Probably not true. Waste disposal is considered in every LCA I have seen. Even including probable methane emission when in landfill in most models.

This is why I said I didn't want to jump into the weeds of LCA methodology and assumptions. Details on what would be included and ascribed impact vary a lot.

But I can confidently say waste disposal and land use like two of you described are almost certainly included in some form.

The discussion was about CO2. Sure methane is related, but how do you convert gastrointestinal illness and dead wildlife into CO2? Kerowo was talking about other sorts of environmental impacts.

And deforestation, like the kind for cows in the rain forest, causes more impact than just greenhouse emissions as well.

Also pigs and cows are smart and aware enough that they shouldn't be tortured and killed either.

CO2e, not just CO2.

What's the CO2e of salmonella? Antibiotics in run off? Ammonia in the drinking water? There are 35000 miles of river in the US contaminated by manure leakage.

Not that OPs matter, but I started this thread because there was already a climate change thread and not all environmental concerns are about global warming.

Those would be converted to CO2e in the LCA, mostly with estimates for costs to contain/control/treat those problems you mention.

I have also seen estimates based on converting what you mentioned to illnesses/deaths and then converting that to CO2e to cause that many illnesses/deaths.

There are also systems where they use essentially arbitrary weights for those impacts and come up with an environmental impact score but ultimately that can also be converted to CO2e.

I have also seen systems that decline to make that determination and just ask users to input their own weights.

Yet final way I've seen to deal with the issue you mention is to just ask users what's the maximum they'd tolerate in each category and then:
1. use these as contraints to find cost/CO2e minimization solution
2. use (acceptable impact - actual impact) / acceptable impact to come up with scores for each category and do some kind of weighted average.

I am sure there are more ways to deal with the issue you mention but most of the packages I have seen come up with a composite score.

That sounds goofy, but w/e. I mean: "There are also systems where they use essentially arbitrary weights for those impacts and come up with an environmental impact score but ultimately that can also be converted to CO2e." is self-defeating. They can't be arbitrary and be converted to CO2e unless CO2e is literally meaningless. A lot of disciplines like to do some math when it's not at all appropriate though. And then the weighing of future vs. contemporary impacts will play havoc with that as well. How do you discount the effects on future generations? If you don't then any temporary effects become essentially unweighted as the future goes on for a long time, we hope.

CO2e would be assigned a weight and the other factors (expected deaths and so on) assigned their weights. That effectively means assigning a CO2e to deaths.

The practice of assigning a value (often $) to life is morbid as hell but the practice is very well established in a whole lot of places. It's just a necessity of resource allocation on a high level. (See QALY for one of the oldest examples and one of the most used)

Turning people vegan is not going to work, particularly if the benefits are debatable. However the success of organic food shows that people will pay a premium for that kind of feel good stuff, so an "eco-friendly" label for meat or veggies farmed in a low emissions way, if such a thing is possible, would be a hit I reckon.

Other things to do would be public awareness campaigns around lower-impact foods. Maybe a protein shake and 100g of beef tonight instead of 200g of beef. Or keeping powdered milk around for some things, and buying smaller quantities of real milk. I don't really know the first thing about low-emissions eating, but I'm sure there are some good options that are a lot more acceptable to the masses than going vegan.

Watching Netflix's Water Explained is pretty depressing. A hamburger takes around 1300kg of water to produce, totally sustainable...

Water is a VERY abundant resource in many parts of the world. The water usage in the Lousiana basin is in the billions of gallons per DAY range (most of it is industrial) and the basin got a LOT more water that's available to use. The water use in a hamburger falls into this category for most of US. The water use is a non-issue in the Lousiana basin (which covers basically all of middle America. Look it up, it's massive) Nature replenishes the water more than quickly enough. What is in question is the amount of pollution (fertilizer runoff for example) that's correlated with water usage.

Unfortunately the CA Central Valley - where most of the countries fruits and vegetables are grown, does not fall into that category. They pull it up out of the ground, it evaporates and winds up elsewhere.

They'll eventually have to stop pumping through nature or regulatory action. Then they have to pay for the water one way or another, which will give other states an opportunity to replace much of California's fruit/vegetable production.

Veg/fruit production is actually pretty hard to move for a variety of reasons but dairy farmers are already moving out.

No one in the US pays the true cost of water or no one could afford to buy almonds or alfalfa.

However, the US aren't the ones who are going to face this first, maybe we'll learn something from Mexico.

Extremely interesting link with estimates country by country of climate change costs

https://country-level-scc.github.io/explorer/

Going to map you can see visually that the current best models estimate A NET GAIN FOR THE EUROPEAN UNION (and canada, and russia).

Which is something you don't hear very often in our political conversations.

Of course people can still say "well, worldwide there are net costs, so we have to intervene", but it is a little harder to justify imposing costs on european citizens when all models predict we would gain from climate change.

So Europe is going to benefit from pumping carbon into the environment at the expense of other countries and they shouldn't be charged for it? Instead of disincentizing their carbon emissions we should what?

That really argues for Europe just straight out paying cash compensation for their benefits and other people's costs. But, fortunately a lot of Europe isn't yet run by people like Trump and don't treat Global Warming as a Europe First issue.

At least we will all be dead by then

Everyone knew this turn was coming. Deny, deny, deny, the compromise, well maybe humans may have something to do with it but who knows how much, and the go full bore "Well the planet is doomed might as well not stop"

https://newrepublic.com/minutes/1514...nt-try-stop-it

Killing billions does not cause these people to lose a second of sleep.

I have to think that with our globally interconnected eoconomy, Europe, Canada and Russia would have a difficult time going it alone while the rest of the world burns. And of course there would be billions of refugees.

wait, even the most extreme scenario that got modeled still sees a much higher worldwide gdp in 2100 than now, and it's not even close.

Also about the refugees something really strange is going on with that estimate.

Let's take Bangladesh, one of the areas where the damage of climate change will be higher. Now Bangladesh gdp per capita is like 10 times what it was 45 years ago.

So, unless you think that climate change will reduce real gdp per capita more than 90% in Bangladesh from current levels (and lol if you do), emigration for economic reasons can't be higher than in the 70s right?

So if there are big waves out of Bangladesh it won't be for economic reason (this includes all decrease in quality of life that climate change Will generate, compared to now).

In which case what's the point? Why should the world be compelled to take them in if it wasn't compelled to do so when their life's were objectively worse some decades ago?

Most probable scenario is that Bangladesh instead of growing 6-7% per year will grow 4-5%. How is that supposed to be called a catastrophic scenario, you tell me. How is that supposed to call for moral imperatives of help, you tell me.

Bangladesh residents in 2049 will almost certainly have a higher pro capita gdp than today even in the worst climate change model. If that's the case there is really 0 justification to the refugee scare that I see cited very often.

It's a fearmongering approach explicitly intended to generate fear in western society and motivate people to heavily distort their economies in order to reduce climate change impact.

And that's especially the case in Europe, where the propaganda machine already managed to convince a lot if people of factual lies: climate change is true and occurring, but the idea that it is disastrous for Germany (for example) is an objective lie that no one in the left is admitting.

Let's see how much support for green taxes there would be if the population knew the truth, which is that most models predict that climate change is a net benefit for Germany and it's neighbours.

And of course this conversation isn't happening. Because the left can hide behind the silly negationist alt-right and justify their lies as the only response to the alt-right lies.

No1 sane of mind is a climate-denier. But the position of the climate-catastrophist is only little better. It's based on factual lies and science doesn't predict, for Europe, any aggregate cost from climate change.

Ok, well, I'm nowhere near informed enough on the effects of climate change to comment on all that. I assumed that large swathes of farm land would become unusable, ecosystems disrupted, and lots of heavily populated places unlivable, resulting in mass famine globally.

I know very little about this topic, but as a Northern European I thought maybe it could cheer me up.

https://www.vox.com/2018/9/26/178976...al-cost-carbon Damn it!