Comment on Save the planet, hold your breath
sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip 2 weeks agoThey’re omitting the fact, that a lot of the biomass we’re eating comes from farming. Those plants that collect carbon dioxide from the atmosphere use a lot of synthetic fertilizers to grow, which itself uses A LOT of fossil energy to be produced.
The CO2 emissions per calorie of food varies almost 3 whole orders of magnitude between different food types:
ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore
At the same time, our CO2 exhalation is about the same per calorie of food, regardless of source. So it’s more fair to describe our baseline biological needs and bodily functions separately from our economic consumption of the products we prefer to consume (food or otherwise).
So I still think the focus on the raw calorie count of our consumption (and the accompanying CO2 exhalation) obscures, rather than explains, how our food consumption contributes to climate change.
SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
I agree with everything you’re saying.
I think it should have been clear from my text, that imho the issue lies in food production rather than food consumption and that what kinds of food you’re eating and how it was produced is the part of this issue, that you have some control over. I mean, consumers can’t buy what “the market^TM^” don’t offer and yadda yadda yadda, but at least you can do more about it than about the fact, that you need to breathe at all. (Apart from drastic measures, that I neither expect nor recommend)