Item — HN Reader

The next frontier will be meat consumption. Particularly red meat.

A single 1/4 beef hamburger emits 7-12 kg of carbon[1]. Compared to ~1.5kg of carbon driving your car 3 miles[2].

Not telling you to go full vegetarian, but I'm personally far less interested in a beef product unless you're going to guarantee its an extremely expert prepared steak. Most beef is mediocre.

1 - https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

2 - https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...

14 comments

Yeah, plus the ethical angle. It's a bit ridiculous that we have people researching the 'theoretical ethical treatment of LLMs' when we are doing such awful things to animals on a massive scale.

We have dogs and cats as pets and we eat cows and pigs (in Western countries). As if cows and pigs didn't also have personalities, memories, parental bonds, the ability to feel pain. It's a mass wilful ignorance.

What's the difference between us and animals? I would argue that it's our ability to take ethical decisions and not inflict suffering even if it goes against our base instincts.

>What's the difference between us and animals?

I always find it incredible some people equating animals with people. How do you not see the difference in human range of emotions, ability to do science, technology, arts, etc. Do you perhaps live in the city and don't really have any real contact to animal?

Plenty of humans have have little ability in your mentioned fields, and animals can show an enormous range of emotions. If those were the only criteria, we'd have little trouble eating e.g. brain-dead people.

That's not to discount human lives, we all have worth aside from our abilities to create. But I don't think there's a sensible non-arbitrary hard line you can draw to separate humans from all other animals.

Where do you draw the line though? Because plants themselves (DNA-beings) are also alive.

Unless you decide to go on a full mineral diet.

It's not about being alive, it's about having emotions and the ability to feel pain.

Plants don't cry out for days when their children are taken away from them. Plants don't remember your face, come up to you and want attention. Plants don't scream when they are killed (no matter what some edgy research shows).

Or to put it more simply, would you feel bad pulling a plant out the ground? I would imagine probably not. Would you feel bad pulling the lever and watching as a pig is lowered into a gas chamber? Or while slitting a cow's throat? I would imagine probably yes (hence why slaughterhouse employees have so many mental health issues and there is such high turnover).

Your argument sounds like the nirvana fallacy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

with most plants its more like were eating their eggs. Not many plants require eating the whole thing instead of the fruiting body. i think an argument to stop uprooting plants entirely makes sense but really the impact of going from beef to just vegetarian is much more drastic than cutting out plants which are destroyed by harvest

not accusing, but in case any commenter is going down a slippery slope: what produces the most harm? people! why dont we just kill ourselves instead of cutting out beef? vegetarian options have never been more accessible, and increasingly so

its certainly regional and cultural in the US. there are many towns and cities i visit where its quite difficult to find menu items without meat. i expect it will change over time

There was a German article comparing different traveled distances between German cities with CO2 impact of meat production.

https://www.merkur.de/reise/reduzieren-sollte-besser-reisen-...

Beef is already too expensive for most people. Americans are probably the exception but I can assure you that most Europeans do not have beef heavy diets. Even culturally, pork (and now chicken) were the proteins of choice.

'Europe' is a big place. Here in Ireland good quality beef is readily affordable, and not particularly more expensive than chicken or pork.

Yes, it's one of the few EU countries that is suitable for cattle.

Sweden as well.

It's still way, way, too cheap compared to its climate impact

I'm in the USA and I eat a lot less beef than I used to. The price has really jumped in the past few years, maybe since the pandemic?

Subbed pork, poultry, and eggs for the most part, some fish but that's not particularly cheap either.

Yeah, since COVID and then the Nord Stream terror act they raised beef prices to unsustainable levels. Döner (which is cheap ground sausage like beef in practice) between 7 and 10 EUR now (was between 3,50 and 4). Blockhouse steak (tiny) is 48 EUR.

>Beef is already too expensive for most people. Americans are probably the exception but I can assure you that most Europeans do not have beef heavy diets.

Beef is too expensive for many Europeans because GDP per capita/standards of living are declining in many European countries. People in East Asia, the Middle East, Oceania and South America still eat plenty of beef too.

That is true, however beef was always somewhat of a luxury in many European regions, simpily due to geography and population density. We don't have a lot of cheap grazing land to raise cattle on. And if you have cattle it's typically more economical to use them for diary than meat.

Going vegetarian would only cut it if you stayed clear of dairy. Gram for gram it's better to eat chicken than cheese for the climate.

My research seems to indicate its about on-par with chicken. IE a chicken filet is about the carbon impact of 8oz of milk.

And it seems here its about 1/4 carbon per kg of food as beef:

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

I switched to fortified soy milk and haven't looked back. Milk is tasty but soy has less sugar as well and now I prefer it. Cheese is harder to make a substitute but eating it 1-2 per year satisfies my craving.

Wait, how does beef emit carbon? I thought the main problem with beef was methane, not carbon emissions.

Ah, I see, your graph says CO2-equivalent, not CO2. It's the methane.

It's the infrastructure required to create a pound of beef, including the farmed grains.

I don't think it is, I think it's the methane, which is by far the largest greenhouse gas contributor in the process. Besides, the other emissions go away once your energy production is renewables.

Getting people to agree to the same cultural diet is about as easy as getting people to agree to the same religion.

If we could change culture and the global diet, there are many exciting low carbon foods being promoted, especially in aquaculture. Shellfish and seaweed do not rely on artificial fertilizer, fresh water, or people burning down the rain forest.

Indeed. And also it's not healthy, compared to veggies, or even leaner meats like poultry

There's tens of millions of well-armed Americans who'd rather die fighting then let anyone take away their right to eat red meat, so good luck trying.

To state the obvious, it's not about taking away the right to eat red meat, right? It's about trying to convince people to adopt a diet that is:

- healthier

- tasty

- cheaper

- a small contribution to keeping the planet livable for their children

- as a sign of respect for $DEITY/the planet/...

Many people will see some sense in at least one of the above arguments at one point in life.

It’s more effective to convince people 95% of beef is very mid. So you’re not missing anything

I would never argue for banning red meat as it will certainly backfire and end up counterproductive.

This is the most Euro commie thing I've heard in a long while.

Sure, get rid of factory farms and CAFO's, but I see nothing wrong with raising animals on family farms where they eat a nutritious diet in line with what they evolved to eat.

Grass for cows, pasture and bugs for poultry, silvopasture for pigs. Anyone who wants to go vegan for ethical or environmental reasons is fine, but I hate this idea that all of us have to fall in line with your crazy ideas.

> I see nothing wrong with raising animals on family farms where they eat a nutritious diet in line with what they evolved to eat.

Me either. It just means beef will become about 10x more expensive in places that don't have so much grassland or pastureland. Which is almost all of the places. You cool with that?

Do whatever you want.

I'm just sharing my personal choices based on what I've learned.

What could be more American than that? :)

The problem is, you have to choose. Do you really think people can continue to eat meat 2-3 times a day, purely supplied by family farms where animals are able to roam free?

The reality is that the only way to feed people's insatiable demand for meat is to use factory farms. You can't factory farm without causing suffering to animals, and you can't factory farm without use of antibiotics, etc.

Also you say, 'evolved to eat'. Do you think people were eating meat every day throughout human history? This started after WWII with mass agriculture and factory farming. That's why so many cultures have beans and rice as their primary dish: it's a perfectly balanced protein.

If 'evolved to eat' is your primary concern then actually you should be eating meat like once or twice a month, max. Evolution doesn't happen in less than a century.

The next frontier should be preventing forest fires. This is just Canada, imagine if we could prevent them around the world.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-nasa-study-tallies-carbon-...

>Stoked by Canada’s warmest and driest conditions in decades, extreme forest fires in 2023 released about 640 million metric tons of carbon

We tried "preventing forest fires" for about a century, and it's a large part of why they're burning so intensely and destructively now.

Forest fires are a natural part of the life cycle of many forested regions - particularly in Canada and the Western US.

Suppressing all fires as soon as possible means that dead, dry plant matter continues to build up for decades longer than it naturally would, creating a "tinderbox" effect where eventually you have vastly more intense and destructive forest fires than would typically have occurred if you'd just left nature alone in the first place. And because these fires have so much more concentrated fuel they also burn hotter and can make the recovery of the forest in the area take far longer to come back.

The correct answer is to regularly perform controlled burns in areas near human settlement and to mostly leave things alone in areas away from it. Much of Canada's land area is literally uninhabited and dozens if not hundreds of miles from the nearest road, much less actual settlement.

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Additionally: Strongly discourage new construction in the Wildland-Urban Interface (aka: low density settlement in a wooded setting, your typical picture-esque rural mountain home - that wood is meant to burn one day, taking your cute house with it). Beyond that, strict building codes for whatever does get built there + ordinances for maintaining the space around the home to reduce risk.

Although to a significant extent, property insurers are basically already taking on this role in recent years. I have family out in the hills in CO, their insurance rates are multiple times that of their property taxes and they are now quite strict on evaluating properties in terms of risk-mitigation. And failure to adhere to all of what they want to see means you're getting dropped by the insurer and you will have a very hard time getting a different company to pick you up.

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Anyway, as another poster noted: The forest grows back and recaptures all that carbon in a few decades, making those fires basically carbon-neutral.

Forests burn and grow back. Healthy forests (not poorly-managed monoculture) are carbon-neutral on human timescales.

In the spring I will get 3 cows with calf-a-foot who will graze the immense amount of herbal leys we have, as well as maintain our SSSI fields, and then in a few years some of them, the meanest, will go off to the abatoir to become the very finest and well fed beef that money can buy.

We'll expand the herd, and do mob grazing to maintain our species rich grasslands and our SSSI fields, while also providing the best beef to those that appreciate it, family first of course.

Grass fed and pasture fed, are not good enough. The cattle need a wide variety of food, which starts with more than grass or a monoculture pasture.

Meat, and red meat, is truly a miracle food. Dense in nutrients, satiating and of course tasty.

Nature needs animals as well. In fact it is essential.

Agricultural reform or innovation is certainly an avenue to explore; but this strange obsession with "stop eating red meat" is a bit too much.

But you just read an argument, and then completely ignored it, instead started brining up other aspects of red meat.

That most red meat is very co2 expensive compared to getting the proteins from other sources is a relevant argument for many of us, and not a particularly 'strange obsession' for those of us caring about reducing our co2 footprint.

>Agricultural reform or innovation is certainly an avenue to explore; but this strange obsession with "stop eating red meat" is a bit too much.

Most of the people pushing it are doing so because they believe it's immoral to eat meat, so they'll latch onto whatever excuse they can to try to stop people.

How many miles does the burger drive my car? Not to question your numbers but they lack context. Also, it would be good for nature if there were fewer or no humans on this planet. But then there would be no human here to enjoy nature.

Burgers don't drive cars.

People drive cars, and people eat burgers. Is that the context you were looking for?

We've identified two ways to reduce carbon production. 1) reduce production per human. 2) reduce humans.

Only the first one is being argued for here. Conflating it with the second is just a confusion.

Sorry but this is just such an ignorant comment. You really need to read up on how agriculture contributes to global warming and loss of land/deforestation. What do you think cows eat, air?

Nihilistic bullshit isn't the hot take you think it is. The problem isn't too many people. The planet couldn't handle billions more if we used resources correctly. Is your idea of "humans enjoying nature" extreme deforestation and water scarcety?

I question the methodology of that 100kg (per kg) figure for beef, for several reasons:

1. It's not the true Carbon or CO2 figure. It's weighted for other greenhouse gases. That's kind of an issue because methane naturally breaks down (into CO2 and water) over time. The methane issue comes up all the time in such estimates (eg leaks in natural gas pipelines) where methane is a worse greenhouse gas but temporary (7-12 years) and CO2 is essentially forever (until sequestration or photosynthesis);

2. Production method really matters here. American beef, for example, is primarily grain fed. That grain requires fertilizer (more natural gas) and distribution. Australian beef, for example, is largely fed on natural grasses and vegetation, typically until the last 60-120 days where it's transitioned to grain for marbling. American cattle is also heavily fed on corn, which really shouldn't exist in the quantities it does;

3. Ecosystems are complex. One of the big causes of the dust bowl, for example, was the destruction of the great bison herds. Replacing the natural grasses with crops like wheat was just the last straw. The point of the bison is that they're heavy, like up to 2000+ lb heavy, and they leave deep hoof prints on the plains. Water collects there when it rains and feeds cgrasses and the aquifers.

This has been backed up elsewhere too. China has had long projects to stop the desertification of the Gobi and spent a ton on planting trees with varied successes. You know what did work? Horses. They released horses and the same thing happened. Horse hoof prints allowed water to collect and grasses to grow and spread. Grasses, as it turned out, were key to stopping desertification, not trees.

So the point is that certain ecosystems need large herd herbivores to survive. So if you got rid of cattle entirely, what other second order effects would there be?

More practically, people just arne't going to give up meat. Sorry. Unless it become sprice prohibitve (as beef arguably is rapidly becoming now).

On the ecological point, the difference is whether the grassland would naturally support that number of bison. Or if bison (or cows) are continually being grown, killed, grown killed at industrial scale beyond the normal bison lifecycle. With many carbon inputs (fossil-fuel based fertilizer, etc) and production costs (slaughtering, transport, etc).

Wild bison live 15-20 years.

Cattle raised for beef ~18 months.

That's beyond the natural carbon cycle an existing ruminant population.

Also horses, in my reading of the data, actually have less of a methane impact. They have a different digestive system entirely.

On the methane point, methane, yes, is a greenhouse gas that breaks down over years (~12 years). But has far worse impact on climate while its in the atmosphere.

It’s completely made up. All meat is carbon neutral because animals don’t produce carbon atoms from nothing. They get them from the plants they eat which in turn get their carbon from the atmosphere.

The carbon cycle is basic scientific fact yet confidently ignored by people who hate things like logging and meat.