Being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one(worksinprogress.substack.com) |
Being an effective environmentalist can often feel like being a bad one(worksinprogress.substack.com) |
> Environmental impact is measured over a full life-cycle analysis (LCA) across the following metrics: greenhouse gas emissions, ozone depletion, human toxicity (cancer effects), human toxicity (non-cancer effects), photochemical ozone formation, ionizing radiation, particulate matter, terrestrial acidification, terrestrial eutrophication, marine eutrophication, ecosystem toxicity, resource depletion (fossil), resource depletion (abiotic), and water resource depletion.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental...
What you described is a non-issue if the bag is disposed of properly. Presumably you, as a environmentalist can be relied upon to do that.
I'm glad you brought it up, because upon looking at the study the chart is based on, it seems hopelessly optimistic - it accounts for several end-of-life scenarios but they are all 'good' disposals performed after plastic collection, like recycling or incineration. Zero accounting for accidental or incompetent sending to landfills, which indeed seems the main issue with plastic bags.
(The study is also specific to Denmark, where perhaps disposal programs are more reliable than they are in the US.)
https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
That means I've used them maybe 100 times. Now they're starting to fall apart, and soon I'll need new ones.
I wonder, since they're much heavier and clearly use a lot more plastic, whether I would have used less plastic with the disposable ones.
And the end result won't be what you want it to be. It doesn't do us any good to stop climate change if the ecosystem still collapses out from under us.
Creating a sustainable environment is a systems problem and carbon is just one of many variables in that system. Yes, it's a really important one and in many ways it is the most pressing. But biodiversity and maintaining ecosystem services are close seconds, and if you optimize your eating for carbon in the way the author is describing you inevitably end up doing more net harm by undercutting those other two.
Further, a lot of the "data" she's linking is completely with out method or context. And method and context can make a huge difference in these sorts of lifecycle analyses. They are fraught with pitfalls. It's one of the reasons it's been so fucking hard to pin down exactly what the most environmental behavior is.
And this whole mess is one of the prime motivators behind my current effort to write an open academic publishing platform [1] that would allow review to be crowdsourced so that we can open and centralize the whole literature. Because then we actually could get a complete picture of what the best current answer to these questions is with out having to go through secondary sources like this which inevitably cherry pick studies, data, and lack context.
[1] https://blog.peer-review.io/we-might-have-a-way-to-fix-scien...
Environment is not all about carbon footprint. Reducing...or rather not increasing as much global warming doesn't help reducing the 7th continent or the micro plastics/graphene/whatever life threatening microscopic waste we are sending in the environment.
Still support plastic bag and straw 'bans' though.
One small factor to add to the mix is giving less money and power to fossil fuel producers, which I think has an outsize effect.
So I'd like to see most plastics move towards non-fossil feedstocks and better recycling.
Luckily, Extended Producer Responsibility laws lead to both less packaging, less harmful packaging and more recycling of packaging by putting the cost of disposal onto the people with the ability to make systematic change.
The people pushing the "all regulations backfire" line are just anti-regulation because they know they can foist the costs onto other people. If they'd lie about climate change then they've kind of blown their trust with me.
I agree environmentalalsim should be data driven, in both identifying problems and potential solutions. I believe that the meme that it's not is an obvious political fabrication by genuinely bad people.
Only when the minimal amount is used. Clamshell packaging is almost always incredibly wasteful and could be replaced by less weight of cardboard. Plastic jars and similar could often be bags or pouches. etc.
For example, British milk sellers mostly use the same shared milk container, with different labels.
They figured out how to lower the cost, because they were paying for it. They get really in depth in the specific amounts of dye to use in lids etc. to maximise recycling.
https://wrap.org.uk/resources/report/hdpe-milk-bottle-resear...
None of that needed specific regulations, just assigning the costs to the people responsible.
My imperfect personal tactic is to consume less of everything.
Refuse -> Reduce -> Reuse -> Recycle
> "Lab-grown meat, dense cities, and nuclear energy need a rebrand. These need to be some of the new emblems of a sustainable path forward."
1) Lab-grown meat is nowhere near commercialization. At best we have plant-based meat substitutes that have similar nutritional profiles (high protein) to meat that can be produced at scale.
2) Dense cities don't really matter that much, as each human requires a similar amount of arable land to grow the food they need each year. That per-human land area might be a bit less for vegetarians, but I doubt it's that big of a factor.
3) Nuclear energy is still quite expensive relative to wind/solar/storage, and that won't change because nuclear's catastrophic failure potential requires over-engineering and high-security, plus the uranium ore and cooling water requirements can be problematic.
Are you sure? My understanding is that people who live in dense cities rely less on automobiles, have their waste treated more efficiently, and consume less energy per capita in order to enjoy clean air and water. Those factors are more important than the land mass required to feed someone.
You can pack a lot of people into a 3km^2 circle at fairly moderate density when you're not wasting 500m^2 (8 parking spaces @ 40m^2 then roads, misc infrastructure and setbacks) per person forcing them to own cars.
A well connected walkable rural town full of 3 story fourplexes and 2 story cottages all clustered within 1km around a main street and train station is completely fine.
A walkable city which is almost all under 8 stories and where large portions of the population live in row houses or five over ones is fine.
Houston or Phoenix is not fine.
People use much less resources per unit of quality of life when they live in dense cities. Density provides massively more productivity with a given amount of natural resource consumption.
Now, if you really care about moving towards a more environmentally friendly world, you'll not stop there. You'll first want to change your diet to be plant-based, but then also want to make sure that those plant-based foods you buy are best-in-class (environmentally speaking), i.e. lead to healthier soil and less microplastics.
Beyond the environmental aspect, I'd also suggest looking at what impact your choices have along social and economical axes.
People are angry their neighbours don’t properly sort their trash while recycling is a shame. Meanwhile planned obsolescence is prevalent.
Making people feel guilty about their very small impact prevent them looking at the real culprits: electricity production, oil companies, global manufacturing and shipping and construction.
Same thing goes for rooftop solar power: it's fine, but protecting it is not important.
If you limit the neighbor to n stories at the boundary and n+1 at a setback of the winter noon sun angle where n is the current building then you can get your solar cake and eat it too.
Agree on the urban farming front (delicious lead). Although when done right, high mass yield, refrigerated, low calorie produce can be a net neutral or minor win there and should he considered as reasonable as any other hobby. There is also something to be said for the follow on effects of praxis, even if the immediate effects are minor.
1. stop buying meat
2. stop eating meat
3. stop buying dairy-based products
4. stop eating dairy-based products
5. stop eating eggs, honey, fish
6. use public transport, if possible
7. don‘t fly, if possible
Congrats, you now are an environmentalist.
- Highly processed food, including fake meat, could be extremely bad for you. The point is we just don't know yet as there isn't good data.
- Dense cities have the potential to be inhumane and not worth living in for various health (e.g. particulates, aerosols, nitrogen, disease) and social (digital-gov tight controls over movement, work, and access to resources) reasons. Just look at covid era China. Large groups of people displaced into under resourced cities ends badly.
-Nuclear is great until you get something like Ukraine where its used as a stick against the rest of Europe. Thyroid cancer rates in western europe would spike as a result of a critical incident. Or ofc Fukashima and Chernobyl. I'm totally pro nuclear but not mentioning its failures is a bad take and I don't believe the figures about nuclear related deaths.
Sure they have the potential for this, but only if we don’t take these problems into account and mitigate them. Take particulates for example (and noise, which you didn’t mention but is also an issue); a lot is from cars. If we assume that every city resident will have and frequently use a car, then sure that becomes an issue. But if we provide viable alternatives to driving and make them as or more convenient than driving, much less of an issue.
Another point: fertility drops massively in cities and this is an environmental concern as you need labour to transition industries at scale (e.g. nuclear plants, solar, wind, biomanufacture). Low birth rate dense cities are a recipe for disaster in terms of sufficient labour for a green transition.
The list of issues with the authors "I'm a misunderstood future hero" viewpoint goes on and on imo.
You might be interested in what we're doing at LabDAO, including our publishing lab and the community governance we're developing. Note: we're a DAO but it's not about crypto.
Contact in my profile if you'd like to chat.
I could imagine using natural language processing as part of looking at generating an automated Q&A algorithm or attempting to automate literature reviews in some way, but in the review process?
Someone I was talking to the other day was suggesting using sentiment analysis during the review process as a kind of tone grammarly aid to help people write constructive reviews, which is interesting. But I think that's different from GPT3.
Judging from your bio, I would guess you have much strong ideas about that answer to that question than I do. What are your thoughts?
The truth is reducing CO2 emissions is an emergency, and any other environmental considerations other than doing that is just arguing about deck chairs on the Titanic.
At this point, we would have been in a much better position if the Greens had no been so rabidly anti-nuclear. Germany is restarting coal plants now.
At some point, as the article argues, following “environmental intuitions” is self-defeating.
I don't think that latter sentence follows from the first at all - it's very much a slow emergency that will play out over decades and indeed centuries, and furthermore with a global population of 8+ billion, clearly it's not feasible for all of us to drop everything just to focus on any one single environmental issue. There are inevitably going to some actions that need to be taken to ensure long term ecological health that aren't related to mitigating against climate change, but are just as important, esp. wrt release of toxins/agricultural runoff into the environment, or drawing down water tables or monitoring invasive species (a problem already, but often exacerbated by warming temperatures). Thankfully we can walk and chew gum at the same time. (FWIW I agree re the anti- nuclear stance of environment groups - and would do so regardless of the need for low-emission power: nuclear energy production generally has a much lower environmental footprint than fossil fuel generation)
Climate is an emergency, but if we go chasing the wrong "solutions" based on bad data or incomplete data, or take the base of the ecosystem out from under us in the process, then we won't resolve the emergency or we'll end up in a worse place.
There are some things we know - transportation, housing, urban design, energy, many aspects of industrial manufuaction and waste disposal. These are still complex, but have much clearer cost benefit analysis. We know what the answers are there. Some of them involve individual action (like I laid out below) others are going to require collective action.
Agriculture is a mess with a pitched propaganda war taking place around it. I've spent a decade trying to sort out what is true, and I'm still no closer to feeling like I can say with certainty what the most ecological diet is. But I know that anyone who can say it with certainty has not done complete research.
We're making significant progress on cleaning up energy production, as wind and solar are now the most economic ways to produce new energy by a very long shot. The trajectory of the temperature curve is bending in the right direction, and should bend further. At some point we also need to pay attention to the rest of the quality of life on earth.
Almost nobody among claiming that treats it seriously.
Prominent celebrities claiming that travel by plane.
Greenpeace continues to oppose nuclear power.
Solar power gets blocked because some endemic species or pretty views are threatened.
Noone supports killing air travel.
---------------------------
Almost nobody among "CO2 is emergency" is actually willing to sacrifice own benefits or other priorities. At most they demand sacrifice from others.
I am not going to treat plane-travelling celebrities declaring climate emergency that threatens survival of humanity. The same goes for eco-organizations not willing to support deregulation of nuclear power.
This statement is wrong. Climate and collapsing ecosystems/biodiversity are connected, and one is not more urgent than the other.
honestly I never understood this. Always seemed a more Luddite response than a environmentally principled one.
Is this seriously an issue compared to trash in general? Sure, people bitch about how it's impossible to repair their iphones or macbooks, but even if you had to replace them every other year, the amount of trash they generate in relation to everything else is absolutely minuscule.
>It’s a conscientious strategy. Making people feel guilty about their very small impact prevent them looking at the real culprits: electricity production
But every kilowatt that you don't consume is a kilowatt that's not being generated by the electric grid. In that sense your actions have a direct impact on greenhouse emissions. Sure, you unplugging your electronics isn't going to single-handedly stop global warming, but that's because no one is single-handedly causing global warming either.
Also, you can literally buy a PV system for your house which would cut your emissions to zero.
>oil companies
see above, also electric cars.
>global manufacturing and shipping and construction
Well the goods you buy has to be manufactured somewhere, so presumably you're against the shipping rather than the manufacturing aspect. However, this source[1] says that shipping is responsible for 2.5% of global emissions, which isn't very significant.
[1] https://www.ukri.org/news/shipping-industry-reduces-carbon-e...
No it’s not an issue that’s my point. What people sort is rarely recycled anyway. That’s why it’s a shame.
> But every kilowatt that you don't consume is a kilowatt that's not being generated by the electric grid.
Yes but what individual consumes is far less relevant than how this electricity is produced especially when you compare domestic consumption to industrial consumption. It’s far more impactful to lobby for the end of coal power plants than switch off your electronic.
> see above, also electric cars.
Yes, it’s finally coming quite slowly but for decades oil was heavily subsidised.
> Well the goods you buy has to be manufactured somewhere, so presumably you're against the shipping rather than the manufacturing aspect.
I’m not against anything. There are huge gain to be made in both shipping and manufacturing. Investments are far too low because they are not mandated.
That’s my point. The most significant gains are at an institutional or corporate level. Most of the debate surrounding individual behaviour is a distraction.
1. Walk or bike.
1a. If you can't do the above, use public transport.
1b. If you can't do that, consider moving to a city where you can do all of the above (if you can afford it). If you're rural, seek a land trust or farmer to buy your land when you do.
2. Insulate your house.
3. Get solar if you can afford it.
3a. Replace all gas appliances with electric (Heat pump, electric water heater, ec)
4. Don't fly.
5. Dietary changes, but remember to include ecosystem services and impact in your analysis. A little carbon is worth it if it means more land stays free of pesticides and continues to provide for the ecosystem.
At least, this is the best I've been able to make of it after a decade of study using open sources. Agriculture is important, but whenever I've actually dug into the referenced data I always find they're optimizing for the wrong things, leaving out important variables, or just all around cherry picking data with an end goal in mind.
If a crop needs pollination but you want to reduce dependence on honeybees, it's likely you would need to break up the land the crop is on in order to plant flowering species that attract native pollinators at the edges, and that comes with its own downsides for maintenance and harvest.
The proper way to frame it provided someone has no desire to be vegetarian would be limit your consumption of meat - only eat red meat as an exceptional treat and favour poultry a few times a week - and switch to plant based milk.
Eggs and honey are very much fine as is cheese given the average per individual amount eaten per year.
What we can still control is how bad it is. (An increase 1.5 degrees C looks a hell of a lot different than 4 degrees C). That's still very much a fight worth fighting.
When people ask if we should do this or that, the answer should be "yes". These rules are fine - we should eat less meat, we should drive and fly less, etc. We should also do more systemic things, like investing heavily in battery tech and solar and wind and even fusion longshots. We should regulate the hell out of emissions, and use the proceeds from taxes and fines to help mitigate the effects on the poor. Getting to net zero carbon is going to be hard but it has to happen.
You don't start eating 50kg a day if you become vegetarian, and you don't spend 30 hours a day travelling if you do it by train. Yes, universally switching from cars to any other form of transport would save people 1-3 hours a day to do other things, but if they spend that time doing anything other than sitting in a car it's a win.
You also don't get to use "what if noone did that" as a counter argument for something helping if everybody did it.
If everyone insulated their home properly, got rid of their cars, stopped eating beef, and cut the remaining animal proteins by half we'd be pretty close to net zero right now.
Get your house insulated. Helps with both heating and cooling.
Use a fan rather than AC if you can.
Do not buy unneeded stuff, buy durable, sell or repair rather than junk.
Stop pretending like climate change is created by consumers and can be controlled by "turning your lights off."
An example might help: Elon Musk is not, AFAIK, vegan. But he's done a lot to popularize electric cars, having far more impact than he could by changing his diet. Likewise, the Beyond meat people have probably done a lot more to reduce meat consumption than they could ever outweigh by eating steak every meal for the rest of their lives. (I am actually not clear on the net environmental benefit of using gas vs. making more batteries, but let's say for the sake of argument that electric cars are an environmental benefit, since it's just an example.)
But it is actually created by consumers. By human beings consuming resources and emitting greenhouse gases in return. Simply because there's nothing else even close in scale as a source of global warming. What else could there be, wild herbivores?
It follows almost tautologically that it is human beings that is causing the warming.
You blame "industrial production processes". But those are completely funded by human consumption in a mostly on-demand action.
So what else is there to blame? The transportation industry? Again, completely funded by, and a direct response of consumers buying stuff. Consumption is at the beginning of the chain. It's the cause.
So your argument sounds wrong to me. It sounds like you want to shift blame to wealthy industrialists. Guess what, a fat bank balance or stock ownership like that of Elon Musk or Bezos does not emit greenhouse gases by simply existing.
Milk bags have been in use in some places for decades, pack better, are lighter and use less plastic than a bottle lid. Other places do not use them for no particular reason.
I rather like the frontiers review process as a gatekeeping process. Papers get much better through their interactive review. But I don’t think peer review should stop with publication. I think there is a need to rate and rank and otherwise gather sentiments from researchers on papers in their field —ideally in a manner that allows for new important work to surface more easily. Whether the goal is to make science human and machine readable, for the further advancement of science. There is going to be a lot of science.
* check this out: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02787-5
I think what I'm building in peer-review.io actually achieves this. Because I've split out the two functions of review into pre-publication review and post-publication integrity management.
Pre-publication review is entirely about helping authors improve their work. It's rather akin to a Github PR.
Post-publication integrity management happens through voting and responses. More akin to StackExchange. Votes require responses, though responses don't require votes. That part is all public and on going. If you vote on a paper based on reading it, and then later discover its fraudulent in some way, you can come back and change your vote and edit your response. Both review and voting/response stay with the paper in perpetuity.
Also, thanks for the link, I'll give it a read!
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa6cd5
Which only looks at greenhouse gas emissions (and only then compares grass feeding to grain feeding), and does NOT consider the effects to local groundwater, surface water, or air quality from CAFOs.
Here's a CDC resource that goes into depth about the swathe of negative effects on local resources CAFOs create: https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/ehs/docs/understanding_cafos_nalboh...
Besides things like frequent manure spills that pollute surface and groundwater, children living near these CAFOs have elevated rates of asthma.
The piece is very focused on greenhouse gases and the benefits of "economies of scale" but doesn't say a peep about the meltdown of our consolidated food supply when the pandemic subjected it to supply shocks.
AFAIK only food delivery to restaurants was slightly affected
"The rules are fine", and net zero "has" to happen". So in your mind there's no room for argument and the objective is sacred. So how many guns are you willing to put to peoples' heads to get them to change their diets? To get them to stop flying? Driving in particular is required for many peoples' livelihoods, particularly those on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
IMO, the truly "hard" part of getting to net zero is getting people like you to realize you're not going to force your proposed solutions onto the rest of the world. You're going to have to team up with people you don't like. You know why Texas, the oil/petrochemical capital of the US, has so much wind power? It isn't because an army of environmentalists descended on the state house shouting slogans and waving signs, it isn't to save the environment, it isn't to stop climate change. It's because wind energy is cheap in Texas, something that appeals to even the most coal-rolling, roundup-spraying, green-lawn-in-the-desert Texan.
If you want to save the environment, drop the moralizing and meet people where they are. Until that happens environmentalism is just going to produce backlash, that allow the environmental movements feel even more superior and do things to produce even more backlash, until the price of meat, power, transportation and housing goes up so much that you get a backlash that undoes any short-term progress that was made.
So how do we stop the slow-motion disaster that we're living in?
1) I completely agree that trying to minimize pain by teching our way out is important. The reason we have cheap wind and solar power is heavy government investment in research, which eventually trickles out and becomes commercially viable. The recent energy bill is great, but doesn't go nearly far enough. Still, if you take an honest look at the numbers, it's simply not going to be enough to avoid the worst effects.
2) We have to make it more profitable to be low-carbon than it is to burn things. I think that unavoidably leads to the conclusion that we need to tax carbon. It also has to be done in a smart way - not super-high all at once, and then return the proceeds with checks to the middle/lower income people who are hit hardest to solidify political support. The goal is to nudge people to change their behaviors, without doing it so hard that they vote you out of office.
Look, we were happy to keep dumping arsenic in streams until those externalized costs were built into the cost of doing business. The effects of carbon as a pollutant are here now - we can't keep pretending that they don't exist. What is the cost of Miami being underwater? What is the cost of wildfires and drought in the west? Yes, it will cost billions of dollars, but if it saves trillions, that's a smart investment.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-40/chapter-I/subchapter-I...
OK. But how it makes
> rooftop solar and urban gardening (or "farming" if you must). Both are ecological catastrophe
claim true?
OK, that makes more sense.
> zucchini-hugging (google it)
Nothing relevant gets found
Anything else is just greenwashing at this point.
That's an extreme example, but it's not impossible to imagine that there are low-income occasional meat-eaters out there who might start consuming more meat if the price went down. Maybe the increase wouldn't completely reverse the initial reduction, but if the net result was equivalent to only 5% of people changing their lifestyle, then we're talking about a very small change in CO2 emissions.
Of course there are limits to how much latent demand there is, and how price-sensitive consumers are, but it is not unreasonable for me to have raised this as a possibility.
I see your point, but this isn't viable. Too many people live too far away from their workplaces, shopping centers, etc (not to mention unpleasant weather) for walking/cycling and we don't have adequate public transit networks (nor can we build them in time to meet our public transit goals). Moreover, EVs are coming in very quickly and will largely wipe out our personal transportation carbon footprint (especially as the grid transitions to clean energy) such that there's very little to be gained (environmentally speaking) from a transition to walking, cycling, and public transit (I say this as someone who wants America to be more walkable, but not at the expense of the environment). Not only is it technically unviable to build out the transit networks and otherwise reorganize our society away from cars, but it's politically unviable--apart from urban progressives, there's very little political will for public transit (many of the people who say they support increased public transit networks aren't actually going to avail themselves of them until they really become more convenient than cars for their specific transit needs).
EVs still cause massive inefficiency in infrastructure and living. They require obscene amounts of energy to make and run (just less obscene than similarly oversized ICEs). They cause local and global pollution. And they compete for resources with other, much better solutions. Direct emissions are only a tiny part of the ravages cars cause on the climate and environment. The only upside is they are so inefficient they might induce the public to buy grid storage directly.
> Not only is it technically unviable to build out the transit networks and otherwise reorganize our society away from cars,
Places like istanbul or toronto prove that it can be done in less time than an EV transition will take (and in toronto's case in the face of massive political opposition). The costs are commensurable with the subsidies and infrastructure required for moving from ice to ev.
Getting the political will starts with not concern trolling with lies every time it comes up.
Maybe, but there's no sense in optimizing for those things in the midst of a climate crisis. Yes, if we could flip a switch and everyone could start cycling, that would help the climate crisis enormously, but there is no such switch and in reality it would be completely reorganizing our society which is not a viable project in the timeframe the climate demands.
> They cause local and global pollution.
They cause less pollution per passenger mile than the average diesel bus.
> The only upside is they are so inefficient they might induce the public to buy grid storage directly.
They are strictly more efficient than the status quo, and especially where it counts: miles traveled per unit carbon emission. This is the overriding concern.
> Places like istanbul or toronto prove that it can be done in less time than an EV transition will take (and in toronto's case in the face of massive political opposition).
Istanbul and Toronto are more densely populated than almost anywhere in the United States. Of course public transit investment works there. Moreover, they're individual small places--we're talking about public transit infrastructure for the entirety of the United States--there aren't enough public transit infrastructure firms in the world to get that done, and developing experienced people to do that work takes decades and considerable expense.
> Getting the political will starts with not concern trolling with lies every time it comes up.
I would say that smugness and self-righteousness from the anti-car people is the biggest obstacle to political will. I don't think the people bringing a dose of reality to the anti-car party are doing any meaningful harm.
There's currently a propaganda war between multiple powerful lobbies - the animal rights lobby, the meat producers, conventional ag producers, and more - which means there is a ton of misinformation flying around about the actual environmental impacts of eating meat. Really, of all things dietary.
Meanwhile there are a bunch of people exploring alternate agriculture systems through agroecological approaches that show a lot of promise, but haven't been studied enough to really make claims about either way.
Further, you cannot just say "x amount of finished beef produces y emissions" because there are so many factors that go into it. Feedlot vs traditional range vs intensive rotational vs silvopasture are all different with completely different environmental impacts - of which carbon is only one.
> An all grass cow-calf – to – finish operation was included as a minor component in the eastern and northwestern regions
They examined a single all grass finished operation. There are studies that have found grass finishing can cut emissions in cattle by as much as 80%.
> The modeled operations were not intended to be actual operations; they were developed to represent the practices found in each region.
> Environmental footprints for all individually simulated ranch and feedlot operations were integrated into full production systems within their respective study regions using two methods
They also don't appear to be measuring actual operations, but rather modeling operations based on surveys of farmers and ranchers about the characteristics of their operations and then extrapolating from there.
Models have their place for sure, but I wouldn't make any kind of declaration of certainty based on a single model-based study. You have to average the outputs of hundreds or thousands of models, and even then, you can't be sure you have the answer.
A better approach would be one that measures the actual output of each operation at various phases and averages across them. Difficult to do, but I've seen studies that attempted it.
Which we don't because we fear losing comfort/commodity and can't agree on modalities.
I don’t expect this will happen magically. I expect it will happen through advocacy and legislation.
There is also evidence that this sort of grazing can substantially reduce carbon emissions. Meanwhile monocultured grain, beans, and veggies - especially conventional with heavy pesticide* (edit: originally wrote fertilizer, meant pesticide) use - are devastating to ecosystems. They're essentially turning large swaths of land into killing fields, taking the bottom right out of ecosystem and contributing to the massive drop in insect populations (which form the foundation of the food web) we've seen across the developed world.
In short - the agricultural analysis is really fucking complex, multivariate, and grey.
She links a literature analysis that claims to contradict much of this, but I've read literature analyses making these sorts of claims before that just ignore most of the alternative systems, gloss over a lot of nuance, or downplay the harm of convention systems in major ways. I need to read the one she linked, but experience has taught me to treat it skeptically.
> b) Because there is evidence that meat production done right IE intensive rotation grazing or silvopasture where the meat is grazed on a small section of land at a time and most of the land is left fallow most of the time can actually drastically increase ecosystem services. It allows the land to function as native prairie or savanna.
There's no way the method of meat production that you described can produce meat to sastisfy current US demand, let alone increasing demand from the developing world. Therefore practically speaking, reduction of meat consumption will still be needed.
>Meanwhile monocultured grain, beans, and veggies - especially conventional with heavy fertilizer use - are devastating to ecosystems.
You're suggesting, in a very roundabout way, that we drastically reduce meat consumption. None of these things you describe can be done sustainably without a drastic reduction of livestock.
But that's not the same as putting it on top of the list. Ever since Cowspiracy came out (which has been roundly debunked) there's been this segment of the environmental movement that wants to put beef on the top of the list of carbon problems. It just doesn't belong there and there are so many issues with putting it there - not least of which is the individual responsibility trap.
Climate cannot be solved by individual action alone. Individual action is necessary, but not sufficient. And since people have limited capacity to make lifestyle changes, we need them to focus that capacity where it will do the most good. Meat just isn't it - transporation, housing, energy - those are where it belongs. We should be encouraging people to eat less meat, yes, and to eat sustainably pastured an grazed meat. But we shouldn't be telling people to go vegan as their primary lifestyle change.
Okay, let's stop burning coal then, because we use electricity for a lot more things than just recycling.
Similarly, if cotton is that bad for the environment, maybe we need to fix that generally rather than just switch to disposable plastic bags for this one minor use case?
though the biggest problem with reusable plastic bags is the weakness of the handles. i'd rarely get more than a dozen uses out of a plastic bag before the handle rips. and that is not as easily to fix because of the stresses involved.
also, i feel the math is off, because cloth bags are a lot stronger and they get uses that no plastic bag is even designed for. so the reality is that even if i use plastic bags for shopping, i'd have a cloth bag anyways for other needs. and if i have it already, then using it more comes with zero additional impact.
plastic bags only have less impact on the environment than the cloth bags that i don't already own.
Those things are the climate crisis. Tailpipe emissions are only one part of the ravages that car dependent suburbia puts on the climate.
There is also a trivial switch to start the transition for >50% of the population. Put some paint and barnicles on the roads and end euclidean zoning.
> They are strictly more efficient than the status quo, and especially where it counts: miles traveled per unit carbon emission. This is the overriding concern.
The overriding concern is units of carbon emission. Halving the per km but doubling the miles travelled doesn't net you anything.
> Istanbul and Toronto are more densely populated than almost anywhere in the United States. Of course public transit investment works there. Moreover, they're individual small places--we're talking about public transit infrastructure for the entirety of the United States--there aren't enough public transit infrastructure firms in the world to get that done, and developing experienced people to do that work takes decades and considerable expense.
Low density is a symptom, not a cause. If you don't legally mandate low density, take the lion's share of infrastructure to enable it, and gesture to traffic making things unlivable any time anyone tries to build an apartment then you get density hy default.
More of the people live in the higher density areas definitionally. Stop forcing them to spread out and let the others who actually need to be spread out use EVs (or ICEs as there are so few of themit doesn't matter). More money has been gifted to Elon Musk for luxury vehicles in california alone than would be required to build out a world class transit system for San Francisco and LA from scratch, at his promis of a ridiculous boondoggle, high speed rail was cancelled.
> I don't think the people bringing a dose of reality to the anti-car party are doing any meaningful harm.
"We can't do the one thing that works because of those other people objecting to it" while objecting to it is obvious disingenuous lies and self righteous smugness to boot. You are the opposition you gesture vaguely to, and the solution to the political problem is to stop being the political problem.
It's also not self righteous or smug to say stop taking most of the infrastructure money and 90% of the communally paid for space to build a moat of death around me that is only passible if I spend a quarter of my income on a car. It's not even neutral. It's a tiny step towards equality and you're so entitled you perceive it as an attack.
EVs are here to save the car industry, not the planet.
Perhaps, but again we're not going to convert our suburbs into dense urban utopias in just a few decades even if we had the political will. But as with EVs, we can move people from natural gas residential heating to cleaner heat pumps (which become even cleaner as we transition the grid to renewables).
> There is also a trivial switch to start the transition for >50% of the population. Put some paint and barnicles on the roads and end euclidean zoning.
If you want bike lanes, go for it, but you're deluding yourself if you think that's going to meaningfully reduce transportation emissions for >50% of the US population.
> The overriding concern is units of carbon emission. Halving the per km but doubling the miles travelled doesn't net you anything.
Of course, EVs don't travel twice as far as ICE cars, and their per-mile carbon emissions of an EV is about 1/3 that of gasoline cars today (https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html) and it only gets better as the grid transitions to clean energy sources.
> Low density is a symptom, not a cause. If you don't legally mandate low density, take the lion's share of infrastructure to enable it, and gesture to traffic making things unlivable any time anyone tries to build an apartment then you get density hy default.
Yes, zoning plays a part in density, but removing zoning restrictions isn't going to turn some exurb into Istanbul or Toronto. Density has no natural state, it's the result of interaction between dynamic social, technological, and economic forces which push people together or pull them apart. Arguing that everything would be dense enough to support public transit if only we changed our zoning laws is absurd, and I say that as someone who wants to change zoning laws.
> More of the people live in the higher density areas definitionally. Stop forcing them to spread out and let the others who actually need to be spread out use EVs (or ICEs as there are so few of themit doesn't matter).
Not definitionally, but yes, more people live in higher density areas. I'm not "forcing them to spread out"--I'm support changing zoning laws! Critically, *changing zoning laws isn't incompatible with EVs*! My position has consistently been "we should continue to invest in EVs rather than forcing everyone to change their lifestyles" (obviously this doesn't imply forcing people who are happily using public transit to adopt EVs), but it seems your position has changed from "we should force everyone to change their lifestyles" to "stop forcing public-transit-using urbanites to use EVs" (which no one was proposing).
> More money has been gifted to Elon Musk for luxury vehicles in california alone than would be required to build out a world class transit system for San Francisco and LA from scratch, at his promis of a ridiculous boondoggle, high speed rail was cancelled.
This doesn't impugn EVs. I can't speak to California specifically, but nationally it makes a lot more sense to invest in something that we know will work (EVs) than something that is politically impossible, impossibly expensive, and certain to fail to meet the required environmental timelines (getting some significant share of the country to move to areas of higher density and change their lifestyles so they can make public transit viable in the next several decades).
> It's also not self righteous or smug to say stop taking most of the infrastructure money and 90% of the communally paid for space to build a moat of death around me that is only passible if I spend a quarter of my income on a car. It's not even neutral.
I don't know how you can type that (especially "moat of death") and not realize how smug or self-righteous it sounds to people outside of the anti-car ideological bubble. I don't mean this as an attack, but to let you know how you sound to others (which is important if you want to persuade others to join your anti-car crusade!).
> It's a tiny step towards equality and you're so entitled you perceive it as an attack.
I didn't perceive an attack until your "you're so entitled", but I'm happy to overlook that. My "smug and self-righteous" wasn't an attack nor a counterattack, it's a description of how the anti-car rhetoric (and the people who espouse it) comes off to just about everyone else (you're welcome to disagree, but I think you should at least consider the possibility that I'm correct). I think there are some good points that bely much of the anti-car movement's rhetoric, but when you tell rural people to forego cars and use bikes and trains to get around it sounds like "let them eat cake" (I've lived in big cities, rural towns, and in the middle of nowhere). It's going to sound smug to just about everyone, and talking about how the US is being paved over by suburbs sounds ignorant and absurd to everyone who doesn't live on the coasts (I don't believe you've said this, but this is a common anti-car talking point).
> EVs are here to save the car industry, not the planet.
I don't think the car industry has been particularly eager to adopt EVs, but I'm sure they like the government incentives. That said, I prefer carbon pricing which would have made ICE vehicles more expensive. Unfortunately, progressives react allergically to any solution that is "market based" and conservatives react allergically to anything that is a tax, so we get government spending. It's imperfect in that society ends up bailing out the fossil fuel industries, but it's still far better than chasing an ideological pipedream.
Sweden has a lower population density than the USA, but has a quarter modeshare in each of transit and cycling. There are cities with population densities as low as some places in texas that still have good non-car infrastructure. Re. building transit and density in a couple of decades, that's how long it took to steamroll urban areas and replace them with highways. It can be undone in less time. And again toronto and istanbul did it, so san francisco and new york with orders of magnitude more money can do it too.
It's not an idealogical pipedream when many places have done it successfully. Just because you currently choose to restrict the designs that produce good living areas with infrastructure that is far cheaper to maintain and run to rich people, doesn't make them expensive or unattainable.
Sustainable transport and zoning are good for the budget, they're good for the environment, they're good for car drivers, they're good for residents, and they're good for the poor. Your gaslighting about calling people smug not being an attack does not change that.
The pipedream that hasn't happened is one where self driving cars work properly and don't render any high density area completely uninhabitable by humans.
But here's a paper that found that properly grazed beef could not only potentially reach net-zero emissions, but might even be a carbon sink: http://www.thefutureoffoodjournal.com/index.php/FOFJ/article...
Here's another study that found that the soil type of the grassland and the dominant species of grass had a significant effect on whether intensively grazing it sequestered or released carbon from the soil overall:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.12144
And that one appears to be a literature review of other studies.
Related note, you have to be so careful looking through the studies, here's one that purports to compare the different systems. But when you read the abstract it uses "A deterministic model based on the metabolism and nutrient requirements of the beef population". In other words, they aren't actually measuring anything. They just have numbers in a database for "x lb of beef requires y inputs" and "x lb of beef gives z outputs" and they're crunching those numbers under assumptions about the productivity of each approach. Naturally, they find that conventional feedlots are the most environmentally friendly.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/2/2/127
Note that one's also in an MDPI journal, which MDPI has begun to get a reputation as a pay to play paper mill.
Except using it more means more wear and tear which means replacing it sooner. So unfortunately it doesn’t make the math easier.
Diet is actually one of the easiest things for people to change. You have to eat every day. And there is evidence this personal choice has affected markets. Walmart wouldn't be selling more soy milk, selling tempeh, producing their own plant-based cheese if it was just a non-impactful minority changing their habits. Even if it takes a year to change, it helps people understand they can do things that do help the environment.
Everything you describe - transportation, housing, energy are all things that take often decades to reform. Giving people something they can do right now to make a collective impact (however small the impact) is worthwhile. It brings a certain kind of spirituality to the movement - even if I can't switch to an EV or the bus takes too long or I rent, so I can't do energy efficient changes, I can still eat food that reduces my impact on the environment. I can eat with people who share environmentalist feelings. We can come to collective conclusions, like deciding to take the bus to go downtown tomorrow instead of driving. We can share emotions about our worry, but also our optimism for the future. When it comes time to demand systemic changes, we already have a well-organized cohort to proselytize for those changes.
This push to tie the vegan diet to climate, it didn't come from the climate movement - it came from the animal rights movement. And it really exploded with Cowspiracy, which was a blatant propaganda film that badly abused the literature and has since been roundly debunked.
You still see some climate campaigners harping on this point, George Monboit being the most prominent to come to mind, but again, an honest accounting of the literature does not support their point -- that "going vegan is the easiest and highest impact choice an individual can make for their personal carbon reduction". It is not easy for most people and the impact of it is not nearly that clear cut.
The meme is a distraction that was imposed on the environmental movement by people who do not have the environment, or climate change mitigation, as their first priority.
I've been seeking a sustainable diet and agriculture for over a decade. Believe me when I tell you it is not simple or clear cut. There are a lot of things we should be pursuing in that area, but universal veganism is not one of them. (General meat reduction is, but that is not the same thing.)
“… while shifting to a vegetarian meal one day a week could save the equivalent of driving 1,160 miles.”
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability...
Meanwhile, here's a study I found, which I linked elsewhere in the thread, that found that under the right circumstances, grass finished, rotationally grazed cattle can actually act as a carbon SINK. Not a carbon producer. Now that's one study and I have no idea of the quality and trustworthiness of the journal it's in, but it lines up with other studies I've read on the topic. And it tracks with the ecological model. There are ecosystems where these animals belong and in those ecosystems they play a key role in building the soil, and soil building is one of the key methods of carbon sequestration.
http://www.thefutureoffoodjournal.com/index.php/FOFJ/article...
Here's another study I found showing that many factors play into whether grazing hoofed animals builds soil or erodes it. Grass type, soil type, rainfall patterns - they all matter.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.12144
Again, single study, no idea of the quality of the journal, but it goes to show that these questions are not definitively answered. These lifecycle analyses that people keep pointing to are using a limited set of data sets that have huge deficiencies.
And that's why I push back on these narratives so hard. They are not well founded. Every time I dig into the studies being referenced, I find massive assumptions and huge deficiencies and a paucity of actual measurement.
Carbon Footprint Factsheet | Center for Sustainable Systems
https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability...
The dialog around agriculture and sustainability all too often is akin to telling people to just cut their power consumption rather than discussing or exploring non-emitting sources of energy.
You say I have some weird axe to grind, because I keep pushing back on people saying that meat consumption is a much bigger contributor to GHG emissions than it is. Yet you keep insisting that I'm somehow not accounting for a meat reduction as a piece of the puzzle when I have readily admitted that it should be a piece of the puzzle multiple times, and have happily conceded that it will be necessitated if we switch to the more sustainable, but less productive modes of producing it.
I think I've made my point pretty clearly, and repeatedly. Seems to me like your the one with an axe to grind, one not supported by the data.
My suggestion that people eat one less meat based meal per day is far less drastic that if all meat was produced with the methods you are advocating. Yet, you imply that I am the one calling for the drastic action.
Edit: let me ask you this, what are you actually proposing? Should the government ban meat that isn’t produced the way you suggest? If not, what are you proposing that will have a bigger impact than my suggestion that people eat one less meat based meal a day?
The internet over represents vegans, so you and many others are naturally underestimating how much of a minority anti-meat fanatics truly are.
If a self-proclaimed environmentalist even suggests that we as individuals need to stop eating meat to save the planet, then we naturally assume you are a moralizing vegan who is trying to launder your issue under the guise of environmentalism.
Eating meat is a part of a humans natural diet, studies saying otherwise have repeatedly been proven to be wrong, we no longer trust you. The ketogenic diet has helped many people I know see real health improvements, further cementing our distrust for mainstream dietary "science" that always seem to align with the morals of vegans (and big corporations) but never show any genuine results in real life.
In fact over the course of my entire life, I have never met a preachy vegan who didn't either look like a cancer survivor or a fat ass who's diet only consists of junk food.
Studies showing the negative environmental impact of meat agriculture have the same smell as the ones saying it's bad for our health, we also do not trust them. Studies saying that adjustments to how it is farmed could help the environment, are much more palatable, something people would realistically be willing to try, since there is less likely to be moralizing vegans involved within the equation, and therefore more likely to actually work at all.
Any hint of moralizing veganism within any environmental suggestion is doomed for failure. The difference between your suggestion and his is that yours isn't even going to be acknowledged by the general public, while his solution could at least be feasibly accepted.
That is the difference, even if the effect ends up similar (higher meat prices).
The comment above mine includes eating fake cheese.
Come on, it's pretty clear what they're driving at.
Also, nowhere have I said I don't want a reduction in meat consumption. In multiple comments I have said that it is a necessary part of the solution, whether by personal choice or driven by market forces as people shift to more sustainable agricultural solutions.
I am arguing against putting it front and center in the fight against climate change as the OP does and as the root comment on this thread does.
Here is you’re list.
“ 1. Walk or bike. 1a. If you can't do the above, use public transport. 1b. If you can't do that, consider moving to a city where you can do all of the above (if you can afford it). If you're rural, seek a land trust or farmer to buy your land when you do.
2. Insulate your house.
3. Get solar if you can afford it. 3a. Replace all gas appliances with electric (Heat pump, electric water heater, ec)
4. Don't fly.
5. Dietary changes, but remember to include ecosystem services and impact in your analysis. A little carbon is worth it if it means more land stays free of pesticides and continues to provide for the ecosystem.”
Reduction of meat consumption is part of 5. Dietary changes