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I'm actually surprised how much dairy products contribute to global warming. It's only veganism that really cuts down on carbon emissions.

Tade0 3y ago
Not really. I looked at the different scenarios and we would probably do fine on chicken and cheese in terms of water consumption, CO2 and land use. Pork is where it starts being risky. Beef, lamb etc. are the most problematic parts.
- klipt 3y ago
  Isn't beef bad because cows release methane, but feeding cows seaweed can mitigate that?
  - Tade0 3y ago
    It's largely (heh) about their size and that they're not really as optimized for meat as e.g. pigs. They breed comparatively slowly and take longer to grow. Moreover the weight of a cow carcass is no higher than 60% that of the animal, while for pigs the lower bound is ~78%. Poultry is also very efficient in this regard, especially turkey yielding 80%+. Where I'm from domestically consumed beef comes mostly from dairy cows so it's not particularly good, but it appears to be the more environmentally sound choice than growing them just for the meat(not that this was the aim - it's just cheaper).
    - autoexec 3y ago
      The sooner we can get lab grown beef the better. I don't care if it's more expensive or even if it isn't as efficient in terms of energy input as growing, raising, and slaughtering actual cows. It'd still come with tons of benefits like reducing antibiotic use, taking up less land, causing less suffering, eliminating illnesses, etc.
      - jononomo 3y ago
        We're not about to run out of land. My recommendation is to use nuclear power to desalinate seawater and turn the Sahara Desert into a vast grassland on which we can raise a couple of billion cattle in order to feed the world. I think the same should be done in the Australian Desert.
        sprucevoid 3y ago
        > We're not about to run out of land We already did, in the sense that we'd need more earths to let everyone on earth eat the kind of diets prevalent in rich countries today. https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets Current enourmous land use by meat industries has many negative effects. We should individually switch to plant based (if you haven't already) and in public policy rapidly remove all subsidies from meat and animal industries and fully price in all negative externalities (GHG, antibiotics risks, pandemic risks, air and water pollution). At the same time subsidize plant based alternatives. As a result plant based alternatives would be several times lower in cost than the meat versions, which in turn would drive consumption changes.
        Tade0 3y ago
        Or just give up beef and mutton - it's responsible for most of the problem. No need to get all radical - you won't gain much support for such ideas. Beef consumption already peaked in rich countries anyway.
        sprucevoid 3y ago
        The problem with only reducing meat from cows and sheep is that other meat sources are still worse than plant based with regard to climate change and we're at a juncture where climate policy need to shift into full gear on all fronts. Not a time for half measures. Meat from chicken is also likely even worse than beef in terms of pandemic risk and perhaps also antibiotics resistance risk. In addition to that chicken meat industries cause much more animal suffering than all other land based animal meat industries combined which I think is a very strong argument to phase out chicken meat production - that industry wouldn't last a week if the type of animal protection regulation people in general think already exists for it would in fact be enacted, applied and enforced. The idea that negative externalities should be priced in is the standard view in economics. I think most people, if provided the reasoning for it, would accept such pricing in when it comes to such serious global problems as climate change, antibiotics resistance, pandemic risk and air and water pollution.
  - em500 3y ago
    Maybe beef is bad largely due to their sheer volume (c.f. China's per capita emission is much lower than North America or Europe, but their aggregate impact is still enormous due to their large population). There was this eye opening old XKCD that showed that by aggregate weight cattle dwarf every other land mammal: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1338:_Land_Mammals https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1338:_Land_Mammal... (Not a subject expert, do your own research, check the sources, etc.)
  - himinlomax 3y ago
    I find the methane issue quite dubious: as it gets oxidized over time, the quantity of methane from cattle in the atmosphere is more or less proportional to the number of heads. The problem with CO2 otoh is that it keeps increasing because we create it from fossil sources.
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      There are two problems with methane: for one, while it is "sitting" in the atmosphere, its greenhouse effect is much stronger than CO2's. After that somewhat short-lived period, it oxidizes to CO2 and water, so it still at best ends up as bad as CO2. So even if we stopped producing CO2 from fossil fuels today, we would still be increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere though breeding cows and other livestock, moving through a CH4 phase that does even more harm. Livestock are releasing the C trapped in plant bodies.
      - dTal 3y ago
        But the C trapped in plant bodies comes from sequestered atmospheric CO2, no? It's not possible to permanently increase atmospheric CO2 purely through livestock, only "temporarily" increase methane (permanently, if we keep the livestock industry running forever). There is only one place that actual surplus carbon comes from, and that is fossil fuels. Everything else is part of the closed-loop carbon cycle.
      - himinlomax 3y ago
        That carbon in cow farts & burps was grass yesterday, which was atmospheric CO2 last week. Cows are not fed petroleum products, though some petroleum may be used in the production of industrial feed (but not or much less for pasture feeding). Atmospheric CH4 does not "do harm" as such, it's indeed a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming in proportion to its prevalence. Said prevalence, as I'm trying to point out, is proportional to the number of heads of cattle. As such, if we don't increase the number of heads significantly, the impact will be constant. Contrast with fossil fuels for, say, transportation: their impact on greenhouse effect is constantly increasing at a rate proportional to the number of cars/planes/trips. Or put another way: we have to stop using ICE cars and planes altogether to stop increasing greenhouse effect; we only have to keep eating the same amount of beef and cheese to stop their impact.
  - mklarmann 3y ago
    Seaweed, garlic, etc. has shown to reduce methane. Yet at the same time creates uncertainty around more nitrous oxide, which might makes it even worse.
  - sgu999 3y ago
    There's also what they're being fed, which apparently is mostly soy and corn... and require a lot of land, water (and chemicals) at this scale. As far as I understand, it'd be much more efficient to grow calories and proteins that we can directly consume instead.
  - sprucevoid 3y ago
    The seaweed/algea story is pushed strongly by meat industry greenwashing efforts. It isn't large scale deployed anywhere and the potential benefits are overblows. https://www.wired.com/story/carbon-neutral-cows-algae/ https://www.wired.com/story/carbon-neutral-cows-algae/ "What’s more, feeding cattle algae is really only practical where it’s least needed: on feedlots. This is where most cattle are crowded in the final months of their 1.5- to 2-year lives to rapidly put on weight before slaughter. There, algae feed additives can be churned into the cows’ grain and soy feed. But on feedlots, cattle already belch less methane—only 11 percent of their lifetime output. ... This means that even if algae diets on feedlots worked perfectly, it wouldn’t help with the 89 percent of cows’ belches that occur earlier in their lives."
- choeger 3y ago
  This. There needs to be a pyramid in top of the food pyramid. Beef is not bad per se, it just shouldn't be your weekly meat.
  - shortcake27 3y ago
    I’m not sure if you responded to the wrong comment or what because the parent is referencing environment impact but you’re referencing health impacts. From an environmental point of view, there’s a linear relationship between your consumption of beef and environmental impact. There is no amount of beef that is good for the environment. From a health point of view, it’s debated, however there are more studies that show red/processed meats having negative health effects than neutral or positive effects. Of course, you can cherry pick the studies that align with your beliefs, but the prevailing data, evidence, and research show beef actually _is_ bad per se. Note: there is no nutrient (that we know of) that you can only get from beef and no other food source. So it isn’t necessary to include it in your diet. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-beef-with-red-meat https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-bee...
    - choeger 3y ago
      > There is no amount of beef that is good for the environment. That's a tautology. In that strict sense, there's no amount of you that's good for the environment, either. Unless we all commit suicide, we have to accept the fact that our behavior changes the environment. So, yes, quantities matter a lot.
      - mklarmann 3y ago
        If you define “sustainable” in the sense of “enabling human life on earth”, you should be fine.
    - himinlomax 3y ago
      Dairy from cows grazing on marginal land that is not otherwise suitable / efficient for other cultures is very competitive as far as producing proteins is concerned. Proteins are a necessary nutrient. Industrial cattle fed corn is an entirely different story and should almost certainly be counted as a different category as far as climate impact is concerned.
- himinlomax 3y ago
  The water use claim regarding beef has been debunked, it was based on the weird accounting trick where you count rainfall on pasture as wasted water for some reason. Also speaking of pasture, afaik the equation for cattle is completely different whether they're fed corn vs grazing on marginal land as they're supposed to.
  - wiz21c 3y ago
    > they're fed corn and where does the corn grow ?
    - himinlomax 3y ago
      What's your point?
  - fredrikholm 3y ago
    What? The problem is that cattle consumes orders of magnitude more water compared to plants, on top of the fact that they also eat plants, of which they convert a small portion of into (edible) mass. Their urine, en masse, is highly toxic to the local environment as it kills plants (high salt content, fertilizer burn) and pollutes rivers (pH, over-fertilization, algae blooming).
    - himinlomax 3y ago
      That water claim was based on a flawed accounting that's been repeated over and over so much without source. The debunking was posted right here on HN a few years back, don't have time to find it for now, maybe later. Other than that, what you describe only applies to industrial farming, not grazing cattle. Cows graze pasture, they shit and piss in pasture, it's almost a closed cycle except for the added salt the herder usualy gives them.
      - fredrikholm 3y ago
        > That water claim What water claim? That cows consume water and excrete concentrated urine? I don't know what you're debunking without a source, but appears to be a straw man. > industrial farming, not grazing cattle Grazing requires orders of magnitude more land compared to cramming cows into small cages, which decreases the amount of food you can derive from this already (very) expensive food source. I love beef, but that doesn't change the fact that it's an incredibly wasteful source of food and it ultimately unsustainable compared to plants, fish, eggs etc.
choeger 3y ago
I often wonder, how much double counting goes into these stats. Of course, dairy currently relies on fossile energy often. But how much of it is attributed elsewhere as well? Diesel, for instance, is often also attributed to big oil companies like shell. Cows are slaughtered and sold as meat at some point - is the dairy CO2 emission subtracted here? I don't think so.
- cinntaile 3y ago
  Since you often wonder, I suggest you spend some time reading some relevant papers and their methodology. You won't have to guess and assume if you do that.
NovaDudely 3y ago
I'm not too surprised, in some ways Dairy is the meat industry by proxy. All dairy cattle end up in the same abattoirs.
- asterix_pano 3y ago
  On top of that they have one of the most miserable life we could imagine. Birthing babies and getting them taken away ASAP to give milk to a machine and getting slaughtered when you are less productive... It's hard to describe our lack of empathy to create and accept such systems.
  - NovaDudely 3y ago
    Oh yeah... don't worry I know all the gruesome details. I have changed my ways accordingly. This is a why I say the meat industry is more honest than the Dairy industry. The Dairy folks are all about cows in green fields in the sun - ignoring the 4-5 years of psychological and physical torture only to end the exact same way. At least the meat industry just says - it's for meat!
Aromasin 3y ago
One of the major issue's isn't just the calorific inefficiencies in the fodder->dairy process, but the simple act of creating pastures for animals. About 85% of deforestation world-wide is being driven by animal agriculture; of which dairy makes up a huge part of that. We could use less land to produce food if we ate less dairy, by a huge margin.
karmakurtisaani 3y ago
I suppose theoretically optimal diet would have to be some flavour of vegan, plus maybe some fish if available. In practice, a major reduction of meat and dairy would probably be enough to make a difference.

Tade0 3y ago

Not really. I looked at the different scenarios and we would probably do fine on chicken and cheese in terms of water consumption, CO2 and land use. Pork is where it starts being risky. Beef, lamb etc. are the most problematic parts.

klipt 3y ago
Isn't beef bad because cows release methane, but feeding cows seaweed can mitigate that?
- Tade0 3y ago
  It's largely (heh) about their size and that they're not really as optimized for meat as e.g. pigs. They breed comparatively slowly and take longer to grow. Moreover the weight of a cow carcass is no higher than 60% that of the animal, while for pigs the lower bound is ~78%. Poultry is also very efficient in this regard, especially turkey yielding 80%+. Where I'm from domestically consumed beef comes mostly from dairy cows so it's not particularly good, but it appears to be the more environmentally sound choice than growing them just for the meat(not that this was the aim - it's just cheaper).
  - autoexec 3y ago
    The sooner we can get lab grown beef the better. I don't care if it's more expensive or even if it isn't as efficient in terms of energy input as growing, raising, and slaughtering actual cows. It'd still come with tons of benefits like reducing antibiotic use, taking up less land, causing less suffering, eliminating illnesses, etc.
    - jononomo 3y ago
      We're not about to run out of land. My recommendation is to use nuclear power to desalinate seawater and turn the Sahara Desert into a vast grassland on which we can raise a couple of billion cattle in order to feed the world. I think the same should be done in the Australian Desert.
      - sprucevoid 3y ago
        > We're not about to run out of land We already did, in the sense that we'd need more earths to let everyone on earth eat the kind of diets prevalent in rich countries today. https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets Current enourmous land use by meat industries has many negative effects. We should individually switch to plant based (if you haven't already) and in public policy rapidly remove all subsidies from meat and animal industries and fully price in all negative externalities (GHG, antibiotics risks, pandemic risks, air and water pollution). At the same time subsidize plant based alternatives. As a result plant based alternatives would be several times lower in cost than the meat versions, which in turn would drive consumption changes.
        Tade0 3y ago
        Or just give up beef and mutton - it's responsible for most of the problem. No need to get all radical - you won't gain much support for such ideas. Beef consumption already peaked in rich countries anyway.
        sprucevoid 3y ago
        The problem with only reducing meat from cows and sheep is that other meat sources are still worse than plant based with regard to climate change and we're at a juncture where climate policy need to shift into full gear on all fronts. Not a time for half measures. Meat from chicken is also likely even worse than beef in terms of pandemic risk and perhaps also antibiotics resistance risk. In addition to that chicken meat industries cause much more animal suffering than all other land based animal meat industries combined which I think is a very strong argument to phase out chicken meat production - that industry wouldn't last a week if the type of animal protection regulation people in general think already exists for it would in fact be enacted, applied and enforced. The idea that negative externalities should be priced in is the standard view in economics. I think most people, if provided the reasoning for it, would accept such pricing in when it comes to such serious global problems as climate change, antibiotics resistance, pandemic risk and air and water pollution.
- em500 3y ago
  Maybe beef is bad largely due to their sheer volume (c.f. China's per capita emission is much lower than North America or Europe, but their aggregate impact is still enormous due to their large population). There was this eye opening old XKCD that showed that by aggregate weight cattle dwarf every other land mammal: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1338:_Land_Mammals https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1338:_Land_Mammal... (Not a subject expert, do your own research, check the sources, etc.)
- himinlomax 3y ago
  I find the methane issue quite dubious: as it gets oxidized over time, the quantity of methane from cattle in the atmosphere is more or less proportional to the number of heads. The problem with CO2 otoh is that it keeps increasing because we create it from fossil sources.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    There are two problems with methane: for one, while it is "sitting" in the atmosphere, its greenhouse effect is much stronger than CO2's. After that somewhat short-lived period, it oxidizes to CO2 and water, so it still at best ends up as bad as CO2. So even if we stopped producing CO2 from fossil fuels today, we would still be increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere though breeding cows and other livestock, moving through a CH4 phase that does even more harm. Livestock are releasing the C trapped in plant bodies.
    - dTal 3y ago
      But the C trapped in plant bodies comes from sequestered atmospheric CO2, no? It's not possible to permanently increase atmospheric CO2 purely through livestock, only "temporarily" increase methane (permanently, if we keep the livestock industry running forever). There is only one place that actual surplus carbon comes from, and that is fossil fuels. Everything else is part of the closed-loop carbon cycle.
    - himinlomax 3y ago
      That carbon in cow farts & burps was grass yesterday, which was atmospheric CO2 last week. Cows are not fed petroleum products, though some petroleum may be used in the production of industrial feed (but not or much less for pasture feeding). Atmospheric CH4 does not "do harm" as such, it's indeed a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming in proportion to its prevalence. Said prevalence, as I'm trying to point out, is proportional to the number of heads of cattle. As such, if we don't increase the number of heads significantly, the impact will be constant. Contrast with fossil fuels for, say, transportation: their impact on greenhouse effect is constantly increasing at a rate proportional to the number of cars/planes/trips. Or put another way: we have to stop using ICE cars and planes altogether to stop increasing greenhouse effect; we only have to keep eating the same amount of beef and cheese to stop their impact.
- mklarmann 3y ago
  Seaweed, garlic, etc. has shown to reduce methane. Yet at the same time creates uncertainty around more nitrous oxide, which might makes it even worse.
- sgu999 3y ago
  There's also what they're being fed, which apparently is mostly soy and corn... and require a lot of land, water (and chemicals) at this scale. As far as I understand, it'd be much more efficient to grow calories and proteins that we can directly consume instead.
- sprucevoid 3y ago
  The seaweed/algea story is pushed strongly by meat industry greenwashing efforts. It isn't large scale deployed anywhere and the potential benefits are overblows. https://www.wired.com/story/carbon-neutral-cows-algae/ https://www.wired.com/story/carbon-neutral-cows-algae/ "What’s more, feeding cattle algae is really only practical where it’s least needed: on feedlots. This is where most cattle are crowded in the final months of their 1.5- to 2-year lives to rapidly put on weight before slaughter. There, algae feed additives can be churned into the cows’ grain and soy feed. But on feedlots, cattle already belch less methane—only 11 percent of their lifetime output. ... This means that even if algae diets on feedlots worked perfectly, it wouldn’t help with the 89 percent of cows’ belches that occur earlier in their lives."
choeger 3y ago
This. There needs to be a pyramid in top of the food pyramid. Beef is not bad per se, it just shouldn't be your weekly meat.
- shortcake27 3y ago
  I’m not sure if you responded to the wrong comment or what because the parent is referencing environment impact but you’re referencing health impacts. From an environmental point of view, there’s a linear relationship between your consumption of beef and environmental impact. There is no amount of beef that is good for the environment. From a health point of view, it’s debated, however there are more studies that show red/processed meats having negative health effects than neutral or positive effects. Of course, you can cherry pick the studies that align with your beliefs, but the prevailing data, evidence, and research show beef actually _is_ bad per se. Note: there is no nutrient (that we know of) that you can only get from beef and no other food source. So it isn’t necessary to include it in your diet. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-beef-with-red-meat https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/whats-the-bee...
  - choeger 3y ago
    > There is no amount of beef that is good for the environment. That's a tautology. In that strict sense, there's no amount of you that's good for the environment, either. Unless we all commit suicide, we have to accept the fact that our behavior changes the environment. So, yes, quantities matter a lot.
    - mklarmann 3y ago
      If you define “sustainable” in the sense of “enabling human life on earth”, you should be fine.
  - himinlomax 3y ago
    Dairy from cows grazing on marginal land that is not otherwise suitable / efficient for other cultures is very competitive as far as producing proteins is concerned. Proteins are a necessary nutrient. Industrial cattle fed corn is an entirely different story and should almost certainly be counted as a different category as far as climate impact is concerned.
himinlomax 3y ago
The water use claim regarding beef has been debunked, it was based on the weird accounting trick where you count rainfall on pasture as wasted water for some reason. Also speaking of pasture, afaik the equation for cattle is completely different whether they're fed corn vs grazing on marginal land as they're supposed to.
- wiz21c 3y ago
  > they're fed corn and where does the corn grow ?
  - himinlomax 3y ago
    What's your point?
- fredrikholm 3y ago
  What? The problem is that cattle consumes orders of magnitude more water compared to plants, on top of the fact that they also eat plants, of which they convert a small portion of into (edible) mass. Their urine, en masse, is highly toxic to the local environment as it kills plants (high salt content, fertilizer burn) and pollutes rivers (pH, over-fertilization, algae blooming).
  - himinlomax 3y ago
    That water claim was based on a flawed accounting that's been repeated over and over so much without source. The debunking was posted right here on HN a few years back, don't have time to find it for now, maybe later. Other than that, what you describe only applies to industrial farming, not grazing cattle. Cows graze pasture, they shit and piss in pasture, it's almost a closed cycle except for the added salt the herder usualy gives them.
    - fredrikholm 3y ago
      > That water claim What water claim? That cows consume water and excrete concentrated urine? I don't know what you're debunking without a source, but appears to be a straw man. > industrial farming, not grazing cattle Grazing requires orders of magnitude more land compared to cramming cows into small cages, which decreases the amount of food you can derive from this already (very) expensive food source. I love beef, but that doesn't change the fact that it's an incredibly wasteful source of food and it ultimately unsustainable compared to plants, fish, eggs etc.

choeger 3y ago

I often wonder, how much double counting goes into these stats. Of course, dairy currently relies on fossile energy often. But how much of it is attributed elsewhere as well? Diesel, for instance, is often also attributed to big oil companies like shell. Cows are slaughtered and sold as meat at some point - is the dairy CO2 emission subtracted here? I don't think so.

cinntaile 3y ago
Since you often wonder, I suggest you spend some time reading some relevant papers and their methodology. You won't have to guess and assume if you do that.

NovaDudely 3y ago

I'm not too surprised, in some ways Dairy is the meat industry by proxy. All dairy cattle end up in the same abattoirs.

asterix_pano 3y ago
On top of that they have one of the most miserable life we could imagine. Birthing babies and getting them taken away ASAP to give milk to a machine and getting slaughtered when you are less productive... It's hard to describe our lack of empathy to create and accept such systems.
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  Oh yeah... don't worry I know all the gruesome details. I have changed my ways accordingly. This is a why I say the meat industry is more honest than the Dairy industry. The Dairy folks are all about cows in green fields in the sun - ignoring the 4-5 years of psychological and physical torture only to end the exact same way. At least the meat industry just says - it's for meat!

Aromasin 3y ago

One of the major issue's isn't just the calorific inefficiencies in the fodder->dairy process, but the simple act of creating pastures for animals. About 85% of deforestation world-wide is being driven by animal agriculture; of which dairy makes up a huge part of that. We could use less land to produce food if we ate less dairy, by a huge margin.

karmakurtisaani 3y ago

I suppose theoretically optimal diet would have to be some flavour of vegan, plus maybe some fish if available. In practice, a major reduction of meat and dairy would probably be enough to make a difference.