Grains are not vegan debate

[Jamie in Chile]

Wow, I didn't know nuts were carbon negative. Is that for nuts in general? I assume some nuts are better than others (also the nuts where you scoop them instead of buying in a container is better still).

I am skeptical about this because the trees may lock up carbon but trees also change the albedo of the ground to absorb more heat than open cropland on average causing more warming.

Almonds do have a water issue though, they use so much water that it is a problem. Avocados are similar. I do eat both though, almonds are good for calcium.

Also, I found out that most of the entire planet's almonds are grown in California, so they must be shipped a long distance on polluting ships. However this tends to work out quite a small issue in the grand scheme of things.

So nuts are fine (ish).

[edited to switch less/more mistake]

[Jamie in Chile]

Another one I am a bit skeptical of is the low carbon footprint of wild fish, below rice in an estimate above. It makes perfect sense when you think they are just scooping a net into the sea and not producing anything.

However, according to a new study published are recently as last week, https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ate-crisis the finishing method bottom trawling causes between 600 million and 1500 million tonnes of CO2 per year by disturbing and dragging up and releasing carbon from the sea floor. For context, that, if correct, is about 1%-3% of all global heating / climate change. And I doubt that is included in the estimates.

This appears to be perhaps the first study on this area (that I know of anyway), and unclear how accurate it likely is. It looks pretty rough to me and wasn't based on field work.

The study really challenges the claim that fish is a low carbon product, and reinforces the idea that only a vegan diet is low carbon, since we already know that meat and dairy are high carbon.

Of course, if you were eating fish that you know is a type of fish not obtained from bottom trawling, then it can still be low carbon. And local fishermen in poor countries just sailing out of their harbour and putting a net in the sea is almost zero carbon. Whereas if you are eating fish that you know is gained from bottom trawling, who knows - that might be as destructive as eating beef produced on land where they had to destroy the rainforest in order to get started.

I also think we should support calls for a ban to bottom trawling. Regardless of whether this study is correct, it is very destructive killing.

PS Ignore the clickbait headline about air travel in the Guardian article. That is misleading since they have only considered the CO2 effects of air travel, and not the other effects like contrails. Air travel is currently around 5% of global heating (pre COVID).

[Forests]

brimstoneSalad and Jamie in Chile you show good knowledge about this topic. I am sorry to side track I am going to respond in detail about grains and yours posts here but I have a few papers I have lost that I need to cite, I need to dig them up this weekend. I have had a busy week this week with work.

But I wanted to ask about this grass fed beef nonsense. Do you guys have any info on this?

These carnivore diet/keto trolls are all over YouTube and social media platforms promoting grass fed beef as the best food source for the environment etc. They are telling people not to eat fruit or vegetables but grass fed beef.

There was a study in 2020 showing that grass fed beef is not good for climate change "The cost of the climate damage caused by organic meat production is just as high as that of conventionally farmed meat, according to research."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... tudy-finds

Why are these carnivore people so obsessed with promoting grass fed beef? They are misled.

[Forests]

Another one I am a bit skeptical of is the low carbon footprint of wild fish, below rice in an estimate above. It makes perfect sense when you think they are just scooping a net into the sea and not producing anything.

However, according to a new study published are recently as last week, https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ate-crisis the finishing method bottom trawling causes between 600 million and 1500 million tonnes of CO2 per year by disturbing and dragging up and releasing carbon from the sea floor. For context, that, if correct, is about 1%-3% of all global heating / climate change. And I doubt that is included in the estimates.

This appears to be perhaps the first study on this area (that I know of anyway), and unclear how accurate it likely is. It looks pretty rough to me and wasn't based on field work.

The study really challenges the claim that fish is a low carbon product, and reinforces the idea that only a vegan diet is low carbon, since we already know that meat and dairy are high carbon.

Of course, if you were eating fish that you know is a type of fish not obtained from bottom trawling, then it can still be low carbon. And local fishermen in poor countries just sailing out of their harbour and putting a net in the sea is almost zero carbon. Whereas if you are eating fish that you know is gained from bottom trawling, who knows - that might be as destructive as eating beef produced on land where they had to destroy the rainforest in order to get started.

I also think we should support calls for a ban to bottom trawling. Regardless of whether this study is correct, it is very destructive killing.

PS Ignore the clickbait headline about air travel in the Guardian article. That is misleading since they have only considered the CO2 effects of air travel, and not the other effects like contrails. Air travel is currently around 5% of global heating (pre COVID).

Thanks for throwing this study my way. I really need to look at this as a pescatarian.

[Jamie in Chile]

On the organic vs inorganic debate on carbon footprint I don't know but inorganic does have one other major downside which is the damaging effect of fertiliser and pesticides on the planet. However, organic takes up more land. Therefore, it's not clear to me which is better inorganic vs organic. The approach I take is that I never consider this when I buy food since it's not clear to me which is best. If organic can be made to produce the same calories per square meter as inorganic then it should be better.

Grass fed beef is a difficult one, and I don't have a strong knowledge, but I can share some thoughts.

The fundamental difficulty is that with industrially produced food you can say well they transported x tons of grain to feed the cows using y gallons of petrol and therefore you can determine the carbon footprint to a reasonable degree of accuracy.

However, with grass feed the carbon footprint is related to land use and interaction with nature, soil erosion, changes in albedo effect of the ground. Therefore the overall effect on global warming is harder to discern accurately and any estimates will inevitably carry a high margin for error. This may (I totally speculate) be one of the reasons that some people love to argue for it as being low environmental impact. Because, although they are probably wrong, you can't defeat them decisively, if they are not truly open minded, it becomes a back and forth argument with no end. Grass fed beef may even be the worst kind, but it's hard to prove this.

As far as I understand it (I am not certain on this) the fundamental and no 1 problem with grass fed beef is its high land use - square metres of land required per calorie - which is dramatically higher I believe than plant foods and perhaps higher than industrial meat also. If I recall correctly, it can be argued that if everyone on planet earth was regularly eating grass fed meat that we would have to use most of the viable land area of the planet. Land use is very important since the more land we grow to use food the less we have for animal ecosystems, people to live on and have leisure space and so on. It also makes it harder to do the tree planting and rewilding and accommodate the world's growing human population.

Another thing to keep in mind is that "grass fed beef" can mean fed on grass for a part of the cow's life, but not all. I think this is common (first part of life grass, second feedlot) whereas being grass fed right up until slaughter I think is rare. (Haven't seen statistics, but this is the general impression I recall from books and articles.) You could challenge the proponents of grass fed beef whether the cow they eat was grass fed its whole life or not.

In my view, there are two types of proponents of grass fed meat. The first is someone who actually eats mostly or exclusively grass fed meat. In order to achieve this, they would only buy beef from specialist suppliers, high end restaurants, or cases where it says grass fed on the packet. These people are eating vegetarian whenever they are at a sports game, at a friend's house, at a wedding, in a fast food joint, or in most restaurants. These people are actually helping to end industrial factory farming so good for them. If everyone did this, we'd probably end up with a vegan world since grass fed meat is not sustainable.

The second type of person is someone that argues for grass fed meat more in the future, and sometimes eats it now, but in practice just orders industrial meat in a fast food joint or takes what is on offer at the next family BBQ. These people are actually using the claims that grass fed meat is better to allow them to continue eating industrial meat. They could be challenged to follow through on their views and truly give up industrial factory farming. Hopefully, they might eventually figure out that it's just easier to go vegetarian.

[Jamie in Chile]

I was just reading Bill Gates's climate book today How to Avoid a Climate Disaster and he reminded me that cow methane is produced mostly by enteric fermentation - that's how they can eat grass. That did make me wonder if grass cows cause more climate change, at least in this one important aspect. But I'm not sure and a quick google didn't give a clear answer.

The book also makes it clear that fertilizer causes more climate change for various reasons, so in that sense organic has a climate change benefit (unless this is somehow offset by land use issues). However the book also makes it clear that inorganic methods also produce way more food than organic.

There seem to be just too many people in the world so, for better or worse, we're stuck with mainly inorganic food unless and until populations start to decline.

However technological solutions could help. An interesting part of the agriculture and land use chapter in the book (Chapter 6) is where he says:

“Other experts are working on different ways to solve the nitrogen problem [fertilizer causing global warming]. For example, some researchers are doing genetic work on new varieties of crops that can recruit bacteria to fix nitrogen for them. In addition, one company has developed genetically modified microbes that fix nitrogen; in effect, instead of adding nitrogen via fertilizer, you add bacteria to the soil that always produce nitrogen even when it’s already present.”

That sounds promising. However it's an R and D project for now. If someone could do that, you could have the best of both worlds: calorie per unit land while avoiding fertilizers causing global warming and damaging the soil.

OK, that's it for today, sorry if it was a bit long.

[brimstoneSalad]

I am surprised to see potatoes being worse than rice in one link posted by Brimstone Salad.

I think this is principally based on U.S. potatoes, which are stored for long time periods in poorly insulated climate controlled warehouses with dehumidifiers and while mainly electric, pretty much all ultimately running on dirty energy like coal.

I am skeptical about this because the trees may lock up carbon but trees also change the albedo of the ground to absorb less heat than open cropland on average causing more warming.

You mean more heat?

Any kind of carbon absorption like that is also temporary, which is the issue with "regenerative grazing" which can at best trap a small amount by changing land use, but that it quickly outstripped by ongoing inputs and methane production.

Forestry for wood products locked up in construction seems to be the best use of trees (that, and shading buildings to reduce energy use in the summer, and blocking wind to reduce energy use all year).

However, something to consider: Nut wood is wood too. When the trees are thinned, and when production drops, they're harvested for use and long term carbon capture in furniture, flooring, and things like that.
For long term carbon capture statistics, I think we'd have to look at nut trees as forestry products too.

Almonds do have a water issue though, they use so much water that it is a problem. Avocados are similar. I do eat both though, almonds are good for calcium.

I'm not convinced that water is a serious environmental issue, unless it's compelling replacement with energy intensive ocean desalinization.

[brimstoneSalad]

Another one I am a bit skeptical of is the low carbon footprint of wild fish, below rice in an estimate above. It makes perfect sense when you think they are just scooping a net into the sea and not producing anything.

However, according to a new study published are recently as last week, https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ate-crisis the finishing method bottom trawling causes between 600 million and 1500 million tonnes of CO2 per year by disturbing and dragging up and releasing carbon from the sea floor. For context, that, if correct, is about 1%-3% of all global heating / climate change. And I doubt that is included in the estimates.

That's very interesting. It would be important to add that in if we can develop an improved infographic (with a note about it being preliminary).

PS Ignore the clickbait headline about air travel in the Guardian article. That is misleading since they have only considered the CO2 effects of air travel, and not the other effects like contrails. Air travel is currently around 5% of global heating (pre COVID).

Contrails are complicated, because they literally vanish overnight if we stop flying or implement a means of preventing them (like changing altitudes slightly).
I'm not convinced that their heating effect should not be at least partially discounted.

The worst pollutant stays around the longest, but the most compelling for reduction to mitigate climate change is one with a shorter half-life -- up to a point. Once it's in the range of hours or days it becomes less compelling because we could do it at any time and see immediate returns. Things like methane with short half-lives, but that we can't just eliminate overnight when we decide to, have an impact on the time scale we need it but require a pressing decision now.

On the organic vs inorganic debate on carbon footprint I don't know but inorganic does have one other major downside which is the damaging effect of fertiliser and pesticides on the planet. However, organic takes up more land. Therefore, it's not clear to me which is better inorganic vs organic. The approach I take is that I never consider this when I buy food since it's not clear to me which is best. If organic can be made to produce the same calories per square meter as inorganic then it should be better.

Pesticides?

No reason to believe Organic pesticides aren't worse, since they're less targeted, less regulated, and used in larger amounts. But in either case this is a question of local environment. Is there a claim that there's a larger global climate impact from this?

In terms of fertilizer, we can only call manure lower emissions if we take them for granted and assume it would exist either way despite it being a major coproduct of animal agriculture that subsidizes production, drives price down, and increases demand.
Keep in mind also that the option of incinerating manure for power production may be greener since it avoids the more damaging greenhouse gases being released. Man made fertilizers can be controlled better in terms of application and may have less climate impact *after* production when applied to the field due to quick uptake and more targeted use. Not all all convinced they're worse.

[Jamie in Chile]

I am skeptical about this because the trees may lock up carbon but trees also change the albedo of the ground to absorb less heat than open cropland on average causing more warming.

You mean more heat?

Yes, instead of "absorb less heat" I mean "absorb more heat".

Do you have the power to go back and edit that? Ideally change it but put a note at the bottom to explain the correction?

I think that could confuse anyone that comes to this discussion later.

[Jamie in Chile]

You make some good points there.

I do think we should grow trees and then cut them down and build out of them, and immediately replant. That is a carbon negative process for at least the lifetime of the building. I could see a balance being achieved in 50 or 100 years whereby we remove carbon at the same rate as put it into the atmosphere and control the process. Therefore my feeling is that if you lock carbon away for 50 or 100 years that might turn out to be as good as locking it away forever.

I think the same might be true of nuts. If they are used in furniture and flooring that could lock away enough carbon to make the whole process carbon neutral or negative after all… provided it really is locked away from a long time. If anyone has any more detailed info about end of life of nut trees and whether what you say really is common, that would be interesting.

I think fertilizer increases the carbon footprint of inorganic foods vs organic food. Whether the extra land use of organic food offsets that in some way, I am not sure.

I don’t know too much about pesticides so wouldn’t want to comment on that.