181–190 of 302 posts
Not eating cows or drinking cow milk reduces your carbon emissions from cows 100%. You actually don't need technology or a start up to solve this issue!
This isn't true unless your substitute is to eat nothing.
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eating less meat is a good idea, but why go to zero? how about eat beef up to once a week or smth like that? i think making a point more extreme than necessary motivates people to disagree with you
Why not go to zero? It's a bit like saying: "Reducing the amount of fossil fuel is a good idea, but why go to zero?"
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eating less meat is a good idea, but why go to zero? how about eat beef up to once a week or smth like that? i think making a point more extreme than necessary motivates people to disagree with you
So you say that it's more extreme to eat beans than to raise animals by feeding them beans to then slaughter them to eat them? I've read somewhere recently that you need 16kcal of feed to produce 1kcal worth of chicken. That's a 16 times loss in efficiency that requires a lot of plants to feed to the chicken that could have been consumed by humans.
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The wikipedia page you link to clearly shows that enteric fermentation accounts for 16% vs Coal and Oil at 19%. There is also another 36% anthropogenically produced methane in that chart so I think that easily accounts for the 3x increase without pinning it on cows. Interestingly rice cultivation contributes a whopping 12%.
It's like we got shot by a firing squad of 6 people and we're arguing about which one of them had the blank.
A common misconception which I frequently see when this topic arises is the failure to distinguish carbon cycles and one-way carbon emission. You exhale carbon dioxide. However, this carbon dioxide comes from the carbon in the food you eat, and the food you eat obtained it from the atmosphere. Thus, it's a cycle. As a system (ignoring food transportation, deforestation, etc.) it's effectively carbon neutral. By contr…
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Then just buy American beef, which is produced without any deforestation.
Is that sarcasm? Pretty much the entire midwest was forest before colonization. Now take a look at Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri...they're basically one big farm criscrossed by roads, highways, sprinkled with small spinneys of trees, and dotted with cities. Just load up Google Earth, satellite mode, turn off all labels, and zoom out. It's astonishing.
There are actually a lot of researchers who believe that the Native peoples were keeping the forests back via controlled burns, since grassland is better for hunting and agriculture, and the forests have regrown substantially _since_ most of the indigenous people died via disease.
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I wasn't aware that fertilizers are commonly produced from fossil fuels. That's definitely a problem! I'll add some additional caveats myself. In certain areas of the world (South America comes to mind) cattle production is driving deforestation. Food transportation and farming equipment generally consumes fossil fuels. I'm sure we can think of more!
I don't think it's fair to treat deforestation as a local issue. Cattle production drives deforestation - whether it's in Brazil or the USA or China, doesn't matter, because we share the atmosphere. Three-quarters [of global deforestation] is driven by agriculture. Beef production is responsible for 41% of deforestation [...] https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-drivers-deforestation
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Is that sarcasm? Pretty much the entire midwest was forest before colonization. Now take a look at Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri...they're basically one big farm criscrossed by roads, highways, sprinkled with small spinneys of trees, and dotted with cities. Just load up Google Earth, satellite mode, turn off all labels, and zoom out. It's astonishing.
This just isn't true. The Eastern half the US was heavily deforested by colonization, but that's really not true in the midwest. It was prarie. There are actually a lot of researchers who believe that the Native peoples were keeping the forests back via controlled burns, since grassland is better for hunting and agriculture, and the forests have regrown substantially _since_ most of the indigenous people died via dis…