A Surprise Contributor to Climate Change? Food Waste (theguardian.com) 178
The Guardian writes:
About a third of all the world's food goes to waste, and producing, transporting and letting that food rot releases 8-10% of global greenhouse gases. If food waste were a country, it would have the third-biggest carbon footprint after the U.S. and China...
Food waste fell sharply last year during lockdown as people stuck at home began to use leftovers, plan meals and freeze food rather than throw it away. Once lockdown ended, however, food waste rose again.
Their conclusion? "Cutting food waste can help the climate."
Food waste fell sharply last year during lockdown as people stuck at home began to use leftovers, plan meals and freeze food rather than throw it away. Once lockdown ended, however, food waste rose again.
Their conclusion? "Cutting food waste can help the climate."
Food waste is the price of convenience. (Score:2)
In order for people not at home to eat, someone else has to cook for them. This takes time, and rather than wait, most people at lunch would rather get something that is already prepared or half-prepared so they're not 2/3 of the way through lunch before they even get their food. This, in turn, requires guesswork on the part of the proprietors preparing and vending that food and sometimes they're going to guess wrong. Or it's more profitable to throw food away at the end of the night than to turn away custo
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Or it's more profitable to throw food away at the end of the night than to turn away customers at the end of the night.
They could give the food away to the homeless at the end of the night, reducing their need to steal or panhandle to eat, and also somewhat reducing the amount of prepackaged foods they consume.
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You'd think so, but it took a public outcry for something like this to take off.
A while ago, a national supermarket chain got a HUGE load of bad press for the practice of dumping bleach all over "waste" produce to discourage bums from digging through their dumpsters for something edible. So they started a PR campaign where they now cooperate with the local homeless kitchens, they deliver the leftovers and stuff they can't sell anymore.
I have it on good authority that it's SO much that they can't even use it
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I have it on good authority that it's SO much that they can't even use it all before it rots away.
I hope they're composting the rest, even the meat can be composted with some special enzymes etc. That's something that society needs to get more on top of. High-tech composting has lower emissions and happens faster.
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I think they hand it over to a "retirement" home for aging animals nobody wants anymore where they may live out their last days instead of being sent to some kind of knacker.
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I hope they're composting the rest,
You do realize that mostly food does that anyway over time.
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Bullshit, we never throw food away at home, I will go out of way to eat over date stuff to avoid waste.
This whole "we throw away X percentage of food every year" is yet another one of those things to make the *consumer* feel guilty while in reality it is the industry that is doing most of the wasting. Just like they do most of the polluting, so no surprise there.
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So you base your argument on anecdotal evidence?
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You are just an idiot.
Certainly a high percentage of people throw away food.
However the majourity is thrown away: right at the supermarket.
Supermarket throw aways, is about 40% of the food produced in the world.
"Food Waste" / "Article Waste" / "big surprise" (Score:3)
Ok I will iterate because the Guardian article cannot be really called article more like "burp" - that's not a big surprise.
0.) Its greenhouse gases plural, CO2 is one greenhouse gas but makes up the majority by mass of all, however there is also CH4 (methane) that per weight unit has a higher greenhouse factor than CO2, furthermore is R-134a (AC-gas), N2O (laughing gas), and so on ..
1.) You produce food
agriculture -> needs -> fertilizer
Fertilizers are from
- minerals (mining) -> mining needs energy
- nitrogen synthetesis based (you need energy = CO2 to produce them)
- direct use: organic/poop/pee -> which contain CH4 and still active bacteria that produce CH4
livestock -> needs -> food from agriculture (soy, wheat, corn)
Feeding livestock food produced by agriculture will put the CO2-footprint for the fertilizer onto the meat
PLUS livestock especially cows produce methane during digestion
Also plants have a higher efficiency in contrast to livestock (this is the reasoning behind -> eat "less" meat to help the climate)
2.) you dump food / food residue
If it's old and has mold you dump it.
This dumped food (residue) is often dumped untreated into landfills where the organic residue is converted by bacteria to methane which escapes the landfill into the atmosphere (older landfills can be covered by plastic foil, but )
Or the food residue is heat treated (burned) then you need to supply extra fuel (currently carbon based) to remove/convert any organic compounds that can be used by bacteria to produce methane
Sounds strange spent fuel and release CO2 to minimize methane production? -> No, it is just a trade off, because methane as mentioned above has a much higher greenhouse factor.
3.) You transport food
If you would waste less food, less food would be transported and less food transported would reduce the amount of CO2 released by transport. (Eat less, stay thin)
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All a fallacy, the things die and rot in the biosphere anyway, and that overshadows by far the amount of "food" rotting, it's a rounding error.
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I think the point is that if you didn't need to produce 30% of our current food in the first place, then we reduce the scope 2 emissions (fossil fuels required to transport it, etc) by 30%
I don't think it's so much the CO2 of the food itself when it decomposes because that's already in the carbon cycle.
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Oh sure, I'll agree man has screwed up biosphere, even so rotting food is nothing compared to natural rotting. Things die and rot, so it is on Earth.
Compost? (Score:3)
I realise the CO2 in food is mainly from its production - throwing it away doesn't suddenly release all that CO2. However, I wonder what effect composting has on all of this? Disposing of food waste to make compost (or at least, to enrich existing soil in some way) is presumably better than putting it in landfill (where, deprived of oxygen it tends to produce all sorts of hellish gasses, not least methane). The other point of course is that if your food waste is collected by your local refuse people, then they have to drive diesel guzzling heavy machinery to do it - so compost at home if you can (I just got a hot compost bin to try this out).
Of course the ideal is that we don't throw it away in the first place, which I get - I'm just wondering what's best to do with the carrot tops and eggshells...?
Which is a curious irony (Score:2)
"About a third of all the world's food goes to waste"
Which is funny (sad) because while about 9% of the world's population are ACTUALLY starving, it's estimated that ALSO about 1/3 are nutritionally deficient (ie that 'other 24% on top of the actually starving' are getting food, just shitty food that's making them unhealthy*),
*this is people who /don't have a choice/. Fatties in the western world who preferentially live on Doritos and Mountain Dew aren't counted.
Starvation (Re:Which is a curious irony) (Score:2)
The problems with starvation around the world comes from shit-hole nations with corrupt and/or incompetent governments. Western nations are typically quite generous with gifts of food, fuel, and medicine but corrupt governments will leave the food to rot or sell it off elsewhere. If it is not corruption then it is incompetence, where people come to government positions not by merit but to give jobs to the inept as political favors.
We are seeing this happen in South Africa where productive farms are being
Future headline (Score:2)
News at 11.
Waste? (Score:2)
Won't someone please think of the bears [gannett-cdn.com].
Fuck all the Band Aid fixes (Score:2)
A distraction. (Score:2)
If we're being honest, this is merely a distraction away from the sectors that are known to be massive contributors of GHGs. Not that it matters because we are f, u, c, k, FUCKED.
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Not that it matters because we are f, u, c, k, FUCKED.
Or we could use nuclear to de-carbonize the grid and produce fuel to replace extracted fossil fuels. Or did you believe that solar panels would power your car and that would be more efficient in terms of extracted resources?
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You misunderstand because it's way too late for any of that.
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Industrial plants have made Z E R O changes to reduce the amount of CO2 they emit. The changes in power generation are minimal and mostly still pollute. It's game set and match and humanity lost.
This is idiotic petroleum corporation FUD. (Score:5, Informative)
Rotting food may generate CO2 as part of its biological process. But one needs to realize that biological activity covers the planet. You're not going to regulate plant growth or food production in order to lower CO2 levels; they're part of the O2/CO2 equilibrium of the surface of the planet.
What causes CO2 global warming is the extraction of carbon from the ground (called petroleum/nat gas) and converting it to CO2 that gets released in the air; a manmade transfer of carbon sequestered deep into the earth into our atmosphere. At *best*, reducing food waste will depress the agriculture industry to produce less food "destined" to be wasted, which would mean less petroleum extracted & converted to nitrogen fertilizer.
If you want to avoid global catastrophe caused by the CO2 production of our civilization, the most effective means to accomplish this is to remove combustion engines from the the global economy, by replacing it with electricity based devices, and doing everything possible to generate electricity without using petroleum. That's solar, wind, geothermal, and yes, properly implemented and managed nuclear power.
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"For every 12 calories we put into the food system, we only deliver 1 calorie for human nutrition" -- ARPA [energy.gov], with sources within.
Most food energy comes from fossil fuels, not sunshine, so food waste causes drilling and burning more fossil fuels. It doesn't have to be this way, and before the Green Revolution, it wasn't, but it is now.
As for your ways to reduce CO2 emissions, you suggested replacing combustion engines' electricity but not simply reducing the need. Not wasting food and regenerative agriculture
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As for your ways to reduce CO2 emissions... turning off the a/c when not home
In all seriousness this is probably false, at least for a typical day. If you turn your AC off during the day then turn it back on when you get home, it's pulling a huge amount of energy to extract all that heat in your house right as everyone else is also pulling more energy. That energy is almost certainly being produced with fossil fuels, even in areas with high renewables penetration like California. In fact it's even worse because those peaking fossil units are even less efficient than baseload unit
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The problem is not the "rotting food". That is a zero sum game.
The problem is the fuel and energy invested producing that food ... that all could be saved if we would:
a) produce less food
b) transport less food
c) -> not throw away the surplus food
The surplus food could even be used to feed lifestock: bit it is not.
(Obviously it makes no sense to realize as super market manager in the evening: Woh, this is spoiled (out of date) I have to throw it away", and then try to ship it into a famine zone)
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You're not going to regulate plant growth or food production in order to lower CO2 levels; they're part of the O2/CO2 equilibrium of the surface of the planet.
The only thing that is going to slow down the increase of global temperature is a significant, if not radical reduction of CO2 production. We're at the point where the world needs to ban the use of coal. (Good luck getting China to go along with that.)
Nipping at the edges with greater efficiency in food production will not help avert the catastrophe!!!
Stop trying to advance idiotic notions concocted by petroleum companies (and/or science funding bureaucracy) to avoid the real solution!
Hydro, geothermal, and nuclear fission. (Score:2)
Nations with the lowest per capita CO2 emissions get a large portion of their energy from one of three energy sources. Those are hydroelectric dams, geothermal power, and nuclear fission. What is great about these technologies is that not only are they low in CO2 emissions but also reliable, low tech, and therefore low in cost.
Lowering CO2 emissions from lighting can come from switching from incandescent to LED lighting but a far greater gain can be had in fixing where the electricity comes from. When it
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Nations with the lowest per capita CO2 emissions get a large portion of their energy from one of three energy sources. Those are hydroelectric dams, geothermal power, and nuclear fission.
Simply: nope, to all three.
Find me a country that uses "geothermal power" to create electricity. Oh, you found one? Good. That was easy. Now: find me a second one? Oh ... waiting ...
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How do you respond to people asking you to back your claims? Oh, I remember, "Google it". So, until you start answering people's questions with anything other than "Google it" you can assume that's my reply to any request from you that I back up my claims. If someone else asks then I'll respond to them.
It appears you are following me around asking me to back up my claims, tossing insults, saying I'm wrong and providing no counter evidence. Not only that but you are the ONLY person doubting my claims. S
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You make claims all the time about this and that.
And you are usually so wrong, that it is pretty clear you never researched/googled anything regarding such claims.
So: learn to google.
Or alternatively (that would be preferred): get an education.
I'm pretty sure... (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure that if all the articles about climate change were not written, the amount of CO_2 being blown into the atmosphere would drop by 50% due just to that.
Closed restaurants (Score:2)
Food waste fell sharply last year during lockdown
When there was much less eating out. Either because establishments were outright closed or because the numbers of eaters was reduced due to distancing requirements and reduced seating capacity. While some of that would be cancelled by people buying and eating more at home, that shift isn't quantified. Neither is there information about whether the total amount of food produced changed: up or down.
Rather than just saying one-third of the world's food is wasted, it would be helpful to know how this is class
sources of greenhouse gas - (Score:2)
09% Waste food, per this article; 1/3 of all food
18% Unwasted food. Total food = 27% of greenhouse gas.
OK, that's a start. It does seem odd that food alone is such a large contributor to this massive worldwide problem. Where would the other 73% come from?
42% Power generation worldwide.
16% Cattle, other gassy animals
18% Commercial ocean vessels
But hey, wait a minute! We're already over 100% and there are plenty of categories left to consider as sources of evil pollutants.
15% Commercial trucking
12% Ai
Restaurants should cut down portion sizes (Score:2)
Of course, why would restaurants reduce portion sizes, when they can keep them large and charge higher prices?
Re:Seems like a stupid argument to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
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You are right but consider, those fertilizers allow farmers to use between 1/10th and 1/100th the land to grow the same amount of food. Eliminating those techniques moves the resource usage from oil to land (which is also in short supply). Also, most land isn't suitable for growing crops. There are bands at certain latitudes that grow most of the food. There are several "bread baskets" around the world: France, Ukraine, Great Plains (US), southeastern China and not surprisingly the largest populations w
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those fertilizers allow farmers to use between 1/10th and 1/100th the land to grow the same amount of food.
That is nonsense. It allows them to grow food, that would not grow there otherwise. And perhaps increases yield by 1/3rd or 1/2 and: thats it.
How can you come to such an idiotic idea?
Europe's major wars all occurred when the population grew beyond what the land could produce
That is completely wrong.
and most of the world wastes very little food.
Food waste is the biggest in the industrialized west. Not
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and water is a much stronger greenhouse gas than methane.
[Citation needed]
In any case, water in atmosphere is self-limiting. If you attempt to put more in it, it will condense out rather rapidly (and the condensed form even reflects sunlight efficiently). This is not the case with methane; you can emit as much of it as you want and it will stay in the atmosphere for quite some time.
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and water is a much stronger greenhouse gas than methane.
[Citation needed]
Citation provided - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .
36 to 70 percent percent of greenhouse warming provided by water vapor.
Side journey - one of the fundamentalist young earth biblical flood hypotheses was an attempt to explain how enough water to cover the entire earth to allow for no landmass to be exposed was that all of that water was stored in the atmosphere.
Even the people promoting that hypothesis ended up agreeing that we'dbecome Venus for a while.
Today of course, fundamentalists are n
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one of the fundamentalist young earth biblical flood hypotheses was an attempt to explain how enough water to cover the entire earth to allow for no landmass to be exposed was that all of that water was stored in the atmosphere.
Even if the whole atmosphere were pure water vapor, it would be a 10m layer of water.
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Yes, and there's like 12000 times as much water vapor in the atmosphere than there is methane. So the fact that the 25000 ppm of water vapor cause 36-70% of the warming while the comparatively puny 2 ppm of methane cause 4-9% of the warming mean that methane is a much stronger GHG than water vapor.
Not my argument - Water vapor has a certain percentage of the warming. It does cycle much quicker - something like 9 days.
And here in the ready to flood east, it's sad we can't send some of our rain out to our western friends. I just finished watching people escaping through fires in Northern Nevada. What a shame -
one of the fundamentalist young earth biblical flood hypotheses was an attempt to explain how enough water to cover the entire earth to allow for no landmass to be exposed was that all of that water was stored in the atmosphere.
Even if the whole atmosphere were pure water vapor, it would be a 10m layer of water.
Aha! Yes - Okay - I see you do know what you are doing here. Yes, the people who proposed that pretty quickly admitted it wasn't possible.
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state secrets there. But I can do protip, it doesn't need to be the whole earth, just a sea that quickly came into existence. Flood "myths' are common enough that you would be foolish to believe there is not at least some truth in them, its just that like the massive cities in the Amazon jungle until recently, its not been made public yet.
It's the problem of Fundamentalists, who claim that every word in their book is the exact words of their god, as revealed to man. Interestingly until the early mid 20th century, most of those tales were regarded as allegory. In the flood's case, yes - it was considered a great local flood, not as their book notes that the entire earth was covered past the tallest peaks - but fundies allow for no other interpretation. Being raised by strict Catholic parents with even stricter fundamentalist grandparents, I h
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->It's the problem of Fundamentalists, who claim that every word in their book is the exact words of their god,
yuck. which branch of christianity is that. Im only familiar with Judiasm, Catholic, protestants and orthodox, and they all teach the bible is a symbolic record of events. e.g. God saying "let there be light" would today be written as "god created the big bang".
Catholics seem to interpret it the best, they have (at least) three meanings for every passage.
The Evangelicals tend toward Each wors is the exact word of God as given to man.
King James translation only.
And with heavy focus on the old Testament. I love watching them twitch while I read the Beatitudes - presumably words direct from God himself sans any possible translation by ancient desert dwellers.
Modern fundamentalists would crucify Jesus all over again, because they would call him a commie.
And they would love to attack the neighboring village, kill the all the men and women except for
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->The Evangelicals tend toward Each wors is the exact word of God as given to man.
Well, thats just bonkers when 90% of the bible is little more than a few ancient autobiographies told as folk tales and translated through (at least) three modern languages and likely a few pre ice age ones as well.
My favourite of which is the common mistranslation of "thou shalt not murder" into "thou shalt not kill"
King James bible cant even get the abbreviated version of the commandments right (Moses was given some 300+ to live by, Jesus and his followers shortened it to 10 throwing out the broken ones like "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth")
There is a bit of wisdom in saying that the old Testament should be read in Hebrew.
There is also a school of thought that says that the whole Old Testament was a way of forging a civilization from a bunch of rowdys, and not much is really relevant to people who have become civilized. Various restrictions were more about getting people to behave themselves, and not many civilized groups would stone women to death for infidelity, or for not being virgins when they married these days, or marrying your broth
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Why do you not simply save us all those posts and simply google which one he stronger is?
It is not that hard ...
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You are aware of an acceleration factor coming from warmer climate and higher water vapor content in the atmosphere?
And I hope you are aware that you have a problem with cause and effect.
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dude we can barely even track the temperature of a room accurately today
Fortunately measuring the average temperature on larger scale is easier than measuring instantaneous temperature at a smaller scale - the errors decrease inversely proportionally with the square root of the number of measurements.
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Re: Seems like a stupid argument to me. (Score:5, Informative)
Technically yes, but water's half life in the atmosphere is much shorter (on the order of hours or days) and it can't be a driver of long term climate change. It can be a multiplier of the effect of less potent greenhouse gases.
Climate scientists are not stupid. The effect of water vapor has been a key element of climate models from the start. Climate scientists initially rejected Arrhenius's idea of a CO2 driven greenhouse effect because it was believed at the time that CO2 and water vapor had the same absorption spectrum. When more precise spectrum measurements showed that to be false, the very first thing they looked at is could this have any effect given that water was both common and a potent short term greenhouse gas.
Climate change is not a question of being pro- or anti-human. It's a scientific question. The *policy* question is whether ignoring facts we'd rather not be true is better than considering them. It certainly feels better in the short term, but that doesn't make it better for humanity.
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and water is a much stronger greenhouse gas than methane.
I honestly can't tell is this post is clueless, a troll, irony, deliberate disinformation, or is intended as an example of "a stupid argument" mentioned in the comment subject .
Yes, water is a greenhouse gas. But oceans full of water are exposed to the atmosphere continously; it's not a greenhouse gas that humans are significantly adding to the atmosphere. And it equilibrates out of the atmosphere on a time scale of hours to days-- we call this "rain".
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The idea was that getting people to stop drinking would solve climate change faster than getting them to stop eating.
Indeed, that is a stupid idea.
What you didn't make clear is whether you posted that because you were stupid, or because you were showing it as an example of a stupid idea.
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You can recognize humans' negative impact on the planet without being antihuman.
I'm antiunsustainablebehavior.
Frankly I suspect the planet could support a lot more humans, but only if we practiced sustainable agriculture, and it's hard to do that in our modern system. A lot of pharmaceuticals can for example survive composting of poop, which in surprisingly short order can turn crap into soil. So even a sewage sludge recovery system can actually be causing problems.
Re: Seems like a stupid argument to me. (Score:3)
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Before the plague, europe had reached its population max for sustainability. Ever scrap of land was dedicated to growing basic sustenance to support the population.
That is nonsense. I really wonder who teaches such bullshit in school, or where/how you picked up that nonsense.
During the plague(s) literally 90% of Europe was: woods. Call it "European jungle" if you want.
Food problems had two reasons:
a) miss harvests
b) trade barriers (it is not funny to carry food 100km when you have to cross 5 borders and ge
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Either you believe antihumanists have a right to stop humans' negative impact on the planet without being antihuman or you dont.
Mu
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Antihumanists are the people characterised by Agent Smith in the Matrix.
People who believe human beings are a cancer of the planet. Mostly follow the work of Thomas Robert Malthus, fund eugenics programs like planned parent hood and forced sterilisations of people the deem particularly unworthy.
Lot of them in the US after the mass immigration from Germany after WWII.
You made a pretty big strawman there.
One does not be all of those things to say, understand Malthus. The idea that Malthus was wrong once, therefore he will always be wrong, shared by so many is their version of the cold hand fallacy. And those who I have pressed on the issue go into ancient aliens ideas, where humans somehow become creatures of pure energy to support their ideas.
Eugenics? forced sterilization? No need at all, a waste of energy because Nature will take of the human issue all by itself.
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The idea that Malthus was wrong once, therefore he will always be wrong,
Ah the falling sky fallacy. Maybe you will be right at some point but since you have a 0% accuracy so far, I'm going to go with no. Why do we teach ideas from the 18th and 19th century in liberal arts still? They have a track record on par with religion.
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The idea that Malthus was wrong once, therefore he will always be wrong,
Ah the falling sky fallacy. Maybe you will be right at some point but since you have a 0% accuracy so far, I'm going to go with no. Why do we teach ideas from the 18th and 19th century in liberal arts still? They have a track record on par with religion.
The irony is that I was posting what other people have claimed to me which is their using the "Hot Hand Fallacy".
And never said one thing or another about the sky is falling.
This is pretty simple. If the earth has infinite capacity to sustain humans, Malthus will have been proven completely wrong, There is no limit to either the ability to provide sustenance, therefore there is no limit to population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
His argument was that abundance cannot be sustained forever.
Where
Re:Seems like a stupid argument to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you talking about? Food waste means excessive food production. Which means CO2 (from cow's farts, to oil burned transporting, to plastics and energy packaging and waste disposal).
We should at least manage restaurant and supermarket food waste better, not just to reduce CO2, but to help people in need. At least in developed countries nobody should be dumpster diving.
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I agree with you on principle but I believe there's real legal and health issues involved with giving the needy unfinished food that someone else touched. You mentioned restaurants specifically, they usually only cook what's directly given to someone so other than that their only waste would be barely edible (and uncooked) cuttings or spoiled stock. They might be more useful for biofuel than the homeless.
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You mentioned restaurants specifically, they usually only cook what's directly given to someone so other than that their only waste would be barely edible (and uncooked) cuttings or spoiled stock. They might be more useful for biofuel than the homeless.
I said restaurants and supermarkets. From what I know, many restaurants have several dishes that are not cooked to order, friends working in various restaurants do normally take leftovers home. It may not be true if we are talking about a specific type or restaurant, e.g. a Chinese take-away where most dishes are done in reasonable time in a wok (with some pre-cooking for some ingredients), but various types of dishes that take hours to cook are prepared once per day (or two days). Since I mentioned Chinese
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What are you talking about? Food waste means excessive food production.
Uh, not quite that simple.
The main complaint here seems to center around the production and transport of food that spoils.
You assuming that spoilage isn't calculated into the demand, is exactly that; an assumption. "Excessive" food production is defined as food that was never needed anyway. From mass producers to small grocery stores, anyone and everyone who manages produce products knows you have to calculate for waste; you don't order exactly what you need. You order what you need, plus XX% more to ac
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Uh, not quite that simple.
The main complaint here seems to center around the production and transport of food that spoils.
You assuming that spoilage isn't calculated into the demand, is exactly that; an assumption. "Excessive" food production is defined as food that was never needed anyway. From mass producers to small grocery stores, anyone and everyone who manages produce products knows you have to calculate for waste; you don't order exactly what you need. You order what you need, plus XX% more to account for expected losses.
Not sure why you are discussing the semantics of the word "excess". You are saying pretty much the same thing. Significant "food waste" means we could have produced, packaged, transported, disposed of etc less food, while managing to feed the same people. In fact, I recognise that it is much harder to estimate/manage better and produce less waste in the first place, hence why I was focusing on putting some of that waste to good use.
And in America, you can thank the greedy legal system for that. A restaurant providing food is essentially liable for that, in every manner that they serve it.
Well, yeah, depending on the country it might be easier or harder to do thin
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What are you talking about? Food waste means excessive food production. Which means CO2 (from cow's farts, to oil burned transporting, to plastics and energy packaging and waste disposal).
Any excess CO2 in food production comes from re-release of one time sequestered CO2 or methane.
So unless we're munching on coal chips covered with petro oil, it's pretty much null, because we're just releasing carbon that the food took up.
There is no transmutation of elements - we do not create nor destroy the Carbon. We simply eat - or waste carbon that has been temporarily incorporated into the vegetable matter.
Same with cows - that whole thing is a vegan excuse. Cows fart, humans fart. But the who
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There is no transmutation of elements, nobody said that, it is chemical reactions at issue.
The popular idea that that Carbon somehow suddenly appears out of nowhere - we might as well call it transmutation.
PCarbon is fine when it stays in soil, in grass, in petroleum. It, however, becomes a greenhouse gas when cows eat grass (not CO2 in that case, but CH4 which is worse), or when trucks burn petroleum. Yes, there is a natural process too, we are just adding to it (and excess food production is a part). You seem to be the one misunderstanding how the carbon cycle works.
Carbon must be sequestered if it isn't to get into the atmosphere. And just Carbon in dirt isn't going to do that - Oxygen will oxidize any carbon it gets areound that is not buried in places too deep for the oxygen to get to, and it is in the layers of soil that plants grow from.
https://www.scielo.cl/scielo.p... [scielo.cl]
But AC - I always enjoy when I'm taught - Tell me exactly what I am missing
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we might as well call it transmutation.
Because that's what you call it when you change one element to another; this requires neutron flux or something else nuclear.
Carbon must be sequestered if it isn't to get into the atmosphere
This is sort of correct. You are missing that carbon will leave the atmosphere with a 20 year half-live into outer space. The real amount to look at is the extra carbon coming from under the ground. All other sources are pretty much moot. Which is why focusing on anything other than energy is foolish and a distraction by people who don't understand science (but they often work in
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The reason food waste is adding CO2:
1. Supermarkets carrying more than they can sell and disposing of it instead of discounting it or sending it to homeless shelters
2. Farms dispose of "unsellable" food, mass-production of certain foods, just dispose of it instead of trying to sell it.
3. Certain foods spoil on the shelf and are "unsellable"
4. Certain foods spoil in the fridge, and are unsellable.
5. Certain foods spoil in the freezer and are unsellable.
The irony is that all of those points can be solved usin
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Delivering with smaller vehicles (mopeds and motorcycles) also reduces the logistics issues with small orders. It doesn't solve everything, but it might be a piece of the puzzle. Driverless vehicles might be another piece. The government would need to want to make shipping more efficient before it happens. Otherwise it's too big of a project.
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It's a good thing logistics is free and doesn't produce CO2, otherwise it would have been far smarter to concentrate all the groceries somewhere, like a traditional market except more compact and with a better selection, so that people can go get what they need when they need it.
Re:Seems like a lazy reader to me. (Score:2)
I realise that reading the entire first line of a summary may seem like an insurmountable hurdle, but were you to some day accomplish that monumental feat, you would find that it mentions production and transport, first even, right there starting at word no. 13.
And, yes, rotting food does contribute to warming too, because the methane produced is a much more potent greenhouse gas than the CO2 the carbon came from.
Re:Seems like a stupid argument to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
Much of the CO2 emitted when producing and selling food is from fossil fuels. The factory might use gas for cooking, and uses electricity. Transport from the factory to the shop is likely to be using fossil fuels. If it's frozen or chilled the cooling will use electricity. Then you have the packaging which is likely to be made of oil products.
When disposed of it will need transporting again, and might be burned (using gas).
Re: Seems like a stupid argument to me. (Score:2)
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It says "producing, transporting and letting that food rot", implying that all three are part of the process it is giving figures for.
Re: Seems like a stupid argument to me. (Score:2)
Re: Seems like a stupid argument to me. (Score:2)
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Ok, so I'm undoing moderation to ask this, because to me, it feels like the elephant in the room, yet nobody. ever. talks about it.
If food (relevant) emissions are essentially industrial emissions, shouldn't we focus on fixing that problem instead? Making agriculture less dependent on fossils fuels?
Anything else to me feels like a dishonest argument. Like someone is trying to cheat their way out of doing their job and owning up tontgeirto their past mistakes.
And before I hear any "yes, but meanwhile..." arg
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Considering that you produce any plant based food, you need to sequester carbon rather than emit it, yes?
Re:Seems like a stupid argument to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that you produce any plant based food, you need to sequester carbon rather than emit it, yes?
If you look at "the big picture", the food itself part of the normal carbon cycle - plants absorb CO2, plants are eaten, animal releases CO2. That part should be neutral. However, we add a lot of carbon to the cycle in order to do this - gas to produce fertiliser, fossil fuels to handle production and transport.
To further complicate things, both the production (e.g. cattle) and the biodegration will produce methane, which is a much stronger greenhouse until it is broken down into CO2 and H2O.
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"It's not the food. It's the "big picture". Picture of which I zoom in a certain part of so that things that sequester carbon are out of the picture, and things that emit are in".
You didn't change OP's argument. You just zoomed in on a different part of the picture. The core argument "let's focus on one side of the equation and ignore the other" is still present.
Relevant: https://i.imgur.com/Izby8sN.jp... [imgur.com]
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"You stated that we're not paying attention to the other hand of the equation. I'm just going to continue ignoring that half of the equation and pretend that you said that there's something wrong with the side of the equation I'm focusing on".
I reject your false premise.
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"I will accuse you of the very thing I'm guilty of".
I reject your false accusation.
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Have you tried addressing what I actually said yet? Because at no point in any of your last three posts did you manage to address a point I actually made.
Because you're welcome to actually do so if you want meaningful engagement. But I'm not going to accept a premise of a lying asshole. And that is all you had to offer so far.
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Considering that you produce any plant based food, you need to sequester carbon rather than emit it, yes?
Yes, except I go to the store (in Europe) and they're selling lettuces from Peru and tomatoes from China.
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So lettuce in Peru and tomatoes in China grow on something different than photosynthesis?
P.S. Is this another US myth about Europe? I just came from the store a few hours ago, and as usual, tomatoes are from Spain and local (about 1 EUR price difference but I prefer local because they're tastier) and lettuce is local or from Spain/Italy during winter.
The rare things that we do import from South Africa is usually certain frozen meats and certain tropical fruit. The taxation regime on EU borders for food are
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The taxation regime on EU borders for food are so high that importing things we can grow domestically is overwhelmingly not a thing.
That is in general completely wrong.
For most countries there is no tax/import duties at all for food. However you pay import VAT, according to the country of final destination, e.g. German VAT if the food will be delivered to Germany, or French VAT if it is France.
There are some "penalty duties" e.g. for Rice from Cambodia and Malaysia (or was it Myanmar). Some stuff can not be
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>For most countries there is no tax/import duties at all for food. However you pay import VAT, according to the country of final destination, e.g. German VAT if the food will be delivered to Germany, or French VAT if it is France.
I'll add this hilariousness to "Germany controls wind, there are no winters below -20C in Northern Europe any more because of global warming" and other anti-reality nonsense you posted over the years. One of the biggest complaints that everyone outside ETA has for EU in pretty m
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No idea what you are talking about.
You can google "Germany controls wind"
You can google "how cold it is now usually in Scandinavia" NOW, and how "cold did it use to be in winter 50 years ago".
You can google "taxes, tariffs, import duties to the EU"
Perhaps it enlightens you, but you seem to have some mental problems.
What actually does "Germany controls wind" mean? I have no clue.
All simply google thinks. Or Bing it, or use DuckDuckGo or how it is called.
Good luck ...
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I'd ask you if you're ok, not knowing your own posting history. But having interacted with you over last two or so years on this site, I know the answer to that question.
I'll simply re-iterate my point from long ago that you should seek help for the severe mental problems you appear to be still suffering from.
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So, shouldn't we fix the chain of supply - you know, the actual f'ing problem - instead?
Re:Seems like a stupid argument to me. (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA says that about 1/3rd of all food globally is wasted, equating to around 8-10% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
So somewhere between 16% and 20% of all global emissions are for food that is consumed. A quick google says that checks out, with this article in Nature claiming 1/3 of all GHG emissions are for food.
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
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