and climate refugees in 10 years, and people believed it back then, just like people today believe we will be seeing the same in 10 years from now.

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

#244

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#245

Post by amanaplanacanal »

gremloni wrote: post #228
tuatoru wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moralizing can work, though. Recall slavery, child labor, feminism, equal rights, welfare (,healthcare outside the USA). Plant based meat substitutes will improve (via the production learning curve and competition) if there is enough demand. (According to this article that attracted much comment[1] a few days ago, though, artificial meat is a non-starter.) 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28621288

Modern feminism is a cancer and a societal regression.

Not sure what you mean here by “modern feminism”. The idea that people should be treated as individuals regardless of their gender seems like a huge societal win.

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

#246

Post by amanaplanacanal »

adrianN wrote: post #201
sdenton4 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 )

I think the steelman pro-nuclear argument is that if we seriously wanted to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear, we'd have to build so many reactors that they become faster and cheaper to build. They also don't require expensive seasonal storage like solar panels and wind would in most of the world or expensive HVDC lines from always-sunny areas of the world to the areas requiring seasonal storage. So it might be p…

I would expect that companies that sell electricity are the experts in this field, and they don’t appear to be jumping on the nuclear bandwagon. I don’t have anything against nuclear, personally.

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

#247

Post by mrjangles »

wumpus wrote: post #146
tuatoru wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Michael Crichton, the author who has researchers overwhelmed with lust for research grants as the evil people in his novels.

If you see this is an unrealistic you should talk to someone (anyone) who works in academia.

Actually I work in academia so I'll start the ball rolling by telling you this isn't unrealistic.

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

#248

Post by herbst »

randomperson_24 wrote: post #213
Doji wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a certain amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and a certain amount of carbon in the ground. When you burn oil, you take carbon from the ground and introduce it into the atmosphere. This increases the total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere. When you grow plants, you take carbon out of the atmosphere. When you eat it, you release it back into the atmosphere. The total amount of carbon resident in th…

You also have to feed the cows, which requires food. And by normal concensus only 10% of energy is transferred to the next species. And producing food for cows causes more damage than making same food for humans. (Deforestation, Soy plants, etc emitting more carbon)

This is only true for mass grown meat. A typical Swiss cow spends their summer in die Alps and their winters eating grass from the very same fields.

Most popular meat labels here would not even allow buying external food, if not absolutely necessary.

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

#249

Post by amanaplanacanal »

crucialfelix wrote: post #191
quotemstr wrote: post #53

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…

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...

I bet most of the folks reading this are in the richest 1%. I don’t know about you, but I am definitely price sensitive.

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

#250

Post by amanaplanacanal »

theshrike79 wrote: post #231
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 ...…

The difference between stopping smoking and stopping eating meat is that it's perfectly possible to eat meat in moderation than it is to smoke just a few. I haven't eaten any 4-legged animals with the exception of bacon and the odd burger here and there (a chicken burger just doesn't cut it) for 3-4 years. I mostly eat fish and poultry and have been accidentally vegan a number of days. I'd be completely fine paying 2…

Looking at global fishing stocks, I don’t think they would survive if most of the world went that direction.
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