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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!
by valgor 6y ago
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!
- MsMowz 6y agoThis isn't true unless your substitute is to eat nothing.
- arcticfox 6y agoThe "from cows" technically makes it pretty much true. Regardless, it's not a constructive comment for that reason.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoThere was an interesting TV show on British TV (apologies, my Google foo is not able to find the name at this moment in time) where they invited a number of people to eat dishes at a hypothetical restaurant, after each course the tallied the carbon emissions released in creating the dish. Now obviously being a TV show they had to show some extreme examples but it was definitely interesting when things like imported asparagus dishes released more than the British beef dish. However, things like the wine were even more challenging, wine imported from Australia in bulk tanks was relatively ok, but wines imported after bottling (from Europe for example) where horrible because of the extra transportation.
- ip26 6y agoToo bad there isn't some sort of free market based mechanism that would inherently account for all of these factors without you needing to think about it.
- MsMowz 6y agoI'm not sure if this is sarcastic, but there quite literally is not a "free market based mechanism" to do this. If there were, there would not be the market failure that we can observe today. There are plenty of market-based methods for accounting for these externalities though, such as Pigovian taxes.
- valgor 6y agoNot all sources of food contribute equally to climate change. That is why this article is about cows, and why I commented about cows. They pollute the most.
- beforeolives 6y agoYou do if you want it to scale to large numbers of people. Affordable lab-grown meat (when we have it) and intermediate solutions like the one in this article (if it's indeed viable) actually work for everybody. Even if we assume that veganism is an okay choice for one's health, trying to convince people to go vegan won't get you very far.
- Tepix 6y agoLook at India. There you have more than a billion people who don't eat cows.
- nkingsy 6y agoThey do drink the milk
- briandear 6y agoHow’s their carbon footprint?
- toiletfuneral 6y agoway better than the US
- meowgoldie 6y agoNot much (per capita)
- ArkanExplorer 6y agoMore importantly: what is their CO2 efficiency? How much GDP and science do they output per unit of CO2? India is close to Italy in Scientific output [1]: 1040 units vs 1104 respectively. India's CO2e output is 2.62 billion tonnes, vs Italy 337 million tonnes. India's GDP is $2.869trillion vs $2.004 trillion. India's population is 1,336million vs Italy 60 million. So, India consumes 7.7x the Earth's CO2 budget, but generates only .94x the scientific output and 1.43x the GDP. Or put another way: the average Italian consumes 2.86x the CO2 as the average Indian, but generates 23x the scientific output and 15x the GDP. Its really the 2nd and 3rd world who are flagrant wasters of the Earth's resources, not the developed world. Looking at CO2 on a per-capita basis is basically irrelevant. The inescapable solution to climate change and resource degradation is population reduction of the 2nd and 3rd world to density and intensity levels seen in the 1st world, or perhaps even lower seeing as housing is typically unaffordable in most 1st world countries. This would suggest a sustainable population of India of about 650 million - which was the population of the country as recently as 1977 [4]. [1] https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/All/global/All/score https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/All/glo... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/india https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/india [3] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/italy https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/italy [4] https://www.populationpyramid.net/india/1977/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/india/1977/
- goda90 6y agoBut how much does it reduce your total carbon emissions from all food sources? Any food source, animal or plant, can have a big impact if the agricultural practices involved are not sustainable. Destroying rain forests for palm oil plantations is arguably worse than raising cattle on pre-existing grasslands and using beef tallow in place of palm oil.
- valgor 6y agoReducing total emissions is another question. Checkout the first graph on this site: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local?fbclid=IwAR2xdS0n70M1sighJ_PbXCmOmYTQefiX2-Fa1SD8WGIXqgNGjhmuuLdNv-E https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local?fbcli... It shows how eating animals and animal products is far worse. So even if we don't immediately eliminate all carbon emissions, reducing our consumption of animals can have a huge impact.
- Gustomaximus 6y agoWhat do you substitute this? What do you spend your saved money on? There was a study (Swedish researches I think) that looked at what purchasing effect have form vegetarians as they typically spend less on food than meat eaters. It found while they do have lower green house gas footprint from food, the additional purchasing power brought this back around 2% overall. So if you look at this holistically, stopping one thing doesn't end its effect unless there is zero flow on from other behaviours as a result.