6 ms·

Differences in the carbon footprint of different foods (2020)

11235813213455 4y ago
In response of a recent post about Perennial rice and its top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35483071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35483071 Other relevant article: https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/03/07/meat-diary-and-rice-which-foods-contribute-the-most-to-global-warming https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/03/07/meat-diary-and-ric...
melling 4y ago
“Methane has a much shorter atmospheric lifetime than carbon dioxide (CO2) – around 12 years compared with centuries – but absorbs much more energy while it exists in the atmosphere” https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/methane-and-climate-change https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/meth...
- timeon 4y ago
  >Methane has a much shorter atmospheric lifetime than carbon dioxide And after that it continues as carbon dioxide (and water).
tbrownaw 4y ago
Why is the title phrased as a question? It's not like carbon footprint is a directly measured value that takes investigation to figure out where it came from, it's something that's calculated and you can just look at what went into the calculations.
DoingIsLearning 4y ago
It's interesting to understand the impact across different food types but this type of infographic is kind of misleading when you look at emissions by sector. The whole of agriculture related emissions pales in comparison with the emissions from coal/natural gas plants or steel industry emissions. It's ok to not eat meat for animal welfare but to spin it for emission purposes is misleading. You would have a greater impact for the environment by not using your car, not using AC in the summer, midly heating your home in the winter, stop buying trinkets from Amazon, etc.
- f6v 4y ago
  > You would have a greater impact for the environment by not using your car, not using AC in the summer, midly heating your home in the winter I agree with some of this. But not having cooling or heating will make the civilization existence in many parts of the world nearly impossible. India(and probably other Asian countries) is a prime example.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    At least a few years ago, 90%+ (probably even 95%+) of people in India didn't have AC, so not having cooling clearly does not make the existence of civilization impossible there.
    - f6v 4y ago
      1. The temperatures are going to get higher, and nothing is going to reverse the trend in the near future. 2. Yes, people can survive. But I assume most time is spent surviving instead of living. You can’t be very productive at 35+ degrees. 3. Many people in India survive without a toilet. Doesn’t mean it’s how it should be. And their lives will be much better if they didn’t have to defecate on the streets. I’d argue same applies to ACs.
- tomp 4y ago
  > not using AC in the summer Can you expand on this? AC is 100% matched by the curve of solar energy input (sun -> heat -> AC cooling but also sun -> solar power), so presumably as we transition towards more and more solar, we should be using AC more.
  - 11235813213455 4y ago
    AC is still using a lot more energy (x50-x100) than a basic fan
gregwebs 4y ago
Cows and ruminants have been roaming the Earth for a long time. If they were a huge contribute to global warming, it would be pretty hot already. Focusing on methane emission omits the fact that grasslands absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and that a properly managed grassland actually sequesters carbon dioxide. Whereas factory farming breaks this cycle. We need to think in more nuanced ways if we’re going to solve global warming. https://www.agriculture.com/livestock/cattle/methane-and-grazing-a-broader-view https://www.agriculture.com/livestock/cattle/methane-and-gra...
- cinntaile 4y ago
  > Cows and ruminants have been roaming the Earth for a long time. If they were a huge contribute to global warming, it would be pretty hot already. The number of cows has of course massively increased over time.
  - Taywee 4y ago
    As a slight diversion from the carbon focus, the proportion of animals that is cows has increased drastically, as well. Look up the animal biomass proportions. It's shocking (sickening, even) to learn what proportion of the mammal biomass is cows and humans, and what proportion of the animal biomass is cows, chickens, and humans.
  - jutrewag 4y ago
    I’m inclined to think so but wasn’t America full of hundred of millions of bison at one point.
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      80 million before 1850 according to Wikipedia. Now we're at about 1 billion cows worldwide, so it would depend on the number of cows/bison in the rest of the world at that time.
    - timeon 4y ago
      https://animalclock.org/ https://animalclock.org/
tomp 4y ago
Reasoning from first principles (physics), there is zero CO2 impact of food, including beef (especially discounting methane). Animals are part of the CO2 cycle. They breathe out CO2, you eat meat and breath out CO2, grass consumes CO2 to grow, cow eats grass - loop complete. Of course, there are other inputs - e.g. transportation and fertilizer production (fun fact: 50% of the protein of your body is artificially produced, organic nitrogen bound via Haber-Bosch process). But those are energy inputs, not CO2 inputs. If we used nuclear/solar, farming would be CO2-neutral. All long-term climate change impact is coming from fossil fuels, not meat/farming. (Methane has only short-term impact.)
- timeon 4y ago
  Nuclear/solar is not going to solve deforestation.
  - tomp 4y ago
    It won't, but economic progress will. Most rich countries are increasing forest (reforesting, not deforesting).
    - 11235813213455 4y ago
      it's more like a side-effect of lower fertility, because 1 person in rich country pollutes as much as 40 persons in poor countries
emmanuel_1234 4y ago
Reading the article, I thought that it was not relevant to compare carbon footprint per unit of mass, and I was pleased to see it was addressed in the last section. However, the way it's addressed feels even more disingenuous: they removed all the non protein-rich food from the chart. Naturally, mostly animal products remain at the top. Based on the assumption that humans need protein[0], it seems only fair to compare everything we eat on a carbon-cost / protein-value basis without cherry-picking the data points. It's here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore?tab=table https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore?tab... A few observations: - coffee and chocolate are very high up. To be fair, nobody assumes that those have any kind of nutritional value, and that's not why they are consumed. - beef and lamb are very high. It implies that, even in the most charitable light, lamb and beef are bad in terms of carbon emission[1]. - among non-animal products, tomatoes, cassava and bananas are surprisingly high up. Higher than a lot of animal products. Now that is relevant, because those are consumed for their actual nutritional value. Rice, a staple all around the world, is worse than farmed fish, or eggs! - wheat and nuts have an amazing carbon-cost/nutritional value ratio. [0] and fat, there are no essentials carbs. [1] and that makes me sad because I love both.
- cush 4y ago
  Coffee is also consumed ~20g at a time
- 11235813213455 4y ago
  the fact chocolate & coffee consumption are not primarily for nutrition make their impact even worse and for proteins & fat, maybe I'm not human, or maybe rice have enough for me, but I don't eat animal food more than a few times a year, rest of the time I eat rice and plenty vegetables, so that's just to put a nuance on the "you need a daily meat intake" common falsy recommandation

In response of a recent post about Perennial rice and its top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35483071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35483071 Other relevant article: https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/03/07/meat-diary-and-rice-which-foods-contribute-the-most-to-global-warming https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/03/07/meat-diary-and-ric...

melling 4y ago

“Methane has a much shorter atmospheric lifetime than carbon dioxide (CO2) – around 12 years compared with centuries – but absorbs much more energy while it exists in the atmosphere” https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/methane-and-climate-change https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/meth...

timeon 4y ago
>Methane has a much shorter atmospheric lifetime than carbon dioxide And after that it continues as carbon dioxide (and water).

tbrownaw 4y ago

Why is the title phrased as a question? It's not like carbon footprint is a directly measured value that takes investigation to figure out where it came from, it's something that's calculated and you can just look at what went into the calculations.

DoingIsLearning 4y ago

It's interesting to understand the impact across different food types but this type of infographic is kind of misleading when you look at emissions by sector. The whole of agriculture related emissions pales in comparison with the emissions from coal/natural gas plants or steel industry emissions. It's ok to not eat meat for animal welfare but to spin it for emission purposes is misleading. You would have a greater impact for the environment by not using your car, not using AC in the summer, midly heating your home in the winter, stop buying trinkets from Amazon, etc.

f6v 4y ago
> You would have a greater impact for the environment by not using your car, not using AC in the summer, midly heating your home in the winter I agree with some of this. But not having cooling or heating will make the civilization existence in many parts of the world nearly impossible. India(and probably other Asian countries) is a prime example.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  At least a few years ago, 90%+ (probably even 95%+) of people in India didn't have AC, so not having cooling clearly does not make the existence of civilization impossible there.
  - f6v 4y ago
    1. The temperatures are going to get higher, and nothing is going to reverse the trend in the near future. 2. Yes, people can survive. But I assume most time is spent surviving instead of living. You can’t be very productive at 35+ degrees. 3. Many people in India survive without a toilet. Doesn’t mean it’s how it should be. And their lives will be much better if they didn’t have to defecate on the streets. I’d argue same applies to ACs.
tomp 4y ago
> not using AC in the summer Can you expand on this? AC is 100% matched by the curve of solar energy input (sun -> heat -> AC cooling but also sun -> solar power), so presumably as we transition towards more and more solar, we should be using AC more.
- 11235813213455 4y ago
  AC is still using a lot more energy (x50-x100) than a basic fan

gregwebs 4y ago

Cows and ruminants have been roaming the Earth for a long time. If they were a huge contribute to global warming, it would be pretty hot already. Focusing on methane emission omits the fact that grasslands absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and that a properly managed grassland actually sequesters carbon dioxide. Whereas factory farming breaks this cycle. We need to think in more nuanced ways if we’re going to solve global warming. https://www.agriculture.com/livestock/cattle/methane-and-grazing-a-broader-view https://www.agriculture.com/livestock/cattle/methane-and-gra...

cinntaile 4y ago
> Cows and ruminants have been roaming the Earth for a long time. If they were a huge contribute to global warming, it would be pretty hot already. The number of cows has of course massively increased over time.
- Taywee 4y ago
  As a slight diversion from the carbon focus, the proportion of animals that is cows has increased drastically, as well. Look up the animal biomass proportions. It's shocking (sickening, even) to learn what proportion of the mammal biomass is cows and humans, and what proportion of the animal biomass is cows, chickens, and humans.
- jutrewag 4y ago
  I’m inclined to think so but wasn’t America full of hundred of millions of bison at one point.
  - cinntaile 4y ago
    80 million before 1850 according to Wikipedia. Now we're at about 1 billion cows worldwide, so it would depend on the number of cows/bison in the rest of the world at that time.
  - timeon 4y ago
    https://animalclock.org/ https://animalclock.org/

tomp 4y ago

Reasoning from first principles (physics), there is zero CO2 impact of food, including beef (especially discounting methane). Animals are part of the CO2 cycle. They breathe out CO2, you eat meat and breath out CO2, grass consumes CO2 to grow, cow eats grass - loop complete. Of course, there are other inputs - e.g. transportation and fertilizer production (fun fact: 50% of the protein of your body is artificially produced, organic nitrogen bound via Haber-Bosch process). But those are energy inputs, not CO2 inputs. If we used nuclear/solar, farming would be CO2-neutral. All long-term climate change impact is coming from fossil fuels, not meat/farming. (Methane has only short-term impact.)

timeon 4y ago
Nuclear/solar is not going to solve deforestation.
- tomp 4y ago
  It won't, but economic progress will. Most rich countries are increasing forest (reforesting, not deforesting).
  - 11235813213455 4y ago
    it's more like a side-effect of lower fertility, because 1 person in rich country pollutes as much as 40 persons in poor countries

emmanuel_1234 4y ago

Reading the article, I thought that it was not relevant to compare carbon footprint per unit of mass, and I was pleased to see it was addressed in the last section. However, the way it's addressed feels even more disingenuous: they removed all the non protein-rich food from the chart. Naturally, mostly animal products remain at the top. Based on the assumption that humans need protein[0], it seems only fair to compare everything we eat on a carbon-cost / protein-value basis without cherry-picking the data points. It's here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore?tab=table https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore?tab... A few observations: - coffee and chocolate are very high up. To be fair, nobody assumes that those have any kind of nutritional value, and that's not why they are consumed. - beef and lamb are very high. It implies that, even in the most charitable light, lamb and beef are bad in terms of carbon emission[1]. - among non-animal products, tomatoes, cassava and bananas are surprisingly high up. Higher than a lot of animal products. Now that is relevant, because those are consumed for their actual nutritional value. Rice, a staple all around the world, is worse than farmed fish, or eggs! - wheat and nuts have an amazing carbon-cost/nutritional value ratio. [0] and fat, there are no essentials carbs. [1] and that makes me sad because I love both.

cush 4y ago
Coffee is also consumed ~20g at a time
11235813213455 4y ago
the fact chocolate & coffee consumption are not primarily for nutrition make their impact even worse and for proteins & fat, maybe I'm not human, or maybe rice have enough for me, but I don't eat animal food more than a few times a year, rest of the time I eat rice and plenty vegetables, so that's just to put a nuance on the "you need a daily meat intake" common falsy recommandation