7 ms·

Pet ownership is an overlooked driver of carbon emissions

38 points by prostoalex 7y ago

phnofive 7y ago
> “This analysis does not mean that dog and cat ownership should be curtailed for environmental reasons, but neither should we view it as an unalloyed good” Money well spent.
- kasey_junk 7y ago
  But it’s fairly easy to see how you might tax pets more to cover the externalities better right?
  - aeternum 7y ago
    Why only look at carbon though? We could tax non-pet owners as they have statistically higher cortisol levels and high-blood pressure vs. pet owners. Non-dog owners are also more likely to get insufficient exercise. Children of non-pet households are more likely to have asthma and allergies. On the flip side, pet owners are more likely to get parasites, cat-scratch disease, or toxo. Taxes for everyone!
    - the8472 7y ago
      That's a false equivalence. If bad health is a concern you handle that through a direct "tax" (e.g. increased health insurance premiums based on general lifestyle/health assessments), not through such indirect measures as a non-pet tax. On the other hand the cost of pets (carbon footprint, other environmental damage) is directly related to the pets or their food, thus taxes would be directly levied on those aspects.
    - ip26 7y ago
      If there's a meaningful link, I expect one day health insurance companies will give you a break on your premiums if you won a dog.
  - phnofive 7y ago
    Not at all.
thedance 7y ago
Cats also kill billions of birds every year, way more than any number of windmills or skyscrapers ever did. And they don’t do it for food, either. It’s just because cats are jerks.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  Most cats I know stay indoors but I had no idea they killed so many birds.
  - fiblye 7y ago
    Most cats I know stay indoors as well. Most of the cats I don't know stay outdoors. Walking 10 minutes down any quiet street usually results in me seeing at least a cat or two. Cats are very common if you're looking for them.
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      I only noticed them when I lived in apartments. Now that I live in a neighborhood I don't see them unless it's in a house. I live in Florida so things might be different here.
- the8472 7y ago
  Should cat owners be held legally liable for the animal cruelty committed by their pets?
  - dx87 7y ago
    I think cats should lose their special pet status if they aren't kept indoors or restricted to an owner's yard. There were a couple of "outdoor cats" in my neighborhood a few years ago, and they'll kill birds in my yard, attack my dogs, leave dead animals on my porch, etc. There was nothing I could do about it though, because cats are considered pets whether or not they actually have an owner. Animal control said all you can do is try to humanely catch them, then take them to a shelter, you can't leave out poison like you can with mice and rats.
pdonis 7y ago
"Owners can also feed their pets lower-quality proteins" Huh? Why should I risk my pet's health?
- throwawaywrench 7y ago
  I wouldnt assume that "quality protein" has any correlation with being healthy. >Owners can also feed their pets lower-quality proteins, as dogs and cats can happily chow on meat byproducts, such as marrow, kidneys and spleen, left from processing meat for humans. Us humans don't choose what parts of animals we eat based on any kind of health-centric metric. It just based on what parts we deem distasteful to eat. So the bits that are deemed undesirable/low quality are not necessarily any worse for the consumer. Some amount of organ meat may even be beneficial to health. Arguably meat eating humans would do well to include some amount of kidney, liver, marrow etc in place of some of the muscle tissue that we tend to eat a lot of.
  - melq 7y ago
    I think you’re totally right in your assumption re: quality == healthy. However, I really doubt the vague assertion of this article that implies there’s a large population of pets being fed ‘high quality’ food. There are many problems with modern industrial agriculture and mass produced food, but efficiency is not one of them. There is very little waste in these operations and those kidneys, livers, and marrow bones are already being put to good use, whether its for human consumption or animal. I won’t pretend to know what proportion of pets are fed standard, ‘low quality’ food (ie. food made from corn, grain, and what most would consider as low quality meats and byproducts) but if I had to guess I would wager its >90%.
    - mrpopo 7y ago
      > There are many problems with modern industrial agriculture and mass produced food, but efficiency is not one of them. There is very little waste in these operations and those kidneys, livers, and marrow bones are already being put to good use, whether its for human consumption or animal. Maybe modern industrial agriculture is efficient, but modern food consumption isn't. Over a third of all available food is wasted in the USA. How much of that food waste would be OK to be re-processed as pet food?
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I feel these kind of articles are, if not "dumb", then just pointless. You know what else is a big driver of carbon emissions: humans. We would certainly have a lot lower carbon emissions if half of us voluntarily committed suicide, but that doesn't seem like a realistic proposal. Also, the lack of analysis in this article doesn't help. There is nothing in this article, for example, that says how much of the meat protein that goes into pet food would essentially be waste from meat production intended for humans.
- the8472 7y ago
  If that protein is waste it could be fed to fish farms or something, thus upcycled to human food. As for suicide, that probably has a lower utilitarian balance than producing fewer pets.
  - Razengan 7y ago
    Of course, because suicide means one less person spending money. If everyone could just leave this shitshow on their own terms, whenever they wanted to, how would the people who want to tax pets get their money? And the majority of pets worldwide are not “produced”, they’re adopted from the pool of animals who already exist.
- dkdk8283 7y ago
  I love my pet and would do anything for them. At times my pet has kept me alive. If I’m poor does this mean I shouldn’t be able to get help from a pet because people want it to be taxed? I’m getting pretty tired of all these empty and worthless sensationalist articles.
  - the8472 7y ago
    Pets have real costs associated with them (as this article highlights) and to my knowledge they're not considered basic needs by any stretch. So why should you be exempt from paying those costs, externalties included?
jjtheblunt 7y ago
Interesting assertion, less shallow than the article's premise, is that Guns, Germs, and Steel (and other research) asserts pet ownership significantly increases human immune response. Does that mean more humans consuming more cattle, or less illness-driven carbon emissions? It's super complicated to assess all the alternatives, I guess.
Razengan 7y ago
I honestly cannot believe some of the things I read here. In a recent post, airlines are burning thousands of gallons of fuels flying empty planes in order to keep their “slots” and how organizations literally destroy goods to keep their “use it or lose it” budgets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22511488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22511488 Then there’s other news about how tons of food is just thrown away every day, or how presidential candidates are blowing millions of dollars on political ads just for the heck of it. Some people actually defend that kind of blatant waste, in the name of Mammon, but you want to tax pets? It’s bizarre how a small part of the population is so out of touch and so anti-human. In any case, why is it about taxing pets and not just taxing pet food?
strictnein 7y ago
"Overlooked" except for the myriad of other articles that keep harping on this. https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/4/16094674/cats-dogs-meat-diet-greenhouse-gases-climate-change https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/4/16094674/cats-dogs-meat-di... https://www.dailywire.com/news/environmentalists-save-world-dump-your-pets-emily-zanotti https://www.dailywire.com/news/environmentalists-save-world-... https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/the-truth-about-cats-and-dogs-environmental-impact https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/the-truth-about-cats-and-...
dsmonk 7y ago
If we stop making humans, wouldn't it automatically reduce the demand for pets? Think about it. That infact may just be the truly viewed as an unalloyed good.
robocat 7y ago
Get rid of the pets and we spend our money on other CO2 producing goods or activities like travel. The best generic metric for how much CO2 you produce is simply the amount you spend, which is highly correlated with how much you earn. Fixing that is hard...
forkexec 7y ago
People living are a driver of carbon emissions. Should we defenestrate ourselves to commercial non-journalism and feel guilty and insecure about not immediately committing suicide?

38 points by prostoalex 7y ago

> “This analysis does not mean that dog and cat ownership should be curtailed for environmental reasons, but neither should we view it as an unalloyed good” Money well spent.

kasey_junk 7y ago
But it’s fairly easy to see how you might tax pets more to cover the externalities better right?
- aeternum 7y ago
  Why only look at carbon though? We could tax non-pet owners as they have statistically higher cortisol levels and high-blood pressure vs. pet owners. Non-dog owners are also more likely to get insufficient exercise. Children of non-pet households are more likely to have asthma and allergies. On the flip side, pet owners are more likely to get parasites, cat-scratch disease, or toxo. Taxes for everyone!
  - the8472 7y ago
    That's a false equivalence. If bad health is a concern you handle that through a direct "tax" (e.g. increased health insurance premiums based on general lifestyle/health assessments), not through such indirect measures as a non-pet tax. On the other hand the cost of pets (carbon footprint, other environmental damage) is directly related to the pets or their food, thus taxes would be directly levied on those aspects.
  - ip26 7y ago
    If there's a meaningful link, I expect one day health insurance companies will give you a break on your premiums if you won a dog.
- phnofive 7y ago
  Not at all.

thedance 7y ago

Cats also kill billions of birds every year, way more than any number of windmills or skyscrapers ever did. And they don’t do it for food, either. It’s just because cats are jerks.

giancarlostoro 7y ago
Most cats I know stay indoors but I had no idea they killed so many birds.
- fiblye 7y ago
  Most cats I know stay indoors as well. Most of the cats I don't know stay outdoors. Walking 10 minutes down any quiet street usually results in me seeing at least a cat or two. Cats are very common if you're looking for them.
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    I only noticed them when I lived in apartments. Now that I live in a neighborhood I don't see them unless it's in a house. I live in Florida so things might be different here.
the8472 7y ago
Should cat owners be held legally liable for the animal cruelty committed by their pets?
- dx87 7y ago
  I think cats should lose their special pet status if they aren't kept indoors or restricted to an owner's yard. There were a couple of "outdoor cats" in my neighborhood a few years ago, and they'll kill birds in my yard, attack my dogs, leave dead animals on my porch, etc. There was nothing I could do about it though, because cats are considered pets whether or not they actually have an owner. Animal control said all you can do is try to humanely catch them, then take them to a shelter, you can't leave out poison like you can with mice and rats.

pdonis 7y ago

"Owners can also feed their pets lower-quality proteins" Huh? Why should I risk my pet's health?

throwawaywrench 7y ago
I wouldnt assume that "quality protein" has any correlation with being healthy. >Owners can also feed their pets lower-quality proteins, as dogs and cats can happily chow on meat byproducts, such as marrow, kidneys and spleen, left from processing meat for humans. Us humans don't choose what parts of animals we eat based on any kind of health-centric metric. It just based on what parts we deem distasteful to eat. So the bits that are deemed undesirable/low quality are not necessarily any worse for the consumer. Some amount of organ meat may even be beneficial to health. Arguably meat eating humans would do well to include some amount of kidney, liver, marrow etc in place of some of the muscle tissue that we tend to eat a lot of.
- melq 7y ago
  I think you’re totally right in your assumption re: quality == healthy. However, I really doubt the vague assertion of this article that implies there’s a large population of pets being fed ‘high quality’ food. There are many problems with modern industrial agriculture and mass produced food, but efficiency is not one of them. There is very little waste in these operations and those kidneys, livers, and marrow bones are already being put to good use, whether its for human consumption or animal. I won’t pretend to know what proportion of pets are fed standard, ‘low quality’ food (ie. food made from corn, grain, and what most would consider as low quality meats and byproducts) but if I had to guess I would wager its >90%.
  - mrpopo 7y ago
    > There are many problems with modern industrial agriculture and mass produced food, but efficiency is not one of them. There is very little waste in these operations and those kidneys, livers, and marrow bones are already being put to good use, whether its for human consumption or animal. Maybe modern industrial agriculture is efficient, but modern food consumption isn't. Over a third of all available food is wasted in the USA. How much of that food waste would be OK to be re-processed as pet food?

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

I feel these kind of articles are, if not "dumb", then just pointless. You know what else is a big driver of carbon emissions: humans. We would certainly have a lot lower carbon emissions if half of us voluntarily committed suicide, but that doesn't seem like a realistic proposal. Also, the lack of analysis in this article doesn't help. There is nothing in this article, for example, that says how much of the meat protein that goes into pet food would essentially be waste from meat production intended for humans.

the8472 7y ago
If that protein is waste it could be fed to fish farms or something, thus upcycled to human food. As for suicide, that probably has a lower utilitarian balance than producing fewer pets.
- Razengan 7y ago
  Of course, because suicide means one less person spending money. If everyone could just leave this shitshow on their own terms, whenever they wanted to, how would the people who want to tax pets get their money? And the majority of pets worldwide are not “produced”, they’re adopted from the pool of animals who already exist.
dkdk8283 7y ago
I love my pet and would do anything for them. At times my pet has kept me alive. If I’m poor does this mean I shouldn’t be able to get help from a pet because people want it to be taxed? I’m getting pretty tired of all these empty and worthless sensationalist articles.
- the8472 7y ago
  Pets have real costs associated with them (as this article highlights) and to my knowledge they're not considered basic needs by any stretch. So why should you be exempt from paying those costs, externalties included?

jjtheblunt 7y ago

Interesting assertion, less shallow than the article's premise, is that Guns, Germs, and Steel (and other research) asserts pet ownership significantly increases human immune response. Does that mean more humans consuming more cattle, or less illness-driven carbon emissions? It's super complicated to assess all the alternatives, I guess.

Razengan 7y ago

I honestly cannot believe some of the things I read here. In a recent post, airlines are burning thousands of gallons of fuels flying empty planes in order to keep their “slots” and how organizations literally destroy goods to keep their “use it or lose it” budgets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22511488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22511488 Then there’s other news about how tons of food is just thrown away every day, or how presidential candidates are blowing millions of dollars on political ads just for the heck of it. Some people actually defend that kind of blatant waste, in the name of Mammon, but you want to tax pets? It’s bizarre how a small part of the population is so out of touch and so anti-human. In any case, why is it about taxing pets and not just taxing pet food?

strictnein 7y ago

"Overlooked" except for the myriad of other articles that keep harping on this. https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/4/16094674/cats-dogs-meat-diet-greenhouse-gases-climate-change https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/4/16094674/cats-dogs-meat-di... https://www.dailywire.com/news/environmentalists-save-world-dump-your-pets-emily-zanotti https://www.dailywire.com/news/environmentalists-save-world-... https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/the-truth-about-cats-and-dogs-environmental-impact https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/the-truth-about-cats-and-...

dsmonk 7y ago

If we stop making humans, wouldn't it automatically reduce the demand for pets? Think about it. That infact may just be the truly viewed as an unalloyed good.

robocat 7y ago

Get rid of the pets and we spend our money on other CO2 producing goods or activities like travel. The best generic metric for how much CO2 you produce is simply the amount you spend, which is highly correlated with how much you earn. Fixing that is hard...

forkexec 7y ago

People living are a driver of carbon emissions. Should we defenestrate ourselves to commercial non-journalism and feel guilty and insecure about not immediately committing suicide?