Comment by rcMgD2BwE72F | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcMgD2BwE72F | Hacker News Reader

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>Farming is a small contributor to greenhouse gas emissions

This is soo wrong:

>The AFOLU sector is responsible for just under a quarter (~10 – 12 GtCO2eq / yr) of anthropogenic GHG emissions mainly from deforestation and agricultural emissions from livestock, soil and nutrient management (robust evidence; high agreement)[11.2]. Anthropogenic forest degradation and biomass burning (forest fires and agricultural burning) also represent relevant contributions. > >Annual GHG emissions from agricultural production in 2000 – 2010 were estimated at 5.0 – 5.8 GtCO2eq / yr while annual GHG flux from land use and land-use change activities accounted for approximately 4.3 – 5.5 GtCO2eq / yr. > >Leveraging the mitigation potential in the sector is extremely important in meeting emission reduction targets (robust evidence; high agreement) [11.9].

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

>(...) nonsensical if you look at the math that is used to justify it.

Please enlighten me!

Technical summary of "Special Report on Climate Change and Land": https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/4/2020/07/03_T...

Also, quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Report_on_Climate_Chan...

>According to the August 8 Carbon Brief in-depth article on the SRCCL, Chapter 2 provides data on livestock methane emissions, about 66% is agricultural methane" and "about 33% of global methane emissions" come from livestock.[22][23]:38

Attacking our own food supply over a supposed 25% of emissions should be lower priority than for example taxing actual emissions so that the food suppliers can adapt, and people can stop going on vacations to Bali twice a year. Doing it this way will push farmers towards e.g. regenerative agriculture which can actually be carbon negative. Waging war on certain foods will accomplish relatively little and also alienate huge parts of the people we need to cooperate with us.

>and people can stop going on vacations to Bali twice a year.

Who goes to Bali twice a year? Those aren't representative at all, and why count on people who destroy so much to save our planet? We can ignore them and simply ban such spending. There are so many things I cannot buy (e.g explosive) because we know it's too dangerous for society. Why not prevent the very few from neutralizing all the efforts of millions? A Paris-Bali flight emits more than one year of heating and cooling for a whole family!

>taxing actual emissions so that the food suppliers can adapt

Wait. The only way this could have an impact is you make meat/fish so expensive that people stop buying it. Then, what's the point of adding taxes if you just want people to stop buying it? I bet you simply want to have the freedom to continue to do whatever you want only because you expect to have the means to pay this tax. So you'd only want others to change... and you argue that we cannot expect people to change (e.g become vegetarian versus to having the resources to eat meat/fish). But I understand why you don't believe you can get people to change since you start by excluding yourself from this possibility...

Also, can you explain why I've become vegetarian after I heard facts about the impact of agriculture? Facts that are now more and more spread (see OP's story). The money I save from meat and fish goes to farmers (I've since joined a cropsharing group, which is organic, of much better quality than what can be found in markets, and provide far more support to farmers than just paying more for the same quantity). I'm not pushing farmers to be carbon negative, I'm pulling them because I accepted to change and inviting others to do the same. There's really nothing preventing anyone to be vegetarian (or almost veggie) except ignorance and misconceptions.

> The AFOLU sector is responsible for just under a quarter

1/4 of world-wide emissions. In developed nations it isn't nearly that large of a fraction. The US agriculture industry is responsible for a little less than 1/10 of our emissions.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas...

Does that chart separate out the transportation that's involved in agriculture, though? It has transportation at nearly 30%. If the answer to my question is "yes", then the question is how much of the transportation slice is part of the agricultural process (transportation of raw materials, to processing facilities, to packaging facilities, to grocery stores, etc).

And a further question, regardless of the answer to the above question, is: how much does this change depending on the type of agriculture? For example, I would imagine the supply chain for beef would have much more transportation involved than that for beans or soy (think of all the steps that go into making animal feed alone, and that is step 0).

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