Too many monkeys in the zoo

[sophie]

I decided to cut out meat about a year and a half ago, and I never really looked back. I don’t think I really feel meat’s absence that much tbh. Earlier this year I went with my partner to Alinea, and opted to go for the meat menu, because, c’mon it’s a 3 Michelin star restaurant, and they had an impeccably cooked A5 wagyu cut and it was just…meh? The best thing I had that night was a fermented celery root.

I dated a vegetarian all through college and the whole time I was very insistent that I couldn’t ever give up meat, bacon and burgers and cured meats are too good, blah blah blah, but really I’m surprised by how easy it ended up being.

 

[Lexicus]

I don't eat meat more than about once a week, red meat less often than that.

 

[El_Machinae]

I'm not sure if you're just being silly, confusing cow farts with cow burps. Or pretending that the conversation is about carbon neutrality vs greenhouse gases.

Methane is a much worse GHG than CO2. Turning CO2 into CH4 is 'carbon neutral' but a real misrepresentation of the underlying concern. Plants turning CO2 into carbs that cow bacteria turn into CH4 increases the speed of the warming.

Look, maybe you know that increasing methane production makes things worse. This knowledge isn't captured in your simple sentences. There are two/three problems. We use fossil carbon to get the hay to grow faster. Some of that hay is exhaled as CO2, so the only problem (really) is the fossil carbon. But then we're also turning CO2 into CH4, which is much worse. (the third problem is land use, which is more 'ecologically unsustainable' than a simple AGW conversation).

Sure, over the years, that CH4 will degrade back down to CO2. But we don't have time for these quibbles. The warming caused by that CH4 will aggravate any unstable systems. Again, I might as well claim that forest fires are carbon neutral.

I don't mind if I got fooled by a trolling sentence (or quote marks, 'trolling'), but obviously I see those ideas all the time by people who brag about eating meat. I don't think that approving of the over-consumption should be done, even if chastising it won't work.

 

[Lexicus]

Yeah, you are mistaking what I'm saying as a defense of eating meat, I guess, when it isn't. It's just pedantry. Remember what I posted that in response to.

I also think that, while you are not wrong about methane being worse than Co2, you are wrong insofar as you are implying that biogenic methane emissions would be a problem absent the massive quantity of fossil carbon emitted by burning fossil fuels. But again, that is pedantry, because we are burning all those fossil fuels. The methane emissions are a problem because the ten years it takes that carbon to get back into plants is the same ten years we need to cease burning fossil fuels.