this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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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: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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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)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 48 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

If the non-food products (which account for about 40% of the animal) are accounted for, the food-CO2 falls by ~40% to about 51.

This doesn't seem to take into account methane production and its effect on the climate either, which would probably put cows and pigs much higher.

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

Right. Cattle produces a lot more than just beef. Leather, horns, bones, and hooves are additional products that come from the cow. Then there's all the animal feed and plant fertilizer that come from the less desirable parts of the cow. I wonder what the carbon footprint is when the entirety of the cow is taken into account. No part of the animal is wasted during rendering.