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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)
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What's wrong with it?
the paper tries to quantify all the inputs and outputs for foods, but it fails to actually calculate either the actualy outputs (like non-food animal products), or the actual costs of the inputs (many of which would be waste products)
if you total all the inputs that go into a product (the water, the carbon emissions, the land use, etc), then you can see what it would cost to produce it if you made no other products. but that's not actually the environment in which meat dairy and eggs are produced.
the most illustrative example is cotton. cotton is not a food. it is grown for textiles. it wrecks the soil and it is THIRSTY. after you harvest the cotton and separate the fiber from the stalk and seed, you have seed left over. way more seed than you need to replant. cottonseed can be and is pressed for oil, but it takes much less processing to mix it into cattle fodder. why should the water used to grow cotton count against the water inputs for beef and milk? it's actually a conservation of resources. these industries are all interconnected, and trying to just put a singular value on every product in the absence of the context of its production is not actually useful in determining what would be ecologically responsible.
The paper is a meta-analysis, it's not trying to calculate those things at all. It's collating and standardising the results of other studies doing that. To take Ridoutt et al 2011 as an example because it's the first beef one that comes up in the dataset, regarding feedlots:
It's depending on the work of the 1,530 source papers to calculate the inputs appropriately. You would know this if you had looked at the paper, so where did you get the idea that it is as you described?
the conclusion is "beef produces 85kg co2e". it's calculating exactly what I said.
Emphasis mine, of course. The remaining four-fifths of your comment focussed entirely on inputs too. The paper does not do this and never intended or claimed to. It collates the work of other papers that did it. Why tell such an obvious lie? Your comment is literally right there
this is splitting hairs.
Is it fuck. You complained about their methodology and then went on to cite an example of a problematic methodology that they simply did not use. You have not read the paper.
I have and you are splitting hairs about this
Alright, point me to the page of the study or the line of the database that counts the full water usage of cottonseed in beef production. Should be easy for you.
you know as well as I do that the meta analysis is depending on studies that do exactly what I said, and relying on papers that employ a flawed methodology is, itself, a flawed methodology.
I already gave you an example of one of the papers it's relying on, and it clearly isn't doing that. Which ones are?
I'm on mobile rn. can you link the bibliography