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Live stock farming is ~27% of methane production, where fossil fuels are ~33% [1]. Eating an eco friendly diet is great on the individual level, but we should n

Live stock farming is ~27% of methane production, where fossil fuels are ~33% [1]. Eating an eco friendly diet is great on the individual level, but we should not underscore the drastic need for decisive action on an institutional level. [1] https://whatsyourimpact.org/greenhouse-gases/methane-emissions https://whatsyourimpact.org/greenhouse-gases/methane-emissio...

h0l0cube 7y ago
One way to achieve both action on an institutional level, and reduce the consumption of meat, would be to capture the 'environmental costs' in the price. This could be orchestrated by government intervention, or on a less-effective scale, it could be a market differentiation for certain beef brands to include climate-change mitigation as part of their strategy and charge a premium.
- FailMore 7y ago
  Yes 100%. The world needs Environmental Economics. This would make it financially worth while for huge investment to flow into environmentally friendly products.
rjf72 7y ago
And to emphasize here, those figures are likely both inflated if this article's hypothesis is correct. That being that primarily natural factors are driving the surge. It's because of this, and practical reality, that I don't understand why scrubbing is not considered a bigger part of the discussion on these topics. For instance one new technological solution [1] proposes an atmospheric removal of CO2 that could cost as little as $94 per ton. Our current CO2 emissions due to fossil fuels are about 37 billion tons a year. That's $3.5 trillion, 4% of the global GDP, to remove 100% of annual emission output. And an even better aspect of these solutions is that they also scale indefinitely. For instance you could not only reduce our footprint to 0 but even reduced the concentration of various gases in the sky, such as CO2, if that was deemed desirable. The same technology (or an inverse) also has direct application to future geoengineering efforts on other planets. Ultimately this is technology that there does not seem to be any physical barrier against - in other words we can develop it. And now seems like a great time to develop it. The current mitigation ideas of cutting back on x seem to be all we consider, yet they have immense barriers to execution. By contrast technological solutions would be something that would require no sacrifice and simultaneously also greatly expand our technology and developmental capabilities. And most importantly they all seem tantalizingly close. Yet in spite of all of this there seems to be near 0 discussion of these options. This is something I find confusing. [1] - http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/new-method-reduces-the-cost-of-scrubbing-co2-from-the-atmosphere/article/524596 http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/ne...
- jefflombardjr 7y ago
  More important than carbon scrubbing, we need energy innovation and to make environmental damage illegal and stop allowing companies to profit off of it. See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20013495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20013495
  - rjf72 7y ago
    I think the argument that you posed in your other post to be challenged in one particular way. You claim that there is no time to deploy carbon scrubbing. I immediately see two major issues with this argument. The first is that greenhouse effects are not irreversible. As you remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, you change the heat equilibrium. Even feedback effects can be mitigated both by temperature change which reduces the feedback as well as by simply managing with their (causative) consequences - which tend to be an increase the gas emissions, by removing those emissions. In other words human social change does have a limited timeline of viability, but scrubbing does not. The second is that everything is relative to other options. The first major paper (to my knowledge) regarding imminent danger from climate change was published some 40 years ago. The first 'alarming' governmental report and subsequent media involvement was 30 years ago. Since then there's been effectively 0 change by reliance on social systems, treaties, agreements, and so on. Nearly all of the progress we have made is because natural gas became cheaper than coal, which would have happened with or without these agreements. I don't see this inability to effect social change in any way changing in the future. So by claiming there's not enough time to enact scrubbing (which by the earlier point is not necessarily a reasonable argument to begin with) you're suggesting that other viable alternatives can be enacted more rapidly - and I also see no reason to believe this to be accurate.
    - jefflombardjr 7y ago
      > The first is that greenhouse effects are not irreversible. The UN clearly says there is a point of no return, could you please clarify what you are trying to say? https://www.un.org/press/en/2018/gaef3500.doc.htm https://www.un.org/press/en/2018/gaef3500.doc.htm edit: better report https://www.egu.eu/news/428/deadline-for-climate-action-act-strongly-before-2035-to-keep-warming-below-2c/ https://www.egu.eu/news/428/deadline-for-climate-action-act-... And what do you think about this type of scrubbing? https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/the-search-for-a-perfect-plant-that-could-stop-climate-change/92396 https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/the-search-for-a-perfect-pl...
sametmax 7y ago
A good part of fossil fuel is used to farm those stock, farm the food for those stock and move around / process / package both.
scythe 7y ago
Whatever the current numbers are, they must be wrong. The subject article, after all, says that methane is way higher than estimated. But, if I’m looking for errors, it seems more likely to me that we’d mis-estimate methane leaking out of the ground during fracking or from landfills than methane coming out of cows or manure storage facilities. I mean, you can measure a cow. You can put it in a room and measure the methane. But how do you measure the ground? It seems like the kind of thing you can mess up.
fit2rule 7y ago
We stop feeding cows corn, and feed them seaweed instead. Trouble is, how do we get the seaweed to the cows? Turn corn into biofuel for the purpose?

h0l0cube 7y ago

One way to achieve both action on an institutional level, and reduce the consumption of meat, would be to capture the 'environmental costs' in the price. This could be orchestrated by government intervention, or on a less-effective scale, it could be a market differentiation for certain beef brands to include climate-change mitigation as part of their strategy and charge a premium.

FailMore 7y ago
Yes 100%. The world needs Environmental Economics. This would make it financially worth while for huge investment to flow into environmentally friendly products.

rjf72 7y ago

And to emphasize here, those figures are likely both inflated if this article's hypothesis is correct. That being that primarily natural factors are driving the surge. It's because of this, and practical reality, that I don't understand why scrubbing is not considered a bigger part of the discussion on these topics. For instance one new technological solution [1] proposes an atmospheric removal of CO2 that could cost as little as $94 per ton. Our current CO2 emissions due to fossil fuels are about 37 billion tons a year. That's $3.5 trillion, 4% of the global GDP, to remove 100% of annual emission output. And an even better aspect of these solutions is that they also scale indefinitely. For instance you could not only reduce our footprint to 0 but even reduced the concentration of various gases in the sky, such as CO2, if that was deemed desirable. The same technology (or an inverse) also has direct application to future geoengineering efforts on other planets. Ultimately this is technology that there does not seem to be any physical barrier against - in other words we can develop it. And now seems like a great time to develop it. The current mitigation ideas of cutting back on x seem to be all we consider, yet they have immense barriers to execution. By contrast technological solutions would be something that would require no sacrifice and simultaneously also greatly expand our technology and developmental capabilities. And most importantly they all seem tantalizingly close. Yet in spite of all of this there seems to be near 0 discussion of these options. This is something I find confusing. [1] - http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/new-method-reduces-the-cost-of-scrubbing-co2-from-the-atmosphere/article/524596 http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/ne...

jefflombardjr 7y ago
More important than carbon scrubbing, we need energy innovation and to make environmental damage illegal and stop allowing companies to profit off of it. See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20013495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20013495
- rjf72 7y ago
  I think the argument that you posed in your other post to be challenged in one particular way. You claim that there is no time to deploy carbon scrubbing. I immediately see two major issues with this argument. The first is that greenhouse effects are not irreversible. As you remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, you change the heat equilibrium. Even feedback effects can be mitigated both by temperature change which reduces the feedback as well as by simply managing with their (causative) consequences - which tend to be an increase the gas emissions, by removing those emissions. In other words human social change does have a limited timeline of viability, but scrubbing does not. The second is that everything is relative to other options. The first major paper (to my knowledge) regarding imminent danger from climate change was published some 40 years ago. The first 'alarming' governmental report and subsequent media involvement was 30 years ago. Since then there's been effectively 0 change by reliance on social systems, treaties, agreements, and so on. Nearly all of the progress we have made is because natural gas became cheaper than coal, which would have happened with or without these agreements. I don't see this inability to effect social change in any way changing in the future. So by claiming there's not enough time to enact scrubbing (which by the earlier point is not necessarily a reasonable argument to begin with) you're suggesting that other viable alternatives can be enacted more rapidly - and I also see no reason to believe this to be accurate.
  - jefflombardjr 7y ago
    > The first is that greenhouse effects are not irreversible. The UN clearly says there is a point of no return, could you please clarify what you are trying to say? https://www.un.org/press/en/2018/gaef3500.doc.htm https://www.un.org/press/en/2018/gaef3500.doc.htm edit: better report https://www.egu.eu/news/428/deadline-for-climate-action-act-strongly-before-2035-to-keep-warming-below-2c/ https://www.egu.eu/news/428/deadline-for-climate-action-act-... And what do you think about this type of scrubbing? https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/the-search-for-a-perfect-plant-that-could-stop-climate-change/92396 https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/the-search-for-a-perfect-pl...

sametmax 7y ago

A good part of fossil fuel is used to farm those stock, farm the food for those stock and move around / process / package both.

scythe 7y ago

Whatever the current numbers are, they must be wrong. The subject article, after all, says that methane is way higher than estimated. But, if I’m looking for errors, it seems more likely to me that we’d mis-estimate methane leaking out of the ground during fracking or from landfills than methane coming out of cows or manure storage facilities. I mean, you can measure a cow. You can put it in a room and measure the methane. But how do you measure the ground? It seems like the kind of thing you can mess up.

fit2rule 7y ago

We stop feeding cows corn, and feed them seaweed instead. Trouble is, how do we get the seaweed to the cows? Turn corn into biofuel for the purpose?