Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

What makes you think it won't come down to that?

Posted by Lurking Observer at March 7, 2007 08:02 AM

I, too, often wonder why the global warming people don't warn us about Posted by Rand Simberg. After all, imagine how much electricity you must be using to put up each post every day...

(btw, that's my way of saying that the post is broken in IE...)

Posted by John Breen III at March 7, 2007 08:08 AM

I follow the most green policy of all: I balance vegetarianism with recycling. That is, I only eat animals that eat plants.

Posted by Roger Strong at March 7, 2007 08:32 AM

Ideological Republicans and Rand Simbergs who don't like the global warming model have been reduced to dismissing scientists as "scolds". Even if a scold is completely correct, who likes to be scolded? PETA is a convenient target for this stance, since PETA members really are leftist scolds. And vegetarianism, not climate protection, is their long-term agenda.

But global warming is still real. Sober scientists and sober economists have long been saying that it's a collective problem that needs an economic solution. Despite what Dick Cheney says and what PETA believes, it's not a matter of personal virtue.

But there is one truth behind the opportunistic exaggerations about meat and global warming. Beef --- not all meat, just beef specifically --- really is a bull in the ecological china shop. Beef really is a big contributor to greenhouse gases, because cows release methane by chewing their cud. Beef also chews up a lot of land and diverts enormous quantities of water. What is especially galling is that not only do the cattle ranchers not pay the hidden environmental costs of their business, they don't even pay existing market costs. They get a lot of subsidized cattle feed; the subsidized cattle feed is grown with subsidized water.

Beef would be a lot more expensive if not for farm subsidies. If cattle ranchers also had to pay for environmental costs, beef would be yet more expensive.

Again, the discussion is not about "meat" in general. Anthropogenic global warming is not about fish, chicken, or pork, but it is about beef. It's not even about venison, even though deer also ruminate.

Posted by at March 7, 2007 09:29 AM

If Beef is a culprit then we did a good thing by killing 99.99% of the buffalo?

I seem to remember reading in history about heards of Buffalo that were millions strong. I guess that was natural methane.

Dennis

Posted by Dennis Ray Wingo at March 7, 2007 09:46 AM

What about all the rotting biomass in wetlands, which accounts for more methane production than livestock?

Posted by Joe at March 7, 2007 09:57 AM

I seem to remember reading in history about heards of Buffalo that were millions strong.

They were millions strong. But domesticated cattle are a billion strong. That's different!

What about all the rotting biomass in wetlands, which accounts for more methane production than livestock?

Yes, they do produce a large, predictable amount of methane. There are natural source of carbon dioxide too, of course. Of course they should be counted in a full balance sheet. But human-induced global warming is not about good chemicals vs evil chemicals, it's about throwing the atmosphere out of equilibrium.

You know there was that unlucky (and maybe stupid) lady in California who died from drinking a gallon and a half of water in a radio contest. One thing that the DJs who killed her did not say was, "if water is poison, what about the five gallons that she had in her body before she started?" Maybe their thinking was that dumb, but they were at least wise enough not to say it. On the other hand, one of the defenses of human-induced carbon dioxide and methane production really is that dumb.

Posted by at March 7, 2007 10:09 AM

They were millions strong. But domesticated cattle are a billion strong. That's different!

Humans produce carbon dioxide and methane themselves. Humans were once only millions strong. Now we're over 6 Billion strong. Perhaps we need to start culling our own herd as well, then? Any volunteers willing to sarifice their own life for the good of the future of the planet?

Posted by John Breen III at March 7, 2007 12:31 PM

To whoever made the 9:29 comment.

The problem with your post is there are no beef subsidies. There are subsidies for wheat, corn cotton, milk, peanuts, etc but there is no subsidy for beef.

These subsidies are pushed by the farmers. Additional policies like ethanol mandates and sugar tariffs are pushed by the corn farmers and companies like ADM. These policies are what makes ADM's high fructose corn syrup and ethnaol products profitable.

If the 9:29 commentor really wants to improve the environment it can do a few easy things.

1. Push to end to farm subsidies
2. Push to end ethanol mandates
3. Push to end sugar tariffs

Talking about non existent beef subsidies confuses the issues and makes it more difficult to end real farm subsidies and the real environmental damage they cause.

Posted by TJIT at March 7, 2007 12:33 PM

Interesting post at another blog

if we look at the geological record, we see that the climate changes of the last 1000 years -- both warmer and colder, wetter and drier -- are more radical than most anything the global warming alarmists are predicting. Look at the last 15,000 years and you've got an ice age with a mile-deep sheet of ice covering most of North America north of the 40th parallel, and a millenium-long drought that had open blowing sand extending from western Wyoming to central Nebraska. None of that climate change can be realistically attributed to anthropogenic causes.

When I first heard the discussion on climate change my thought was so what is the big deal it has been going on long before man arrived on the scene. A internet search on eustasy will clearly illustrate this.

Over the years since then it has become obvious that the climate change is being pushed as an issue because it gives the usual suspects an enormous amount of power to do what the usual suspects like to do. That is create massive government programs that will likely end up doing more harm then good.

Even worse, the actions the usual suspects want to take are likely to seriously degrade our ability to respond to the next event of real, non-anthropogenic climate change.

Posted by TJIT at March 7, 2007 01:00 PM

Humans produce carbon dioxide and methane themselves.

But not very much. The human metabolism is far more energy efficient than a car or the electricity grid, hence less carbon dioxide. Humans are also not ruminants, hence less methane than cows.

If humans were ruminants, we could look at remedies like collecting and burning methane inside houses. In fact some people have proposed putting tents over cattle feed lots to collect and burn the methane.

Perhaps we need to start culling our own herd as well, then?

There is no need to divert the discussion with totalitarian solutions like that. The world certainly is overpopulated --- it just doesn't look that was in the US because its population density is lower than China, India, Bangladesh, etc. But it is enough to do positive things for people to limit their rate of reproduction. If you teach them how to read, if you provide contraceptives and vaccinations, and if you provide them with pensions in old age, then they will have few enough children on average. If you treat people better than rats, then they won't breed like rats. It's that simple.

Okay, it does take one more thing. You have to set aside ideologies that encourage people to have a lot of children. Some of these ideologies openly conflate contraception with genocide. Part of the point is to win the rat race instead of ending it.

Posted by at March 7, 2007 04:44 PM

The problem with your post is there are no beef subsidies.

It's not quite true that there are no direct beef subsidies. The USDA has an emergency aid program for livestock, and BLM provides some very nice unspoiled land to cattle ranchers at a financial loss. But you are mostly correct about direct subsidies. I rather had in mind indirect subsidies concerning cattle feed and the water used to grow the feed.

USDA has substantial subsidies for milk, so that the milk is overproduced and wasted. This is part of the same coin, because of course dairy cows also generate methane.

Push to end to farm subsidies

Absolutely, and while you are at it, end their special access to the water.

Push to end ethanol mandates

I agree completely, corn ethanol is a crime.

Push to end sugar tariffs

Certainly the sugar tariffs are economically unsound --- as is the Cuban trade embargo. Whether this would really help the environment is less clear, because sugar cane is grown in environmentally valuable places.

So sure, it's easy to agree on ending farm subsidies and unfair tariffs. But even if you took those steps, cows, like coal and oil, would still have huge hidden costs. Greenland is melting suprisingly quickly. For all we know, Antarctica is too, or will be soon.

Posted by at March 7, 2007 04:58 PM

> Beef also chews up a lot of land and diverts
> enormous quantities of water.

I don't buy this.

Well, maybe in the worst cases, but that doesn't damn the whole industry any more than someone being irresponsible with pesticides should damn vegetarianism.

On my grandparent's farm, watering the cattle was a simple matter of a dugout reaching a couple feet down to the water table. (If is isn't in your area, THEN it isn't sensible to put a herd there.)

Nor did raising cattle "chew up land". The cattle were kept where no crop could be planted - a rocky area, or somewhere that they wanted to keep the trees. (A wheat field doesn't have a lot of biodiversity, let alone trees. The cattle areas had both.)

This scales up to larger cattle herds. There's nothing anti-green about meat; just be sensible about where you keep the herd.

Posted by Roger Strong at March 7, 2007 06:51 PM

On my grandparent's farm, watering the cattle was a simple matter of a dugout reaching a couple feet down to the water table.

Watering the cattle themselves isn't the problem. You can give your cattle a shower every day, it doesn't matter. The problem is watering the food that the cattle eat. Through the food that it eats, one steer uses enough water to float a destroyer.

The cattle were kept where no crop could be planted

Again, the issue is the food that the cattle eat. If you have family experience with cattle, you probably know that a steer needs a sizable grazing area, unless you buy feed which of course has to be grown somewhere.

Posted by at March 7, 2007 07:22 PM

Mr no name,

The sugar tariffs make high fructose corn syrup profitable. Which leads to more corn production and water usage.

The tariffs also have the nasty side effect of wrecking the economies of third world nations that produce cane sugar.

Unfortunately, you are fundamentally ignorant of what drives farm production and practices. The government spent $51,261,278,801 in the past ten years subsidizing corn production.

Farmers plant corn because it is subsidized and the government is going to make sure they make money on corn. Until the subsidies end farming practices will not change.

If somebody was to wave a magic wand and make all of the cattle go away absoluteley nothing you are complaining about would change.

Farmers would plant and raise the same amount of corn they always have. They would use the same amount of water and other inputs also. The government pays them to produce corn and no surprise here they produce corn.

The only difference would be instead of cattle eating all of the surplus corn, the government would get rid of it by using it to power boilers in power plants and to fire cement kilns.

If you want to fix a problem work on the root cause (subsidies) not tangential issues (cattle production)

Your dislike of cattle is preventing you from being an effective change agent with respect to the environmental damage caused by feed grain production.

Posted by TJIT at March 7, 2007 08:28 PM

Unfortunately, you are fundamentally ignorant of what drives farm production and practices. The government spent $51,261,278,801 in the past ten years subsidizing corn production.

All I can tell you is that I agree with you about corn subsidies.

Posted by at March 7, 2007 08:41 PM

The human metabolism is far more energy efficient than a car or the electricity grid,

Um, no. Musculature converts chemical energy to mechanical energy with an efficiency (in rowing and biking) that has been measured at 14-27%. The thermal efficiency of good baseload plants is well above this; some combined cycle gas-fired plants in operation have efficiencies above 50%. The efficiency of the power grid in the US averages around 92%, last I checked.

Posted by Paul Dietz at March 8, 2007 01:48 PM

Musculature converts chemical energy to mechanical energy with an efficiency (in rowing and biking) that has been measured at 14-27%. The thermal efficiency of good baseload plants is well above this; some combined cycle gas-fired plants in operation have efficiencies above 50%. The efficiency of the power grid in the US averages around 92%, last I checked.

You got me there! Too much intuition and too little fact-checking in these particular comments.

What I should have said is that human metabolic energy is used far more conservatively than either electricity or fuel for motor vehicles. A car engine's efficiency may be comparable to vertebrate metabolism according to your numbers. The difference is that the car weighs a ton and travels much further and faster.

Likewise electric temperature control of a building is a much bigger task than direct temperature control of its occupants.

Posted by at March 8, 2007 08:00 PM

Another point is that humans run on renewable fuel. Or would, if it wasn't for food subsidies leading to use of vastly increased amounts of oil products in food production.

Posted by Fletcher Christian at March 10, 2007 05:35 AM

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