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I guess everything helps, but we put so much effort into the problems with easy solutions, that could be invested into the difficult stuff. Livestock contribut
by j-pb 6y ago
I guess everything helps, but we put so much effort into the problems with easy solutions, that could be invested into the difficult stuff.
Livestock contributes to 15% of all greenhouse gasses. But the solution is easy, cheap, and only midly inconvenient.
Going vegan.
This has the added benefit of protecting threatened ecosystems in the rainforrest and seas.
We could then spend that energy on the difficult stuff.
Fast tracked rollout of renevables and interrim energy storage.
- Eric_WVGG 6y agoThe solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. Feed cattle some seaweed.
- j-pb 6y agoThe seaweeed is not a full on substitute for the refular feed. You still have the climate, land, and water impact of the majority of the feed. You're also stil stuck with the huge water requirements, antibiotic resistence, disease, and animal cruelty. You're advocating for a reduction of at most 50% of the harmfull effects. But going 100% is trivial, so why not do it?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Eric_WVGG 6y agoBecause I like solutions that are possible, and I can't think of many things more difficult than changing people's behavior. We can't even convince the public to wear face masks in public and that vaccines are safe, and you're telling me that it would be trivial to make everyone go vegan? Even discussing this is pointlessly filling the atmosphere with more CO2. I actually happen to think that our civilization will inevitably become vegetarian, but it won't happen within my lifetime, and in the meantime, some scientists have found a cheap way to reduce methane emissions. That's awesome! Stop pissing on their work.
- yboris 6y agoIt doesn't solve the problem of dealing with water runoff pollution. Or air pollution (seaweed is not a 100% reduction). Or ethical problems with wellbeing of animals. Or health concerns of eating too much meat.
- calvinmorrison 6y agoSo we could all go vegan, skip off our normal diets, a huge change to the world OR china could stop running their very dirty coal plants. Please stop making everything _my_ problem when other countries do not give a rats ass.
- j-pb 6y agoAll coal plants produce the same amount of CO2, the dirtyness is inly related to micro-particles. The richest countries are the reason for climate change. We've lived way past what is sustainable for a hundred years, and now you want to blame it on somebody else? Sure, everything but taking personal responsibility...
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago> All coal plants produce the same amount of CO2, the dirtyness is inly related to micro-particles. This isn't correct. Different types of coal can result in dramatic difference in CO2 production per kWh hour generated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelwood_Power_Station
- yboris 6y agoWhere's that American aim of being #1 ("exceptional") in ways like "ethically good" or "world leader taking the world into a better future"? Why is it now "well, others are doing bad things, we may as well pollute the shit of the planet too"?
- jinkyu 6y agoreally? America is far cleaner than it was in the 70-90s. but I'm sure giving a bunch of money to folks in Paris and Kyoto while they allow developing nations to dump smog like it was going out of style will fix this problem right up!
- calvinmorrison 6y ago> Why is it now "well, others are doing bad things, we may as well pollute the shit of the planet too"? Why is the burden on me? That's never been explained by all the climate religionists out there. When the west does something it's bad. When everyone else does it, they get a pass? We already did the industrial revolution. We already went through the long process. They have free wins - they don't need to design new processes or methods - they have plenty of money. They have the wrong priorities. Instead we can sit here and pat ourselves on the back for not using plastic straws, because save the turtles or some absolute crock, while 4 or 5 countries in asia produce almost ALL of the plastic trash in the oceans.
- account4mypc 6y agoeating 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
- j-pb 6y agoWhy 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?"
- _ph_ 6y agoThere is no fundamental need to get energy from fossil fuels specifically, we just have to work at getting replacements for all scenarios. Nutrition is an entirely different thing. First of all, it is a very fundamental cultural and personal thing. Meat and dairy products have an important nutritional value, which isn't easily replaced, especially not by local foods in many regions. And except for the fossil fuels used in farming (both for meat and plant production), it is carbon-neutral. The problem with it are rather matters of scale and over consumption, so yes, the idea to just reduce meat consumption sounds like a very good idea overall.
- sesuximo 6y agoYeah I don’t think zero is a good goal. Fossil fuels don’t harm the environment at every scale.
- etu 6y agoSo 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.
- sesuximo 6y agoTo the first part, yeah. It’s more extreme in the sense that it requires bigger changes from more people.
- bookmarkable 6y agoThe world is not going to go vegan. Humans eat meat. No greenhouse argument will ever change this. This is worthwhile research, as is cultured meat and other options. Evolving the tech of raising and cultivating animal protein to eat is important work.
- j-pb 6y agoHabe you tried the latest substitutes? Artificial chicken based on pea proteins has become virtually indistinguishable from real chicken.
- 52-6F-62 6y agoI have. I can't eat a lot of fats due to a bad pancreas, but I'm also B12-deficient and anemic. Doc asked me to eat more red meat on occasion, so I try to about once a week. As an attempt at an alternative, I tried one of the popular substitutes. I tried it before my ... "pancreatic situation" was known to me. It made me sick for days. Vomiting, other digestive issues I won't list, and incredible abdominal pain and sourness of my stomach resulted. I've even seen similar reports in various Vegan forums. Those substitutes are filled with canola (and other) oils to add body, flavour, and characteristic "juiciness". I'm intrigued by lab-grown meat, but those pea and soy meat substitutes are not viable. They're not even close to a viable substitute. Eating a steak or some bone marrow once a week or so keeps me feeling like I'm an alive human being, which I have to say is nice having been close to the alternative.
- j-pb 6y agoWhy not take the B12 substitute directly? I take 1 1000% daily reccomended dose per day, as per consultation with my doctor. Together with D3, Folic Acid, and Iron. Most people are vitamin deficient, meat eating/milk drinking or not, unless you actively substitute. It's all the same stuff anyways. B12 is produced by bacteria living on the ground. Which would normally bio accumulate in livestock. Howeve since most livestock is fed with silo feed, theyd too get B12 deficiency, if it wasn't substituted. So you have the choice of eating B12 directly with a lot of control over dosage, or have the livestock swallow the pill for you. Seems like an inefficient intermediary step.
- preinheimer 6y agoI think it's really interesting that you view changing the eating habits of millions of people "easy". We've known and broadly accepted that smoking is bad since 1964[1]. Yet new people start smoking every year. Even in countries where packaging displays disgusting pictures showing the long term results of smoking. To me it seems unlikely that relevant parts of the world will become vegan in the short term, or that cattle farmers will pivot to something else. But I do often see that "green" initiatives that also save companies money are adopted quickly. Not all farmers may care about emissions, but needing less feed (and thus saving money) seems like an easy win. Hopefully all these small gains will add up. [1] - https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/history/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/history/inde...
- j-pb 6y agoOh I didn't mean to say that changing people to go vegan is easy. Just that going vegan is an incredibly simple solution, and itself super easy. I probably wouldn't be vegan if it weren't for all those tasty vegan meat alternatives. Just now I had a german "currywurst" made from wheat protein that tastes indistinguishable from the meat original. It actually tastes "better" becauese you don't get the "joyous experience" of biting onto a piece of bone or onto some chewy piece of atery or god knows what... shudder
- CarelessExpert 6y agoThis reasoning is flawed in the same way recycling is flawed: it puts all the responsibility on individuals to change their behaviour rather than government or industry using their greater leverage to change the system itself. And it'll work just as well. If you want to stop people eating meat, the solution is to tax it so that the price of the good reflects its true cost. But that ain't gonna happen. So the least we can do is clean up the production and supply chains to reduce those externalized costs.
- j-pb 6y agoWhat makes you think that it's not going to happen? It's already happening to such a degree that diary and meat farmer interest groups are HEAVILY lobbying the EU, to make it as difficult as possible for replacement products. We might as well put our efforts into cleaning up these roadblocks/corruption to a brighter future. And why can't we do both? Expect individuals to go vegan, expect governments to support the development of vegan substitutes. Have people take the bike instead of cars more often, but have a carbon tax on flights.
- paulcole 6y ago> I guess everything helps This is a dangerous attitude. While technically true it gives everyone an easy cop out to avoid making real substantive change. Some things help and some things help.
- rhinoceraptor 6y agoHow will we fix the topsoil damage caused by industrial monocropping without grazing animals? We only have a few decades left before our petrochemical dependent agricultural system will be impossible to sustain. Also, rebuilding topsoil with grazing animals has a side benefit of being a carbon sink.
- etu 6y agoHave you seen an image of a factory farm? They don't fix the soil. They ruin it more by having too many animals in a small space. I'm fine with having smaller amounts of animals in open spaces that goes around and take care of the fields, but today's animal agriculture doesn't take care of that.
- j-pb 6y agoFor every m2 of top soil you repair with grazing animals, you deforest 10 m2 of rainforest to produce their feed.
- LegitShady 6y agoWhat if you don't get your feed from the rainforest? I'm confused with the cause and effect of your statement.
- j-pb 6y agoMost crops grown are for livestock. We grow so much that we've stated to deforest the amazonas for it. You will never be able to feed mainl seaweed, nor by grazing alone. The advantage of soil protection from grazing is thus negated by the additional feed production.
- rhinoceraptor 6y agoThis is utterly false. About 20% of livestock feed is fodder crops and grains. The rest is grass, leaves, and plant matter by-products such as crop residue, oil seed cakes, etc. All things that are inedible to humans. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22119...
- brightball 6y agoThe issue here is specifically with beef, so going to an extreme like vegan is way past the reasonable change line. Eating more shrimp/seafood, chicken, pork, etc instead of beef would be just as effective without all of the extra work necessary to ensure people are getting necessary amounts of protein. Asking everyone to go vegan is selling a lifestyle and a belief system, not solving a problem.
- whitepaint 6y ago> But the solution is easy, cheap, and only midly inconvenient. Making ~99% of people vegans is anything but easy, cheap, and mildly inconvenient. In fact, it is impossible (until we manage to replicate meat in the lab). Your view is ridiculously myopic; I will not and most people will not stop eating meat anytime soon. It is a simple fact and you must accept it before trying to solve this. Real solutions are something like the article describes.
- fogihujy 6y agoTo put things in perspective, I'm still trying to convince the in-laws to recycle basic things like paper and plastic instead of simply burning it in a barrel in the back-yard, and to recycle glass and metal instead of just throwing it in the bin. Because, you know, recycling is "mildly inconvenient".
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago"But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. Going Vegan." "But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. Ride a bicycle." "But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. Live in a solar powered minihome." ""But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. Don't reproduce/have kids." "But the solution is easy, cheap, and only mildly inconvenient. No plastics." I am a huge environmentalist, and I've adopted large swathes of these policies personally. As MIB said, a person is smart, rational, and reasonable, but PEOPLE are scared, stupid, and crazy. They are lazy, apathetic, ingrained in habit, and tired. Global warming in particular should be pursued in a multifront effort. No one can prognosticate and see "this is where we put ALL our efforts". To succeed it needs to be a combined, iterative, democratic process of research, technology, education, and cultural advancement.
- titzer 6y ago> PEOPLE are scared, stupid, and crazy. They are lazy, apathetic, ingrained in habit, and tired. I think we both know where this is going. Me? I pick up litter. It's time to put lipstick on this pig.
- jinkyu 6y agolol. vegan is just as bad if not worse for the climate. _sustainable_ vegan is horrifically expensive. go make a victory garden in your back yard and sell your car if you feel so strongly about this.
- danlugo92 6y agoMeat makes human healthy like no plant based protein does. Also, in terms of non processed stuff, the highest protein-to-calories ratio is Chicken Breast, lentils don't even come close (if you need 180g of protein, chicken breast will cost you 800calories while lentils will 2400cal). Now I'm not aware whether eating chicken contributes as much CO2 as beef, but if it doesn't, why not tell people to switch to chicken instead of plant based stuff.
- anonuser123456 6y ago>Going vegan. So not a solution.