Red meat has a huge carbon footprint because cattle requires a large amount of land and water.
https://sph.tulane.edu/climate-and-food-environmental-impact-beef-consumption
Demand for steaks and burgers is the primary driver of Deforestation:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/marcel-gomes-interview
If you don’t have a car and rarely eat red meat, you are doing GREAT 🙌 🙌
Sure, you can drink tap water instead of plastic water. You can switch to Tea. You can travel by train. You can use Linux instead of Windows AI’s crap. Those are great ideas. Also, don’t drive yourself crazy. If you are only an ordinary citizen, remember that perfect is the enemy of good.
So… yes and no. Yes, most corporations aren’t mitigating their impact as much as they could, even if trying to maximize profit.
But something like consuming red meat… if people aren’t buying it, they’re gonna downsize operations. But that requires a huge change in the diet of a lot of people. So like… yes, but no? If enough people change, yes, but reality suggests that won’t happen, so no. I try to avoid beef, but I’m just one dude.
Here’s what I don’t get: methane is energy rich, and cattle produce a lot. Why the hell don’t they capture the methane and sell it? Yes, combusting it produces CO2, but CO2 has a lesser impact than methane, as I understand. So it’s a (minor) help for the environment and theoretically profitable. Why hasn’t this been done yet???
It’s really hard. Most methane comes directly from the cow, and cows spend most of their time in air. The methane gets mixed in the air, in very small percentages. Extracting a small bit of methane from a lot of air is complex and energy Intensive, and methane is cheap.
So you’d spend a lot of money and power to produce very little money or power.
That’s very sensible. Thank you for the explanation. A part of me is thinking “hard means opportunity,” but I do computers, not physics