Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 9:21 AM UTC

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...

[deleted]

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

#252

Post by herbst » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 9:29 AM UTC

legulere wrote: post #132

emkoemko wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes that already exists, last time i checked governments don't like it when people eat other people;

Or depending on where you live horses, cats and dogs.

Welcome to Switzerland, the only place you can have all of those.

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

#253

Post by amanaplanacanal » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 9:38 AM UTC

wumpus wrote: post #43

GhettoComputers wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it could be as easy as banning cows and using buffalo for better ruminant yields.

To be fair, that has nothing to do with the current economy, where almost all cows go to feed lots to be fed human food (corn) to double their weight.

Don’t they feed the whole corn plant though, not just the grain? I could be totally wrong about this.

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

#254

Post by goldforever » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 9:44 AM UTC

beckman466 wrote: post #2

this is a half-baked ‘solution‘ that just makes eating meat a luxury. a thing only for the rich. it’ll be like crimes that are punished by a fine - they just become the ‘fee’ that allows the propertied class to do whatever they want. beef is deadly for humanity because of destructive water and land usage (Vice had a great video showing the Amazon deforestation due to beef production). edit: my point is that the prope…

Dumb.

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

#255

Post by herbst » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 9:46 AM UTC

How about making meat production more ethical and practical?

I live surrounded by cows, literally. The area has no good soil, so every farmer here has like 13 to whatever cows (13 is the magical number of cows you can have without studying agriculture or so, assuming you live in a relevant area). All these cows spend most of the time outside, in the summer they are in the Alps, spring and fall they chill in the fields and go to 'sleep' in their stall and winter they are mostly indoors, except on sunny days.

They eat ONLY what is growing around here in the more or less useless soil. Even in the winter.

90% of the farmers here are at least organic. So synthetic fertilizer & power food are out of the question too.

Many small farmers do what one or two people can and help each other on the busy days. And it works.

Literally every reason I've read is this thread about why cow meat is so bad does not apply as far as I can tell to the meat I eat.

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

#256

Post by lm28469 » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 9:47 AM UTC

kybernetyk wrote: post #91

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…

Yes, we absolutely need the government to tell people what they’re allowed to eat.

That's where we'll be in 50-100 years if we want to have a future that doesn't suck too much, and not just about what you eat. We're definitely living in the golden age of consumerism in every aspects: energy, food, travel, electronic gadgets, &c. We're producing and consuming so much useless shit and well aware that we're heading for disaster.

We're either going to be limited by natural resources, climate issues or our own actions to limit ourself to avoid #1 and #2.

There is just no way around it, you can't keep on extracting more and more ressources from a closed system, you can't keep polluting more and more in a closed system, you can't target an exponential growth in a closed system.

Companies don't give a shit, because their sole purpose is to not care about these issues. That's how you get companies like apple shitting unrepairable products every 6 months, but it's ok because their offices are carbon neutral, right ?

Countries don't give a shit, because GDP is king and energy = GDP, https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/correlation-...

So it's a game of chicken, everyone knows about the problem, they all know the solutions, but no one is really taking action, because that would be a massive paradigm shift in virtually every aspect of our economy

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

#257

Post by kilotaras » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 9:53 AM UTC

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...

> To make it into the richest 1 percent globally, all you need is an income of around $34,000 [0]

That group is still pretty price sensitive. Maybe not enough to drop beef completely, but enough to at least partially move to pork or chicken.

[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/27/were-all-the-1-percent/

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

#258

Post by adrianN » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 9:58 AM UTC

mrjangles wrote: post #243

beachy wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The goal posts have moved significantly since the early nineties. Back then we had a realistic chance of limiting warming to well below one degree. We're now far past the point of no return for that. Today we talk about approaching the point of no return for 2° warming. Chances are good that we'll still talk about approaching the point of no return in another decade, only this time we'll talk about 3°.

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

#259

Post by johnydays » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 10:06 AM UTC

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…

Most plant monocrops are for feedstock. You can do regenerative agriculture with only plants. Feeding animals plant calories is terribly inneficient (~10-15% depending on the estimate)

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

#260

Post by johnydays » Fri, Oct 01, 2021, 10:10 AM UTC

Doji wrote: post #111

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…

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…

Grass grows more vigorously but also consumes more nutrients when regularly pruned, other plants also "grow more vigorously" e.g get replanted when harvested by humans. This does not seem unique to grass or animal feeding.

Even if it was, grass-fed beef is about 1% of the supply in the US. It has also been shown that grass-fed beef on average causes more environmental degradation than conventionally fed beef, due to the deforestation required to create grazing areas