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.
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.
Oh true and we consequently need to eat less cow meat, more different meat and/or have less people.
but focusing on that is shifting blame in an innefectual way of course. Pointing at cow farts puts the pressure on the individual and seeks to dampen effects in the short term.
Pump up less or no fossil fuels with actual long term thinking and those fertilisers will automatically become more expensive. At that point tho our oversized animal herd becomes harder to support and beef becomes automatically a lot more expensive whilst at the same time the manure becomes more important.
Always worth noting that the fertilizers don't require fossil fuels, just currently use them as they are cheaper if you ignore the externalities and alternatives haven't got the scale yet.
Pro-fossil fuel types will regularly claim fossil fuels are a hard requirement for fertilizer.
I have often read the Haber-Bosch process credited with making the population explosion and drastic decreases in hunger possible, making it one of the most impactful discoveries in human history.
> A cow that's fed on gras and farts emits nothing that that gras didn't pick up
Sorry to say, this is a very basic misunderstanding of chemistry. Methane is produced by the cow from carbohydrates in the grass. It is not present in grass, and the grass did not get it from the air. If we stopped producing methane in this way, no other process would replace it and the planet would cool down.
I didn’t say animal agriculture, I said “cow farts”. The animal agriculture figure listed on that Wikipedia page includes all ruminant livestock (mainly cattle, sheep, and goats).
Also, from that Wikipedia article:
There is accumulating research and data showing that oil and gas industry methane emissions – or from fossil fuel extraction, distribution and use – are much larger than thought.[35][36][37][38][39]
Still, my “astronomically dwarfs” looks to be overstating it by a wide margin.
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.
Yeah, exactly. I didn’t say anything to dispute that so I’m not sure what your point is. The time it spends as methane before turning back into CO2 is really bad
There were cows a decade ago as well. The herd size dictates a level in the atmosphere it does not constantly increase the amount of methane in the atmosphere, there is an equilibrium.
Increasing herd sizes increases that equilibrium level and that is partially responsible for the overall increase.
But there are mitigations that can be applied there are feed additives that reduce the cow related methane emissions to 1%.
Overall point is cow farts can be a drop in the bucket in the overall scheme of things, all we have to do is modify their diet slightly. Should we do it yes. Is it a huge issue no.
Industrial methane leaks are a bigger problem, that methane when it breaks down will turn into co2 that was not there to begin with contributing to global warming permanently.
It isn't the "cow farts" that produce most methane, but rather the anaerobic processing of cow dung emanating from feed lots, dairy operations, etc.
Grass-fed beef cattle whose dung is "recycled" in a more natural way in the fields produce the same emissions as would wild ruminants such as antelope, bison, etc.
The biodiversity problem in the above refers mostly to new land clearances intended for farming, including for feedstock. This is minor in N. America and Europe, mostly as the clearances were done decades or over a century ago.
This Wikipedia article linked to elsewhere in this discussion gives the impression that the agricultural methane emissions are primarily a result of enteric fermentation by ruminant livestock.
That's the source of emission by the cow or steer. Industrial processing of the dung produces vastly more.
Table 3 in this source [0] shows enteric vs manure methane emissions are 158 vs 137 kg CH4/yr for dairy cows, who are mostly fed in feedlots, and 58 vs 2.4 for meat and other cattle, in the US and Canada. So the CH4 emissions range 65-fold from 2.4 to 158 depending on how the cattle are farmed.
Cows produce around 50 kg CH4 per head per year. There's around 1.5 billion cattle. That's around 75 teragrams (million metric tons).
Humans release about 410 teragrams altogether. About 40 percent is agricultural. And another 40 percent is from fossils, namely natural gas.
The top 100 natural gas leaks release over 20 teragrams of methane a year. That's just the leaks. That's 400,000,000 cattle worth of methane just pissed into the wind.
>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.
I never understood this argument. With Oil & Gas you release green house gases that have been sealed away back into the air.
For methane produced by farming all components remain in a cycle. Everything released by animals eventually finds its way back to plants, which get eaten, which become exhaust of animals, etc.
This sounds to me more like a spin by big oil to finger point at another industry.
The methane will eventually break down and be part of new plants, but in the meantime it will heat the planet much more than if it hadn't been there. Think of it this way: industrial scale cattle farming essentially makes and feeds biochemical reactors that turn hydrocarbons into a gaseous form that maximizes their global heating effect. Consider the counterfactual where we don't stuff billions of fart machines full of corn.
> The methane will eventually break down and be part of new plants
To be exact, excess methane go in the high troposphere, where it is broken down in CO2+H2O (the half life is very short, I don't remember which is which but it's either 5 or 20 years). So in any case, it accelerate climate change.
> For methane produced by farming all components remain in a cycle.
No, they don't. Methane is not absorbed by plants and is not part of any cycle. The only reason it is not a catastrophe is that it breaks down in a relatively short time. If we stopped producing methane in this way, no other process would replace it and the planet would cool down.
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
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.
The mean human has approximately one ovary, one testicle. A few hundred million Indians refusing all meat is compatible with the others not doing that.
Supplements if you're vegan, there are vegetarian sources.
Just looked up the Wikipedia page to check on vegan, and… looks like all the animal and plant "sources" actually ingest the stuff from elsewhere?
Since only bacteria and some archea possess the genes and enzymes necessary to synthesize vitamin B12, plant and algae sources all obtain the vitamin secondarily from symbiosis with various species of bacteria,[5] or in the case of fermented plant foods, from bacterial fermentation.[86]
It's not *that* hard to prosper with even a vegan diet in the modern world, I know several who do fine.
Hardest part is knowing implicit animal ingredients you might not otherwise guess, which almost tripped me up when I visited the US and (as a vegetarian*) almost bought some yogurt before reading the ingredients list and finding to my surprise that it contained gelatine.
* it's mainly the cheese; I've substituted out other uses of milk. Also, vegan yogurt is a thing now, not sure when that happened, before or after that visit.
It literally is designed to survive without meat, meat used to be a luxury that was only eaten on special occasions for most people in history, we only eat so much nowadays because it became so cheap
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't change the fact that you're still burning coal, while you could be putting up solar.
Far too many so-called environmentalists are far more concerned with stopping life rather than practical methods to reduce and eliminate harm, and they get ignored - and worse fought back against.
“If you build a solar farm generating 100MWh rather than an ethanol farm generating 50MWh that’s bad because the it’s a supper slope to banning beefburgers”
It is not just a few stragglers, 30% of americans believe climate change isnt real, the us president is one of them.
Fighting climate change is not going to be successful without sacrifice, we tried that for the last decades and fossil fuel consumption has only risen.
Of course people dont want to do that and so instead deny it happening or that it will be magically fixed in the future.
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.
ACs are not going to stop storms, floods, droughts and the rising sea level. Fighting climate change requires sacrifice of current comforts for an easier life of future generations.
So of course we are not going to do anything about it, when it is much easier to deny it exists or pretend that it is going to magically fix itself in the future.
Okay lets get this straight, animals do not contribute to global warming. The co2 they emit has been taken from the atmosphere from plants.
Methane breaks down to Co2 in the atmosphere on average in 9.6 years.
Animal rearing does not permanently affect the climate.
Increasing stock sizes does increase the methane level equilibrium but there are mitigations to this, there are additives to feed that can reduce methane emissions to 1%. Last I checked a few years ago, there were pilot programs to determine effects on animal welfare and product quality.
The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.
Animal-emitted CO2 isn't the problem, but methane.
The CO2 captured by plants and eaten by livestock gets converted in part to methane, a more more potent greenhouse gas. This does eventually degrade back to the original CO2, but on a scale of decades, it's currently too slow to prevent accumulation of methane.
> Methane breaks down to Co2 in the atmosphere on average in 9.6 years.
Despite which, over a 100 year period it has 25 times the warming impact as the CO2 it turns into.
> The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.
Everyone should focus on whatever they know how to make a dent with, the "sustainable" emissions rate is 0.1% of the current rate which is essentially "we need to fix everything everywhere except for pick one of grassland or North Korea".
It's probably not the tone. You only choose to hear that tone and close up. (From my experience)
I hold some fringe ideas, e.g. helmets are bad. So I have lots of experience with handling discussion where people close up for any rational argument. Because I am just wrong by definition. That really lets you explore how people react to ideas they do not support.
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).
Stockyards are the worst offenders. This is due to how the dung is processed, which releases a lot of methane. Grass-fed cattle have much lower net emissions of greenhouse gasses.
Managed grazing along with other regenerative techniques can sequester carbon in the soil. Factory farms have the problem of concentrated dung disposal which usually leads to letting it sit in methane producing conditions and also feed for intensive operations usually comes from non-regenerative crop farming which uses more fossil-fuel fertilizer and depletes the soil.
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.
Yes and doing regenerative practices all the way to the end would naturally force this reduction in consumption. It would be really good, because the land used to grow feed could be redirected to other more efficient uses.
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.
"Efficiency and ROI" can be applied to financial but also to environmental impact. Producing more with less [land use/fertilizer/water use] is also a form of efficiency, and it's good, but it requires vast capital that mom & pop farms don't have + strong government incentives. De-scaling is only an agrarian nostalgia fantasy, it's incompatible with reaching climate goals.
I am pretty sure that stakeholder capitalism has an answer to this that might not be aligned with the ecology of Earth or what the meat consumers see as the right answer.
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).
I am not vegan, will never be, but I have known vegans for more than two decades and they are doing fine. We need to make it easy to make the right choice about food, and one way to do that is to stop making meat meat meat the ONLY cool thing. I am fine with vegans serving me tasty food, they make alternatives easier. If you do not want to be a full time vegan just switch to 3 out 7 days of the week or something like that.
I gather this is a vague snarky comment loosely implying that vegans don't get enough B12. If so, it's a profoundly ignorant point that shows you don't have any knowledge of a typical vegan diet nowadays.
Yep, B12 is a solved issue. It's pretty cheap to supplement.
I do want to mention that you do also have to look out to get enough of : Omega 3, Calcium, Iodine, Iron, Selenium, Protein.
Takes a bit of work at the start to adapt but it's very doable, and it's not like Omnivores don't have comparable deficiencies from not eating enough plants and fruit. Not to mention other problems that come with eating animal products...
I only supplement with Omega 3, Vitamin D, B12, Iodine (although sometimes I go for wakame). Have been on a plant-based diet for around 4 years now, feeling healthy.
I know people who only eat chicken and beef, I'm pretty sure they need iodine way than you do. I don't have the issue, the main animal I eat (besides eggs and cheese) is fish, but I would bet you are healthier than a large part of omnivores.
This is bullshit. The vast majority of CO2 is created by energy production.
The problem is systemic and blaming other people for their lifestyle choices is neither effective nor helpful and just leads to further division. It's exactly this sort of division that helps fossil companies to destroy the planet and keep making money.
It's more than 6%. Cows eat a lot, so people cut forests to grow more feed (like in the Amazon). Deforestation contribute to global warming, not to mention the biodiversity damage.
I would say it’s important to emphasize people don’t need to go complete vegan. Reducing consumption of animal products can be more realistic for most people.
> As omnivores above the poverty line, we can all make conscious and conscientious choices about what we eat.
This being a forum of mostly tech workers, many of us can afford to choose more sustainable animal products and support agriculture that promotes biodiversity and carbon sequestration too. If you don't want to give animal products up, then look for sources that engage in regenerative agriculture practices. They tend to be the most humane ways to raise animals as well.
In the end, demand for meat, eggs, and dairy is never going to disappear. Maybe someday lab grown alternatives can be molecularly and structurally equivalent. But until then the most effective change we can make collectively is to change government incentives to farmers so they choose better practices.
A lot of vegans eat fake meat and dairy which shares many of the environmental problems of meat, such as needing a lot of inputs so a lot of plant material relative to the final product.. It also adds energy use, transport, packaging etc.
There are also environmentally beneficial meats. So much so that when rewilding we sometimes need to add the same animals back (as is happening in Scotland - rewilders are breeding cattle that look like wild ones to make it "natural"). In the UK you can buy venison from wild animals that need to be culled to to preserve the environment.
Beyond Meat is one such product, and it generates a lot fewer greenhouse emissions.
> Based on a comparative assessment of the current Beyond Burger production system with the 2017 beef LCA by Thoma et al, the Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less energy, has >99% less impact on water scarcity and 93% less impact on land use than a ¼ pound of U.S. beef.
Please provide the research that say that going vegan is one of the most effective ways to combat global warming.
According to a Swedish study publish a few years ago (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541), going vegan is mid-tier in combating global warming. Who you buy your electric from has a larger impact on the environment than going Vegan, as does if/what car you own and naturally what kind of trips and vacations you do. A single trip with an airplane can have a bigger impact on global warming than all the meat they eat through their whole life.
This seems to say that an individual going vegan would save an entire transatlantic (!) flight for their footprint every single year, and recommends it as one of the four most effective things one can do?
I read the study wrong. A single transatlantic trip produce the same amount of emissions as eating meat for two full years. 1.6 tons for a flight vs 0.8 tons for a eating meat for a whole year.
Technically the lowest of the high impact actions. Combine one Moderate Impact Action with a part of a second Moderate Impact Action and you get more than a plant-based diet, or just do one of the better High Impact Action.
Sure, if you assume the low end of the range provided for a plant-based diet's impact. You'd need to combine every Moderate Impact Action to reach the high end of the range.
You asked for evidence that a plant-based diet is one of the most effective ways. You found it.
Wynes & Nicholas downgraded electricity sourcing to "questionable merit." Table 1 gives a range of under 100 kg to 2,500 kg CO₂e saved per year, depending on the default CO2 intensity of the state/country you are living in.
A plant-based diet is one of their high-impact lifestyle choices.
Plowing pasture-land to grow soybeans is likely to reduce bio-diversity even more than running cattle on that land. A lot of pasture land is marginal land where a plow is very destructive, and is often a lot closer to the pre-human ecology where the land was grazed by large mammals.
Your primary point still stands -- eating tofu likely has a lower ecological impact than eating beef, but the trade-off isn't obvious, and second order effects can be significant.
If you stop grazing cattle on land, the owner of that land is going to find another use for the land to profit from it. Some of those uses are going to be better for bio-diversity, some are going to be worse. It's highly unlikely to become parkland.
So will going vegan reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase bio-diversity? Probably, but not certainly. This uncertainty shouldn't dissuade people from acting on "probably" though.
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”
Even on a site like HN, where rational and logical thinking is held in high esteem, and where few could be suspected of climate change denialism, a factual statement such as this one from the article:
"On average, animal-sourced foods are associated with eight times more carbon loss and 14 times more biodiversity loss per calorie than plant-sourced foods."
is very likely to be countered by listing personal preferences, anecdata, concern for vegans' health or mockery of that lifestyle choice, and generally nitpicking.
Honest admissions like 'I am part of the problem and will maybe try doing something about it' are very rare.
Indeed, that's the same answer when topics like public surveillance or dependency-inducing media are debated. It's difficult to criticize a problem, when you're a part of the problem, respectively paid to be the problem.
We have around 27 million cattle (in the US) today. There were something like 30-50 million bison in the US before we almost eradicated them. Were the bison equally bad? Or is the problem that we’re feeding these ruminants unnatural diets?
Incidentally, I’d love to see the Great Plains return to huge roaming ruminant populations, and find a way to build our meat industry around that.
That is not how we keep cattle in the United States. In the US about 82% of grazing land is rangeland, which continues to support the natural ecosystems (prairies, shrublands, steppes, etc).
In places like Ireland, where cows have existed for 6000 years, they're also part of the ecology by any meaningful metric. There are a lot of more recently arrived species considered native! Mice, hedgehogs, rabbits, and red deer all came later.
That's a feedlot for finishing. Throughout its life, a cow will spend 70-80% of its life in pasture. Feedlots are only efficient for the finishing of the cow.
The ecology of it, including emissions, isn't really that bad if you're American. We're very efficient at beef production. It's really the global south that's most of the novel emissions, and that's mostly from counting land-use changes.
One of the biggest biodiversity-related threats - as in able to trigger cataclysmic-level event - is IMO commercial honey production.
Farm honeybees are essentially one breed, which is in itself a huge problem as a single pathogen/parasite can quickly wipe them out globally. On top of that, honey farmers move their hives all over the place, effectively displacing any wild pollinators present in vast areas.
Commercial honey is farmed in the most ecologically risky way.
Total insect mass dropped by 70% in Europe in 30 years, no insects = no pollination, no pollination = no flower = real mass scale extinction of pretty much everything that lives on earth since 80%+ of plants need pollinators.
8by3 | 7 hours ago
enquirewithin | 7 hours ago
I would hazard a guess that the incidental methane emissions from one gas extraction field would astronomically dwarf the emissions from cow farts.
krige | 7 hours ago
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%.
tempfile | 7 hours ago
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 | 7 hours ago
orwin | 5 hours ago
Complete rice also carry lisine (although less than beans) which is a really hard amino acid to get on a vegetarian diet.
BobaFloutist | 40 minutes ago
enquirewithin | 6 hours ago
dev_l1x_be | 7 hours ago
Llamamoe | 7 hours ago
Yeah, but they also provide 80% of the world's calories to animals' 20%
modo_mario | 7 hours ago
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.
lotsofpulp | 7 hours ago
Otherwise, I wonder if non fertilizer supported grass could support sufficient cows to satiate demand (which has not even peaked yet).
modo_mario | 6 hours ago
but focusing on that is shifting blame in an innefectual way of course. Pointing at cow farts puts the pressure on the individual and seeks to dampen effects in the short term. Pump up less or no fossil fuels with actual long term thinking and those fertilisers will automatically become more expensive. At that point tho our oversized animal herd becomes harder to support and beef becomes automatically a lot more expensive whilst at the same time the manure becomes more important.
ZeroGravitas | 2 hours ago
Pro-fossil fuel types will regularly claim fossil fuels are a hard requirement for fertilizer.
lotsofpulp | 2 hours ago
tempfile | 3 hours ago
Sorry to say, this is a very basic misunderstanding of chemistry. Methane is produced by the cow from carbohydrates in the grass. It is not present in grass, and the grass did not get it from the air. If we stopped producing methane in this way, no other process would replace it and the planet would cool down.
enquirewithin | 6 hours ago
Also, from that Wikipedia article:
There is accumulating research and data showing that oil and gas industry methane emissions – or from fossil fuel extraction, distribution and use – are much larger than thought.[35][36][37][38][39]
Still, my “astronomically dwarfs” looks to be overstating it by a wide margin.
shiandow | 7 hours ago
throwawayffffas | 7 hours ago
aqme28 | 7 hours ago
firebot | 6 hours ago
aqme28 | 4 hours ago
throwawayffffas | 6 hours ago
Increasing herd sizes increases that equilibrium level and that is partially responsible for the overall increase.
But there are mitigations that can be applied there are feed additives that reduce the cow related methane emissions to 1%.
Overall point is cow farts can be a drop in the bucket in the overall scheme of things, all we have to do is modify their diet slightly. Should we do it yes. Is it a huge issue no.
Industrial methane leaks are a bigger problem, that methane when it breaks down will turn into co2 that was not there to begin with contributing to global warming permanently.
pcrh | 6 hours ago
Grass-fed beef cattle whose dung is "recycled" in a more natural way in the fields produce the same emissions as would wild ruminants such as antelope, bison, etc.
The biodiversity problem in the above refers mostly to new land clearances intended for farming, including for feedstock. This is minor in N. America and Europe, mostly as the clearances were done decades or over a century ago.
enquirewithin | 6 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_emissions
pcrh | 6 hours ago
Table 3 in this source [0] shows enteric vs manure methane emissions are 158 vs 137 kg CH4/yr for dairy cows, who are mostly fed in feedlots, and 58 vs 2.4 for meat and other cattle, in the US and Canada. So the CH4 emissions range 65-fold from 2.4 to 158 depending on how the cattle are farmed.
[0] Revised methane emissions factors and spatially distributed annual carbon fluxes for global livestock. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/pmid/28959823/
enquirewithin | 3 hours ago
firebot | 6 hours ago
Cows produce around 50 kg CH4 per head per year. There's around 1.5 billion cattle. That's around 75 teragrams (million metric tons).
Humans release about 410 teragrams altogether. About 40 percent is agricultural. And another 40 percent is from fossils, namely natural gas.
The top 100 natural gas leaks release over 20 teragrams of methane a year. That's just the leaks. That's 400,000,000 cattle worth of methane just pissed into the wind.
guerby | 6 hours ago
Thanks!
modo_mario | 7 hours ago
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.
DarkNova6 | 6 hours ago
For methane produced by farming all components remain in a cycle. Everything released by animals eventually finds its way back to plants, which get eaten, which become exhaust of animals, etc.
This sounds to me more like a spin by big oil to finger point at another industry.
nDRDY | 6 hours ago
The obsession with CO2, specifically emitted by fossil fuel use, for me indicates geopolitical motivations (for both standpoints).
Flashtoo | 6 hours ago
orwin | 5 hours ago
To be exact, excess methane go in the high troposphere, where it is broken down in CO2+H2O (the half life is very short, I don't remember which is which but it's either 5 or 20 years). So in any case, it accelerate climate change.
pizzaiolo | 6 hours ago
tempfile | 3 hours ago
No, they don't. Methane is not absorbed by plants and is not part of any cycle. The only reason it is not a catastrophe is that it breaks down in a relatively short time. If we stopped producing methane in this way, no other process would replace it and the planet would cool down.
dnautics | 6 hours ago
sudo_cowsay | 7 hours ago
techterrier | 7 hours ago
lotsofpulp | 7 hours ago
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 | 7 hours ago
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.
slau | 6 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_milk_cons...
bitlad | 7 hours ago
savolai | 7 hours ago
lukan | 7 hours ago
tonyhart7 | 7 hours ago
lotsofpulp | 7 hours ago
tonyhart7 | 7 hours ago
lotsofpulp | 7 hours ago
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-and...
ben_w | 6 hours ago
The mean human has approximately one ovary, one testicle. A few hundred million Indians refusing all meat is compatible with the others not doing that.
firebot | 7 hours ago
JoeyJoJoJr | 7 hours ago
choo-t | 7 hours ago
hackernud3s | 7 hours ago
ben_w | 6 hours ago
Just looked up the Wikipedia page to check on vegan, and… looks like all the animal and plant "sources" actually ingest the stuff from elsewhere?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12IsTom | 6 hours ago
lukan | 7 hours ago
But mainly, beef and meat is not the same, cattle needs way more ressources than chicken for example, or well, insects.
shiandow | 7 hours ago
Also dairy is not a meat.
mschild | 7 hours ago
Chicken, for example, produces 10% of CO2 per kg of meat compared to beef.
tonyhart7 | 7 hours ago
tempfile | 7 hours ago
lukan | 7 hours ago
ben_w | 6 hours ago
Hardest part is knowing implicit animal ingredients you might not otherwise guess, which almost tripped me up when I visited the US and (as a vegetarian*) almost bought some yogurt before reading the ingredients list and finding to my surprise that it contained gelatine.
* it's mainly the cheese; I've substituted out other uses of milk. Also, vegan yogurt is a thing now, not sure when that happened, before or after that visit.
Aefiam | 6 hours ago
hutattedonmyarm | 6 hours ago
lukan | 4 hours ago
enquirewithin | 7 hours ago
williamdclt | 7 hours ago
choo-t | 7 hours ago
Llamamoe | 7 hours ago
Ketogenic diet is a band aid to both, not a solution, and plants are not the cause of either problem, either.
DarkNova6 | 6 hours ago
lukan | 6 hours ago
"Beef: roughly 70–80% of people eat it at least occasionally
Milk and dairy: roughly 85–90%"
karakarakarakar | 7 hours ago
tempfile | 7 hours ago
hackernud3s | 7 hours ago
not-kinsale-joe | 7 hours ago
lentil_soup | 7 hours ago
pvaldes | 7 hours ago
Yep, is the miracle of literature. An hectare of cattle allows more biodiversity than the same hectare of lettuce.
tovej | 7 hours ago
facecalm | 7 hours ago
Buxato | 6 hours ago
pastage | 6 hours ago
plaguna | 7 hours ago
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.
Yizahi | 7 hours ago
hdgvhicv | 7 hours ago
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 | 7 hours ago
It doesn't change the fact that you're still burning coal, while you could be putting up solar.
hdgvhicv | 3 hours ago
Your force people to stop heating their homes they’ll revolt. You give them a better alternative they’ll take it.
> How do you make beef and milk more sustainable?
This is the right question. And is being answered, along with other improvements in farming. I have no idea about the specifics, as I’m not a farmer.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002203022...
https://discoverwildscience.com/the-dutch-are-growing-floati...
Far too many so-called environmentalists are far more concerned with stopping life rather than practical methods to reduce and eliminate harm, and they get ignored - and worse fought back against.
“If you build a solar farm generating 100MWh rather than an ethanol farm generating 50MWh that’s bad because the it’s a supper slope to banning beefburgers”
Aefiam | 6 hours ago
Fighting climate change is not going to be successful without sacrifice, we tried that for the last decades and fossil fuel consumption has only risen.
Of course people dont want to do that and so instead deny it happening or that it will be magically fixed in the future.
hackernud3s | 7 hours ago
simianwords | 7 hours ago
Aefiam | 6 hours ago
So of course we are not going to do anything about it, when it is much easier to deny it exists or pretend that it is going to magically fix itself in the future.
simianwords | 5 hours ago
throwawayffffas | 6 hours ago
Methane breaks down to Co2 in the atmosphere on average in 9.6 years.
Animal rearing does not permanently affect the climate.
Increasing stock sizes does increase the methane level equilibrium but there are mitigations to this, there are additives to feed that can reduce methane emissions to 1%. Last I checked a few years ago, there were pilot programs to determine effects on animal welfare and product quality.
The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.
pcrh | 6 hours ago
The CO2 captured by plants and eaten by livestock gets converted in part to methane, a more more potent greenhouse gas. This does eventually degrade back to the original CO2, but on a scale of decades, it's currently too slow to prevent accumulation of methane.
ben_w | 6 hours ago
Despite which, over a 100 year period it has 25 times the warming impact as the CO2 it turns into.
> The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.
Everyone should focus on whatever they know how to make a dent with, the "sustainable" emissions rate is 0.1% of the current rate which is essentially "we need to fix everything everywhere except for pick one of grassland or North Korea".
https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
paweladamczuk | 6 hours ago
pastage | 6 hours ago
I hold some fringe ideas, e.g. helmets are bad. So I have lots of experience with handling discussion where people close up for any rational argument. Because I am just wrong by definition. That really lets you explore how people react to ideas they do not support.
paweladamczuk | 6 hours ago
nobodywillobsrv | 7 hours ago
tempfile | 7 hours ago
pjmlp | 7 hours ago
chickenbig | 7 hours ago
tempfile | 7 hours ago
choo-t | 7 hours ago
pcrh | 6 hours ago
goda90 | 6 hours ago
chickenbig | 5 hours ago
avesi | 7 hours ago
soupspaces | 6 hours ago
graemep | 6 hours ago
dqv | 3 hours ago
testemailfordg2 | 7 hours ago
concinds | 6 hours ago
dev_l1x_be | 7 hours ago
imjonse | 7 hours ago
dev_l1x_be | 2 hours ago
greyw | 2 hours ago
whyage | 7 hours ago
firebot | 7 hours ago
pastage | 6 hours ago
PxldLtd | 6 hours ago
expedited123 | 5 hours ago
I do want to mention that you do also have to look out to get enough of : Omega 3, Calcium, Iodine, Iron, Selenium, Protein.
Takes a bit of work at the start to adapt but it's very doable, and it's not like Omnivores don't have comparable deficiencies from not eating enough plants and fruit. Not to mention other problems that come with eating animal products...
I only supplement with Omega 3, Vitamin D, B12, Iodine (although sometimes I go for wakame). Have been on a plant-based diet for around 4 years now, feeling healthy.
orwin | 5 hours ago
softwaredoug | 6 hours ago
0x000xca0xfe | 5 hours ago
e40 | 4 hours ago
hackernud3s | 6 hours ago
And if you're not willing to do your part, that just means the rest of us have to pull double duty.
DarkNova6 | 6 hours ago
The problem is systemic and blaming other people for their lifestyle choices is neither effective nor helpful and just leads to further division. It's exactly this sort of division that helps fossil companies to destroy the planet and keep making money.
nDRDY | 6 hours ago
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-warming-by-gas-and...
dnautics | 6 hours ago
xscott | 6 hours ago
https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
More than 70% of CO2 from energy, less than 6% from ALL livestock.
whyage | 4 hours ago
xscott | 3 hours ago
If your arguments aren't believable, I'm buying extra steak this evening.
Buxato | 6 hours ago
IsTom | 6 hours ago
Kichererbsen | 6 hours ago
You do realize those soybean plantations are not for human consumption, right? And that that's what is factored into the quoted loss of biodiversity?
firebot | 6 hours ago
Global meat production is only increasing.
You're delusional with main character syndrome?
whyage | 4 hours ago
softwaredoug | 6 hours ago
ZeroGravitas | 2 hours ago
And the headline suggests this applies to biodiversity damage too.
Probably applies for health benefits too.
goda90 | 5 hours ago
This being a forum of mostly tech workers, many of us can afford to choose more sustainable animal products and support agriculture that promotes biodiversity and carbon sequestration too. If you don't want to give animal products up, then look for sources that engage in regenerative agriculture practices. They tend to be the most humane ways to raise animals as well.
In the end, demand for meat, eggs, and dairy is never going to disappear. Maybe someday lab grown alternatives can be molecularly and structurally equivalent. But until then the most effective change we can make collectively is to change government incentives to farmers so they choose better practices.
graemep | 5 hours ago
There are also environmentally beneficial meats. So much so that when rewilding we sometimes need to add the same animals back (as is happening in Scotland - rewilders are breeding cattle that look like wild ones to make it "natural"). In the UK you can buy venison from wild animals that need to be culled to to preserve the environment.
e40 | 4 hours ago
Fake meat is just tofu with preparation.
graemep | 2 hours ago
They eat fake fairy instead.
> Fake meat is just tofu with preparation.
Its made from a variety of things, and the the health and environmental effects will vary a lot.
camel-cdr | an hour ago
I often see these vegan meat substitute products as an on-ramp and people who are vegan for longer tend to use other things in their staple dishes.
softwaredoug | 4 hours ago
> Based on a comparative assessment of the current Beyond Burger production system with the 2017 beef LCA by Thoma et al, the Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less energy, has >99% less impact on water scarcity and 93% less impact on land use than a ¼ pound of U.S. beef.
https://css.umich.edu/publications/research-publications/bey...
graemep | 2 hours ago
belorn | 4 hours ago
According to a Swedish study publish a few years ago (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541), going vegan is mid-tier in combating global warming. Who you buy your electric from has a larger impact on the environment than going Vegan, as does if/what car you own and naturally what kind of trips and vacations you do. A single trip with an airplane can have a bigger impact on global warming than all the meat they eat through their whole life.
Martinussen | 3 hours ago
belorn | 3 hours ago
widgets | 3 hours ago
belorn | 3 hours ago
widgets | 2 hours ago
You asked for evidence that a plant-based diet is one of the most effective ways. You found it.
AlecSchueler | 8 minutes ago
Also I already don't own a car at all and I haven't taken a plane in a little over a decade.
aoeusnth1 | 3 hours ago
A plant-based diet is one of their high-impact lifestyle choices.
bryanlarsen | 2 hours ago
Your primary point still stands -- eating tofu likely has a lower ecological impact than eating beef, but the trade-off isn't obvious, and second order effects can be significant.
If you stop grazing cattle on land, the owner of that land is going to find another use for the land to profit from it. Some of those uses are going to be better for bio-diversity, some are going to be worse. It's highly unlikely to become parkland.
So will going vegan reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase bio-diversity? Probably, but not certainly. This uncertainty shouldn't dissuade people from acting on "probably" though.
throwthrowuknow | 7 hours ago
rimworld | 7 hours ago
imjonse | 6 hours ago
"On average, animal-sourced foods are associated with eight times more carbon loss and 14 times more biodiversity loss per calorie than plant-sourced foods."
is very likely to be countered by listing personal preferences, anecdata, concern for vegans' health or mockery of that lifestyle choice, and generally nitpicking.
Honest admissions like 'I am part of the problem and will maybe try doing something about it' are very rare.
soco | 6 hours ago
tdeck | 6 hours ago
/s
igleria | 6 hours ago
That is until people are faced with stuff like this :D. Then emotions take over.
vrganj | 6 hours ago
HN leans strongly reactionary and just likes to dress it up a bit so as to appear more respectable.
catlike0076 | 6 hours ago
graemep | 6 hours ago
christophilus | 6 hours ago
Incidentally, I’d love to see the Great Plains return to huge roaming ruminant populations, and find a way to build our meat industry around that.
j16sdiz | 6 hours ago
In natural environment, they cohabitant with other animals. They migrates.
When we farm them, we remove anything not our primary product.
simonsarris | 6 hours ago
In places like Ireland, where cows have existed for 6000 years, they're also part of the ecology by any meaningful metric. There are a lot of more recently arrived species considered native! Mice, hedgehogs, rabbits, and red deer all came later.
toasty228 | 4 hours ago
This is how cattle is kept in the US: https://www.hcn.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/sucked-dry-th...
I'd love to read your definition of "natural ecosystems", is it something like "a system in nature", with "nature" meaning "on planet earth"?
simonsarris | 3 hours ago
simonsarris | 5 hours ago
The ecology of it, including emissions, isn't really that bad if you're American. We're very efficient at beef production. It's really the global south that's most of the novel emissions, and that's mostly from counting land-use changes.
toasty228 | 4 hours ago
dqv | 4 hours ago
And maximize how they're fed in the last months of their lives in feedlots.
They were certainly not killing 30 million bison each year.
The only answer here is less meat production, especially feedlot-finished, no matter how people try to twist it.
friendzis | 5 hours ago
Farm honeybees are essentially one breed, which is in itself a huge problem as a single pathogen/parasite can quickly wipe them out globally. On top of that, honey farmers move their hives all over the place, effectively displacing any wild pollinators present in vast areas.
Commercial honey is farmed in the most ecologically risky way.
toasty228 | 4 hours ago
Total insect mass dropped by 70% in Europe in 30 years, no insects = no pollination, no pollination = no flower = real mass scale extinction of pretty much everything that lives on earth since 80%+ of plants need pollinators.