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Comment by supportlocal4h | Hacker News Reader

My family raise one steer in our back yard. It feeds two families for a year. Do you consider this animal abuse? Do you consider it a source of groundwater or air pollution?

I'm genuinely curious and somewhat open to being persuaded. It's hard for me to see it, but there could be an argument for it.

Or perhaps you feel that those things are a product of industrial scale. If so, can you not conceive any solution that would involve less than 100% reduction?

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Most of the ill effects come from industrial scale production, which (at least in the USA) probably covers 99% of production. Regarding your personal cow, it does produce (from quick googling) ~220 lbs of methane a year, which seems to trap ~85x as much heat as an equivalent amount of CO2 over a ~20 year timescale, or ~30x as much over a much longer timescale, so that's like releasing ~18700 lbs of CO2 each year in the short term. A gasoline powered car will produce about a pound of CO2 per mile driven, so you can think of your cow as being equivalent to having an extra car that drives 18.7k miles per year (or ~9.5k miles per family). Eating half a cow seems pretty close to driving an extra car.

Apples to oranges - a pasture raised cow doesn't produce as much methane because the "rumen flora" differs between a grain-based and a forage-based diet. The bacterial population is so different between the two foods that if you switch a cow's feed to grain too quickly, the ensuing bloating can be life threatening. The bacteria digesting the corn is what produces the most methane.

Unlike CO2, methane breaks down in the atmosphere so it's not an infinitely growing sink, it's a rolling window.

Brief research doesn't really appear to support that - grass fed cows seem to put on weight much slower, and therefore produce methane longer, and the methane of course degrades into CO2 (hence the 'effective' amount of CO2 over a given time period). But the differences between the two seem to be relatively small-ish (certainly 'different sized apples' rather than apples and oranges).

Does this take into account the CO2/energy used to harvest the grain and move it?

Methane is CH4. It doesn't degrade to CO2 so much as the relative ability to trap infrared radiation is given in proportion to what an equal number of CO2 molecules would absorb/trap. Similarly, other gasses like refrigerants are rated in Global Warming Potential (GWP) units based on 20 years of absorption of infrared.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential

So you do a thing that almost no consumers do? Interesting question for finding out philosophical underpinnings of someone’s beliefs/opinions, but at best tangential and at worst verging on sophistry when discussing practical matters. This is not an accusation, just an observation.

But to attempt an answer: for example, I have rescued pet cats. If I find some arts and crafts use for the plentiful fur I “acquire” when I groom them, no big deal. If I make a commercial enterprise out of this and seek to maximize my profits at the expense of their well-being, that’s bad. There are gradations in between that are bad as well — ones that can easily occur for backyard farm animals, where their welfare and enrichment are very low on the totem pole. Especially if you are slaughtering, which obviously places their welfare very low on the totem pole. I’m avoiding the environmental aspect because it’s inarguably increasing GHG emissions compared to what was originally suggested.

But again, irrelevant for arguments about ideal supermarket habits.

I was specifically contrasting the two to question whether there might be some point in the middle that avoids the downfalls but is still practical. Some balance that could be doable and acceptable.

The original proposal was to do something that almost no consumers do: eliminate beef consumption. I was not proposing to change consumer behaviour so much as producer behavior. Of course it would impact consumers significantly in the prices they pay.

They’re social animals though. Wouldn’t it be lonely?

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