Cows and Climate Change -- Time To Get Real

[SageBrush]

Did you come to this with an open mind or were you just looking for excuses to confirm your preexisting mind set?

Was there any doubt ?

 

[mspohr]

I don't see where he asked about stopping eating meat, but I do see where you did. Anyway, I didn't intend to initiate a game of gotcha, just to point out that Skotty's initial question ("eat less meat", as you quoted) was different. This jumped out at me because I was thinking about the notable difference between the two just before you posted.

I'm not sure what your point is...
Skotty asked about eating less meat and we gave him pages of information about why that would be a good idea.
He didn't seem convinced because there was "no acceptable meat substitute".
As far as "less meat" vs "no meat". If eating meat is bad for your health and bad for the environment (and bad for the animals) then "less meat" is good and the logical extension of that is eating "no meat" is better.

 

[jgs]

I'm not sure what your point is...
Skotty asked about eating less meat and we gave him pages of information about why that would be a good idea.
He didn't seem convinced because there was "no acceptable meat substitute".

Probably best for me to let this go. Apparently I am pickier about the exact meaning of words than you are. Not the first time it's happened to me.

As far as "less meat" vs "no meat". If eating meat is bad for your health

Which wasn't the topic of the thread, of course

and bad for the environment

which was

(and bad for the animals)

back to wasn't

then "less meat" is good and the logical extension of that is eating "no meat" is better.

I went down the thread looking for another post I thought would have illustrated why I think the above is not very helpful in addressing the "bad for the environment" bit (which after all, was the original topic). This is because the overall improvement from getting (say) 150M people to cut their annual beef consumption from 50 pounds to 25 pounds would be much greater than getting 10M people to cut their consumption from 50 pounds to zero. (1.875Gtons reduction vs. 0.25Gtons. This is virtually the same argument that says it's more important to improve the worst vehicles in the fleet from 10 to 20 mpg than it is to improve the best from 50 to 100 mpg.) Similarly, it would probably be better in terms of carbon footprint if everyone who now drives landfilled their car and adjusted their lifestyle to only ever go where they could walk or bike. Presumably nobody reading this practices that -- you've decided to drive an EV and do the best you can while maintaining your lifestyle. For those who enjoy the taste of meat, an analogous situation exists -- it may be relatively easy to convince them to reduce their intake. It is demonstrably very difficult indeed to convince a meat-lover to be a vegan.

Anyway, while I was looking for the post that made the above points (probably more concisely, sigh), I encountered a post from me:

Yeah -- to pick an analogy outside the election cycle, it's like telling people to take the bus (or bike, or walk, or stay home) instead of telling them to get an EV. "Perfect is the enemy of good."

... which means it's probably time for me to bow out, since that's the summary of what I said above, and loops without termination conditions are no fun.

 

[dhanson865]

"When it comes to climate change, periodically the topic of cows comes up. Eat less meat.

Read the math, graphs in this thread and the response isn't eat less meat. It is eat other meats.

As in eat mor chikin

Or eat more pork

Or eat more turkey

Or eat more duck

Or eat more fish

Or eat more eggs

Or drink more milk

Or eat more eggs, chicken, turkey, and pork, fish, and ducks, and drink more milk

but eat less beef.

I like beef, I'm just willing to look at the data and say it is more efficient to eat smaller leaner animals since I don't want the bones and fat and don't care about the byproducts (I don't consider cow milk a byproduct of cows grown for turning into meat for the butchers cooler/freezer).

 

[deonb]

Read the math, graphs in this thread and the response isn't eat less meat. It is eat other meats.

As in eat mor chikin

Or eat more pork

Or eat more turkey

Or eat more duck

Or eat more fish

Or eat more chicken, turkey, and pork, fish, and ducks

but eat less beef.

I like beef, I'm just willing to look at the data and say it is more efficient to eat smaller leaner animals since I don't want the bones and fat and don't care about the byproducts.

So basically what you're saying is that we should eat turducken with bacon fish.

Mmm. Time to bring out the Meat Glue...

 

[Topher]

I drive two electric cars, so I'm offsetting busloads of meat eaters.

No, you really are not. EVs have their own negative impacts on the environment. They are less impactfull than other alternatives, but you aren't making the environment better, just less swiftly making it horrible.

One of the few things you can do to actually offset some harm is to plant trees. Lots of trees, where they weren't trees before (i.e. no fair cutting existing trees first).

Thank you kindly.

 

[SageBrush]

This thread led me to wonder about the energy intensity of my diet which is grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits and a lot of soybean (Tofu.)

Soybean agriculture

Pretty good I think, but I don't have a base for comparison to other staples.

Addendum: FEAT

 

[Caligula]

People should be more careful when citing "Cowspiracy". This is a pretty good synopsis of the errors contained within the film;

Cowspiracy: stampeding in the wrong direction

 

[SageBrush]

People should be more careful when citing "Cowspiracy". This is a pretty good synopsis of the errors contained within the film;

Cowspiracy: stampeding in the wrong direction

Your preferred source backtracks to GLEAM which calculates about 15% of human CO2e is from livestock agriculture. For a x-check, I googled world-wide per capita meat consumption, reported as 115 grams a day. I estimate a gram of meat as 6 kCal, thus 2928800 joules of energy a day, equal to ~ 1.05 kWh

Since capita CO2e emissions are about 13.7 Kg CO2e a day, meat accounts for 0.15*13.7 = 2.05 Kg CO2e a day

In normalized terms:
Meat: 2.05/1.05 = 1.98 Kg CO2 per kWh
Petroleum: 11/33.7 = 0.33 Kg CO2 per kWh

Note the calculations are 'meat,' and not any specific animal

My personal objections to meat eating stem from ethics and health, but even a casual look at the environmental costs show them to be high.

 

[dhanson865]

So basically what you're saying is that we should eat turducken with bacon fish.

Mmm. Time to bring out the Meat Glue...

I'm totally OK with the concept of turducken though I have to admit I've never had it.

I've somehow missed the bacon fish meme to this point. If I've ever seen it before I forgot it. Doesn't seem likely. I'm sure I've seen bacon + fish before, just not the whole meme that followed.

 

[ohmman]

We started reducing our meat portions significantly about a decade ago. We rarely have more than 3 ounces of meat per person at dinner (when we have it), and that's plenty. That meat is typically not beef, though we do have beef on rare occasion. We've found this to be quite sustainable from a meal planning and "making four different people at the dinner table happy" standpoint. It's not perfect, but as was quoted earlier in the thread, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Adding to some of the arguments for a diet with lower meat consumption and saturated fat, it's not just about living one's last decade in poor heart health. It's also the financial burden that those meal decisions place on society as a whole, once you reach that last decade.

 

[Skotty]

I looked at all the evidence so far and, at least for the moment, I am not convinced that a reduction in quality of life is necessary to combat climate change when it comes to eating meat. Yes, I consider eating less meat to fall under the category of reducing quality of life, and this is based on the fact that most people like to eat meat and would be very unhappy if you tried to tell them they can't anymore (or can't eat as much). I know one can argue that less meat has the potential to improve end of life quality, but that is a complex relationship with no guarantees.

The ultimate goal of society is not to protect the environment; it's to increase the quality of life. Of course, the former is often an important part of the latter. Ideally you want both of these to go in a positive direction. That's why when one comes at the expense of the other, I think you need to step back and ask -- how can we fix this so neither is going in the negative direction? This is a general philosophy of mine regarding how you make the world a better place. Thus, for example, I consider setting the thermostat higher in the summer and lower in the winter to be a poor way of increasing energy efficiency, as quality of life takes a hit. However, improving insulation and switching to LED lightbulbs is a good way of increasing energy efficiency, as quality of life is generally not impacted.

This is also why I love Tesla so much. Tesla isn't trying to tell me that I need to give up fun, cool, desirable cars for the sake of the environment. They are trying to make fun, cool, desirable cars that no longer impact the environment negatively, or at least not nearly as much. This fits in nicely with my philosophy. It is exactly what I think we should be doing as a society when it comes to personal transportation.

When it comes to energy, you don't want to ask people to use less than they want to; you want to get them to use clean energy (or use it more efficiently in ways that don't impact quality of life as previously described). When it comes to cars, you don't want to ask people to not drive cars; you want to get them to drive clean cars. And when it comes to meat, you don't want to ask people to not eat meat, you want to get them to eat "clean" meat. So the question is largely about how "clean" can we make meat, and if at it's cleanest it is still not clean enough, only then I would accept permanently having less. However, I might accept temporarily having less if current practices were highly damaging but newer clean practices were on the horizon.

The real intent of this thread is to take a journey aimed at knowledge discovery in both cattle and agriculture as a whole, try to understand where the problems are and how big they are, determine which ones can be fixed or at least improved, and determine how much reduction of meat consumption, if any, is a necessary part of the overall equation.

I am never 100% certain of anything, and I'm always willing to look at new information as it becomes available. But at the moment I personally feel as though it looks probable that meat consumption can remain a part of society, that the problems are not exceedingly extreme (currently less a problem than energy and transportation in the industrialized world), and that many of the environmental ills can be improved upon. But I still don't know by how much, and I still think it's possible even with the improvements we can make, we might still need to generally reduce meat consumption some and/or maybe try to eat more non-beef meats. And there may be reason to do this at the very least on a temporary basis until improvements are put in place. The value of me doing this voluntarily by myself also remains in question.

Unfortunately, voluntary quality of life reductions for the sake of the environment rarely if ever gain any real traction or significance without public policies and regulations forcing people to comply. I hope this won't be necessary and that agriculture and cattle ranching can just be "fixed", if you will, but if not it will likely require legislation for there to be any real impact, and that legislation will need rock solid grounds for it's necessity to have any chance of being enacted.

 

[Chris TX]

So basically what you're saying is that we should eat turducken with bacon fish.

Mmm. Time to bring out the Meat Glue...

Meat glue (transglutaminase) is a wonderful thing to help eliminate meat waste. As for bacon fish, I've always called anchovies the "bacon of the sea"

 

[jgs]

I've always called anchovies the "bacon of the sea"

And here I thought I was the only one who did that!

 

[jgs]

When it comes to energy, you don't want to ask people to use less than they want to; you want to get them to use clean energy (or use it more efficiently in ways that don't impact quality of life as previously described).

Right, the parenthetical especially. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says "welp, I think I'll use some energy today." They want to do things, that require energy to achieve. If you can figure out how they can do their things and use less energy, everyone wins. Otherwise it's down to usually ineffective measures like making them do fewer things. Similarly for meat, I would argue that although it's true that from time to time many people probably do walk up to the table and say "welp, I think I'll eat a big slab of beef now" (many reading this can probably identify), it's not that common, usually it's "I think I'd like to eat something tasty". To the extent you can produce tasty food with less meat input, everyone wins.

Edit to add: Hey, I did it too. The goal is actually to produce tasty food with less energy input -- and I could continue unpacking that until I find the bottom turtle, but in any case the point of this thread has largely been that right now, today, the summary of the stack of turtles is that the single change you can make today that reduces inputs per calorie is dialing the meat down. So "meat" as a proxy for "energy input" as a proxy for a stack of turtles all the way down.

 

[SageBrush]

Your preferred source backtracks to GLEAM which calculates about 15% of human CO2e is from livestock agriculture. For a x-check, I googled world-wide per capita meat consumption, reported as 115 grams a day. I estimate a gram of meat as 6 kCal, thus 2928800 joules of energy a day, equal to ~ 1.05 kWh

Since capita CO2e emissions are about 13.7 Kg CO2e a day, meat accounts for 0.15*13.7 = 2.05 Kg CO2e a day

In normalized terms:
Meat: 2.05/1.05 = 1.98 Kg CO2 per kWh
Petroleum: 11/33.7 = 0.33 Kg CO2 per kWh

Note the calculations are 'meat,' and not any specific animal

My estimate of 6 kCal / gram of meat was wayyy off due to the large amount of water in fresh meat. The actual caloric content is about 1.5 kCal/gram, or about 25% of my prior calc. So the CO2e intensity of meat is ~ 8 Kg CO2e per kWh, about 24x that of petroleum.

So in terms of fossil fuel energy inputs (or CO2e), 24 people can be fed a non-meat diet* for every ONE fed a meat diet. But OP is not convinced ROFL

*assuming one unit of fossil fuel energy input gives unit of food energy. Some are better, some are worse, and farm practices make a big difference. Smart Soya farming e.g, gives 3x food for every x fossil fuel.

 

[deonb]

Meat glue (transglutaminase) is a wonderful thing to help eliminate meat waste. As for bacon fish, I've always called anchovies the "bacon of the sea"

Yeah, I know. Love this stuff - I use it sometimes in modernist cooking. Scary to use, but so is hot cooking oil and liquid nitrogen and that has never stopped anybody.

And. Bacon Fish:

 

[mspohr]

More information here. This looks at air pollution from overuse of fertilizer and from manure:
Forget Cars: Cows And Fertilizer Could Be A Big Pollution Problem

"Yet with a growing global population, agricultural air pollution — in the form of ammonia from fertilizer and livestock waste — is expected to increase, as farmers race to keep up with the growing demand for food."

 

[deonb]

More information here. This looks at air pollution from overuse of fertilizer and from manure:
Forget Cars: Cows And Fertilizer Could Be A Big Pollution Problem

"Yet with a growing global population, agricultural air pollution — in the form of ammonia from fertilizer and livestock waste — is expected to increase, as farmers race to keep up with the growing demand for food."

Hmm. I can also quote stuff from that article out of context:

"the gases will combine with other, naturally-occurring gases higher in the atmosphere, which is not a public health threat. Bauer said that this scenario does result in more atmospheric pollution, but noted that that kind of pollution actually has a slightly cooling affect on the planet"


I suggest people read the entire article instead of listening to either of us.

 

[mspohr]

Yes, please read the article and not just the headline. That's why I put the link in my post.