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Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions

science.org

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Re: Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions

#31

Post by audunw »

throwapine wrote: post #22
notheyarent wrote: post #16

The seaweed pellets they add to cows food that eliminated most of their emissions must be the most ingenious climate policy and breakthrough. Before these were invented we were looking at a situation where meat consumption (or at least beef) may have to be phased out. The rapid development of battery technology must be a close second. I remember as a kid in the 1990s it was difficult to get good rechargeable batterie…

Emission is only one of many problems with animal agriculture. Others include: - Land use (over-grazing, deforestation for pastures and feed crops, most of crops grown are for farmed animals, etc.) - Water use - Inefficient feed -> food conversion - Nutrient runoff leading to eutrophication - Increasing risk of zoonotic diseases and antibiotic resistance - Bioaccumulation (of PFAS, pesticides, heavy metals, microplas…

It should be said that, whether these are really problems depends heavily on how animal agriculture is done.

In many cases animals graze on marginal land that can’t be used to grow human food directly. In these cases the alternative ways to get the same protein production could imply cutting down land in other countries to grow protein rich crops for humans.

Water use doesn’t have to be high. In the US it’s a product of industrialised animal agriculture, bad subsidies and free water rights that farmers are forced to use unless they want to use those rights.

Animals can convert food that humans can’t eat into food that we can eat. In some cases they eat the part of the plant that we don’t.

EU has prohibited all routine use of antibiotics in farming. Other countries should follow.

And there are upsides of animal agriculture as well. They are often a critical to do regenerative agriculture. In the best case they eat grass from land that we can’t grow stuff on, eat parts of the plants that we can’t eat ourselves, and give us high quality fertiliser that greatly improves soil quality. There’s a reason farm animals have been with us for millennia.

That said we should absolutely eliminate all heavily industrialised animal agriculture, which means we have to reduce meat consumption. It would be interesting to know how much meat we could eat if all meat production was sustainable.

Re: Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions

#33

Post by ZeroGravitas »

sien wrote: post #7

Let's have a look at France's emissions : https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/france Somehow, from 1973 they went from 10t C02 per capita to 4.8 t per capita in 2022. Their GDP at the same went from 264 Bn to ~2779 Bn https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/FRA/fra... Whatever mysterious method of C02 reduction they used should be investigated.

If you add UK, Germany and Denmark to the graph, they all look broadly similar, so I'm guessing "EU style regulations".

Re: Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions

#34

Post by nxobject »

If you're interested in how the authors did the analysis, the fun details – the data sources and analytic/econometric methods – are in the supplementary materials (link at end of article).

Ironically enough, I assume that if they hadn't managed to publish a higher-level article in Science, the actual paper (hypothetically published elsewhere) would have been the 116 (+/- epsilon) pages of detailed measures and methods, result displays, and sensitivity analyses/robustness checks.

If I read the article correctly, they systematically detect when emissions policies are adopted by looking at sudden increases/"breaks" in "stringency indices" of a country's emissions policies (within a particular industrial sector.) The machine learning comes in their automated procedure for identifying these breaks (which is well out of my expertise – my longitudinal analysis training is in good old fashioned multilevel modelling and structural equation modelling.) They then do the standard trick of using a binary before/after "treament" indicator variable. Once that is done, though, it looks like you can choose your method of choice for detecting significant changes in emissions pre-post intervention.

Re: Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions

#35

Post by throwapine »

audunw wrote: post #31
throwapine wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emission is only one of many problems with animal agriculture. Others include: - Land use (over-grazing, deforestation for pastures and feed crops, most of crops grown are for farmed animals, etc.) - Water use - Inefficient feed -> food conversion - Nutrient runoff leading to eutrophication - Increasing risk of zoonotic diseases and antibiotic resistance - Bioaccumulation (of PFAS, pesticides, heavy metals, microplas…

It should be said that, whether these are really problems depends heavily on how animal agriculture is done. In many cases animals graze on marginal land that can’t be used to grow human food directly. In these cases the alternative ways to get the same protein production could imply cutting down land in other countries to grow protein rich crops for humans. Water use doesn’t have to be high. In the US it’s a product…

Agree broadly with what you're saying, especially ending industrial animal agriculture and reducing meat consumption.

As you implied, continuing current levels of meat consumption for 8 billion humans, even with regenerative techniques, will still result in substantial increases in land/water use and other negative impacts. We should be sceptical of regenerative grazing claims as well, as they are often pushed by the industry, without sufficient evidence.

I'm hesitant to say just because we've been farming animals for thousands of years is good justification for continuing it (at least at this scale on non-marginal lands). After all, it did lead directly to the problems we face today, as people clung on to traditional methods without thinking even as they migrated and new technologies/knowledge became available. For example, European colonists brought hard-hoofed cows, sheep, goats, horses, and deer to Australia, despite the country's native fauna all being soft-footed, leading to soil compaction and many resultant ecological issues. Now almost 50% of Australia's land surface area is used for red meat farming, and it is the leading cause of deforestation in many parts of the country.

On plant parts that humans can't eat, perhaps it's fine to let wild animals eat them, further improving biodiversity (after all we need a healthy biosphere of many species providing ecosystem services for long-term human survival), or we can compost or process into other products. I'd be looking into stock-free organic farming and precision fermentation as new promising approaches as well.

Re: Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions

#36

Post by ZeroGravitas »

dmagee wrote: post #11
dmagee wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/france#how-much-el...

One of the interesting things demonstrated there is that you really don't want to be generating most of your electricity from imported oil during a global oil shock.

Re: Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions

#37

Post by aaron695 »

notheyarent wrote: post #16

The seaweed pellets they add to cows food that eliminated most of their emissions must be the most ingenious climate policy and breakthrough. Before these were invented we were looking at a situation where meat consumption (or at least beef) may have to be phased out. The rapid development of battery technology must be a close second. I remember as a kid in the 1990s it was difficult to get good rechargeable batterie…

[dead]

Re: Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions

#38

Post by engineer_22 »

sien wrote: post #7

Let's have a look at France's emissions : https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/france Somehow, from 1973 they went from 10t C02 per capita to 4.8 t per capita in 2022. Their GDP at the same went from 264 Bn to ~2779 Bn https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/FRA/fra... Whatever mysterious method of C02 reduction they used should be investigated.

Nukes

Re: Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions

#39

Post by ahartmetz »

dmagee wrote: post #8
sien wrote: post #7

Let's have a look at France's emissions : https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/france Somehow, from 1973 they went from 10t C02 per capita to 4.8 t per capita in 2022. Their GDP at the same went from 264 Bn to ~2779 Bn https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/FRA/fra... Whatever mysterious method of C02 reduction they used should be investigated.

Nuclear power.

Can't be everything. Electrical power is like 20-35% or so of total power used in most countries. I just checked some statistics of the Umweltbundesamt, the German ~environment protection office. The electrical fraction is suprisingly low! Though it's supposed to increase because most renewable energy production is electric.

My guess is nuclear energy, more efficient cars, better insulated houses, and less heavy industry.

Re: Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions

#40

Post by gmuslera »

The turtle will catch Zeno any day now. Those savings in decades are not in the same order than all the fossil carbon that was extracted each single year on them. In fact, neither is with how much we increased the extraction, for most of the single years of that period.

And I am talking about fossil carbon, something deeply buried for millions of years, and added to the cycle, not circulating differently the carbon that already was in it. Most of that new carbon was extracted in less than a century and burned, staying for a couple of centuries more.

And speaking of recycling carbon, it is not even in the order of carbon emitted by positive feedback loops, what is emitted by permafrost thawing, what was emitted just last year in Canada fires is all orders over the effort of decades.

There is a big elephant in the room. While it is there, all effort will be mostly meaningless.

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