271–280 of 344 posts
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The ironic thing is that speed limits reduce revenues collected from gas tax via better fuel efficiency from driving slower.
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
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--- original: Vast majority of the swiss beef supply is conventionally fed, with imported grain/soya crops. I was wrong, correction below
Actually 90% of the food is produced IN the country. Instead of soya they use mostly local corn for mass production. https://schweizerfleisch.ch/herkunft/facts-figures-schweizer...
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Actually 90% of the food is produced IN the country. Instead of soya they use mostly local corn for mass production. https://schweizerfleisch.ch/herkunft/facts-figures-schweizer...
I stand corrected, I was looking for official sources but my german is quite bad. Thank you!
Beef is delicious. Meat is delicious. We have to figure out how to replace that before we get rid of cattle farms.
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A decrease of carbon would many lower crop yields, could I sue for my lowered crop yields? The issue of a carbon tax is basically that politicians are only too happy to give more taxes, and would support carbon taxes regardless of it being good or bad.
Not sure about the potential for a private entity to sue another private entity for those damages - but sure, to the extent that beef production creates positive externalities, the value of those externalities should also be priced in. Though most of the warming potential from cattle farming comes from methane, not carbon dioxide, so I'd be surprised if it actually had a nonnegligible impact on crop yields, let alone…
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…
Here's a quote from the Economist article citing two recent scientific studies: "It takes 33 plant calories to produce one calorie of beef."
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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.cyclewor…
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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…
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…
"plant monocrops" -- like all the soy that is planted to grow so it can be fed to the cows?