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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
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I was curious and went looking because I suspected it was low emissions but not how low. Research seems to suggest Kangaroo meat is significantly lower GHG per kg than tofu!
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5308823/
From a quick glance, it seems they didn't consider emissions coming from exporting kangaroo meat abroad. Though I fancy the total will still be way lower than the alternatives.
This paper focuses on Australian domestic consumption although transportation is still a factor especially with the sheer size of Australia.
I guess it’s good news that Kangaroo thrive basically anywhere that isn’t sand dunes
And it's cheaper. I remember in 90s Australia helped Russia not to starve by exporting kangaroo meaty
I did not know that, I knew it used to be very cheap but it’s more than doubled in price over the last 8 years
It used to be the cheapest legal meat you can get in Russia.
Edit: it was also added in soldiers rations during Afganistan campaign
The biggest difference here is not related to the animals themselves, but the scale.
Much of beef's emissions has to do with land use changes and diet which are both a necessary (but unfortunate) part of managing 1.5 billion cows to serve as a primary protein source for billions of people. In comparison, there's somewhere on the order of 30 million kangaroos on the planet (2% of the number of cows) and I'd wager the overwhelming majority of them are wild, not farmed for meat.
The difference in footprints here shows the differences in management practices and the downside of commercial ranching. If everyone on The planet switched their 0.5 servings of beef per day for 0.5 servings of kangaroos, nothing would be fundamentally different in the environmental outcomes. We'd still be clearing forests in the Amazon, just now it would be for kangaroos.
Sustainable meat consumption is only achieved through dramatic reductions in consumption. People don't have to quit meat, but it does have to become a thing reserved only for special occasions. Like it or not, the only path to sustainable food consumption requires everyone eating veggies (including the dreaded tofu) most of the time. Getting beef fed things like seaweed increases the portion of yearly meals that can include red meat sustainably, but does not somehow eliminate the fact that there majority of people's meals need to avoid red meat (sorry folks).
So you aren't interested in the evidence, got it.
You have evidence that farming 10 billion+ kangaroos (it would probably have to be closer to 15 billion, based on the weight differences, ~200 lb/roo vs ~2000 lb/cow) can be done without any compounding burdens, e.g., land use changes, increasing the CO2/kg?
Are there a lot of studies in industrial-scale kangaroo farming? I'm very much interested in evidence on how we could sustainably manage and farm tens of billions of animals to feed a global population at today's levels of meat consumption.
If you're comparing the footprint of wild caught kangaroos with industrially farmed beef you're comparing apples to oranges. One cannot be a substitute for the other because they exist on tremendously different scales. Unless of course you have evidence on how we manage wild kangaroos to feed 7 billion people. If you do, please oh please share. I am definitely interested in the evidence!
In not disagreeing with what was presented, that wild caught kangaroo is lower carbon intensity than industrially farmed beef, I'm only disagreeing with the clear implication of that statement and its context; that we could somehow swap one for the other and not have to change our levels of consumption. So please, show me the data on global-population-feeding scale kangaroo farming, I'll retract my previous statement and issue a formal apology in the Australian Times.
I don’t recall saying that kangaroo could or should replace beef globally. You’ve taken my observation of a single data point and practically built an army of straw men.
Congratulations it is entirely clear that you are so blinded by whatever ideology you possess that you cannot critically assess new information or meaningfully participate in any discussion.
You’ve got this all so backwards it’s mind numbing. Everything the other person says was correct.
Kangaroos dont fart methane you fucking moron.
Unlike cows.
Even if you replaced all land used by cows with kangaroos they would be lower emissions but I never fucking said that to start with.
I observed that kangaroos are lower GHG emissions than tofu per kg you illiterate fuck.