Global warming: is weight loss a solution? | Hacker News Reader

Global warming: is weight loss a solution?

nature.com

28 pointsfortran7744 comments

This seems like a really misguided and thoughtless connection. In particular, their weight-loss intervention was a low-carb, high-protein diet plus a pretty sharp overall calorie reduction. However, without saying anything about the actual foods consumed and how they were sourced, we have no way of knowing whether the reduced CO2 from the body mass of participants was dwarfed consuming more foods whose production creates more CO2. If you lose weight by eating a lot of beef, is that a net reduction? You'd have to show the math, but it doesn't seem like they considered this at all.

Surely the improved quality of life, longer lives etc are sufficient reason to pursue better nutrition and weight management.

And if you want to reduce carbon emissions, sure you can look at your diet, but in terms of emission reductions per unit of time or attention invested, losing weight has to be one of the worst/slowest right?

These questions are explored in greater detail in Lustig’s recent Metabolical, which makes a systematic case, although somewhat of a brief one (it's not the main point of the book) that heavy greenhouse gas emissions of the bigger greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide can be traced back to factory farming, in particular the high methane production comes from feeding our cows a corn-based diet (most of the emissions are burps, not toots) and nitrous oxide emissions are influenced (IIRC) by chemical fertilizers as opposed to traditional manure. (It might have also been that I am mixing things up and the chemical fertilizers create algae blooms which affect greenhouse gases...)

The corn etc. is cast as part of a greater addiction to processed food that has been growing, with one of the book’s slogans being ~“it's not what's in the food but what's been done to the food, and that's not on any label.” So in addition to these environment-harming practices you get the health-harming effects of excessive antibiotic usage on livestock, and so now we have to all be on probiotics: that sort of health impact is much more the point of the book. Being a Lustig book of course it calls for limiting consumption of refined and added sugars etc. But it is interesting to also see an evaluation of vegetarianism in regards to whether it improves the climate situation or makes it worse, etc.

The biggest kicker for me is, I have a physics background and love back-of-the-envelope calculations. Lustig does a back of the envelope calculation where if we take the estimates of how much of these obesity-related diseases are preventable, multiply by the cost of healthcare to get a rough estimate of how much spending is preventable, it turns out that Big Food’s (extremely generous!) profit margins are only a very tiny amount of what the processed food diet is costing us in healthcare. So the kicker is that in theory we could just ban processed food, keep paying Big Food that profit margin, and free up something like a trillion bucks to do something worthwhile with—if the world worked that way which of course it doesn't.

Worth a read if you are into this stuff, but I imagine the bibliography is more important than the main chapter.

No. 0.2% of today's co2 is reduced with this approach, given that _all_ obese lose 10kg each, according to the article. This simply won't happen, and if it would, it would have a neglible effect.

Keep the carbon in the ground instead using other methods, and capture what you can to return safety to the geosphere.

Haha, interesting thought. For example if I have a bunch of dollars to spend on promoting renewable energy and such, how cost-effective is it to just... buy an oil well and sit on it? I mean, it will raise the price of oil, thus pushing people to develop better substitutes. And it has a certain beauty in not requiring any government involvement, private people can do this just fine. But it will also make current oil producers richer, and increase their incentive to find new oilfields (if only to sell them to you).

So that's the most direct way to interpret "keeping carbon in the ground", and I'm not sure it makes sense. Is there another way that makes more sense?

>Keep the carbon in the ground instead using other methods, and capture what you can to return safety to the geosphere.

The same way removing a knife from some you stab is going to return him to his previous state.

I love how chaos theory came out of climate modeling, but "if we just put CO2 back to the way it was everything is going to be fine". Also love that it's a given that climate is inherently stable and favourable to humans just because we happened to live in a period where it was.

Seems like the change in human body CO2 production is the least of the possible carbon impacts of decreased weight in the obese. From my experience losing five kg over the last couple of months, here are several additional possible effects.

- When you weigh less, you consume less food, all things being equal, because it takes fewer calories to maintain a smaller body.

- Smaller people require less clothing.

- Smaller people also require less energy to move around in vehicles, and possibly allow the more comfortable use of smaller classes of vehicles.

- There are probably many behavioral changes that come from weighing less, although it's nearly impossible to guess what the net effect of these changes are.

Overall, I don't think these items add up to a significant change in the world carbon stance. It might be a nice marginal improvement -- for example, if there were a de-stigmatized and low-carbon-cost diet pill that simply reduced your hunger to a information-age-appropriate level. But it's not going to be enough to move the needle.

As morbid as it sounds when you weight less you’ll live less, I’m pretty sure that living for 10 years fewer would reduce your carbon footprint by much more than losing 20-50 lbs.

> when you weight less you’ll live less

Have you got a citation for that?

I meant weight more you’ll live less.

There was an article recently about planes needing more fuel because people are heavier on average.

First of all, we waste a lot of food, so reducing that would help get part of that 0.2% carrot.

The figures hardly support weight loss as a solution, but even if it were, we couldn't do it. Every time we've faced a major issue, "do less of the bad thing because it helps directly solve the problem" doesn't work. We do the bad thing because it's something we find valuable, and each one of us doing it doesn't add terribly much to the heap. Note I'm talking about tragedy of the commons type issues. Not smoking really does help the individual not get lung cancer, and people did it.

What works is when new tech is invented/expanded:

- Drowning in horse poop? "Ride your horse less" didn't work, inventing cars worked.

- Bad air quality? "Use your car less" is hard when it's so useful to drive to places. Then someone invented catalytic converters.

- Ozone layer hole? Was the answer to use less cold storage? It was non-CFC fridges.

The same is true with our CO2 issue. Telling people to eat less, fly less, drive less, etc just ain't gonna work. The thing to try is to invent our way out of it. Fusion, solar, electric transport, batteries, and a bunch of others are what we need, and it can't go fast enough. Techies have bailed the world out of every shitty situation ever (yes including sewer engineers) and if we get out of this one it will be techies who are to thank.

Great job. You managed to find perhaps the one and only societal issue that's harder to solve than global warming and posit that as a solution.

Right, so let me gets this straight. They use a low-carb, aka meat heavy diet to lose weight hoping to improve global green house emissions. Not sure this one is thought out through.

An alternative approach would perhaps be to advocate a plant based diet which has a much lesser carbon footprint and also can help reduce weight.

As they themselves observe, the decrease of 0.2% in emission, resulting from a 10kg weight loss in the obese, is not a solution.

Obesity is a crisis in itself, however, when some 100 companies have produced 71% of global emissions[0], it's not individuals, who in total would potentially reduce CO2 emissions by 0.2%, that are causing this. It's these companies.

That study literally just attributes all carbon emissions to the firms that pull it from the ground.

i.e. if a Norwegian oil company pulls oil out of the ground and I buy it from them to put in a private jet that flies around in circles while I party in it, rather than the CO2 emissions being attributed to me, they are attributed to the Norwegian oil company that pulled it from the ground.

Obviously, this is a completely useless study which only exists to shift blame. There is nothing insightful about it.

(And most of the firms listed are government run, Saudi Aramco, China Coal, etc...)

did you mean to post a link (because [0]) ? I do not see it.

I sincerely hope this research is used to promote healthier lifestyles for every one. Governments should subsidize health related benefits (gym memberships, yoga classes, etc).

The lack of movement in the average person's life is a travesty, ideally office/desk jobs should require x amount of movement (walking meetings).

I most definitely wouldn't want to live in a society where I'm required to do certain things just because it helps my health. Our world around us is full of great freedoms which we are able to utilize depending on our judgment. Some are drunk, some are high smokers, and in the end it's all these things that make us who we are a part from our skills and mind and likes. Also, I don't want to be 1984'd.

Global warming is caused by societal impacts and any effective mechanism for control must be at a societal level. Trying to create yet another personal responsibility dynamic can only exacerbate the problem.

What we do need is more collective pressure on government action.

In some (quite improbable) circumstances it actually could make it worse.

When you are actually losing weight the way that mass leaves your body is as CO₂ and water with about 85% of the lost mass as CO₂ and 15% as water.

If we were just barely below some irreversible tipping point and everyone decided to lose weight the CO₂ from the weight loss itself could push us over, at which point it then doesn't matter that at the end of our weight loss our bodies are emitting less CO₂ than they were before the weight loss.

> When you are actually losing weight the way that mass leaves your body is as CO₂

Yes, but it happens only once. When you maintain high body mass you consume more food and release more CO₂ every day (compare to a similar person with lower mass). Though physical activity likely affects human CO₂ more than body mass.

> Yes, but it happens only once

...which is why I specified it would require quite improbable circumstances. We'd need to be in a situation where we are extremely close to a tipping point, but we are shutting down or reducing enough CO₂ sources that we are just going to miss crossing it and back away from it, and then a massive number of people decide to lose weight and the little temporary bump in CO₂ emission pushes us over.

Isn't decomposition creating greenhouse gases? Since everyone dies, you can delay the inevitable by getting obese, but in the end it's the same result.

Your body doesn't magically put out more CO2 because you lose weight.

Coordinating individual action is rarely ever the solution. Especially something challenging like weightloss.

Is Nature considered an unreliable, unacceptable source for Hacker News?

COVID risk also would drop to the degree people become fit and healthy, among a million other potential benefits.

I’m not generally a socialist, but I would not be opposed to a monthly government payout to people who provide proof-of-workout.

Edit: the downvotes are confusing. I’ve noticed my comments are downvoted more these days on HN. Not sure if I’ve changed or HN has.

Edit2: oh perhaps some people are reacting to my use of the term socialist. Weird. I’m using the term fairly loosely here in the liberal not Internationalist tradition.

> I’m not generally a socialist, but I would not be opposed to a monthly government payout to people who provide proof-of-workout.

Why do you think this is socialist?

Because it would be redistributive.

You seem to be suffering from a misconception. Redistributive policies are not inherently socialist. If you believe they are, then the US has had socialist policies for over 100 years, because progressive taxation is redistributive.

> If you believe they are, then the US has had socialist policies for over 100 years

The US has had socialist policies for over 100 years, and more intensely so since the mid-1900s; the modern US economic system (like the rest of the developed world) is a form of the “modern mixed economy”, a synthesis (largely ad hoc, rather than comprehensively, coherently planned) of classic capitalism of anti-capitalist alternatives, particularly socialism.

Which US policies involve workers owning the means of production? Because that's essentially the definition of socialism.

I assumed lower case socialist is the proper term to describe policies which trade individual agency for collective benefits, like publicly funded roads or fire stations. What is a better term?

I see. Programs that provide collective benefit, as long as you're a part of the group that benefits, generally aren't considered redistributive, either.

As far as the things you named, I would refer to those things generally as "social programs." Some of them might fall under the term "welfare programs," such as food stamps. Fire departments and roads, I wouldn't even classify as redistributive, for the simple fact that, although you pay for them, you also benefit from them.

Side note: I hate how the word "socialist" is a thought terminating cliche in the US. People should be more open minded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

Thanks I’m aware of all these other terms but was looking for a term to describe situations where the government spends money on things that benefit society collectively by redeploying capital unevenly. For example, a government funded army vs private militias, or a private fire department vs a public one.

That would amount to a payout to people who already exercise (in one of the ways that you would accept as proof of exercise), but how much would it move on the margin?

Obesity is a much bigger health concern than COVID in the long term, but I don't think a payout like the one you proposed would do much, if anything, to actually deal with obesity, especially because the issue is that people eat too damn much (I know that is why I am fat).

I think payout is just one idea. The point I’m making is that I support the government incentivizing fitness through the levers it typically uses to incentivize behavior, like tax benefits, regulatory burden reduction, access to entitlement programs, etc. within reason of course.

Poverty is.

The observation is not just glib and insensitive, but also wrong. While the poor do use less energy, they use higher-carbon energy sources, like burning things for lighting. And poverty is a big driver of land use change and deforestation. Generally getting social justice also improves environmental justice.

That's a very narrow definition of poverty. Some don't have those resources to exploit.

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