Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

It is not as simply to reduce climate impact based on what you eat. The data this article use is based on averages, and as in every industry the lowest standard it drastically different from the top and carry more quantity.

On the very top you got meat produced that actively helps the environment. Highland cattle that keeps national reservations open comes to mind. There is also overpopulated and invasive species. At the bottom you got cattle who live their whole life inside a barn and get feed from deforested jungle farms, using unimaginable amount of pesticide and antibiotics.

It is also important to remember that diet is far from the most effective personal choice to make when it come to climate change (https://phys.org/news/2017-07-effective-individual-tackle-cl...). It is ranked 6th. Driving to buy produce at a farmer several miles out of town is likely to produce more C02 than biking down to eat a burger. An electric car might help, through it depend if the electricity is made from coal or wind.

The article gives some averages and for people who don't want to think about the climate and want a simple guide the article provides. However if you care about the topic and can spend the energy to go deeper and consider all facets then it is much better to make informed decision by digging deeper.

Meat is almost perfectly substitutable. So going out of your way to ensure that the beef you eat has low carbon impact isn't really doing much good. All you're doing is ensuring that somebody else won't eat the beef you bought and will eat something with higher carbon impact instead.

Where it does matter is when you choose not to eat meat. Less demand for beef means less beef raised, but which cattle are they going to stop raising -- the low carbon or the high carbon ones? My guess is that the high carbon beef is the marginal beef. When you stop eating beef you cause the price to drop, so the ranchers with the highest costs are going to be the first to go out of business. And carbon is one of the main costs of ranching, so I would predict that stopping eating beef would have a greater than average impact on carbon emissions.

Low carbon production has higher marginal costs and tend to be small farmers which is the group that suffer first when prices drops.

The high carbon beef is basically all import here in Sweden, and there is no deforestation issue from farming. From a environmental perspective we actually need more open fields to maintain bio diversity.

When climate aware people stop buying beef the ratio of imported beef increase. In last few years we have actually seen an decrease in imported beef, which has been attributed to more awareness of low carbon beef vs high carbon beef. People buy more local and significant less imported. Locally produced beef cost between 2-4 times as much as imported, which naturally impact how much people buy.

Swedish beef has to be sheltered inside and fed over winter, doesn't it? That's a fairly carbon intense activity.

As opposed to the swedish vegetables that flourish in the swedish winter?

Since we are talking about climate change, it happens that the last couple of winters has been the mildest in ages and reduced the number of months that farmers need to keep cattle inside to between one and two months.

But it is more complex than that. We don't have deforestation issue from farming. Fields, even those that is just for hay are important for bio diversity and it is generally soils where other crops won't grow. We don't burn down old jungle forest to grow corn in order to feed cows that then get transported through half the globe. It is fields that if they get overgrown would remove the biotope that many species here depend on.

Highland cattle is the extreme end where they can basically live outside the whole year, and they do the job that people and motorized machines otherwise would need to do in order to maintain national reservations. I would be much interested in reading a study that compared the environmental effect of using forest machines vs letting cows keeping overgrowth down.

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