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   Andrew Helwer (ahelwer@fosstodon.org)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Aug-2023 08:39:40 JST Andrew Helwer

   In public discourse it's all well and good to push back against narratives that devolve #climatechange responsibility to individual choice, but in your own quiet room you are seriously lying to yourself if you think climate change mitigation will succeed without you personally making large changes to how you live. For example, taking a single cross-country flight emits more carbon than citizens of some countries do in an entire year. Not eating meat saves a multiple of that.

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     BowserNoodle ☦️ (bowsacnoodle@poa.st)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Aug-2023 09:28:08 JST BowserNoodle ☦️

     in reply to
     @ahelwer Meat doesn't require much "carbon", and the whole process is cyclical, just like the water cycle (also fake numbers for beef). A typical cow needs roughly 0.8 to 1.0 acres of grass to sustainably forage feed continuously. One acre of grass produces enough oxygen in a day via carbon sequestration and photosynthesis to provide 40 PEOPLE worth of oxygen. Which more than offsets this. The cows breathe 10-30x per minute (call it 20) with a lung capacity of 7.0 L verses a human males 6.0 L 12 - 20 (call it 16). Based on these numbers, a pasture raised grass fed cow is a net negative carbon user during its lifetime. The only logical critique after this is slaughter, which is more of a critique of industrialization and its carbon utilization. Considering cows have been raised and slaughtered since before written language records, I highly doubt this is a carbon intensive process by itself. One could easily criticize the industry, but to do that without criticism of industry writ large is agenda driven and duplicitous.
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     BowserNoodle ☦️ (bowsacnoodle@poa.st)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Aug-2023 09:48:49 JST BowserNoodle ☦️

     in reply to

     • Frondeur
     @Frondeur @ahelwer Maybe, but again it's cyclical. They're just pulling crude out of the ground and funneling it into the cows right? They finish with grains because it gives the beef less of a gamey taste. Grains are a grass, and what I just mentioned about grass further reinforces my point. Let's look into the logic here:
     >harvesting and transporting the grain to the processor, market, cow.
     This would be done anyway with human instead of cows receiving cereals. The difference is that cows, as animals, add one step in between, meaning a large loss of net efficiency from total calories in to total edible calories. Internet says it's about 2.5 lbs of grain to produce 1.0 lb of beef. We still have the unspoken aspects here, which is that pasture grass serves environmental purposes— prevents soil erosion, aeration via roots, and ecological aspects of grass being able to grow in places where other cereal grains cannot. Furthermore, cows provide fertilizer, and the traditional method of rotating fields means a pasture, which even a lot of modern cows use as primary food for the majority of their life, could be naturally fertilized by grazing animals and plowed and used in future seasons. This is very sustainable, which is why it was done without factories since before written records. There's additional nutritional factors like essential amino acids (not able to be produced by the body itself) easily found in animal flesh. It becomes even more clear when you switch to smaller animals like sheep or chickens.
     >Slaughtering transport
     As opposed to transport of soy meal to the Soylent plant? Again, this is a critique of industry masquerading as a critique of eating meat.
     >Methane in farts
     Inconsequential and also results naturally from the decaying of any organic matter. We notice it in cows because they're ruminators who are actually capable of breaking down cellulose-b in their gut, unlike humans who are omnivores and have to objectively tryhard to eat vegetarian, so the concentrated release is detectable. Meanwhile any animal which eats any plant matter will do the same thing either in its gut or in the sewer and soil. Foolish.
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     Frondeur (frondeur@poa.st)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Aug-2023 09:48:50 JST Frondeur

     in reply to

     • BowserNoodle ☦️
     @BowsacNoodle @ahelwer i figured the carbon intense portion is the finishing where they fatten them up just before slaughter...
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     Frondeur (frondeur@poa.st)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Aug-2023 09:50:31 JST Frondeur

     in reply to

     • Frondeur
     • BowserNoodle ☦️
     @BowsacNoodle @ahelwer i have zero numbers to back this up...
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     BowserNoodle ☦️ (bowsacnoodle@poa.st)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Aug-2023 09:53:30 JST BowserNoodle ☦️

     in reply to

     • Frondeur
     @Frondeur @ahelwer I pulled all my numbers searching bing for individual questions. There's not been much "meat apologetics" I've seen and the industry needs to step it up. Maybe someone can write something up on this and do a proper "research" paper and get some big agriculture funding.
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     BowserNoodle ☦️ (bowsacnoodle@poa.st)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Aug-2023 10:31:00 JST BowserNoodle ☦️

     in reply to

     • Frondeur
     @Frondeur @ahelwer Exactly. We don't NEED to use Haber-Bosch process to produce fertilizer, but we do. If we stopped doing it, it would create more volatility in the price and availability of food across the board, because new variables would be introduced. Ironically, discontinuing use of it would require more farm land devoted to herbivore husbandry because that's the next best source of fertilizers used across the board. End factory farming, more animals, more efficient use of their waste, more small businesses and localized production. Suddenly we have increased genetic diversity, decreased waste, a healthier ecosystem, only a small cost increase to consumer, and a massively enriched middle class.
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     Frondeur (frondeur@poa.st)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Aug-2023 10:31:01 JST Frondeur

     in reply to

     • BowserNoodle ☦️
     @BowsacNoodle @ahelwer >pulling crude...
     
     Depends on how they are enriching those grains...the problem (if there is one, which there probably isnt) as it has been presented to me would be at this step where the animals are fed high calorie feed...to my understanding this feed is often grown with nitrogen enriched fertilizers...the process of making those fertilizers directly uses natural gas and/or petrol...though again this i think supports your core theme of being a critique of industrialization rather than meat...
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     GabeLakmann (gabelakmann@nicecrew.digital)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Aug-2023 20:35:31 JST GabeLakmann

     in reply to

     • BowserNoodle ☦️
     This guy is a kook. Even Obama's head of climate change said that the push for individuals to buy electric cars and the like is a result of the major corporations, which are something like 90% responsible for emissions and pollution, trying to shift the blame onto the individuals so that they can keep doing stuff like buying "carbon credits" and the like instead of actually changing their practices.
     
     Meat isn't an issue and if I were to advise people to change any eating habits, it would be to purchase organic products made on a local farm when possible and eat less simple carbs and more meat and vegetables/fruit.
     
     Anything else is silly.
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