Eating meat: threat or menace?

Looking over your pictures you didn’t provide any evidence but just your personal opinion (which is fine but have little credentials based on your other comments where you compare pastrami to wagyu beef or think that prosciutto has cancerous ingredients)

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I asked my friends who have a few acres of avocado trees of several varieties east of Redlands and they do not hire bees. Presumably there are wild bees or other pollinators around. So seems like another gross generalization.

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this is god tier elitism right here

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More a quirky personal history than elitism. To my parents’ chagrin, I decided to become a vegetarian at around 5 years old. I started eating seafood and poultry around age 20. I later moved to Tokyo. Many kaiseki restaurants served wagyu courses and I ate them, in part to be polite. Thus, most of the beef I’ve eaten in my life is wagyu. I did develop an appreciation for wagyu. I subsequently tried several steaks here in the U.S. and found them to be a waste of calories. Langer’s pastrami was okay, but it’s not something I would voluntarily eat. You’ll see that even at Manzke I asked them to substitute the beef course for a scallop. This is just my perspective. I don’t think it’s elitist. I grew up middle class at best.

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EVs, at least in the US are estimated to be beneficial compared to an old car at around 2 years of typical driving when looking at a full life cycle analysis. This will only increase as renewable power increases it’s proportion of the power mix in the US.

Per year, the EV produces roughly 6,041 pounds less CO2 than the 2010 vehicle.

As far as manufacturing goes, the old car is already built, so let’s give it a pass regarding its manufacturing carbon footprint. According to a 2015 Union of Concerned Scientists report, a full-size long-range (265 miles) vehicle had a carbon footprint of about six tons, or 12,000 pounds.

In two years, the EV will have caught up to the used car in terms of ecological footprint. After that, as with new gas cars, an EV surpasses it in efficiency for its entire life cycle.

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Regenerative Ag meat doesn’t reduce emissions more than eating no meat, a recent peer reviewed analysis suggests it decreases the green house gas significantly, but does not eliminate it as earlier studies had suggested. If you’re gonna eat meat, getting it from that source is way better (especially if you can cut the transportation GHG emissions of moving it to you). However, forgoing meat is still going to be more beneficial. In the grand scheme of things as you noted in another post, reducing your personal transportation emissions is going to have a much bigger impact.

https://civileats.com/2021/01/06/a-new-study-on-regenerative-grazing-complicates-climate-optimism/

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Much of the meat I eat is produced by the same farm from which I get most of our vegetables, and they’re not separate endeavors. Animals consume agricultural waste, produce fertilizer, and help with pest control. I’d much rather get my protein from a traditional farm like that than from industrial meat substitutes made with legumes grown on factory farms⁠. I’m particularly opposed to glyphosate-resistant crops, which include the soybeans used in a lot of tofu and tempeh, and in all Impossible products (but no Beyond Meat products).

That seems like another gross generalization. I expect it depends on the details of each farm and what you eat instead. And there’s more to achieving sustainability than reducing emissions.

That depends on how the electricity to charge the batteries is produced. Yet another gross generalization.

The world’s leading climate change activist disagrees with you on meat (posted above) and EVs.

Funny that everyone was all mad when Trump exited the Paris Agreement yet keep on devouring meat.

What I posted was much more specific than the gross generalization of energy mix that you used in your reply and specifically address the full life cycle issues brought up??? Further from a simple google search: in the US our energy mix is ~39% nuclear or renewable which was the basis for the estimation in the article for EVs. In CA it’s about 33%. Of course it’s more general than any individual’s specific situation, that doesn’t invalidate the information or make it useless. It provides specific directional guidance to the GHG impact of different activities and you can use it to extrapolate to a more specific situation and get a more accurate result than without it.

Do you have a link to the full life cycle analysis for Alexandre Family Farm? Any reason to believe it’s significantly better than the farm studied in my reply? Not sure why you’re so dismissive of the information…I’m not telling you not to buy from regenerative farms, I prefer them as well.

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That’s my concern about EVs. Not about renewable power so much as whether our grid (esp in CA) will support all the new EVs. Apparently some gov’t officials are pretty concerned, as well:

I am actually not a fan of EVs for a variety of reasons (I’d prefer a hydrogen car, TBH), but I think it’s wild that some people are trying to claim that EVs are as bad for the environment as is an ICE car…

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It’s a valid concern to look at the full life cycle impact of something, if you already have a car, you shouldn’t necessarily just buy a new car that is more efficient because of how resource/energy/emissions intensive the creation of that car is. However, the science suggests in the US it quickly becomes net positive for EVs compared to a legacy autobile (of course there’s a lot of variation to individual results).

It’s appropriate to be concerned about rapidly increasing energy use, however IMO the government incentives for EV provide an even bigger reason for companies to invest in more power generation. The next part is still up to the gov’t to create a regulatory and incentive environment favorable to the renewable mix of power we want. I tend to look at it as an opportunity :smiley:

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Half that.

That’s energy consumption which is different than source of electric power (consumption includes a bunch of sectors that don’t generate power for the electric grid). Same site, but for electric generation which is most relevant for EV charging, updated in July 2022: Electricity in the U.S. - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

I had a double take there, that the same organization would say such different things. They do not make the difference very clear.

What matters when you’re charging an EV is not what the US uses as a whole but what’s powering the actual line you plug into the car.

And again, there’s more to sustainability than emissions. Personally I’m against operating nuclear power plants until there’s a safe place to store their waste. I think Finland has one.

I appreciate your optimism. You know much more about this whole subject than do I, but the limited experience I have had w/ City of LA’s horrific implementation of green goals for waste disposal has not given me any confidence that a cooperation btw private and public sectors will be fruitful (and I realize that city/state/fed governments can/do operate differently).

I’m an operations-person by nature, and I think that mandating EVs in a country (or state) like ours where the government does not have full control over the utilities is an utter disaster waiting to happen. But time will tell…

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I have been enjoying this thread . Electric vehicle. Good alternative. Global warming. Ok . I would think the main concern would be in the future . Especially in desert areas . Where’s the water ?

If you go by what the state legislature has done, what we’re really short of in California is housing to support rhe unlimited population growth justified by our infinite water and renewable power resources.

there was a great piece about the insanity of this, related to developments being built around the grapevine: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-los-angeles/can-sustainable-suburbs-save-southern-california

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Lake Shasta is nothing but a creek now . Drained the Owens river . Lake Mead drying up . So next plan on draining the Colorado river . Water wars are going to become real . Infinite water , lol .

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“I think this approach to carbon-dioxide mitigation is a new regime of trying to justify the same kind of development,” Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at U.C.L.A. whose research focusses on land use and the environment, told me. “It’s very clever and extremely insidious because it doesn’t change anything: it doesn’t address structural racism, it doesn’t address affordability, it doesn’t address the climate, it doesn’t address resource impacts, it doesn’t address anything except on paper. …

The company also has a history of banning opponents of its development plans from attending the guided nature walks that the Tejon Ranch Conservancy occasionally offers to the public. The blacklist includes the eleven thousand members of the California Native Plant Society; researchers from the California Botanic Garden; the Center for Biological Diversity; and the Eriogonum Society, a group of wild-buckwheat enthusiasts.