Hacker News

Where do you draw the line though? Because plants themselves (DNA-beings) are also alive.

Unless you decide to go on a full mineral diet.

'Europe' is a big place. Here in Ireland good quality beef is readily affordable, and not particularly more expensive than chicken or pork.

I'm in the USA and I eat a lot less beef than I used to. The price has really jumped in the past few years, maybe since the pandemic?

Subbed pork, poultry, and eggs for the most part, some fish but that's not particularly cheap either.

It's still way, way, too cheap compared to its climate impact

>Beef is already too expensive for most people. Americans are probably the exception but I can assure you that most Europeans do not have beef heavy diets.

Beef is too expensive for many Europeans because GDP per capita/standards of living are declining in many European countries. People in East Asia, the Middle East, Oceania and South America still eat plenty of beef too.

Yeah, since COVID and then the Nord Stream terror act they raised beef prices to unsustainable levels. Döner (which is cheap ground sausage like beef in practice) between 7 and 10 EUR now (was between 3,50 and 4). Blockhouse steak (tiny) is 48 EUR.

My research seems to indicate its about on-par with chicken. IE a chicken filet is about the carbon impact of 8oz of milk.

And it seems here its about 1/4 carbon per kg of food as beef:

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food

I switched to fortified soy milk and haven't looked back. Milk is tasty but soy has less sugar as well and now I prefer it. Cheese is harder to make a substitute but eating it 1-2 per year satisfies my craving.

Forests burn and grow back. Healthy forests (not poorly-managed monoculture) are carbon-neutral on human timescales.

It's the infrastructure required to create a pound of beef, including the farmed grains.

To state the obvious, it's not about taking away the right to eat red meat, right? It's about trying to convince people to adopt a diet that is:

- healthier

- tasty

- cheaper

- a small contribution to keeping the planet livable for their children

- as a sign of respect for $DEITY/the planet/...

Many people will see some sense in at least one of the above arguments at one point in life.

On the ecological point, the difference is whether the grassland would naturally support that number of bison. Or if bison (or cows) are continually being grown, killed, grown killed at industrial scale beyond the normal bison lifecycle. With many carbon inputs (fossil-fuel based fertilizer, etc) and production costs (slaughtering, transport, etc).

Wild bison live 15-20 years.

Cattle raised for beef ~18 months.

That's beyond the natural carbon cycle an existing ruminant population.

Also horses, in my reading of the data, actually have less of a methane impact. They have a different digestive system entirely.

On the methane point, methane, yes, is a greenhouse gas that breaks down over years (~12 years). But has far worse impact on climate while its in the atmosphere.

It’s completely made up. All meat is carbon neutral because animals don’t produce carbon atoms from nothing. They get them from the plants they eat which in turn get their carbon from the atmosphere.

The carbon cycle is basic scientific fact yet confidently ignored by people who hate things like logging and meat.

Do whatever you want.

I'm just sharing my personal choices based on what I've learned.

What could be more American than that? :)

The problem is, you have to choose. Do you really think people can continue to eat meat 2-3 times a day, purely supplied by family farms where animals are able to roam free?

The reality is that the only way to feed people's insatiable demand for meat is to use factory farms. You can't factory farm without causing suffering to animals, and you can't factory farm without use of antibiotics, etc.

Also you say, 'evolved to eat'. Do you really think people were eating meat every day throughout human history? This started after WWII with mass agriculture and factory farming. That's why so many cultures have beans and rice as their primary dish: it's a perfectly balanced protein.

If 'evolved to eat' is your primary concern then actually you should be eating meat like once or twice a month, max. Evolution doesn't happen in less than a century.

Burgers don't drive cars.

People drive cars, and people eat burgers. Is that the context you were looking for?

We've identified two ways to reduce carbon production. 1) reduce production per human. 2) reduce humans.

Only the first one is being argued for here. Conflating it with the second is just a confusion.

Sorry but this is just such an ignorant comment. You really need to read up on how agriculture contributes to global warming and loss of land/deforestation. What do you think cows eat, air?

Nihilistic bullshit isn't the hot take you think it is. The problem isn't too many people. The planet couldn't handle billions more if we used resources correctly. Is your idea of "humans enjoying nature" extreme deforestation and water scarcety?

But you just read an argument, and then completely ignored it, instead started brining up other aspects of red meat.

That most red meat is very co2 expensive compared to getting the proteins from other sources is a relevant argument for many of us, and not a particularly 'strange obsession' for those of us caring about reducing our co2 footprint.

>Agricultural reform or innovation is certainly an avenue to explore; but this strange obsession with "stop eating red meat" is a bit too much.

Most of the people pushing it are doing so because they believe it's immoral to eat meat, so they'll latch onto whatever excuse they can to try to stop people.

Discussion about nuclear reactors aside, energy in germany became expensive when they cut off russian gas and they had no good alternative. There was no other source of cheap fossil fuels for electricity production. If anything, renewables are promoted as a solution to that energy problem.

The discussion about fossil fuels vs renewables is a bit different within countries which produce fossil fuels than within those that don't.

You make it sound like there is a causality here. I would be careful. German GDP is declining for other reasons, not for their commitment to renwables. Also, by all measures, living in Germany still means you get one of the most comfortable, secure and free lives on earth. I wouldn't give up on Germany so fast. They still know how to work and often work, even if there is no reason to work (i.e looking at their current regulations, which rather motivate you to _not_ work).

Looks stable:

https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/industrial-production-m...

Of course, stable is probably bad here. But it's not declining.

More often that not I think this is a cheap excuse. When you look at struggling companies (take the car industry for example), I think the issue is more about missing innovation and building things that people don't want or can't afford anymore in Germany.

U.K. energy is expensive because it’s all based on the cost of gas.

Onshore wind and solar is about £40-50

Offshore wind about £60

Gas about £120

That’s generation cost, before subsidies and levees

But we still haven’t put in an emergency legislation to make it easier to build cheaper energy.

Hailing from Germany's eastern neighbor, where part of the industry went to and where energy is even more expensive, I call BS.

The main reason Germany was so hooked on gas wasn't because Hans Müller needed to run his Bosch washer-dryer and heat his home to a comfortable 24°C.

It was because natural gas is an great source of hydrogen, which in turn serves as feedstock for the production of all kinds of chemicals used in industry.

That was the engine of Germany's industry, not just energy. Energy has a whole spectrum of solutions - not the case with hydrogen.

Do you know of any major German industry for which energy costs amounts to even 10% of the labor costs? It's a rhetorical question intended to engage the common sense pathways of your cognitive system.

i am pretty sure its not energy that domaines the move. eg skoda is now way more profitable than rest of VW. The cost of employment is way higher in DE..

> But so is German industry - every day in the news either insolvency or workforce reduction and moving production to Eastern Europe - main reason often stated "expensive Energy". I wonder what are the stats for industrial production in 2025 or total energy consumption in Germany?

Every First World country seems to be following the path from industrialisation, through deindustrialisation (which, when I was at school, was still called ‘structural change’), to a service-based society. It seems to be the price we pay for economic prosperity and cheap goods - and it is not the first time in Germany this happens.

There’s nothing wrong with creative destruction

Heat is really useful if the energy form you want is heat. If you want electricity or motion it's not the best.

"What, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you, excuse me, I have not the time to listen to such nonsense." (Napoleon Bonapart ~1800)

That depends on what you need energy for. Converting heat energy stored during the day to heat my house at night is easy. Converting heat energy stored into light is much harder (as the other reply stated, it needs high heat and thus is a fire hazard)

It's inefficient, but still better than completely losing out on it. Better yet would be direct reuse or remote heating.

Heat can't be converted losslessly to useful energy, but converting to heat to other forms of energy is extremely common. What do you think a steam turbine, boiler, internal combustion engine, etc. do?

"Low grade heat", less than the boiling point of water (often), can be stored in a sand system and recovered efficiently and distributed later.

But low grade heat cannot efficiently drive a heat engine to produce other, more useful and transferable versions of energy, like electricity. For that you need "high grade" heat.

The reason is, heat engines do not operate on heat. They operate on heat flow. You must have a high temperature side and a low temperature side, and you extract energy by taking heat out of the high side and injecting it to the low side, through various processes. By thermodynamics, this process has hard efficiency limits of around 35%, with that efficiency heavily affected by the delta between the hot and cold side.

The "low" heat side is often a great source of low grade heat, for industrial or communal purposes, but cannot be used to run an efficient heat engine. It's already "used up" essentially.

A lot of energy generation is just "produce heat, boil water, steam moves a turbine

So in that regard heat is very useful in producing energy. But converting directly from heat to energy? Not so much as far as I know.

Nuclear reactors do exactly that

Yes. This is sometimes called "Carnot tax".

The efficiency of any heat engine is bounded by the Carnot cycle. In simplified form, it depends on the temperature differential between the cold and the hot parts. So if your hot part is at 300C (572 Kelvin), and the cold part is at 30C (300 Kelvin) then the absolutely best possible efficiency is around (572-300)/572*100% = 47%.

You see that it quickly becomes inefficient as the differential goes down. E.g. if you use 90C to store the heat, then the maximum efficiency is just 17%.

Use it directly, see my silbling comment.

Was this electric or direct water heating?

Europe doesn't produce any fossil fuels?

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

Even if the entire Germany stopped existing overnight, this would barely make a dent in global carbon emissions and planet destruction rate.

The other thing that massive synchronous machines provide is fault current handling. A turbine hall can eat 10x rated current for several cycles. Semiconductor junctions cannot tolerate anything remotely close to this.

That is very much a it depends. The best combined cycle power plants get around 60% efficient. The gas engine in your car is in the ideal case around 45% efficient - but the way you drive in the real world is only about 20-30% efficient.

Indeed. That exponential has renewables being ~100% of electricity in the early to mid 2030s, and approximately ~100% of all power in the late 2030s to early 2040s even without the efficiency improvement from direct electricity use.

> only ~20-30% of the energy in the fuel turns into useful work, while electricity is much, much more efficient. So, we need much less of it.

Isn't a lot of energy used for heating, not work?

They account for this.

> Primary energy is based on the substitution method and measured in terawatt-hours.

(Meta: I understand some folks aren't a fan of nuclear. I disagree, but recognize people have different values and weighing of priorities. But I just find it fucking stupid that coal was left to keep running by people who claim that climate change is a priority. Certainly a discussion can be had about pros/cons of new nuclear, but why the fuck would you prioritize closing current nuclear over coal?)

The Greens were not in Office when the nuclear exit was decided 2011.

The Greens actually prolonged their life time during Covid, after RWE, EON and EnBW argued that it does not make sense economically to let them run longer.

No insurer wanted to insure nuclear, and no energy company wanted to keep losing money on nuclear.

Since nuclear is the most expensive form of energy generation, it makes sense to switch it off first.

And Europe would be in even bigger black-out trouble right now as half of those 20 GW of nuclear power would not be running due to missing cooling water, just like is the case in the other European countries.

The german green part certainly isn't perfect, but they had a plan. A plan that included far more renewable energies than currently build. The ones that orchestrated the ultimate end of nuclear energy while shutting down build up of renewables are the conservatives. Blaming someone for a half executed plan is childish. Especially when it is from a party that supposedly had economic competence yet killed tens of thousands of jobs.

They could have done all this without dismantling nuclear power and emitting more carbon than they otherwise would have.