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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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this is based on the poore-nemecek study and should not be regarded as "true". it's "true if they methodology reflects reality" but it does not.
Can you expand on that or at least link me to the people smarter than me?
they take a myopic view of the inputs and outputs for food sources, not considering, for instance, that much of what is fed to animals would otherwise be wasted. the beef doesn't produce all that CO2, poore & nemecek were calculating all the co2 that goes into the inputs. i mentioned elsewhere cottonseed, but frankly i know that only takes up a minute portion of what they're calculating. instead, they are also counting soy, and that's almost as dishonest as you can get. nearly all soy is pressed for oil, and after that, the waste product is what is fed to cattle and other livestock. technically, you could eat it, but most people don't and don't want to. feeding it to livestock actually reclaims waste products. and even the calculation for the soy itself is skewed since it often also counts the deforestation that has already taken place as an emission source, regardless of whether that particular plot of land has been deforested for decades.
Yeah that seems like it's pretty flawed. Even just going down the soybean oil byproduct rabbit hole the Internet says most of it is "acidulated" to prepare it as an ingredient in lubricants and plastic. So beef production isn't even the main use of the byproduct.
Do we have any better studies? Or is this like the infamous self defense with a handgun study, bad science and all we have at the same time?
I was surprised to see 0.34 Kg or CO~2~ per Kg of Potatoes, but now that I read this, it makes sense.
They are taking many other things into account.
I didn't lie at all: the other user doesn't seem to know how poore and nemeceks lcas are calculated in the first place
I'm afraid they're straight up lying. The paper doesn't mention cotton even once. See for yourself in the paper here or the database here. It doesn't even specify one type of feed for the beef cattle, because it is a meta-analsyis of hundreds of others papers about specific practices in specific areas. It takes a weighted average of those depending on how much of the world's production the area studied in each one accounts for.