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Treating beef like coal would make a big dent in greenhouse-gas emissions

169 points by prostoalex 5y ago

fidgetspinner 5y ago
Hm, this seems to be missing the point that plant monocrops destroy the soil and are not nearly as efficient a source of food for the human body as fresh animal meat. Regenerative agriculture, which ideally requires both animal and plant cultivation, would be a better path forward if it could scale. If I remember correctly the papers that originally thought cattle were a big contributor to global warming turned out to be pretty incorrect when they were re-examined as well https://carolinestocks.medium.com/debunking-the-methane-myth-why-cows-arent-responsible-for-climate-change-23926c63f2c0 https://carolinestocks.medium.com/debunking-the-methane-myth...
- wumpus 5y ago
  I thought the main problem with cows was feed lots feeding 10 calories of grain to make 1 calorie of meat, not methane.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Lets not forget the transportation of fresh meat is not negligible, the cooling and the fuel costs will add greatly to carbon emissions. Preserved foods and not relying on luxuries such as refrigeration would go a long way to sustainability and heath.
    - wumpus 5y ago
      Do you have a source that shows that it's not negligible? The carbon and water cost of 10 calories of grain is pretty large.
      - GhettoComputers 5y ago
        https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... The EPA site shows transportation and electricity as the main contributions to carbon. The grains are not the issue, the subsidies in the US are so strong that they are not a real factor. There is so much excess food produced they export it to other countries for instance. https://modernfarmer.com/2019/01/congress-finally-passed-a-new-farm-bill-and-it-continues-to-pay-homage-to-the-cult-of-corn-and-soy/ https://modernfarmer.com/2019/01/congress-finally-passed-a-n... https://abcnews.go.com/US/dairy-farmers-dumping-milk-amid-covid-19-pandemics/story?id=70268302 https://abcnews.go.com/US/dairy-farmers-dumping-milk-amid-co... https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/business/milk-dumping-coronavirus/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/business/milk-dumping-cor... Fresh food is often wasted, and the dumping of milk is to prevent the prices from going too low. This was happening before corona as well, this paper is a pretty good summary from a marxist perspective on overproduction. https://www.e-ir.info/2016/07/07/agricultural-overproduction-and-the-deteriorating-environment/ https://www.e-ir.info/2016/07/07/agricultural-overproduction...
        wumpus 5y ago
        Again, you apparently are willing to confuse the transportation cost of beef with the transport cost of everything. Nice reference to Marxism.
        lasc4r 5y ago
        Transportation and cooling of meat in particular is nothing compared to the land area of North America and South America combined that we devote to growing crops to feed livestock. https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
        GhettoComputers 5y ago
        Is it negligible that transportation of fresh meat, its cooling or freezing are not at all factors in carbon production? I would like to see how its calculated.
  - Doji 5y ago
    Cow feed is generally not human edible: https://www.milkmeansmore.org/what-do-cows-eat/ https://www.milkmeansmore.org/what-do-cows-eat/
    - wumpus 5y ago
      Most places that grow feed corn could also grow human-edible corn. Remember that I'm talking about feedlots for beef.
    - mdorazio 5y ago
      This implies that the land used to grow cow feed couldn't be used to instead grow human-consumable crops or left fallow as a carbon sink. I'm not aware of any studies showing that.
      - Doji 5y ago
        You make a strong argument. I think this is a case where we'll find the global optimum somewhere in the middle. Deforesting the amazon to grow corn for cows is something I'm sure we can all agree is bad. Should we use livestock to eat cover crops and waste products like corn husks and cobs? This way we reuse waste and produce high quality protein to supplement our diets. Should we graze cattle on natural grasslands like the great plains? Especially in rotation with human foods, like the cover crops mentioned before?
        wumpus 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure that feedlot studies say that the usual situation in the US is that 1/2 of beef calories come from a 10:1 ratio of human edible calories. So sure, go for 100%-grass-and-not-human-edible-food-fed beef, but that's not the current system.
      - WithinReason 5y ago
        If you check out the link, most of the cow feed is a by-product of other industrial processes and would go to waste otherwise.
- yboris 5y ago
  "plant monocrops" -- like all the soy that is planted to grow so it can be fed to the cows?
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    The monocrops are terrible for many reasons but the issue is subsidies. We have HFCS because of an artificial surplus of corn production.
- tasty_freeze 5y ago
  That article seems highly motivated to marginalize the effects of livestock. Quoting a section: While methane is 28-times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, methane’s lifespan is just a decade, while CO2 — known as a long-life pollutant — remains in the atmosphere for 1000 years. After ten years, methane is broken down in a process called hydroxyl oxidation into CO2, entering a carbon cycle which sees the gas absorbed by plants, converted into cellulose, and eaten by livestock. In the first paragraph, it says methane isn't so bad because it lasts only 10 years, unlike CO2 which lasts 1000 years. In the very next paragraph it says the methane is broken down into CO2 which is then absorbed by plants and recycled. Wait, you just said it lasts 1000 years. The next two paragraphs say that livestock accounts for 33% of the total methane released and blithely states that it all gets broken down and reused. If no additional animals are introduced, then net release equals net absorption. That is not very insightful -- eventually an equilibrium will be reached. This glosses over the real data that CO2 levels are rising, it is having measurable consequences, and is pushing control loops to new, worse states. Citing one article written for the "Farm Business" trade publication isn't as conclusive as you seem to state.
  - Doji 5y ago
    There is a certain amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and a certain amount of carbon in the ground. When you burn oil, you take carbon from the ground and introduce it into the atmosphere. This increases the total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere. When you grow plants, you take carbon out of the atmosphere. When you eat it, you release it back into the atmosphere. The total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere does not change. Grass grows more vigorously when regularly pruned, for example by a grazing animal. Farms also make a point of planting thing which grow quickly and efficiently. Thus it's reasonable to expect that farming could increase the rate of carbon turnover in the atmosphere, which would create the appearance of increased carbon emissions without a corresponding increase in the amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere. In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged. But the cow itself only causes a short lived, fixed increase in atmospheric methane and an increased rate of carbon turnover.
- _the_inflator 5y ago
  I disagree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
- adrianN 5y ago
  Well, some meat production is obviously a sustainable part of agriculture. There will always be some areas where the soil is too poor for anything but grazing and you'll always have some waste that you can feed to chicken, pigs, and ruminants. But these sustainable levels of animal husbandry are so far removed from the industrialized meat production that we're currently doing that they might as well be zero. Recall that just a generation or two ago meat was something you ate once a week if you lived in a fairly developed country. Today Americans eat more than a 100kg of meat per year.
  - allturtles 5y ago
    > Recall that just a generation or two ago meat was something you ate once a week if you lived in a fairly developed country. What do you mean by a fairly developed country? McDonald's was selling hamburgers for 15 cents in 1955 (roughly the same as the price of a loaf of bread at the grocery store). Catholics eating fish on Friday (instead of meat) I believe goes back many generations. See also this article about historical meat consumption in the U.S.[0]: "“These sources do give us some confidence in suggesting an average annual consumption of 150–200 pounds of meat per person in the nineteenth century.” [0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-americans-used-to-eat/371895/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-ameri...
    - adrianN 5y ago
      Huh, interesting. I was extrapolating from my parents and grandparents who definitely didn't eat meat every day and certainly not half a pound of meat each day. They didn't live in the US though. My grandparents still had to raise all the meat for the family themselves.
      - bserge 5y ago
        Wouldn't be a bad idea tbh. Raise the tax on meat from industrial deathcamps but not from homegrown. Yes, I realize it's still death and pollution but the scale of modern farms is simply mindboggling. Grow and slaughter your own pigs and hens and then decide if you still want to do it for the meat (or the money from selling the meat).
- rapnie 5y ago
  Yesterday in the investigative journalism program Zembla on Dutch TV they addressed how the entire agri sector was beholden in a vicious cycle of greed. Where in the supply chain from Monsanto to supermarkets huge profit margins were raked in. Large part of the blame is at the supermarkets. While farmers are left no choice but to apply extractive methods (furtilizers, pesticides) to farm their lands to keep their heads afloat. Even with their huge farms and professional production methods they are effectively exploited. In this story the supermarkets say "We'll give consumers the choice", but for them that means choosing eco products that have ~40% higher price and they don't do that (~5% of sales is eco-friendly), so this doesn't work. Once again it is politicians who need to take some tough measures, but they find powerful lobbies in their path plus they do not dare to take impopular measures that make products more expensive, for fear of losing votes. So for 50 years things got worse and worse. One solution mentioned was what social enterprise True Price [0] is trying to establish: explicitly pricing the detrimental externalities that until now are shoved as costs to future generations. A pack of regular coffee with externalities priced in would go from, say, $5 to become $10, while a pack of eco-friendly coffee would go to $6.50. The surplus to the price should be reserved in a fund with which farmers can make the transition to sustainable agriculture. [0] https://trueprice.org/ https://trueprice.org/
- tarsinge 5y ago
  The vast majority of agricultural land today are for feeding animals (between 70% and 80% depending of the studies). The end product meat is maybe more efficient, but compared to what was needed for its production it is not. It’s not humans that eat that much monocultured corn and soy.
  - p_l 5y ago
    "Agricultural land" != "arable land'. It varies a lot by country, pretty sure there's a lot more overlap between pasture land and arable land in Europe, but for example in USA not so much. Considerable amount of animal food also involves byproducts of food production for humans, or plants used in cycling the fields (that's made worse with preference to just put ton of artificial fertilizer)
- asplake 5y ago
  Efficient? That rather depends on the scope of the system you’re measuring.
- johnydays 5y ago
  Most plant monocrops are for feedstock. You can do regenerative agriculture with only plants. Feeding animals plant calories is terribly inneficient (~10-15% depending on the estimate)
- Glench 5y ago
  Your efficiency argument is ridiculously based on a Medium article. Here's a quote from the Economist article citing two recent scientific studies: "It takes 33 plant calories to produce one calorie of beef."
b20000 5y ago
artificial plant based meat is treated with so many chemicals that it is potentially worse for you than eating real meat
- adrianN 5y ago
  Citation needed. "Chemicals" are not all bad. Everything you eat is a chemical.
  - b20000 5y ago
    true. the question is whether your body can deal with it. it knows how to deal with chemicals it has been exposed to for thousands of years. it doesn’t know very well how to deal with GMOs.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      That is nonsense in this generalization and also mostly unrelated to meat-substitutes. Humans have been genetically modifying their food ever since they came up with agriculture and there are plenty of meat-substitutes without GMOs if you don't like them.
- bserge 5y ago
  No more than real meat lol
ginja 5y ago
I can’t read the full article because of the paywall but the main argument seems to be that cows emit a lot of CO2. Ruminants eat plants, which contain carbon captured from the atmosphere. They then release most of that carbon back to the atmosphere, from where it will be eventually absorbed by plants again. So it’s a cycle where no new carbon is really being introduced (unlike burning fossil fuels that would otherwise stay in the ground). Am I missing something or is the seriousness of this issue blown way out of proportion?
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  To be fair, it could be as easy as banning cows and using buffalo for better ruminant yields.
  - wumpus 5y ago
    To be fair, that has nothing to do with the current economy, where almost all cows go to feed lots to be fed human food (corn) to double their weight.
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      >To be fair, that has nothing to do with the current economy, where almost all cows go to feed lots to be fed human food (corn) to double their weight. Have you travled outside the US? This is not true in most parts of the world, I wouldn't be suprised to see it only being a US practice.
      - wumpus 5y ago
        Yes, I've visited several dozen countries, and I assure you that the practice of using feedlots has spread to most developed countries, and is being spread to the less developed world as a way to increase incomes. Nice insult, btw. I had to send my passport to get more pages sewn in.
        5y ago
beckman466 5y ago
this is a half-baked ‘solution‘ that just makes eating meat a luxury. a thing only for the rich. it’ll be like crimes that are punished by a fine - they just become the ‘fee’ that allows the propertied class to do whatever they want. beef is deadly for humanity because of destructive water and land usage (Vice had a great video showing the Amazon deforestation due to beef production). edit: my point is that the propertied class will lower wages and raise commodity prices to be able to pay to keep eating an unsustainable amount of beef. instead we should restrict or ban industrial animal agriculture, while investing in educational material to help society transition away from beef. that and regenerative agriculture, agro-forestry, etc. Ernst Gotsch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
- smt88 5y ago
  That's true of literally anything where the price reflects the externalities. If it bothers you that the rich can afford to pay for the externalities, that's an argument against wealth inequality, not against pricing things correctly.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  It's time to tie all societal fees/fines to income. Start with using 1040's. Yes--their will be guys whom try to game the system, but many will eventually get caught. For example, a a patent fee to a poor man is nothing. A wealthy man pays current rates. A poor man drives through a red light; the fine might get the last straw, or rent. A wealthy guy drives through a red light, he casually mentions it over dinner to Clair. I have never felt it was fair, even when I had money.
- colordrops 5y ago
  If only allowing the rich to eat beef will help save the planet then I'm for it.
  - beckman466 5y ago
    the point is that the propertied class will lower wages and raise commodity prices to pay to keep eating an unsustainable amount of beef. instead we should restrict or ban industrial animal agriculture, while investing in educational material to help society transition away from beef. that and regenerative agriculture, agro-forestry, etc. Ernst Gotsch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE i don’t want to give my children a dead planet either.
koilke 5y ago
https://archive.ph/RoeA3 https://archive.ph/RoeA3
throwawaysea 5y ago
I can’t view the whole article due to the paywall, but I have to ask - where does this line of thinking lead? Does every pleasurable activity we might voluntarily undertake get scrutinized, regulated, or banned? I certainly hope not, since such losses of freedom can make the tyranny of the majority very real. It’s important that any potential policies are applied in a fair manner. For example, priced externalities shouldn’t be limited to just carbon dioxide or only applied to some things like cars or cows. In particular, those who support regulation or bans should also have their own favored things regulated similarly.
- timemachine 5y ago
  I don’t think that a magazine has the power to ban or set global policy on anything. They do have the ability (or perhaps the responsibility, as a free press) to to research, describe, and suggest alternatives to “every pleasurable activity we might voluntarily undertake.” That results in an informed majority, not a tyrannical one.
- tfehring 5y ago
  There's nothing moralistic about a carbon tax - it's a Pigouvian tax, not a sin tax. The point of a Pigouvian tax isn't to say "I don't like that thing so let's tax it so other people do less of it," it's to say "Do what you want but don't make me or my children pay for the externalities it creates."
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    A decrease of carbon would many lower crop yields, could I sue for my lowered crop yields? The issue of a carbon tax is basically that politicians are only too happy to give more taxes, and would support carbon taxes regardless of it being good or bad.
    - tfehring 5y ago
      Not sure about the potential for a private entity to sue another private entity for those damages - but sure, to the extent that beef production creates positive externalities, the value of those externalities should also be priced in. Though most of the warming potential from cattle farming comes from methane, not carbon dioxide, so I'd be surprised if it actually had a nonnegligible impact on crop yields, let alone an impact that came anywhere close to offsetting the negative externalities elsewhere. Empirically, most politicians don't support carbon taxes. Market-consistent pricing of climate-related externalities is broadly opposed by politicians on both sides of the aisle in the US. For example, look at the massive subsidies to dairy farms in my home state of Wisconsin - they get over 40% of their revenue from direct subsidies in a typical year, and if you exclude those subsidies the industry hasn't made a profit for at least several decades, but no one dares to even suggest reducing or eliminating them, let alone going the other way and taxing the negative externalities they create.
seiferteric 5y ago
power is fungible. Nobody cares where their electricity comes from. Coal is failing because it is not price competitive. Food is not fungible, so I am not sure what point this is making.
- wumpus 5y ago
  Lots of foods are commodities, so I'm not exactly sure why you think they aren't fungible. Soybeans, corn, pork bellies, ...
  - seiferteric 5y ago
    That's not what fungible means... A Watt is a Watt, a soybean is not a steak...
    - wumpus 5y ago
      I'm not sure why you think I said a soybean is a steak, but I meant that a soybean is a soybean, corn is corn, and pork bellies are pork bellies, when we're talking about things traded on the commodities markets.
      - tw04 5y ago
        I guess I doing get your point. Fungible means interchangeable. The average consumer doesn’t think twice about whether their electricity comes from coal or solar as long as the lights turn on when they flip the switch. If you try to give someone soy beans when they ordered a steak they’re going to care quite a lot. Food isn’t fungible for the average consumer. That has absolutely nothing to do with it being a commodity or not.
        wumpus 5y ago
        Soybeans are a fungible commodity. That means that it's fungible with other soybeans. Corn is a fungible commodity. Pork bellies are a fungible commodity. It's a mystery to me as to why you think I said soybeans and steak are the same.
GhettoComputers 5y ago
I disagree, its a percentage of roughly 10% according to the EPA in 2019. Here are the EPA statistics. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... I am all for replacing them with native buffalo, but this is overemphasis on minute percentages, this information presented is much too technology based and not practical, it relies on assumptions about plant based foods and lab meat (farming crops is the backbone of civilization, it is not a new idea, meat replacements like tofu, seitan, and even quorn of more reasonable price exists but we should ignore it for the fantasies of lab grown meat) the problem is that nobody will do it, and even with existing solutions you can't force people to eat the way the author wants them to. Electricty (such as that used for cooling), and transportation make up the most carbon emissions. This truck is one such solution for transportation and lower emmission, it uses compression rather than combustion for the engine, and "waste" is cold, so its used to cool the internals. The adoption of this would have a much better effect overall without human habits as resistance. https://atlasofthefuture.org/project/the-dearman-engine/ https://atlasofthefuture.org/project/the-dearman-engine/ Improved infrastructure and improvements in efficiency in larger sector should be focused on rather than a nudged suggestion to change eating habits, the title is a pie in the sky, noit interested in practical applications.
- wumpus 5y ago
  > interested in virute signaling rather than practical applications. Love the insult, I'm sure it helps the conversation along to a good conclusion.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Ill omit that then, I am getting used to using HN. Objectively, we should look at the largest percentages that are causing carbon emissions if the goal was to lower it.
    - wumpus 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure that insulting people for virtue signaling isn't an objective thing.
timemachine 5y ago
I generally like the economist but this article is poor. The topic of deforestation is only whispered in at the end, almost a footnote. However, burning the Amazon for farmland to produce beef in Brazil should be part of the headline.
- analognoise 5y ago
  I thought the modern view was that the Amazon as the "lungs of the planet" was supposed to be totally bullshit and we could burn the whole thing down and be fine - but what we can't do is screw up the oceans, and it's already too late and we're all effectively doomed (walking ghost status) but we just don't realize it yet. I'm paraphrasing here.
  - gotoeleven 5y ago
    If net neutrality doesn't get us first!
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    It is easy to do carbon studies on trees, but not on grasslands and other carbon sinks. The carbon content of the world will not be the destroyer as much as the effect of human nature, the world has been very different at different times, but extinction isn't likely. To screw up the oceans, there must be a standard, but there isn't. There are many problems such as lower native populations, corals, invasive species, stronger weather patterns, microplastics, but I am not sure what it is to "screw up the oceans".
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spydr 5y ago
I disagree with this article and frustrated with those who try to push this narrative Here’s a 20 min video to show you why https://youtu.be/sGG-A80Tl5g https://youtu.be/sGG-A80Tl5g
- analog31 5y ago
  What are its main points?
  - ayngg 5y ago
    Arguments that meat take an excessive amount of resources are disingenuous because those resources cannot simply be translated to other uses, examples being that the water use example many tout uses rainwater would fall anyways, that livestock will eventually urinate meaning it isn't actually lost, and land used for livestock is mostly non arable land and therefore cant be used for producing crops anyways. Also there is a relationship between livestock, agriculture and human society where they all are able to use resources that each other cant, or provide benefit to each other. For example a huge amount of agriculture fertilizer comes from manure, and a huge amount of livestock feed comes from agricultural waste. Without livestock we now have to get fertilizer elsewhere, and all the byproducts that would become animal feed becomes waste. In the grand scheme of things livestock produce an insignificant amount of ghg and that if all Americans stopped consuming beef, it would reduce the nations ghg emissions by ~2.5%, whereas transportation, power generation and construction contribute to the overwhelming amount of emissions (~80%). If you want to look at reducing emissions from food, it is much easier to look at food waste, where ~40% of food in the US is wasted, and of that roughly 80% is produce like fruits, vegetables, tubers etc, meaning that even if there was a transformation to a purely vegan population, food waste would probably increase. edit: I should reiterate that these are points in summary that are made in the video, not my personal opinion.
    - emkoemko 5y ago
      "land used for livestock is mostly non arable land and therefore cant be used for producing crops anyways." so what is it that they grow then cut and roll into those large objects? here they even grow corn for feed.
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gotoeleven 5y ago
If they ban beef from the food supply, people will find substitutes.. like bat.
voldacar 5y ago
It feels like we are headed into a new medieval era of sumptuary laws and moral decrees promulgated by a decentralized international clerical-academic class. I don't think I like it very much
- quotemstr 5y ago
  Right. Prices, not arbitrary bans, are the correct way to incorporate externalities in the costs of a product. People are far too happy to promote ad-hoc bans of all sorts of arbitrary things without creating any kind of general incentive structure that would automatically optimize the metrics of interest. The result is malinvestment, economic inefficiency, and global poverty. The problem is that the externality is set arbitrarily by people who think beef in particular is bad --- it's a sin tax. If you're being honest about pricing emissions, you internalize externalities universally, uniformly, and transparently. An across-the-board carbon tax is defensible; such a tax would likely affect beef. A fee on beef by itself --- that's just disingenuous and moralistic nonsense.
  - voldacar 5y ago
    What bothers me most isn't the malinvestment (though that sucks) or a faliure to calculate costs and benefits, but the fact that they're moralizing zealots. A zealot can justify anything in the name of The Common Good (naturally, they are the ones who decide what The Common Good is)
    - quotemstr 5y ago
      Time to bring out the old CS Lewis quip: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." A big problem is that the moral busybodies who propose laws banning random things are the same moral busybodies who censor internet discussion.
    - 5y ago
tobtoh 5y ago
As someone in the Gen X demographic who has never smoked, I've watched the anti-smoking campaigns and shift in attitudes towards smoking with interest - particularly how resistant smokers were to initially giving up smoking. I feel like eating meat is going to be my generations equivalent of smoking. Intellectually, I agree that eating meat is bad for the environment, cruel to animals (esp industrial farming) etc ... but I can't see myself giving up eating meat.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  Did you notice what drove the change in attitudes towards smoking?
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    Well, in my country (where tax in cigarettes etc was already very high; no one cared) it was not being allowed to smoke almost anywhere anymore, then, when that became normal (many people did it anyway for a few years until the fines got too high), people who used to smoke and everyone else found it smelly and then, way way way way behind that somewhere, something with health.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    Partly, it was generational. Gen X grew up hearing the evils of smoking in the 70s (TV and radio ads were banned as early as 1971), then with great admonition in the 1980s. 1982 was the year that the US Surgeon General announced that second-hand smoke was dangerous. That was the beginning of the end. Then shortly after the lawsuits started. Boomers and the generation before did not have much of that influence in their formative years, even though warning labels were put on cigarette packages in 1965, they were mostly ignored because… marketing. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/timelines/fullindex.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/ti...
  - libertine 5y ago
    I think it was part policy making part witnessing the end-game for a lot of smokers. The cool factor goes out the window.
elil17 5y ago
> The simplest way to cut beef output is for people to eat other animals instead, or become vegetarians. That’s like, in 1900, saying “the simplest way to prevent road deaths is for everyone to drive slower.” That’s not simple at all - that’s an intractable group behavior problem. What you really need is for the government to come along and put up speed limits. Most people will push those rules, a few will flout them, but things will be better. So let’s have a carbon tax that includes all sources of greenhouse gas, including domesticated animals, and stop passing moral judgement on people who are stressed enough as it is figuring out how to navigate our challenging world.
- kybernetyk 5y ago
  Yes, we absolutely need the government to tell people what they’re allowed to eat.
  - emkoemko 5y ago
    yes that already exists, last time i checked governments don't like it when people eat other people;
    - legulere 5y ago
      Or depending on where you live horses, cats and dogs.
      - herbst 5y ago
        Welcome to Switzerland, the only place you can have all of those.
  - heydabop 5y ago
    Maybe read the entire comment before replying to it.
  - lm28469 5y ago
    That's where we'll be in 50-100 years if we want to have a future that doesn't suck too much, and not just about what you eat. We're definitely living in the golden age of consumerism in every aspects: energy, food, travel, electronic gadgets, &c. We're producing and consuming so much useless shit and well aware that we're heading for disaster. We're either going to be limited by natural resources, climate issues or our own actions to limit ourself to avoid #1 and #2. There is just no way around it, you can't keep on extracting more and more ressources from a closed system, you can't keep polluting more and more in a closed system, you can't target an exponential growth in a closed system. Companies don't give a shit, because their sole purpose is to not care about these issues. That's how you get companies like apple shitting unrepairable products every 6 months, but it's ok because their offices are carbon neutral, right ? Countries don't give a shit, because GDP is king and energy = GDP, https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/correlation-of-per-capita-energy https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/correlation-... So it's a game of chicken, everyone knows about the problem, they all know the solutions, but no one is really taking action, because that would be a massive paradigm shift in virtually every aspect of our economy
sjatkins 5y ago
This is grossly overstated. 1) far less methane in atmosphere 2) it deteriorates rapidly 3) the majority of it is NOT from cattle.
chrisbrandow 5y ago
Treating it like coal implies that its users can trade beef for something that is just "as good". At the moment many users don't find that plausible.
- gregable 5y ago
  I'll be honest, it seems reasonable to me in a lot of cases. I'm not enamored with steak, and chicken/pork can work just as well as beef for a lot of other dishes. A chicken sandwich is just as good as a burger to me. I know there are people where that doesn't work, but there may be many where it does too with minimal nudging.
justicezyx 5y ago
So now people see the nuances of why they still want to eat beef ... Not like when they claim that it's ridiculous for the developing countries to burn coals, oil, woods, etc.
anothernewdude 5y ago
I can't see how lab grown meats would enable the use of the land that animals use. Animals take up land that is unusable for crops and make it productive. What land would the labs use?
- wumpus 5y ago
  1/2 of calories in US beef comes from corn at feedlots.
Ekaros 5y ago
If we start banning certain foods like beef. We should do it equally. Only allow those crops with lowest CO2 per calorie/nutrient output. As clearly taste is secondary. After all, replacing all we eat with tasteless gruel and water is acceptable by this logic.
- gregmolnar 5y ago
  The taste of a dish is mainly coming from the spices.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    But they have little nutrional importance. As such producing them cause substantial extra CO2 load relatively. I think ban of them in such scenario is absolutely justified. As we clearly then want to do everything to combat climate change.
    - gregmolnar 5y ago
      You clearly know shit about nutrition :) Spices are rich in vitamins, antioxidants, minerals. They don't produce extra CO2, to the contrary, they remove CO2. Enjoy your beef.
- paganel 5y ago
  At some point Soylent Green becomes an acceptable option.
axiolite 5y ago
Coal is a fossil fuel. Returning ancient carbon to the atmosphere. Cattle is a bio-fuel. The methane/carbon they release was captured by the grains and grasses shortly before the cattle consumed it, and will continue growing after they've consumed it. Cattle should be the trendy and expensive thing among the outspoken, virtue-signaling greens. It's plant-based. Contains all-natural ingredients. Isn't made in a lab/on an assembly line with a a bunch of chemicals with scary names. Old hippies should each buy a cow to keep their lawns mowed and fertilized without burning gasoline.
- wumpus 5y ago
  > virtue-signaling greens Fun how insulting people is OK these days.
  - axiolite 5y ago
    It was an identification of a sub-group, not an insult. But as far as I can recall, it has always been fair game to criticize public figures for their espoused opinions and public actions. Being offended by everything, and making it everyone else's fault, is the part that is new these days.
    - wumpus 5y ago
      It wasn't an insult? Funny, I thought it was the same as calling someone a hypocrite. Indeed, it's fair game to insult other people. Sadly, it's prohibited by the rules of this forum. Disagree with them? Great. Accuse them of being hypocrites? Less great.
      - axiolite 5y ago
        > Funny, I thought it was the same as calling someone a hypocrite. And just where did you look-up that definition? May I point you to a few: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/virtue-signaling https://www.dictionary.com/browse/virtue-signaling https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/virtue-signalling https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/virtu... https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-talk/202008/moral-grandstanding-and-virtue-signaling-the-same-thing https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-talk/202008/mo... > Accuse them of being hypocrites? Less great This seems to be a you problem, not a me problem.
Proven 5y ago
Barely a week can pass without globalist busybodies coming up with new ideas for enslavement and pauperization of the ordinary man. Treating the Economist like a NWO propaganda tool would make a big dent in fascist onslaught on our freedoms.
timeon 5y ago
One should not be surprised by all those defensive comments on the website where most people are from country where beef is dominating.
- wumpus 5y ago
  I wouldn't assume that -- one of my roommates in grad school was a nurse from China who was older because her education had been interrupted by the Cultural Revolution, and she was the biggest beef fan I've ever met.
bongoman37 5y ago
If US solves the issue of massively subsidizing corn, we could have a lot of other pieces automatically falling into place.
OneTimePetes 5y ago
Ah, yes.. lets talk about something that is cyclic in nature of producing and reusing - even if it is cattle, and ignore the carbon adding elephant in the room that pays lots of media to shape the discussionscape to be about anything else but gasoline driven mobility. Agriculture always had the lousiest lobby, thats why its discussed so much, while the car industry and industry in general happily gets ignored. My parents farm went almost broke, while the newspapers in germany discussed the dangerous climate and environmental factors of farming in great detail. Not a word about VW, BMW, Mercedes and many others. I'm all for going vegan, but then in a combined deal. Full vegan, with full stop to petrol cars- at the same time. Everywhere on the planet. Tie it all together and watch the discussion distortion artists squirm.
gremloni 5y ago
Beef is delicious. Meat is delicious. We have to figure out how to replace that before we get rid of cattle farms.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  The article shows that buffalo uses less energy, but its not at all suggested, although it would be a very good replacement in terms of taste and nutrition.
- codezero 5y ago
  It's not as delicious to people who grow up not eating meat. I expect if we want a change it'll have to be generational.
  - gremloni 5y ago
    Meat is delicious even to life long vegetarians. This is anecdotal but just that fact that we have glutamate receptors means it probably generally holds true.
    - codezero 5y ago
      Also anecdotal, I’ve worked with about a half dozen people when they tried meat for the first time and remained unimpressed and never ate it again.
candiodari 5y ago
No it would not make even the tiniest dent. I don't get this sort of reasoning. We keep, and keep, and keep treating this like "let's force everyone" problem. Jevon's paradox. If we kill beef production, we change nothing. Oil and coal that gets dug up gets burned. Law simply does not apply to all states that do this, so these sorts of measures are dead in the water. So the ONLY way to lower (eventual) greenhouse emissions is to leave coal and oil in the ground. Such measures can only ever change WHY fossil fuels get burned, bitcoins instead of steel production, not WHETHER or not coal gets burned ... They can't leave oil in the ground. They can't leave coal in the ground. Problem is that the real change we need can't be done with law, with political action, with any of that ... it can only be done by competing with oil. Outcompete oil and the problem is solved. No country will risk it's energy supply dropping by 0.1% for the climate, it's just not going to happen. Sure, they want to score points with the young political action crowd, but not where it poses actual risks to the economy. So this can only be done with science. You want to help the climate? Get a real education in chemistry and physics and figure out some small part of the problem.
- petermcneeley 5y ago
  As someone with a degree in physics and a comp phys background I would argue that this is a coordination problem and not one of applied science or engineering. There is really no better demonstration of this than the nuclear power situation. We have already discovered the source of 'limitless' energy but we refuse to capitalize on it for political reasons. If you want more innovation you are going to have to fund it. Most of the smart people of this world are currently trying to figure out how to make Ads get clicks. Companies dont really fund the kinds of innovations you are suggesting because they will never see a return on that investment.
herbst 5y ago
How about making meat production more ethical and practical? I live surrounded by cows, literally. The area has no good soil, so every farmer here has like 13 to whatever cows (13 is the magical number of cows you can have without studying agriculture or so, assuming you live in a relevant area). All these cows spend most of the time outside, in the summer they are in the Alps, spring and fall they chill in the fields and go to 'sleep' in their stall and winter they are mostly indoors, except on sunny days. They eat ONLY what is growing around here in the more or less useless soil. Even in the winter. 90% of the farmers here are at least organic. So synthetic fertilizer & power food are out of the question too. Many small farmers do what one or two people can and help each other on the busy days. And it works. Literally every reason I've read is this thread about why cow meat is so bad does not apply as far as I can tell to the meat I eat.
- phonypc 5y ago
  And how expensive is it to eat beef from these cows? How many people that currently have a taste for beef could afford eating it regularly if this was the only option? I'm all for it, but in effect this is just the "massively reduce consumption" argument.
  - herbst 5y ago
    I haven't found any conclusive numbers. About 6.5% of all beef eaten here is organic. However not organic does not always automatically mean it's 100% bad. My neighbor's meat is way cheaper than organic meat in supermarkets. Still at least twice as much as 'cheap' meat.
    - phonypc 5y ago
      Near as I can find, baseline Swiss beef prices are already 4x the global average. I'd certainly be eating beef a lot less if it was 4x more expensive, never mind a premium on top of that.
      - herbst 5y ago
justshowpost 5y ago
Daily reminder what obsessions with radical green agenda is linked to mental disorders and birth defects. > ... an interview with Greta Thunberg and her family, where Greta reveals that the climate activists are > mostly autistic kids suffering from depression, and her father, Svante, reveals that Greta’s mother was > a pro-refugees activist who invited migrants to live with them in their home. > > Both Greta and her only sibling have developmental problems, so there’s a possibility they may have been > abused by some of those “refugees” Svante and his wife housed. (to complete the picture: Svante himself works for non-transparent supranational "cabron tax" authority)
jerome-jh 5y ago
Coal is thriving in China, India, Germany. So treating beef like coal would change ... nothing. Climate change is a global problem and assuming coal is treated globally as it is in the US is short-sighted. Most of the time coal power plants in the US are not even dismantled due on climate concerns. Only talks, no action: the swedish girl is right.
Glench 5y ago
If you want to read the whole article and not get a "sign up to read" prompt you can disable JavaScript in your browser developer tools and reload the page.
noidesto 5y ago
Eating coal like beef, would make a big increase in greenhouse-gas emissions.
TheDudeMan 5y ago
Why would we pick individual products and argue about them? Seems better to apply a blanket carbon tax or CO2 tax.
slowmovintarget 5y ago
Don't we just need to supplement cattle feed with seaweed? No more methane. I'm really getting suspicious of this drum-beat of "we have to stop eating beef." It's come from a number of places, like Bill Gates touting mass-produced synthetic meat from his industrial farming affiliations. He has substantial financial stake in controlling what people eat. And there it is at the conclusion of the article: > Fortunately, lab-grown meats are moving from Petri dishes to high-end restaurants (see Technology Quarterly).
pbronez 5y ago
Is there any data on how Bison compares to Beef regarding climate impact? I'd expect it to be less damaging because the herds are managed differently, but I have no data on that.

169 points by prostoalex 5y ago

Hm, this seems to be missing the point that plant monocrops destroy the soil and are not nearly as efficient a source of food for the human body as fresh animal meat. Regenerative agriculture, which ideally requires both animal and plant cultivation, would be a better path forward if it could scale. If I remember correctly the papers that originally thought cattle were a big contributor to global warming turned out to be pretty incorrect when they were re-examined as well https://carolinestocks.medium.com/debunking-the-methane-myth-why-cows-arent-responsible-for-climate-change-23926c63f2c0 https://carolinestocks.medium.com/debunking-the-methane-myth...

wumpus 5y ago
I thought the main problem with cows was feed lots feeding 10 calories of grain to make 1 calorie of meat, not methane.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Lets not forget the transportation of fresh meat is not negligible, the cooling and the fuel costs will add greatly to carbon emissions. Preserved foods and not relying on luxuries such as refrigeration would go a long way to sustainability and heath.
  - wumpus 5y ago
    Do you have a source that shows that it's not negligible? The carbon and water cost of 10 calories of grain is pretty large.
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... The EPA site shows transportation and electricity as the main contributions to carbon. The grains are not the issue, the subsidies in the US are so strong that they are not a real factor. There is so much excess food produced they export it to other countries for instance. https://modernfarmer.com/2019/01/congress-finally-passed-a-new-farm-bill-and-it-continues-to-pay-homage-to-the-cult-of-corn-and-soy/ https://modernfarmer.com/2019/01/congress-finally-passed-a-n... https://abcnews.go.com/US/dairy-farmers-dumping-milk-amid-covid-19-pandemics/story?id=70268302 https://abcnews.go.com/US/dairy-farmers-dumping-milk-amid-co... https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/business/milk-dumping-coronavirus/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/business/milk-dumping-cor... Fresh food is often wasted, and the dumping of milk is to prevent the prices from going too low. This was happening before corona as well, this paper is a pretty good summary from a marxist perspective on overproduction. https://www.e-ir.info/2016/07/07/agricultural-overproduction-and-the-deteriorating-environment/ https://www.e-ir.info/2016/07/07/agricultural-overproduction...
      - wumpus 5y ago
        Again, you apparently are willing to confuse the transportation cost of beef with the transport cost of everything. Nice reference to Marxism.
      - lasc4r 5y ago
        Transportation and cooling of meat in particular is nothing compared to the land area of North America and South America combined that we devote to growing crops to feed livestock. https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture
        GhettoComputers 5y ago
        Is it negligible that transportation of fresh meat, its cooling or freezing are not at all factors in carbon production? I would like to see how its calculated.
- Doji 5y ago
  Cow feed is generally not human edible: https://www.milkmeansmore.org/what-do-cows-eat/ https://www.milkmeansmore.org/what-do-cows-eat/
  - wumpus 5y ago
    Most places that grow feed corn could also grow human-edible corn. Remember that I'm talking about feedlots for beef.
  - mdorazio 5y ago
    This implies that the land used to grow cow feed couldn't be used to instead grow human-consumable crops or left fallow as a carbon sink. I'm not aware of any studies showing that.
    - Doji 5y ago
      You make a strong argument. I think this is a case where we'll find the global optimum somewhere in the middle. Deforesting the amazon to grow corn for cows is something I'm sure we can all agree is bad. Should we use livestock to eat cover crops and waste products like corn husks and cobs? This way we reuse waste and produce high quality protein to supplement our diets. Should we graze cattle on natural grasslands like the great plains? Especially in rotation with human foods, like the cover crops mentioned before?
      - wumpus 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure that feedlot studies say that the usual situation in the US is that 1/2 of beef calories come from a 10:1 ratio of human edible calories. So sure, go for 100%-grass-and-not-human-edible-food-fed beef, but that's not the current system.
    - WithinReason 5y ago
      If you check out the link, most of the cow feed is a by-product of other industrial processes and would go to waste otherwise.
yboris 5y ago
"plant monocrops" -- like all the soy that is planted to grow so it can be fed to the cows?
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  The monocrops are terrible for many reasons but the issue is subsidies. We have HFCS because of an artificial surplus of corn production.
tasty_freeze 5y ago
That article seems highly motivated to marginalize the effects of livestock. Quoting a section: While methane is 28-times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, methane’s lifespan is just a decade, while CO2 — known as a long-life pollutant — remains in the atmosphere for 1000 years. After ten years, methane is broken down in a process called hydroxyl oxidation into CO2, entering a carbon cycle which sees the gas absorbed by plants, converted into cellulose, and eaten by livestock. In the first paragraph, it says methane isn't so bad because it lasts only 10 years, unlike CO2 which lasts 1000 years. In the very next paragraph it says the methane is broken down into CO2 which is then absorbed by plants and recycled. Wait, you just said it lasts 1000 years. The next two paragraphs say that livestock accounts for 33% of the total methane released and blithely states that it all gets broken down and reused. If no additional animals are introduced, then net release equals net absorption. That is not very insightful -- eventually an equilibrium will be reached. This glosses over the real data that CO2 levels are rising, it is having measurable consequences, and is pushing control loops to new, worse states. Citing one article written for the "Farm Business" trade publication isn't as conclusive as you seem to state.
- Doji 5y ago
  There is a certain amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and a certain amount of carbon in the ground. When you burn oil, you take carbon from the ground and introduce it into the atmosphere. This increases the total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere. When you grow plants, you take carbon out of the atmosphere. When you eat it, you release it back into the atmosphere. The total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere does not change. Grass grows more vigorously when regularly pruned, for example by a grazing animal. Farms also make a point of planting thing which grow quickly and efficiently. Thus it's reasonable to expect that farming could increase the rate of carbon turnover in the atmosphere, which would create the appearance of increased carbon emissions without a corresponding increase in the amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere. In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged. But the cow itself only causes a short lived, fixed increase in atmospheric methane and an increased rate of carbon turnover.
_the_inflator 5y ago
I disagree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...
adrianN 5y ago
Well, some meat production is obviously a sustainable part of agriculture. There will always be some areas where the soil is too poor for anything but grazing and you'll always have some waste that you can feed to chicken, pigs, and ruminants. But these sustainable levels of animal husbandry are so far removed from the industrialized meat production that we're currently doing that they might as well be zero. Recall that just a generation or two ago meat was something you ate once a week if you lived in a fairly developed country. Today Americans eat more than a 100kg of meat per year.
- allturtles 5y ago
  > Recall that just a generation or two ago meat was something you ate once a week if you lived in a fairly developed country. What do you mean by a fairly developed country? McDonald's was selling hamburgers for 15 cents in 1955 (roughly the same as the price of a loaf of bread at the grocery store). Catholics eating fish on Friday (instead of meat) I believe goes back many generations. See also this article about historical meat consumption in the U.S.[0]: "“These sources do give us some confidence in suggesting an average annual consumption of 150–200 pounds of meat per person in the nineteenth century.” [0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-americans-used-to-eat/371895/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-ameri...
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Huh, interesting. I was extrapolating from my parents and grandparents who definitely didn't eat meat every day and certainly not half a pound of meat each day. They didn't live in the US though. My grandparents still had to raise all the meat for the family themselves.
    - bserge 5y ago
      Wouldn't be a bad idea tbh. Raise the tax on meat from industrial deathcamps but not from homegrown. Yes, I realize it's still death and pollution but the scale of modern farms is simply mindboggling. Grow and slaughter your own pigs and hens and then decide if you still want to do it for the meat (or the money from selling the meat).
rapnie 5y ago
Yesterday in the investigative journalism program Zembla on Dutch TV they addressed how the entire agri sector was beholden in a vicious cycle of greed. Where in the supply chain from Monsanto to supermarkets huge profit margins were raked in. Large part of the blame is at the supermarkets. While farmers are left no choice but to apply extractive methods (furtilizers, pesticides) to farm their lands to keep their heads afloat. Even with their huge farms and professional production methods they are effectively exploited. In this story the supermarkets say "We'll give consumers the choice", but for them that means choosing eco products that have ~40% higher price and they don't do that (~5% of sales is eco-friendly), so this doesn't work. Once again it is politicians who need to take some tough measures, but they find powerful lobbies in their path plus they do not dare to take impopular measures that make products more expensive, for fear of losing votes. So for 50 years things got worse and worse. One solution mentioned was what social enterprise True Price [0] is trying to establish: explicitly pricing the detrimental externalities that until now are shoved as costs to future generations. A pack of regular coffee with externalities priced in would go from, say, $5 to become $10, while a pack of eco-friendly coffee would go to $6.50. The surplus to the price should be reserved in a fund with which farmers can make the transition to sustainable agriculture. [0] https://trueprice.org/ https://trueprice.org/
tarsinge 5y ago
The vast majority of agricultural land today are for feeding animals (between 70% and 80% depending of the studies). The end product meat is maybe more efficient, but compared to what was needed for its production it is not. It’s not humans that eat that much monocultured corn and soy.
- p_l 5y ago
  "Agricultural land" != "arable land'. It varies a lot by country, pretty sure there's a lot more overlap between pasture land and arable land in Europe, but for example in USA not so much. Considerable amount of animal food also involves byproducts of food production for humans, or plants used in cycling the fields (that's made worse with preference to just put ton of artificial fertilizer)
asplake 5y ago
Efficient? That rather depends on the scope of the system you’re measuring.
johnydays 5y ago
Most plant monocrops are for feedstock. You can do regenerative agriculture with only plants. Feeding animals plant calories is terribly inneficient (~10-15% depending on the estimate)
Glench 5y ago
Your efficiency argument is ridiculously based on a Medium article. Here's a quote from the Economist article citing two recent scientific studies: "It takes 33 plant calories to produce one calorie of beef."

b20000 5y ago

artificial plant based meat is treated with so many chemicals that it is potentially worse for you than eating real meat

adrianN 5y ago
Citation needed. "Chemicals" are not all bad. Everything you eat is a chemical.
- b20000 5y ago
  true. the question is whether your body can deal with it. it knows how to deal with chemicals it has been exposed to for thousands of years. it doesn’t know very well how to deal with GMOs.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    That is nonsense in this generalization and also mostly unrelated to meat-substitutes. Humans have been genetically modifying their food ever since they came up with agriculture and there are plenty of meat-substitutes without GMOs if you don't like them.
bserge 5y ago
No more than real meat lol

ginja 5y ago

I can’t read the full article because of the paywall but the main argument seems to be that cows emit a lot of CO2. Ruminants eat plants, which contain carbon captured from the atmosphere. They then release most of that carbon back to the atmosphere, from where it will be eventually absorbed by plants again. So it’s a cycle where no new carbon is really being introduced (unlike burning fossil fuels that would otherwise stay in the ground). Am I missing something or is the seriousness of this issue blown way out of proportion?

GhettoComputers 5y ago
To be fair, it could be as easy as banning cows and using buffalo for better ruminant yields.
- wumpus 5y ago
  To be fair, that has nothing to do with the current economy, where almost all cows go to feed lots to be fed human food (corn) to double their weight.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    >To be fair, that has nothing to do with the current economy, where almost all cows go to feed lots to be fed human food (corn) to double their weight. Have you travled outside the US? This is not true in most parts of the world, I wouldn't be suprised to see it only being a US practice.
    - wumpus 5y ago
      Yes, I've visited several dozen countries, and I assure you that the practice of using feedlots has spread to most developed countries, and is being spread to the less developed world as a way to increase incomes. Nice insult, btw. I had to send my passport to get more pages sewn in.
      - 5y ago

beckman466 5y ago

this is a half-baked ‘solution‘ that just makes eating meat a luxury. a thing only for the rich. it’ll be like crimes that are punished by a fine - they just become the ‘fee’ that allows the propertied class to do whatever they want. beef is deadly for humanity because of destructive water and land usage (Vice had a great video showing the Amazon deforestation due to beef production). edit: my point is that the propertied class will lower wages and raise commodity prices to be able to pay to keep eating an unsustainable amount of beef. instead we should restrict or ban industrial animal agriculture, while investing in educational material to help society transition away from beef. that and regenerative agriculture, agro-forestry, etc. Ernst Gotsch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE

smt88 5y ago
That's true of literally anything where the price reflects the externalities. If it bothers you that the rich can afford to pay for the externalities, that's an argument against wealth inequality, not against pricing things correctly.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
It's time to tie all societal fees/fines to income. Start with using 1040's. Yes--their will be guys whom try to game the system, but many will eventually get caught. For example, a a patent fee to a poor man is nothing. A wealthy man pays current rates. A poor man drives through a red light; the fine might get the last straw, or rent. A wealthy guy drives through a red light, he casually mentions it over dinner to Clair. I have never felt it was fair, even when I had money.
colordrops 5y ago
If only allowing the rich to eat beef will help save the planet then I'm for it.
- beckman466 5y ago
  the point is that the propertied class will lower wages and raise commodity prices to pay to keep eating an unsustainable amount of beef. instead we should restrict or ban industrial animal agriculture, while investing in educational material to help society transition away from beef. that and regenerative agriculture, agro-forestry, etc. Ernst Gotsch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE i don’t want to give my children a dead planet either.

koilke 5y ago

https://archive.ph/RoeA3 https://archive.ph/RoeA3

throwawaysea 5y ago

I can’t view the whole article due to the paywall, but I have to ask - where does this line of thinking lead? Does every pleasurable activity we might voluntarily undertake get scrutinized, regulated, or banned? I certainly hope not, since such losses of freedom can make the tyranny of the majority very real. It’s important that any potential policies are applied in a fair manner. For example, priced externalities shouldn’t be limited to just carbon dioxide or only applied to some things like cars or cows. In particular, those who support regulation or bans should also have their own favored things regulated similarly.

timemachine 5y ago
I don’t think that a magazine has the power to ban or set global policy on anything. They do have the ability (or perhaps the responsibility, as a free press) to to research, describe, and suggest alternatives to “every pleasurable activity we might voluntarily undertake.” That results in an informed majority, not a tyrannical one.
tfehring 5y ago
There's nothing moralistic about a carbon tax - it's a Pigouvian tax, not a sin tax. The point of a Pigouvian tax isn't to say "I don't like that thing so let's tax it so other people do less of it," it's to say "Do what you want but don't make me or my children pay for the externalities it creates."
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  A decrease of carbon would many lower crop yields, could I sue for my lowered crop yields? The issue of a carbon tax is basically that politicians are only too happy to give more taxes, and would support carbon taxes regardless of it being good or bad.
  - tfehring 5y ago
    Not sure about the potential for a private entity to sue another private entity for those damages - but sure, to the extent that beef production creates positive externalities, the value of those externalities should also be priced in. Though most of the warming potential from cattle farming comes from methane, not carbon dioxide, so I'd be surprised if it actually had a nonnegligible impact on crop yields, let alone an impact that came anywhere close to offsetting the negative externalities elsewhere. Empirically, most politicians don't support carbon taxes. Market-consistent pricing of climate-related externalities is broadly opposed by politicians on both sides of the aisle in the US. For example, look at the massive subsidies to dairy farms in my home state of Wisconsin - they get over 40% of their revenue from direct subsidies in a typical year, and if you exclude those subsidies the industry hasn't made a profit for at least several decades, but no one dares to even suggest reducing or eliminating them, let alone going the other way and taxing the negative externalities they create.

seiferteric 5y ago

power is fungible. Nobody cares where their electricity comes from. Coal is failing because it is not price competitive. Food is not fungible, so I am not sure what point this is making.

wumpus 5y ago
Lots of foods are commodities, so I'm not exactly sure why you think they aren't fungible. Soybeans, corn, pork bellies, ...
- seiferteric 5y ago
  That's not what fungible means... A Watt is a Watt, a soybean is not a steak...
  - wumpus 5y ago
    I'm not sure why you think I said a soybean is a steak, but I meant that a soybean is a soybean, corn is corn, and pork bellies are pork bellies, when we're talking about things traded on the commodities markets.
    - tw04 5y ago
      I guess I doing get your point. Fungible means interchangeable. The average consumer doesn’t think twice about whether their electricity comes from coal or solar as long as the lights turn on when they flip the switch. If you try to give someone soy beans when they ordered a steak they’re going to care quite a lot. Food isn’t fungible for the average consumer. That has absolutely nothing to do with it being a commodity or not.
      - wumpus 5y ago
        Soybeans are a fungible commodity. That means that it's fungible with other soybeans. Corn is a fungible commodity. Pork bellies are a fungible commodity. It's a mystery to me as to why you think I said soybeans and steak are the same.

GhettoComputers 5y ago

I disagree, its a percentage of roughly 10% according to the EPA in 2019. Here are the EPA statistics. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... I am all for replacing them with native buffalo, but this is overemphasis on minute percentages, this information presented is much too technology based and not practical, it relies on assumptions about plant based foods and lab meat (farming crops is the backbone of civilization, it is not a new idea, meat replacements like tofu, seitan, and even quorn of more reasonable price exists but we should ignore it for the fantasies of lab grown meat) the problem is that nobody will do it, and even with existing solutions you can't force people to eat the way the author wants them to. Electricty (such as that used for cooling), and transportation make up the most carbon emissions. This truck is one such solution for transportation and lower emmission, it uses compression rather than combustion for the engine, and "waste" is cold, so its used to cool the internals. The adoption of this would have a much better effect overall without human habits as resistance. https://atlasofthefuture.org/project/the-dearman-engine/ https://atlasofthefuture.org/project/the-dearman-engine/ Improved infrastructure and improvements in efficiency in larger sector should be focused on rather than a nudged suggestion to change eating habits, the title is a pie in the sky, noit interested in practical applications.

wumpus 5y ago
> interested in virute signaling rather than practical applications. Love the insult, I'm sure it helps the conversation along to a good conclusion.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Ill omit that then, I am getting used to using HN. Objectively, we should look at the largest percentages that are causing carbon emissions if the goal was to lower it.
  - wumpus 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure that insulting people for virtue signaling isn't an objective thing.

timemachine 5y ago

I generally like the economist but this article is poor. The topic of deforestation is only whispered in at the end, almost a footnote. However, burning the Amazon for farmland to produce beef in Brazil should be part of the headline.

analognoise 5y ago
I thought the modern view was that the Amazon as the "lungs of the planet" was supposed to be totally bullshit and we could burn the whole thing down and be fine - but what we can't do is screw up the oceans, and it's already too late and we're all effectively doomed (walking ghost status) but we just don't realize it yet. I'm paraphrasing here.
- gotoeleven 5y ago
  If net neutrality doesn't get us first!
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  It is easy to do carbon studies on trees, but not on grasslands and other carbon sinks. The carbon content of the world will not be the destroyer as much as the effect of human nature, the world has been very different at different times, but extinction isn't likely. To screw up the oceans, there must be a standard, but there isn't. There are many problems such as lower native populations, corals, invasive species, stronger weather patterns, microplastics, but I am not sure what it is to "screw up the oceans".

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spydr 5y ago

I disagree with this article and frustrated with those who try to push this narrative Here’s a 20 min video to show you why https://youtu.be/sGG-A80Tl5g https://youtu.be/sGG-A80Tl5g

analog31 5y ago
What are its main points?
- ayngg 5y ago
  Arguments that meat take an excessive amount of resources are disingenuous because those resources cannot simply be translated to other uses, examples being that the water use example many tout uses rainwater would fall anyways, that livestock will eventually urinate meaning it isn't actually lost, and land used for livestock is mostly non arable land and therefore cant be used for producing crops anyways. Also there is a relationship between livestock, agriculture and human society where they all are able to use resources that each other cant, or provide benefit to each other. For example a huge amount of agriculture fertilizer comes from manure, and a huge amount of livestock feed comes from agricultural waste. Without livestock we now have to get fertilizer elsewhere, and all the byproducts that would become animal feed becomes waste. In the grand scheme of things livestock produce an insignificant amount of ghg and that if all Americans stopped consuming beef, it would reduce the nations ghg emissions by ~2.5%, whereas transportation, power generation and construction contribute to the overwhelming amount of emissions (~80%). If you want to look at reducing emissions from food, it is much easier to look at food waste, where ~40% of food in the US is wasted, and of that roughly 80% is produce like fruits, vegetables, tubers etc, meaning that even if there was a transformation to a purely vegan population, food waste would probably increase. edit: I should reiterate that these are points in summary that are made in the video, not my personal opinion.
  - emkoemko 5y ago
    "land used for livestock is mostly non arable land and therefore cant be used for producing crops anyways." so what is it that they grow then cut and roll into those large objects? here they even grow corn for feed.

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gotoeleven 5y ago

If they ban beef from the food supply, people will find substitutes.. like bat.

voldacar 5y ago

It feels like we are headed into a new medieval era of sumptuary laws and moral decrees promulgated by a decentralized international clerical-academic class. I don't think I like it very much

quotemstr 5y ago
Right. Prices, not arbitrary bans, are the correct way to incorporate externalities in the costs of a product. People are far too happy to promote ad-hoc bans of all sorts of arbitrary things without creating any kind of general incentive structure that would automatically optimize the metrics of interest. The result is malinvestment, economic inefficiency, and global poverty. The problem is that the externality is set arbitrarily by people who think beef in particular is bad --- it's a sin tax. If you're being honest about pricing emissions, you internalize externalities universally, uniformly, and transparently. An across-the-board carbon tax is defensible; such a tax would likely affect beef. A fee on beef by itself --- that's just disingenuous and moralistic nonsense.
- voldacar 5y ago
  What bothers me most isn't the malinvestment (though that sucks) or a faliure to calculate costs and benefits, but the fact that they're moralizing zealots. A zealot can justify anything in the name of The Common Good (naturally, they are the ones who decide what The Common Good is)
  - quotemstr 5y ago
    Time to bring out the old CS Lewis quip: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." A big problem is that the moral busybodies who propose laws banning random things are the same moral busybodies who censor internet discussion.
  - 5y ago

tobtoh 5y ago

As someone in the Gen X demographic who has never smoked, I've watched the anti-smoking campaigns and shift in attitudes towards smoking with interest - particularly how resistant smokers were to initially giving up smoking. I feel like eating meat is going to be my generations equivalent of smoking. Intellectually, I agree that eating meat is bad for the environment, cruel to animals (esp industrial farming) etc ... but I can't see myself giving up eating meat.

rhn_mk1 5y ago
Did you notice what drove the change in attitudes towards smoking?
- tluyben2 5y ago
  Well, in my country (where tax in cigarettes etc was already very high; no one cared) it was not being allowed to smoke almost anywhere anymore, then, when that became normal (many people did it anyway for a few years until the fines got too high), people who used to smoke and everyone else found it smelly and then, way way way way behind that somewhere, something with health.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  Partly, it was generational. Gen X grew up hearing the evils of smoking in the 70s (TV and radio ads were banned as early as 1971), then with great admonition in the 1980s. 1982 was the year that the US Surgeon General announced that second-hand smoke was dangerous. That was the beginning of the end. Then shortly after the lawsuits started. Boomers and the generation before did not have much of that influence in their formative years, even though warning labels were put on cigarette packages in 1965, they were mostly ignored because… marketing. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/timelines/fullindex.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/settlement/ti...
- libertine 5y ago
  I think it was part policy making part witnessing the end-game for a lot of smokers. The cool factor goes out the window.

elil17 5y ago

> The simplest way to cut beef output is for people to eat other animals instead, or become vegetarians. That’s like, in 1900, saying “the simplest way to prevent road deaths is for everyone to drive slower.” That’s not simple at all - that’s an intractable group behavior problem. What you really need is for the government to come along and put up speed limits. Most people will push those rules, a few will flout them, but things will be better. So let’s have a carbon tax that includes all sources of greenhouse gas, including domesticated animals, and stop passing moral judgement on people who are stressed enough as it is figuring out how to navigate our challenging world.

kybernetyk 5y ago
Yes, we absolutely need the government to tell people what they’re allowed to eat.
- emkoemko 5y ago
  yes that already exists, last time i checked governments don't like it when people eat other people;
  - legulere 5y ago
    Or depending on where you live horses, cats and dogs.
    - herbst 5y ago
      Welcome to Switzerland, the only place you can have all of those.
- heydabop 5y ago
  Maybe read the entire comment before replying to it.
- lm28469 5y ago
  That's where we'll be in 50-100 years if we want to have a future that doesn't suck too much, and not just about what you eat. We're definitely living in the golden age of consumerism in every aspects: energy, food, travel, electronic gadgets, &c. We're producing and consuming so much useless shit and well aware that we're heading for disaster. We're either going to be limited by natural resources, climate issues or our own actions to limit ourself to avoid #1 and #2. There is just no way around it, you can't keep on extracting more and more ressources from a closed system, you can't keep polluting more and more in a closed system, you can't target an exponential growth in a closed system. Companies don't give a shit, because their sole purpose is to not care about these issues. That's how you get companies like apple shitting unrepairable products every 6 months, but it's ok because their offices are carbon neutral, right ? Countries don't give a shit, because GDP is king and energy = GDP, https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/correlation-of-per-capita-energy https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/correlation-... So it's a game of chicken, everyone knows about the problem, they all know the solutions, but no one is really taking action, because that would be a massive paradigm shift in virtually every aspect of our economy

sjatkins 5y ago

This is grossly overstated. 1) far less methane in atmosphere 2) it deteriorates rapidly 3) the majority of it is NOT from cattle.

chrisbrandow 5y ago

Treating it like coal implies that its users can trade beef for something that is just "as good". At the moment many users don't find that plausible.

gregable 5y ago
I'll be honest, it seems reasonable to me in a lot of cases. I'm not enamored with steak, and chicken/pork can work just as well as beef for a lot of other dishes. A chicken sandwich is just as good as a burger to me. I know there are people where that doesn't work, but there may be many where it does too with minimal nudging.

justicezyx 5y ago

So now people see the nuances of why they still want to eat beef ... Not like when they claim that it's ridiculous for the developing countries to burn coals, oil, woods, etc.

anothernewdude 5y ago

I can't see how lab grown meats would enable the use of the land that animals use. Animals take up land that is unusable for crops and make it productive. What land would the labs use?

wumpus 5y ago
1/2 of calories in US beef comes from corn at feedlots.

Ekaros 5y ago

If we start banning certain foods like beef. We should do it equally. Only allow those crops with lowest CO2 per calorie/nutrient output. As clearly taste is secondary. After all, replacing all we eat with tasteless gruel and water is acceptable by this logic.

gregmolnar 5y ago
The taste of a dish is mainly coming from the spices.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  But they have little nutrional importance. As such producing them cause substantial extra CO2 load relatively. I think ban of them in such scenario is absolutely justified. As we clearly then want to do everything to combat climate change.
  - gregmolnar 5y ago
    You clearly know shit about nutrition :) Spices are rich in vitamins, antioxidants, minerals. They don't produce extra CO2, to the contrary, they remove CO2. Enjoy your beef.
paganel 5y ago
At some point Soylent Green becomes an acceptable option.

axiolite 5y ago

Coal is a fossil fuel. Returning ancient carbon to the atmosphere. Cattle is a bio-fuel. The methane/carbon they release was captured by the grains and grasses shortly before the cattle consumed it, and will continue growing after they've consumed it. Cattle should be the trendy and expensive thing among the outspoken, virtue-signaling greens. It's plant-based. Contains all-natural ingredients. Isn't made in a lab/on an assembly line with a a bunch of chemicals with scary names. Old hippies should each buy a cow to keep their lawns mowed and fertilized without burning gasoline.

wumpus 5y ago
> virtue-signaling greens Fun how insulting people is OK these days.
- axiolite 5y ago
  It was an identification of a sub-group, not an insult. But as far as I can recall, it has always been fair game to criticize public figures for their espoused opinions and public actions. Being offended by everything, and making it everyone else's fault, is the part that is new these days.
  - wumpus 5y ago
    It wasn't an insult? Funny, I thought it was the same as calling someone a hypocrite. Indeed, it's fair game to insult other people. Sadly, it's prohibited by the rules of this forum. Disagree with them? Great. Accuse them of being hypocrites? Less great.
    - axiolite 5y ago
      > Funny, I thought it was the same as calling someone a hypocrite. And just where did you look-up that definition? May I point you to a few: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/virtue-signaling https://www.dictionary.com/browse/virtue-signaling https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/virtue-signalling https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/virtu... https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-talk/202008/moral-grandstanding-and-virtue-signaling-the-same-thing https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-talk/202008/mo... > Accuse them of being hypocrites? Less great This seems to be a you problem, not a me problem.

Proven 5y ago

Barely a week can pass without globalist busybodies coming up with new ideas for enslavement and pauperization of the ordinary man. Treating the Economist like a NWO propaganda tool would make a big dent in fascist onslaught on our freedoms.

timeon 5y ago

One should not be surprised by all those defensive comments on the website where most people are from country where beef is dominating.

wumpus 5y ago
I wouldn't assume that -- one of my roommates in grad school was a nurse from China who was older because her education had been interrupted by the Cultural Revolution, and she was the biggest beef fan I've ever met.

bongoman37 5y ago

If US solves the issue of massively subsidizing corn, we could have a lot of other pieces automatically falling into place.

OneTimePetes 5y ago

Ah, yes.. lets talk about something that is cyclic in nature of producing and reusing - even if it is cattle, and ignore the carbon adding elephant in the room that pays lots of media to shape the discussionscape to be about anything else but gasoline driven mobility. Agriculture always had the lousiest lobby, thats why its discussed so much, while the car industry and industry in general happily gets ignored. My parents farm went almost broke, while the newspapers in germany discussed the dangerous climate and environmental factors of farming in great detail. Not a word about VW, BMW, Mercedes and many others. I'm all for going vegan, but then in a combined deal. Full vegan, with full stop to petrol cars- at the same time. Everywhere on the planet. Tie it all together and watch the discussion distortion artists squirm.

gremloni 5y ago

Beef is delicious. Meat is delicious. We have to figure out how to replace that before we get rid of cattle farms.

GhettoComputers 5y ago
The article shows that buffalo uses less energy, but its not at all suggested, although it would be a very good replacement in terms of taste and nutrition.
codezero 5y ago
It's not as delicious to people who grow up not eating meat. I expect if we want a change it'll have to be generational.
- gremloni 5y ago
  Meat is delicious even to life long vegetarians. This is anecdotal but just that fact that we have glutamate receptors means it probably generally holds true.
  - codezero 5y ago
    Also anecdotal, I’ve worked with about a half dozen people when they tried meat for the first time and remained unimpressed and never ate it again.

candiodari 5y ago

No it would not make even the tiniest dent. I don't get this sort of reasoning. We keep, and keep, and keep treating this like "let's force everyone" problem. Jevon's paradox. If we kill beef production, we change nothing. Oil and coal that gets dug up gets burned. Law simply does not apply to all states that do this, so these sorts of measures are dead in the water. So the ONLY way to lower (eventual) greenhouse emissions is to leave coal and oil in the ground. Such measures can only ever change WHY fossil fuels get burned, bitcoins instead of steel production, not WHETHER or not coal gets burned ... They can't leave oil in the ground. They can't leave coal in the ground. Problem is that the real change we need can't be done with law, with political action, with any of that ... it can only be done by competing with oil. Outcompete oil and the problem is solved. No country will risk it's energy supply dropping by 0.1% for the climate, it's just not going to happen. Sure, they want to score points with the young political action crowd, but not where it poses actual risks to the economy. So this can only be done with science. You want to help the climate? Get a real education in chemistry and physics and figure out some small part of the problem.

petermcneeley 5y ago
As someone with a degree in physics and a comp phys background I would argue that this is a coordination problem and not one of applied science or engineering. There is really no better demonstration of this than the nuclear power situation. We have already discovered the source of 'limitless' energy but we refuse to capitalize on it for political reasons. If you want more innovation you are going to have to fund it. Most of the smart people of this world are currently trying to figure out how to make Ads get clicks. Companies dont really fund the kinds of innovations you are suggesting because they will never see a return on that investment.

herbst 5y ago

How about making meat production more ethical and practical? I live surrounded by cows, literally. The area has no good soil, so every farmer here has like 13 to whatever cows (13 is the magical number of cows you can have without studying agriculture or so, assuming you live in a relevant area). All these cows spend most of the time outside, in the summer they are in the Alps, spring and fall they chill in the fields and go to 'sleep' in their stall and winter they are mostly indoors, except on sunny days. They eat ONLY what is growing around here in the more or less useless soil. Even in the winter. 90% of the farmers here are at least organic. So synthetic fertilizer & power food are out of the question too. Many small farmers do what one or two people can and help each other on the busy days. And it works. Literally every reason I've read is this thread about why cow meat is so bad does not apply as far as I can tell to the meat I eat.

phonypc 5y ago
And how expensive is it to eat beef from these cows? How many people that currently have a taste for beef could afford eating it regularly if this was the only option? I'm all for it, but in effect this is just the "massively reduce consumption" argument.
- herbst 5y ago
  I haven't found any conclusive numbers. About 6.5% of all beef eaten here is organic. However not organic does not always automatically mean it's 100% bad. My neighbor's meat is way cheaper than organic meat in supermarkets. Still at least twice as much as 'cheap' meat.
  - phonypc 5y ago
    Near as I can find, baseline Swiss beef prices are already 4x the global average. I'd certainly be eating beef a lot less if it was 4x more expensive, never mind a premium on top of that.
    - herbst 5y ago

justshowpost 5y ago

Daily reminder what obsessions with radical green agenda is linked to mental disorders and birth defects. > ... an interview with Greta Thunberg and her family, where Greta reveals that the climate activists are > mostly autistic kids suffering from depression, and her father, Svante, reveals that Greta’s mother was > a pro-refugees activist who invited migrants to live with them in their home. > > Both Greta and her only sibling have developmental problems, so there’s a possibility they may have been > abused by some of those “refugees” Svante and his wife housed. (to complete the picture: Svante himself works for non-transparent supranational "cabron tax" authority)

jerome-jh 5y ago

Coal is thriving in China, India, Germany. So treating beef like coal would change ... nothing. Climate change is a global problem and assuming coal is treated globally as it is in the US is short-sighted. Most of the time coal power plants in the US are not even dismantled due on climate concerns. Only talks, no action: the swedish girl is right.

Glench 5y ago

If you want to read the whole article and not get a "sign up to read" prompt you can disable JavaScript in your browser developer tools and reload the page.

noidesto 5y ago

Eating coal like beef, would make a big increase in greenhouse-gas emissions.

TheDudeMan 5y ago

Why would we pick individual products and argue about them? Seems better to apply a blanket carbon tax or CO2 tax.

slowmovintarget 5y ago

Don't we just need to supplement cattle feed with seaweed? No more methane. I'm really getting suspicious of this drum-beat of "we have to stop eating beef." It's come from a number of places, like Bill Gates touting mass-produced synthetic meat from his industrial farming affiliations. He has substantial financial stake in controlling what people eat. And there it is at the conclusion of the article: > Fortunately, lab-grown meats are moving from Petri dishes to high-end restaurants (see Technology Quarterly).

pbronez 5y ago

Is there any data on how Bison compares to Beef regarding climate impact? I'd expect it to be less damaging because the herds are managed differently, but I have no data on that.