292
Beef produces 85 kg CO2e per kg of food. Tofu produces 2.9 kg CO2e per kg of food.
(ourworldindata.org)
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
292 points (92.7% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5276 readers
1283 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I can just tell you: they did some looking at each production process and the inputs and outputs, then extrapolated it out to global scale.
The problem is that inputs and outputs vary wildly from place to place, that’s why some places are all corn and beans and others are cattle and yet others are something else. Given those differences are because of the economic inputs varying as opposed to the environmental inputs and outputs varying.
You can’t just go around to all the beef producers in the county and figure out how their operation works then multiply it by however much to fit the world scale because the rest of the world might be doing it wildly differently.
Although while I see the criticism of their methodology I think it means things are actually way worse, not better in terms of the environmental impact of beef.
The original paper says that they weighted each measure to the country's national production and then weighted those by the country's share of global production. They didn't just average each result they got for beef with no regard for location.
I think their point is that scaling to the volume of beef production of other countries isn't correct because the methods of production vary widely enough to produce much different results. As in, some countries likely produce more or less CO2/kg of beef so it makes no sense to simply scale the number they got from a single county to global scales.
Not the guy you're replying too though, so I'm not certain.
Right, but they didn't do that. It's a meta-analysis, so they took the value that each study got for a given crop in a specific country and then weighted all of the values by the share of global production that that country is responsible for. So if we pretend that the only three countries are Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, they did the following:
The dataset was 1530 studies across 39,000 farms in 119 countries
Yes I was wildly oversimplifying the methodology using a hypothetical intended to help people who might not have a background in either research or beef production understand.