I would be surprised if dredging up seaweed from the ocean and barging it up the Mississippi and putting it on a train to Omaha where it will be trucked to rural Nebraska could possibly be cost effective against the grass in the pasture the cows are already in. That seems to be job creation in the “I shot myself in the foot, so my doctor has job security” sense. Or are we building oil-rig style floating pastures to cut transportation costs?

It wouldn't work that way. They're used as additives, in very small amounts, to cow feed. And the feed itself gets shipped.

Or just don’t eat the cows it’s really not that hard

Do you really think it's easy to drop meat consumption from the cultures of the world? Meat is a huge part of many cultures around the world, including mine. Stopping meat consumption overnight would close many restaurants and business immediately.

I'm not arguing it's not a benefit, but I am arguing that it's hard.

All I had to do to drop my meat consumption by 80-90% was to live with someone who introduced me to plenty of tasty meatless cuisines and meat alternatives.

Frankly, cutting meat consumption in half is usually easy and would already take us a very long way if done universally.

> All I had to do to drop my meat consumption by 80-90% was to live with someone who introduced me to plenty of tasty meatless cuisines and meat alternatives.

Great, I'm glad that works for you.

> Frankly, cutting meat consumption in half is usually easy and would already take us a very long way if done universally.

That sounds like a good idea, but it's harder to implement than you think, I think.

Why? I cut out almost all meat by simply not eating it. I eat some seafood on the rare occasion but really all it took was just choosing not to. I don't even think of myself as vegetarian, just a normal human who opts for meatless options most of the time.

Same here. I do eat meat at times, especially when eating out; I just opt for meatless option whenever it's good enough to me, which turns out to be very often. I wonder if there's some meat addiction at play there, because that's how all these "it's not that easy" comments start to sound like to me.

That said, I'm fully aware that it's easier to avoid meat in some places than in others. Living in the middle of a capital city, good meatless options were everywhere around, but after moving to suburbs of the same city there's not that much meatless stuff that I can order with delivery, for instance. It can also cost more, making it much less available for some social groups (although I hope it's just a matter of time and economy of scale, because in the end there's no reason why would it stay more expensive). Nevertheless, cutting meat intake by around half still doesn't seem that hard, it doesn't even take much effort once you already got to know the alternatives.

The British could give up tea, the Japanese could give up rice, and Indians could give up cumin. It's entirely possible to do all of those things by "simply not eating it".

Do you think the above are equivalent to what you're asking regarding meat? Why or why not?

I don't think it would be a huge challenge for the British to drink less tea, the Japanese to eat less rice and Indians to use less cumin if continuing to eat, drink and use them would pose a huge risk for the future of all humanity. All of that (and also eating less meat) can be done without damaging the culture around it.

What's much more challenging is to make people care about danger enough to be willing to change their personal behavior even in slightest ways.

> Do you think the above are equivalent to what you're asking regarding meat? Why or why not?

Of course it's not equivalent, because this thread is explicitly not about giving up meat consumption.

Except if they just start feeding the cows seaweed, there is no risk to humanity.

Conversely, if everyone went vegetarian, that would pose a severe risk to humanity in the form of well documented negative health effects.

It's also necessary for survival. "healthy veganism" is largely a myth -- we are omnivores, we need meat and non-meat to have proper nutrition. With a prohibitively expensive and labor intensive diet it is technically possible to be 100% vegan, but people who do this face a myriad of health problems: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/plant-based-diets-are-be...

Even custom-tailored meat replacement products, like impossible burger (which aren't vegan, by the way), have more calories and are worse for your health than standard beef.

Promoting veganism is like promoting minimalism to the wall street elite. Much better idea to push for better living conditions for livestock, free range, etc. That would positively impact many many more animal lives than the small amount of people who will adopt full veganism.

> Do you really think it's easy to drop meat consumption from the cultures of the world?

To completely zero? Probably not. Dropping it by (say) >50%? Much easier.

Meat, especially in large quantities and from large animals, used to be a lot rarer before refrigeration was invented. There's no reason why it couldn't be dialled down culturally.

Reminder: the perfect is the enemy of the good. Getting people more over to pork and poultry would be a pretty good win:

* https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet

I agree with what you're saying in spirit, I think.

I am trying to make a point that "eat less meat, it's like super easy right?" is not about substituting tofu/beyond/impossible meat for beef. There are cultural traditions that cannot be replaced with tofu or vegetables. As a species we'll need to move on from this, but these sorts of things are deeply ingrained in the identity and traditions of many, many people.

For example, removing the consumption of beef brisket, skirt/flank steak, tongue and tripe from the Mexican/Southern US cultures will likely not happen while my generation, or the one after mine, are alive. It will probably happen when folks naturally adopt a more vegetable based diet and eschew those traditions. If somehow we could engineer beef substitutes for these that maintained the same characteristics of how they are cooked and what they tasted like, that would go a long way in getting us there; but we don't have the technology today.

And I don't mean to be over-dramatic, but if you went into any of the many multigenerational households or ranches here specifically in south Texas and told them they could not raise or eat beef anymore - you would be making an extreme and immediate affront to their way of life that many would fight and die to protect.

Stopping world cultures from eating meat is a huge problem. But what about at a personal level: With this information you now have- are you as an individual willing to go stop eating meat? I would argue that on an individual level it actually is pretty darn easy - especially with all the alternatives popping up the last 5 years.

I'm not willing, no.

Upvoting because of your honesty, not your position. The reason you can't reduce meat consumption, in spite of data, is because you don't want to. It's selfish but at least it's honest.

I think a lot of people make choices in spite of data to the contrary. We fly on planes, buy plastic junk from Amazon overseas and replace electronics like they are going out of style. We're burning energy to have digital money and we focus on paper straws. I've done all of these things in the last year (except flying, but only because of the pandemic, not the environment).

I play with my sliders all the time; I'm just not willing to slide so far in one direction that I give up my heritage.

I challenge you to evaluate your own life choices with an equally critical lens.

Thank you for the polite discourse.

Appreciate your honesty from my personal question. I worked with a woman a few years ago who said she was interested in reducing her meat consumption but reasoned that her dad was from Texas and loved to grill so, because of that, she could never stop eating it. I’m puzzled by her thought process but it seems to explain some kind of internal need to maintain identity- and, I guess, culture.

Consider asking the Japanese to no longer eat fish or seafood. It's possible, but the Japanese would lose a big part of their identity.

I understand the point. I’m from the Midwest in the US. Corn everywhere. Cows everywhere. My family drank cow’s milk and ate meat at every single meal. It was something deeply ingrained in the culture I grew up in. This also basically went along with the norms of my heritage. I no longer eat meat or drink milk but I don’t feel any less connected to my heritage and culture. It’s different for everyone.

Impossible to reduce 100% of all meats, but maybe possible to reduce 50% of beef that's significantly worse for environment than pork/chicken.

Parent just suggested a realistic and actionable solution and you replied a snarky totally unrealistic counter offer.

You think it’s more realistic (and better for the environment) to farm seaweed at global beef production scale? You’d have to dredge up so much seaweed and ship it all the way to the cows, it would be insanely bad for marine environments and so expensive to do at that scale. Meanwhile growing feed from the ground can be done right beside the cows at rock bottom prices.

There are millions (billions?) of people that don’t eat cows, it is not unrealistic for people to stop eating them, culture changes very quickly

“I don’t know why we need birth control, people can just stop having sex until they’re ready to reproduce”

When you start your response from a place that is unreasonable, nobody is going to give you the time of day. Telling people to just stop eating beef is both unreasonable and just flat out not going to happen in at least several generations with many steps in between - if it ever happens.

I don't think you understand the scale and flexibility of seaweed farming. But the feed itself is already poised to be adopted by large producers - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-09/world-s-t....

> it is not unrealistic for people to stop eating them

It's unrealistic to force them unless necessary.

Beef industry in some places is subsidized, demand can easily be curbed by removing subsidies or taxing. That isn't even on the table yet.

See my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28517488

You can skip the seaweed and just give the active ingredient.

I'm gonna invoke Poe's law here, but respond genuinely.

The only reason beef is so popular is because it's available. It's pretty inefficient in terms of energy input to calorie output and produces even more carbon as a byproduct of it's production. Carbon-cost wise, it should be seen as a luxury.

I also really don't think it would be an issue health-wise and diverting the market to other forms of food wouldn't really put too much strain on people's ability to provide enough food, calories- and protein-wise

> The only reason beef is so popular is because it's available.

Wait, what? Beef is popular because it tastes good. You don’t pay $50+ for a chicken breast, salmon filet, or pork chop. People consume beef because it tastes good. It’s “available” because people like it. If deer or bison sold for more than the price per lbs of beef, the cattle industry would collapse and be replaced overnight. But it doesn't, because people don't like the taste as much.

$20 for a steak, maybe. I would argue that $50 or even $100+ for a steak has far more to do with the scarcity (fillet mignon is, after all, a very small part of the animal) and definitely the status involved.

Also, bison absolutely cost more per pound than beef. Beef sells because it's cheap, not because it's expensive.

What taste good is just perception, I certainly pay a lot for good salmon filet, about the same as a good steak actually.

No offense, but you're either getting ripped off on the salmon or ordering a cut of steak that's the absolute lowest grade possible. Even decent steak is roughly double the price of salmon per oz. Something like waygu is 10x.

And yes, taste is subjective and the numbers make it pretty obvious that the majority of the population subjectively prefers beef.

Perception is not taste, I'm talking about your idea that "meat has to be better than salmon" that is you perception and it forms how you think meat tastes vs. salmon.

> Carbon-cost wise, it should be seen as a luxury.

Virtually every meaningful part of our lives is a luxury.

Your profile mentions you are a musician and artist: many many people in the world would consider your choices as unnecessary luxuries. In some parts of the world you would be deprived of your choices for the good of others. Surely we could even find people that would judge your art and music as a negative worth to the world.

A world where we only work for the minimum needs necessary to survive (food, shelter, etcetera) would not be worth aspiring for.

Whether or not music and art are a luxury, and should be eliminated because of that, is definitely an interesting discussion

Note that I never argued for the abolition of cattle production, just that it's carbon-cost is not considered a much as it should be (as is the case with most things, I think)

I also never argued against luxury goods or only working for the most efficient means of survival. Luxury is fine, but I think everyone in modern society is going to have to give up at least some amount of the comforts of modern society.

> [meat’s] carbon-cost is not considered a much as it should be (as is the case with most things, I think)

Oh, I strongly agree.

However the majority of the greenhouse gas contribution from meat is methane, which decomposes over many decades. So in the long term, not eating meat is expected to only decrease your carbon footprint by 2% to 4%[1][2].

But meat is expensive, and I suspect that whatever you substitute instead of purchasing meat would generate CO2, so my guess is the impact would be much closer to 0%.

Personally I use money as my proxy for calculating carbon footprint. So your long term footprint is highly correlated and mostly dependent upon your income and the economy you belong to, almost regardless of your actions.

Unless you are doing direct action to capture carbon, not having children, killing people, or reducing your economy’s usage of CO2, then action at an individual level makes very little difference IMHO. Not to say we shouldn’t try!

Edit: also note the 60% headline figure is of 35% agricultural emissions, so actually about 20% of personal emissions. And presumably that is very strongly dependant on the country you in (buying meat from).

[1] https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/green-business/125675673/pa...

[2] https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/10/5568#

> The only reason beef is so popular is because it's available.

You don't think cultures eating meat and integrating meat into their traditions has anything to do with it?

It's difficult to separate the chicken and the egg here because farming meat was super cheap, accessible and beneficial (nutritionally, environmentally and financially) for a lot longer than the last 100 years.

It's "good" to transition to a meatless diet for the sake of the environment. The world is going to have to massively change in order to do that, and the cultures and traditions of a lot of people are going to be casualties along the way. Please don't be so dismissive of that.

"Popular" was probably the wrong word. "Currently ubiquitous" would probably be better.

> was super cheap, accessible and beneficial (nutritionally, environmentally and financially) for a lot longer than the last 100 years.

Interesting sidenote, I recently heard someone talk about how cattle was an extra good form of livestock because it "converted" an inaccessible form of energy (grass, which humans can't eat) that would otherwise be sitting there useless, into a useable form. With (most) modern farming, this is no longer the case.

Note that I never argued for a meatless diet, or even a beef-less one, and I don't think going to that extreme would be necessary or even the best outcome. And I recognize that doing so would mean many many generations of cultural shift and concerted effort. Just that beef farming in its current form should be considered more of a luxury in terms of cost to the environment than it currently is

Can't edit, but "luxury" doesn't mean "eliminate" and "divert" doesn't mean "abolish"

Bullshit.

A large portion of the population have been vegetarian for a long time. How is something alive and well and growing be unrealistic

Because it relies on the majority of the population to unanimously change their mind and diets. Between economic reasons (alternative diets can be more expensive to a family that has no time to cook every meal), health reasons, traditional reasons, societal conceptions, and downright stubborn people, it's essentially not possible without multiple generations worth of effort. That's much less realistic than changing mandated farming practices which could be done in a matter of years.

Cows in world := 1,000,000,000

Seaweed per day per cow := 0.085kg

Seaweed per year per cow := 31.025kg

Seaweed per year for cow population := 31,025,000,000kgs

Global seaweed production := 6,350,293,180kgs

So, we'd need to increase seaweed production by 5 times. We would then need to distribute this from the largest producers (China, Japan, Korea) the countries that consume the most (Europe, US). This isn't a problem that can be solved by mandated changes in a matter of years, and I have no idea what the CO2 output would be for this sort of production and shipping.

Solid answer..

None of this needs to be binary this or that though. We can limit or eliminate our intake of meat products through personal choice AND engineer solutions to minimize environmental harm. We can do both and it does not have to be unanimous.

Also, there absolutely is a very real cultural shift happening right now that is embracing flexitarian/vegetarian/vegan diets.

While the term "vegan" has seen a rise in popularity, "meat" and even "steak" have seen a more significant rise in the last 10 years: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=v...

I also don't have data on this, but I think there has been a much bigger rise in performative veganism than actual veganism. For example many popular twitch streamers say they are vegan, and then the next week viewers point out they are eating a cheeseburger on stream and they'll say "well I'm not today obviously".

That isn't going to happen unless it's somehow forced.

More realistic is taxing it (increasingly tax what you don't like till it goes away, like Tobacco).

Problem is the milk price is connected to the meat price. Which makes half the supermarket more expensive through milk products. Maybe there is a technological solution to abort the bulls like we do for chickens nowadays and give the cows hormons for milk production.

The seaweed/bromoform stuff isn't as perfect as some articles make it seem, raising food safety and animal welfare questions (which explains why it isn't widely adopted yet despite the properties often ascribed to it):

https://www.wur.nl/en/Research-Results/Research-Institutes/l...

I also remember a comment claiming that the cows don't like it because it makes them noticeably sick.

It is poised to become widely adopted - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-09/world-s-t...

> I also remember a comment claiming that the cows don't like it because it makes them noticeably sick.

Had never read such a thing.

Beyond it's shortcomings, it doesn't really solve anything.

The land growing grass and corn to feed livestock isn't suddenly going to be abandoned, or even repurposed, and it's that biomass that's the ultimate source of those emissions.

If nothing else, there'll be that many more fields of corn destined for the ethanol refinery.

> it's that biomass that's the ultimate source of those emissions.

It's cow burps. That's it.

Land-use in the U.S. for cattle has actually been decreasing for decades. It's only increasing in Brazil because of new access to Asian and European markets.

No, it's decomposing grass, expelled as cow burps.

That grass decomposes whether it's eaten by a cow or not.

And grazing land use has been decreasing, but not land use for producing feed.

> That grass decomposes whether it's eaten by a cow or not.

That isn't contested. Decomposing grass won't yield those methane emissions, at the very least insofar as it won't decompose at the same rate.

That's not the alternate reality though. The land will be put into productive use that's doesn't include leaving it to decompose on it's own, at it's own rate. It's either still harvested as hay and fed to something else, or the they grow something else, like corn, that they intentionally ferment into either other feed or energy products.

it’s an interesting idea but I have a feeling that harvesting seaweed at the mass scale necessary would have some impact on the ocean.

it's actually one of those things that translates to vertical farming really well because it uses the entire water column, so you could farm it in a warehouse at mass scale

You can even skip the seaweed and just give them the active agent: bromoform, the amount needed is tiny and would cost very little (unlike seaweed which is complicated).

Or we could mandate everyone to not consume meat, dairy and eggs...