Regional differences are important & due to very large variations in feed digestibility, slaughter age & weight, climate conditions, management, sociocultural factors, & nutrient security.
Are #vegan diets really the 'single biggest way' to reduce our carbon footprints & environmental impact on the planet? We argue that this is a highly misleading claim & that the evaluation of dietary change comes with a lot of context & complexity
🧐📑➡️: https://t.co/kYGeTpy8UP
Regional differences are important & due to very large variations in feed digestibility, slaughter age & weight, climate conditions, management, sociocultural factors, & nutrient security.
A lot of margin is left for higher productivity, feed strategies, veterinary care, smart use of manure, & herd management. A reduction of waste, the re-use of meat-processing by-products, & the valorization of biogas also hold potential.
For Westerners, the effect isn't only small on a yearly basis (1-6%) but especially so on a lifetime of emissions. Some vegetarians may even have higher impacts than some omnivores. Mock products do not solve the issue.
Taking a flight, for instance, easily offsets one or more years of veganism. Yet, cars, tourism, pets, & smart phones receive little attention in comparison to the dietary quick-fix claims.
The higher carbon footprint of nutrient-dense foods can (partially) be offset by a higher nutritional value. Policies that would reduce GHG emissions but are nutritionally harmful or incomplete should be dismissed.
Given that proper grassland management improves soil carbon stocks, offsetting of emissions can be substantial (& sometimes complete). This is commonly overlooked in conventional assessments & GHG inventory reports.
Both are good, but potential is limited. Rewilding would replace livestock with other methanogenic animals. Massive afforestation overlooks practical constraints & is not necessarily more effective than grasslands.
Beef is excessively blamed. Yet, methane from ruminants is part of a biological cycle which doesn't bring in new carbon or add to warming, provided there is no increase in emissions/herd size. It should be considered as such.
LCAs usually do not factor in non-edible products & services associated with livestock production (eg hides, wool, fats, organs, milk, bone, serum, manure, draught power, etc), which would further lower the carbon footprint of animal foods.
More background, details & examples for each of the above-listed 8 points can be found on this website (backed up with links to scientific studies): https://t.co/kYGeTpy8UP
More from Health
No-regret #hydrogen:
Charting early steps for H₂ infrastructure in Europe.
👉Summary of conclusions of a new study by @AgoraEW @AFRY_global @Ma_Deutsch @gnievchenko (1/17)
https://t.co/YA50FA57Em
The idea behind this study is that future hydrogen demand is highly uncertain and we don’t want to spend tens of billions of euros to repurpose a network which won’t be needed. For instance, hydrogen in ground transport is a hotly debated topic https://t.co/RlnqDYVzpr (2/17)
Similar things can be said about heat. 40% of today’s industrial natural gas use in the EU goes to heat below 100°C and therefore is within range of electric heat pumps – whose performance factors far exceed 100%. (3/17)
Even for higher temperatures, a range of power-to-heat (PtH) options can be more energy-efficient than hydrogen and should be considered first. Available PtH technologies can cover all temperature levels needed in industrial production (e.g. electric arc furnace: 3500°C). (4/17)
In our view, hydrogen use for feedstock and chemical reactions is the only inescapable source of industrial hydrogen demand in Europe that does not lend itself to electrification. Examples include ammonia, steel, and petrochemical industries. (5/17)
Charting early steps for H₂ infrastructure in Europe.
👉Summary of conclusions of a new study by @AgoraEW @AFRY_global @Ma_Deutsch @gnievchenko (1/17)
https://t.co/YA50FA57Em
The idea behind this study is that future hydrogen demand is highly uncertain and we don’t want to spend tens of billions of euros to repurpose a network which won’t be needed. For instance, hydrogen in ground transport is a hotly debated topic https://t.co/RlnqDYVzpr (2/17)
Similar things can be said about heat. 40% of today’s industrial natural gas use in the EU goes to heat below 100°C and therefore is within range of electric heat pumps – whose performance factors far exceed 100%. (3/17)
Even for higher temperatures, a range of power-to-heat (PtH) options can be more energy-efficient than hydrogen and should be considered first. Available PtH technologies can cover all temperature levels needed in industrial production (e.g. electric arc furnace: 3500°C). (4/17)
In our view, hydrogen use for feedstock and chemical reactions is the only inescapable source of industrial hydrogen demand in Europe that does not lend itself to electrification. Examples include ammonia, steel, and petrochemical industries. (5/17)
This is the $1mln question still without an answer: why were these workers cleaning bat guano from that abandoned mine?
Surprisingly we simply don't know.
China would have all interest in clarifying that point if for instance they were prospecting or selling guano. It did not.
What we know is that EcoHealth + WIV were sampling bat sites in the vicinity at the exact time of the workers being in that mine.
#DRASTIC wrote about this and about other oddities in the official story:
Maybe it's just one of these coincidences.
Then it gets interesting: about a year after the miners death, Olival & Epstein from EcoHealth Alliance co-authored a paper about the coronavirus risk infection from bat guano collection.
No mention of the
That paper oddly used some old bat samples collected by DARPA in 2006/7 at the famous Thai bat cave.
It never mentioned that the Thai monks have been doing this every Sunday for many many years without infection.
But most interestingly it never mentioned the Mojiang mine accident, even if the perfect timing and recycling of old DARPA bat samples seem to point to a likely knowledge of it.
Anyway, the idea was to ask for more money, as you correctly
Surprisingly we simply don't know.
China would have all interest in clarifying that point if for instance they were prospecting or selling guano. It did not.
The miners were tasked with removing bat feces. AFAIK it hasn't been established why they were doing this. Given that EcoHealth was collecting bat fecal samples in the same province around the same time, is it possible these miners were actually collecting guano for EcoHealth?
— The Great Gumbino (@gumby4christ) February 15, 2021
What we know is that EcoHealth + WIV were sampling bat sites in the vicinity at the exact time of the workers being in that mine.
#DRASTIC wrote about this and about other oddities in the official story:
Maybe it's just one of these coincidences.
Then it gets interesting: about a year after the miners death, Olival & Epstein from EcoHealth Alliance co-authored a paper about the coronavirus risk infection from bat guano collection.
No mention of the
That paper oddly used some old bat samples collected by DARPA in 2006/7 at the famous Thai bat cave.
It never mentioned that the Thai monks have been doing this every Sunday for many many years without infection.
But most interestingly it never mentioned the Mojiang mine accident, even if the perfect timing and recycling of old DARPA bat samples seem to point to a likely knowledge of it.
Anyway, the idea was to ask for more money, as you correctly
Now you know I love to sh-t in Harvard. But I also like accuracy. So I decided to go look at Harvard’s catalog to see its lack of military history that this article describes (they only teach history of pets it claims) and what I found shocked me! Shocked me! A thread: 1/
First off, Harvard students literally have multiple sections of military history that they can take listed. (It appears these ones are taught at MIT, so they might have to walk down the street for these) but... 2/
Say they want to stay on campus...they can only take numerous classes on war and diplomacy...3/
They have an entire class on Yalta. That’s right. An entire class on Yalta. 4/
But wait! There is more! They can take the British Empire, The Fall of the Roman Empire for those wanting traditional topics... 5/
\u201cMilitary history\u201d is only in decline if you\u2014like the author & experts in this obnoxious piece\u2014see the subject as a narrowly defined, white dude-oriented, guns & bayonets approach. The field is 1000% better off w/today\u2019s diversity of topics & historians. https://t.co/dUf3OWyVpQ
— Jonathan S. Jones (@_jonathansjones) February 1, 2021
First off, Harvard students literally have multiple sections of military history that they can take listed. (It appears these ones are taught at MIT, so they might have to walk down the street for these) but... 2/
Say they want to stay on campus...they can only take numerous classes on war and diplomacy...3/
They have an entire class on Yalta. That’s right. An entire class on Yalta. 4/
But wait! There is more! They can take the British Empire, The Fall of the Roman Empire for those wanting traditional topics... 5/
