Not to mention that beef/dairy production is a primary source of methane which is 80x more potent than Co2, but constantly under reported due to its shorter half life. Yes in the long run that matters, but its all the more reason that we should reduce animal agriculture right away as the payback is much faster than limiting Co2.
enquirewithin 27 minutes ago [-]
What percentage of anthropogenic methane emissions can be attributed in cow farts?
I would hazard a guess that the incidental methane emissions from one gas extraction field would astronomically dwarf the emissions from cow farts.
Not astronomically; marginally. Anyone who's been around herbivore farm animals will tell you they fart. A lot.
Then again, farm plants are a further 18%.
modo_mario 8 minutes ago [-]
Those fossil fuels emit what otherwise wouldn't be available in the carbon cycle.
A cow that's fed on gras and farts emits nothing that that gras didn't pick up and contributes virtually nothing to climate change in the long term.
Llamamoe 12 minutes ago [-]
> Then again, farm plants are a further 18%.
Yeah, but they also provide 80% of the world's calories to animals' 20%
dev_l1x_be 13 minutes ago [-]
With corn based feeding.
tempfile 19 minutes ago [-]
> farm plants are a further 18%
Apparently mainly rice growing. I knew paddy fields were bad, but I didn't know they were that bad. Per calorie I am sure it is more like a tenth that of ruminants, perhaps less, but still worth replacing with other carbohydrates.
Llamamoe 12 minutes ago [-]
All the more so since rice is relatively poor in nutrients.
throwawayffffas 7 minutes ago [-]
I would argue animal emissions do not matter at all, methane survives about a decade in the atmosphere. Eventually breaking down to co2, co2 that was already in the atmosphere to begin with. Fossil fuel emissions are the ones that matter.
aqme28 5 minutes ago [-]
Not following your logic. A decade is a long time for such a powerful greenhouse gas.
shiandow 22 minutes ago [-]
You would be wrong, they are about equal in size, both accounting for about a third of the anthropogenic emissions.
mklarmann 20 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
modo_mario 10 minutes ago [-]
>Yes in the long run that matters, but its all the more reason that we should reduce animal agriculture right away as the payback is much faster than limiting Co2.
The long run is the thing that really matters.
A faster payback only serves to cover the impact of those that want to keep pumping up oil and gas in the meantime(also to make synthetic fertiliser) for a few decades.
It shifts focus from that on cow farts. As if the rotting plant matter and wild animal life that could replace it didn't emit any methane.
22 minutes ago [-]
whyage 12 minutes ago [-]
Plenty of people (including me) are vegan, healthy, and happy. As omnivores above the poverty line, we can all make conscious and conscientious choices about what we eat. Going vegan is one of the most effective ways to combat global warming (if you're not in a position to donate large sums of money toward climate change research or mitigation).
firebot 5 minutes ago [-]
Give it a couple decades. Most 'vegans' stop being vegan well before that. I'll let you Google why they do.
testemailfordg2 15 minutes ago [-]
Unfortunately, the priority is increasing efficiency and ROI, rather than sustainability. This leads to centralization and operations at a scale which are not sustainable, without external input or causing damage to existing nature. De-centralization and sustainable practices are the only way forward, as it has been for centuries before us on this earth. Maybe space is the place for these kinds of centralised and intensive practices, like being planned for data centers.
dev_l1x_be 14 minutes ago [-]
Beef & dairy the industrial way drive this. Several studies and decade long experiments show the positive impact of the non-industrial alternatives.
avesi 18 minutes ago [-]
There's more nuance here than reducing consumption of beef and dairy. Moving over to regenerative farming practices instead of factory farming will also improve the situation.
throwthrowuknow 12 minutes ago [-]
We need a new caveat cliche for these headlines like how people love to reply “in mice” to health research. For environmental research it’s almost always “in the 3rd world”
sudo_cowsay 41 minutes ago [-]
But it's also not like we can just stop eating steak and milk.
lukan 38 minutes ago [-]
Yes we can ... but most of us (including me) don't want to. (At least not completely)
enquirewithin 19 minutes ago [-]
With the ever growing popularity and success of the ketogenic diet, it becomes progressively more evident that a plant based diet is massively suboptimal for a not insignificant fraction of people.
Llamamoe 8 minutes ago [-]
This has nothing to do with plant and everything to do with rampant prevalence of gut dysbiosis and harmful gut bacteria feeding on otherwise healthy fibers and carbs, as well as processed carbohydrate and sugar overconsumption plus insulin resistance driven by sedentary lifestyles, inflammation, etc.
Ketogenic diet is a band aid to both, not a solution, and plants are not the cause of either problem, either.
williamdclt 16 minutes ago [-]
Our ecosystem dying is also pretty suboptimal.
choo-t 13 minutes ago [-]
You can do a keto diet without meat.
tonyhart7 28 minutes ago [-]
we literally cant, human body its not designed to not eat meat
JoeyJoJoJr 22 minutes ago [-]
But the human hand was designed to hold a banana.
lukan 20 minutes ago [-]
Not quite true, but cooking becomes quite a bigger challenge.
But mainly, beef and meat is not the same, cattle needs way more ressources than chicken for example, or well, insects.
shiandow 19 minutes ago [-]
There are other sources of meat.
Also dairy is not a meat.
mschild 18 minutes ago [-]
Not all meat is steak. Reducing and/or exchanging beef for other meat sources can at scale already make a massive difference.
Chicken, for example, produces 10% of CO2 per kg of meat compared to beef.
tonyhart7 9 minutes ago [-]
if we going for efficiency, rabbit meat is no 1 choice
choo-t 20 minutes ago [-]
There is no health reason to eat meat.
You can get your B12 elsewhere.
hackernud3s 11 minutes ago [-]
You can get it from supplements. That's about it though.
tempfile 15 minutes ago [-]
Ridiculous comment. The human body is not designed at all, and is very much capable of surviving without milk and meat. It's not even very hard!
lukan 2 minutes ago [-]
Surviving and prospering aren't the same things, though. And you do need to mind a lot of substitutes you now need, if you just let go of meat.
lotsofpulp 26 minutes ago [-]
And yet the most populous country in the world has an enormous contingent of people who do not eat meat (on the order of hundreds of millions).
firebot 8 minutes ago [-]
Sure and like half of them have anemia.
tonyhart7 19 minutes ago [-]
who ?? if you talking about indian, they still eat meat (around 6 - 12 pound every year)
lotsofpulp 5 minutes ago [-]
“Indian” does not seem to be a sufficiently cohesive group to qualify referring to them as “they” (in this matter).
you can, but you can also just reduce it, you can eat say half the meat/milk. Eat more vegetables and grains. Not only massively reduces the impact but pretty good for your body too
tempfile 17 minutes ago [-]
I am not vegan, but I found dropping beef and lamb to be literally the easiest modification to my life possible. Dropping dairy is much harder, but as I am now discovering still incredibly easy to reduce.
hackernud3s 5 minutes ago [-]
Dropping lamb? Something tells me that won't be a problem for most of the people in this thread lol.
techterrier 39 minutes ago [-]
Theres a billion or so Indians that might suggest otherwise
bitlad 30 minutes ago [-]
India is among the largest beef exporter in the world.
savolai 24 minutes ago [-]
Does this make the vegetarians not exist?
lotsofpulp 34 minutes ago [-]
Milk products are very prominent in many Indians’ diets. I wouldn’t be surprised if India’s milk consumption per capita is the highest in the world, given a large proportion of Indians avoid meat, so they might source more protein/fat from milk products.
If it’s not, it’s probably just poverty holding back consumption.
Edit: upon second reading, I realize techterrier was probably refuting only the steak part of sudo_cowsay’s comment
shrubby 26 minutes ago [-]
It's also poverty holding back millionaire consumption.
There was a research, which I can't be arsed to google with mobile, that compared western vegan diet and Indian omnivore and, yup you guessed it, the western version was less costly in terms of future proof.
But as with the zillionaires the human predicament depends on weather we muster the courage to limit ourselves or die to the extinction that's already manifesting itself in forms like forest fires, droughts and crop losses.
karakarakarakar 37 minutes ago [-]
You can eat bugs
38 minutes ago [-]
savolai 16 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
chickenbig 23 minutes ago [-]
Does this mean we should be advocating for more intensive cattle rearing? Stockyards and special breeds may not be the worst way to meet demand and reduce environmental impact (measured by CO2/methane emissions as well as biodiversity loss, for instance).
choo-t 15 minutes ago [-]
It's far easier do avoid producing so much meat.
A vegetarian diet is perfectly healthy.
tempfile 22 minutes ago [-]
I despair. Is it that hard for us to imagine eating less meat?
pjmlp 28 minutes ago [-]
Thing is, will be anything left after we destroy the planet with war, data centers, rare earth minerals mines, nuclear and battery waste?
plaguna 37 minutes ago [-]
Sadly, this being Hacker News, it won't catch much attention and will be quickly flagged by people who have too much karma.
But I think we are making progress, slowly, sadly too slowly, with the current summer we are having in Europe, of the impact of our past actions in the weather. And make no mistake, eating so much meat and drinking so much milk, is a huge impact we are inflicting on our planet.
Please do not comment with "I do X" or "In our house, we avoid doing Y" - it is not about you and me, it is about society. I am convinced, you are convinced, we need everyone to be convinced.
simianwords 1 minutes ago [-]
I would much rather have Europe install ACs instead. Stopping meat, not installing ACs, degrowth all look like masochistic ways to show that we are repenting.
hdgvhicv 22 minutes ago [-]
Everyone apart from a few stragglers agree the climate is changing. Most people agree the world won’t change its behaviour on its own to stop that.
So we can thus incentivise change (things like renewables being far cheaper than fossil fuel) globally, and adapt to reality.
There are a vocal minority whining about how we need to stop eating beef or milk annd stop using energy and there are those who make beef and milk more sustainable and make generating energy sustainable. I have time for the latter. The former can go hand out with the coal rollers.
jcattle 18 minutes ago [-]
How do you make beef and milk more sustainable? I'm honestly wondering. To me it seems similar to saying: we can make coal power plants more efficient. Equivalent to more "efficient" (however you want to define that) forms of animal husbandry.
hackernud3s 17 minutes ago [-]
Beef specifically. If everybody switched to pork, chicken and fish that would mitigate most of this and it's a much more realistic ask.
Yizahi 25 minutes ago [-]
It will be flagged because of the manipulative headline.
nobodywillobsrv 29 minutes ago [-]
Seems causally false.
tempfile 12 minutes ago [-]
What does that mean?
pvaldes 37 minutes ago [-]
Another way of saying the same would be: Agriculture causes almost 60% of the biodiversity damage linked to global farmland.
Yep, is the miracle of literature. An hectare of cattle allows more biodiversity than the same hectare of lettuce.
facecalm 19 minutes ago [-]
The miracle would be to read the article which states the biodiversity damage is 14 times higher per calorie than plant-sourced foods. Which means you could reduce the 40% to 2-3% if you would replace it totally.
tovej 22 minutes ago [-]
You think cows are the only animals that require food production from farms?
Rendered at 10:42:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I would hazard a guess that the incidental methane emissions from one gas extraction field would astronomically dwarf the emissions from cow farts.
fossil fuels contribute 33% farm animals contribute 30%
Not astronomically; marginally. Anyone who's been around herbivore farm animals will tell you they fart. A lot.
Then again, farm plants are a further 18%.
A cow that's fed on gras and farts emits nothing that that gras didn't pick up and contributes virtually nothing to climate change in the long term.
Yeah, but they also provide 80% of the world's calories to animals' 20%
Apparently mainly rice growing. I knew paddy fields were bad, but I didn't know they were that bad. Per calorie I am sure it is more like a tenth that of ruminants, perhaps less, but still worth replacing with other carbohydrates.
The long run is the thing that really matters. A faster payback only serves to cover the impact of those that want to keep pumping up oil and gas in the meantime(also to make synthetic fertiliser) for a few decades. It shifts focus from that on cow farts. As if the rotting plant matter and wild animal life that could replace it didn't emit any methane.
Ketogenic diet is a band aid to both, not a solution, and plants are not the cause of either problem, either.
But mainly, beef and meat is not the same, cattle needs way more ressources than chicken for example, or well, insects.
Also dairy is not a meat.
Chicken, for example, produces 10% of CO2 per kg of meat compared to beef.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-and...
If it’s not, it’s probably just poverty holding back consumption.
Edit: upon second reading, I realize techterrier was probably refuting only the steak part of sudo_cowsay’s comment
There was a research, which I can't be arsed to google with mobile, that compared western vegan diet and Indian omnivore and, yup you guessed it, the western version was less costly in terms of future proof.
But as with the zillionaires the human predicament depends on weather we muster the courage to limit ourselves or die to the extinction that's already manifesting itself in forms like forest fires, droughts and crop losses.
But I think we are making progress, slowly, sadly too slowly, with the current summer we are having in Europe, of the impact of our past actions in the weather. And make no mistake, eating so much meat and drinking so much milk, is a huge impact we are inflicting on our planet.
Please do not comment with "I do X" or "In our house, we avoid doing Y" - it is not about you and me, it is about society. I am convinced, you are convinced, we need everyone to be convinced.
So we can thus incentivise change (things like renewables being far cheaper than fossil fuel) globally, and adapt to reality.
There are a vocal minority whining about how we need to stop eating beef or milk annd stop using energy and there are those who make beef and milk more sustainable and make generating energy sustainable. I have time for the latter. The former can go hand out with the coal rollers.
Yep, is the miracle of literature. An hectare of cattle allows more biodiversity than the same hectare of lettuce.