Yep. I drive 18 miles to work every day. Sometimes I look around at 5 lanes of stopped traffic in each direction and think about how ridiculous the whole thing is. Uber is great for reducing DUIs. But it's just adding more cars to the road and all the negative externalities that go with it.

I used to drive 70 miles one way to work - which should be illegal imo. Working from home should be almost mandatory in any job where it can work. We're basically just crackheads milking the last resin hits out of fossil fuels, and **** everyone else who comes after us.

The amount of **** we throw away on a daily basis is surreal. Some one-use plastic thing wrapped in another plastic wrapper. A little USB dongle from Amazon comes in 3 layers of packaging.

I buy 20 cans of tuna every couple of weeks at Trader Joes. I think about every can of tuna on every supermarket shelf in the world. How the **** is that sustainable?

I remember a line in Book of Eli: "We used to throw away stuff that people would kill for today."

Hopefully self-driving cars will take care of the traffic and reduce vehicle ownership, which should reduce emissions dramatically. Regular public service announcements reminding people to keep their tires inflated properly and not leave heavy stuff in the trunk would do a lot to increase fuel efficiency as well.

In England when the traffic lights go from stop to go, the yellow light flashes on to warn you it is about to go green. Just a tiny feature that makes traffic flow slightly better, which would save vast amounts of fuel per year if implemented everywhere.

Throwing away food, especially meat that's gone bad is my worst fixable transgression, and canned meat like tuna (20 cans every two weeks? jesus) must be much better in that regard. If I had to guess I'd say the emissions impact of a can of tuna would be what, 10% of the that for beef or chicken? Not being perishable, not requiring feed or water, must make a big difference.

edit: I never know how much to trust the methodology of these things, but apparently canned tuna is 6.1kg CO2 per kg of meat, and beef is 27kg. Chicken is 6.9.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/t...15-9?r=US&IR=T

kg is an incredibly dumb denominator.

Quick googling shows 1kg of some of these foods have very different amounts of calories, with tomatoes being the worst.

Tuna has 75% of the calories of chicken or beef.

Why? You don't use gasoline on calories you use it on mass.

Wonder why they don't have any other fish on there and where non-farm salmon comes in.

Fresh (unfrozen) wild salmon is a lot worse than farmed fresh (unfrozen) salmon which may or may not be worse than frozen wild which is usually worse than frozen farmed in terms of carbon footprint.

We do use gasoline on miles travelled. In modern usage, we are basically using kg of gasoline equivalent as an an unit of energy. If you really want to go full idiot and use kg of fuel in denominator then Teslas have basically infinite miles per KG of electricity and that's clearly stupid.

Are there any electric delivery trucks in service right now? How much of that chart do you think the final mile is? It seems pretty straight forward that meats and fish have a higher co2 footprint than veggies, what num/den would you propose that makes that message more clear or do you disagree and think it's misleading somehow?

Insignificant amount is the answer to all of your questions.

I am broadly okay with the ordinal rankings but the chart vastly overstates the magnitude of the difference.

Do you have sources for this or just the feels? Seems unlikely beef is going to be close to corn when we feed corn to beef...

Google says that broccoli has 340 cal / kg, whereas chicken has 2400 cal / kg.

Chicken: .0029 Kg CO2 / kcal
Broccoli: .0061 Kg CO2 / kcal

So eating chicken is much better for the environment than broccoli, but you would think the opposite from that graph. Which is why using kg is misleading. So obviously misleading that you have to wonder about the methodology that was used to get the kg CO2 / kg numbers as well.

Tofu: .0026
Lentils: .00078
P Butter: .00043 Peanut butter has to be by far the best here with 5880 kcal per kg!

If you go hunting for deer or wild boar, driving an hour each way and spending a few rounds for 15kg of meat and freezing it, what's the carbon footprint of that? What about duck shooting?

Compared to corn, lentils, rice, and other staple carbs, everything looks bad on a per calorie basis.

I was thinking more along the lines of comparing beef to vegetables and other sources of protein on the list. I just mentally converted kg to calories and the chart looks a lot different. The calorie density of beef is like 2 or 3x that of the other proteins on the list (except cheese).

Beef is still the worst (hence comment on ordinal ranking) but it's not as bad as it looks on that chart.

Lamb, I am not sure how it got that high. I am guessing it's a combination of lambs being slaughtered young and meat yield of a lamb carcass is low but even then I am a bit suspicious of how far out there it is. To a lesser extent, I am also suspicious of the number for beef.

Eh, the inputs for beef are MASSIVE.

https://www.theguardian.com/environm...more-than-cars

Microbet and I live by I believe the second largest refinery in the country. They bring oil in on tankers and refine it by burning coal brought in on trains and trucks. Then they ship the gasoline back out in a pipeline? to be burned by cars in Southern California.

Imagine the carbon footprint of everything involved with that refinery.

Microbet can fill in if I got some of that wrong. I never see gas tanker trucks leaving, only empty coal trucks, so I'm assuming it's a pipeline.

I don't want to go into too much debate on exact methodology. Everyone uses LCA (Life Cycle Analysis) for this sort of thing nowadays. What people disagree with is how much CO2e to assign to each stage of production/shipping and the numbers vary wildly depending on assumptions and what software package you use (which comes with assumptions).

My suspicion is that cows fart way too much to not be the worst offender. But in every open database and commercial software I've looked at (I had to look at a ton of them for a bunch of professors that loved this sustainability stuff), beef on a per calorie basis isn't that much worse than most meats and in some databases it's actually better.

See this one:

https://opendata.socrata.com/dataset...kcal/f5g3-ki9u

It lists "pig" as 1.9 grams CO2e per calorie. Pork (presumably because people eat mostly lean pork) at 3.1 grams CO2e per calorie. Fish is 2.1, lamb 3.1, and beef 1.8 (I suspect they are assuming we eat a lot of steaks, which is all about the fat marbling.)

Again, I am not trying to say meat (particularly beef) is better. I am saying the magnitude of the difference is overstated when you use kg in the denominator.

According to the numbers at the bottom of this article, switching from a "high meat" diet to something between vegetarian and vegan diet saves about 4kg per 2000kcal. That comes to about 1.4 tonne of CO2e per year, assuming roughly 2kcal/day/person.

That's pretty much best case scenario you gonna get. It's a helpful reduction to be sure but it really is insignificant in the grand scheme of things with people in most developed countries doing 10+ (close to 20 I think in US) tonnes of CO2e per year.

We'd do a lot better just buying less **** on Amazon and/or letting Amazon do an "Environmentally Friendly" shipping option where they bundle up everything you bought for the week and ship it in the most environmentally friendly way available instead of basically airlifting everything with "free" 2-day shipping. (wasn't my idea but I thought it made sense so I remembered it.)

This topic massively triggers me because it is another one of those where there is a ton of misinformation because the people who care about the environment also often have strong biases against meat (and/or against frozen/farmed food.) You see the same thing in renewable energy vs. nuclear and a few other debates.

Refineries are a huge user of electricity, but the power plant in El Segundo doesn't burn coal. It has it's own power station which is the complex on the beach side of the street across from it and I'm about 99% sure it burns natural gas. The RR tracks coming in and out of the plant I think are taking mostly heavy fuel, asphalt and stuff like that out of the plant. They have high pressure huge flow pipelines running underground that ship out gasoline and diesel. You do not want to be around if one of these things rupture. Unrefined oil, as you know, comes in from pipelines that go out to sea where the oil tankers anchor.

I got a fair amount of info about that refinery because I put solar on the house of a guy who was up near the top of management there. He had retired recently and had spent like 30 years there.

The city of El Segundo is named after the refinery, which was Standard Oil's second (el segundo) refinery in California.

At one point, I think the late 60s, the beach in front of the refinery was on fire for years and at one corner of the refinery there was about 20' of "groundwater" that was jet fuel. They run a much cleaner operation nowadays as far as things other than CO2 go.

5 or 10% decrease is hardly insignificant.

The issues around nuclear are pretty much orthogonal to these considerations and nuclear power in theory is a lot different than in practice where **** happens like 50 tons of radioactive waste on the beach in Southern California in containers too fragile and too thin to resist corrosion. A lot of nuclear power boosterism is not based on the real world, but fantasy worlds where huge construction projects don't take 3 times as long, cost 3 times as much and massive screw-ups aren't absolutely inevitable.

You do hit on much of the problem though. There is a lot being done to lower waste and be more efficient and that will go a long way, but a lot of people are ridiculously wasteful and we'd be better off if people just bought less **** - at least if we could figure out how that doesn't wreck the economy.

Ok I was wondering about the tracks and all those trucks that are carrying something solid. There's pretty much a constant flow of them in the morning.

CO2 footprint doesn't really cover the rest of the story with beef production and how harmful it is to the planet. The amount of rain forest cut down for range land, methane, etc. I'm pretty sure pig production also has some really nasty by-products if it weren't for bacon would probably made people stop keeping them years ago.

Pig farming has extremely nasty untreated massive concentrations of waste that affects the local areas. Google hog farm pollution and you'll be glad you don't live in rural North Carolina.

Deforestation would be embedded in the "land use" part of the LCA.

For CO2 emissions, but not the other impacts of having 15 million tons a year of mostly untreated poop.