Comments grussell has made

  • I agreed with everything you wrote here until about the middle of 2008, then I realised the nuclear industry isn't what it used to be. It hasn't stood still for 30 years. I spent some months reading and reevaluating. If you want to close down uranium mines and get rid of nuclear waste, then paradoxically, a nuclear technology may be the best option. IFR (Integral Fast Reactors) use nuclear waste as fuel and there is plenty to run them for a long time (hundreds of years for the entire planet). My conversion from a lifelong opposition to nuclear is described here: http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/04/30/rethinking-nuclear-power/ As for radiation risks from reactors. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9509 Further information on IFR is available here: http://bravenewclimate.com/integral-fast-reactor-ifr-nuclear-power/ http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/09/19/radiation-facts-fallacies-and-phobias/On Do we need nuclear and coal plants for baseload power? posted 2 weeks, 3 days ago 164 Responses
  • Barry Brook's blog "Brave New Climate" has been discussing energy issues intensively for quite some time. I would urge Grist readers to have a look. A series he is currently running is a useful leadin to the discussion. http://bravenewclimate.com/category/tcase-series/ Also relevant is: http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/08/16/solar-power-realities-supply-demand-storage-and-costs/On Do we need nuclear and coal plants for baseload power? posted 2 weeks, 4 days ago 164 Responses
  • Yep. The US ratio of cattle to people is about a third of what it is in Australia or Brazil. You have (in nice round numbers) 100 million cattle and 300 million people, Brazil has 200 million of each and Australia has 22 million people and 28 million cattle.On Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp posted 1 month ago 85 Responses
  • Correct. "Adult attained height" (and obesity) are causes of a few things. But you really need to read the detail, plus some of the studies to understand that this isn't just correlational, there are mechanisms (not entirely understood, but getting clearer) behind these causes. Most people intuitively understand why tall people get more back problems, but they also get more cancer, but the reasons are way more complex. Farmers should undertand this intuitively, breeding or feeding for maximum growth isn't the same as feeding and breeding for maximum health and longevity.On Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp posted 1 month ago 85 Responses
  • rogueintellect: I suggest you spend a couple of weeks reading the 500 pages of the WCRF report before deciding what it says. e.g., The report finds NO other foods (other than alchohol, if you count it as a food) for which there is convincing evidence of cancer causality. If you read the definition of what constitutes "convincing evidence" you will see that it requires a broad range of evidence at various levels. First is the epidemiology, measure what people eat, then wait and see who gets cancer. There are now studies from around the world and they all show that people who eat more red meat have higher rates of bowel cancer. In Australia, most of the local beef is grass fed and our Cancer Council estimates that full half of the 12,000 new cases each year are due to more than 1 serve of red meat per week (details in my book http://perfidy.com.au). You will be able to find plenty of 90 year old smokers if you look, but that doesn't prove smoking doesn't cause lung cancer. I mentioned the heme iron before, it is the causal factor which is best understood ... but there are multiple plausible causal mechanisms, but not all are well demonstrated in people. But the heme iron mechanism is pretty well nailed down. Feed a person red meat, collect their feces, examine the DNA in colon cells which can be isolated from the feces (this has taken a decade to work out how to do), and you find the same kind of damage you find in bowel cancer patients. In some people (lucky genes), the damage is fixed and doesn't proceed to full blown cancer, but in others it does. The damaged cell passes through various stages before being full blown cancer and the process takes a long time (10-20 years), this makes it tough to detect with epidemiology, but the evidence is now in and clear. Like I said, a broad range of evidence, from test-tube chemistry, through the ubiquitous rat studies, to clinical trials and epidemiology. It's all in, and the WCRF judges that there is so much evidence that the chances of any new study contradicting what's already in is slim, very slim. One of the most graphic and easily understood demonstrations is to look at bowel cancer rates after the Japanese added red meat to their diet. Two rising curves, separated by a couple of decades, exactly as anybody could (now) predict.On Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp posted 1 month ago 85 Responses
  • Respectfully, this wiki article looks more like advertising than science. The 150+ scientific authors of the World Cancer Research Fund's 2007 report: http://www.dietandcancerreport.org/?p=ER were clear ... red meat causes bowel cancer. No ifs, no buts, no caveats. And it has nothing to do with grass or grain feeding, its the heme iron that does the damage.On Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp posted 1 month ago 85 Responses
  • I do get a little annoyed when people constantly talk about "agriculture and logging". In the Amazon it is 70% cattle and 3% logging (Livestock's Long Shadow report or mongabay.com), in Indonesia, see my previous comment, which shows that livestock impacts will swamp palm oil which currently occupies about 4.1 million hectares: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120696728/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 Blaming deforestation on agriculture is obviously true but not very informative. Its like attributing lung cancer to poor lifestyle without mentioning smoking, or attributing bowel cancer to poor diet and not mentioning red meat.On Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp posted 1 month ago 85 Responses
  • Australia used to be a major wheat exporter ... we still are in a good year. But over the past few decades a rise in industrial lot feeding (mainly chicken and cattle) has meant that during bad years we now import grain for livestock. So we now eat 2 million tonnes directly, feed about 12 million to livestock and export any excess ... so basically we used to provide 12 million tonnes of good food for people, and now that food goes to produce chicken, pork and beef. We export the beef to rich people overseas and the poorer people that used to get our wheat have to look elsewhere. This is a major factor in the current world food crisis. Once the CAFOs are established, they easily outbid the world's poor for grain ... and biofuel makers can outbid them also! Something similar is happening in Brazil. There grain production has doubled since about 1990, but the proportion going to livestock has increased massively, so they still have plenty of malnourished people.On Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp posted 1 month ago 85 Responses
  • FoodProvider: Meat and deforestation. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say cattle is the prime driver. There is data in the 2006 UN report "Livestock's Long Shadow", but briefly, about 70% of previously forested Amazon rainforest is now under cattle. In my country, Australia, we were clearing about half a million hectares per annum for cattle right through the 1990s until about 2004 when legislation came in to stop it. Clearing has been reduced since then but is now been renamed "fodder harvesting" ... the same bulldozers are dragging the same chains however. Indonesia is about the same size as Queensland in Australia and has a similar number of cattle ... and those in Queensland graze close on 150 million hectares and those Indo cattle either graze or live on grain, and you need to clear land for that also. Many Australian cattle farmers don't clear land (because their grandfather, or great grandfather did that!), and argue "well I don't clear land, therefore no cattle farmers anywhere on the planet clear land and you can keep your international studies ... " etc.On Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp posted 1 month ago 85 Responses
  • Meat might be carbon neutral, but it isn't "forcing neutral", see my other posts about changing CO2 into CH4 (methane). Also meat is the major driver of deforestation, and deforestation definitely isn't carbon neutral. There are plenty of other parts of the meat production/consumption chain that also aren't carbon neutral ... right through to building hospitals for heart surgery, the manufacture of statins and other pharmaceuticals to treat blood pressure driven up by saturated fat ... etc. etc.On Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp posted 1 month ago 85 Responses
  • Did they use the same cattle? You can read it yourself, but the short answer is yes, first a grass trial and then 10 days to adapt to grain prior to the grain measurements. Judging by your question about "passing it on", you don't know any chemistry, which is fine, my chemical knowledge is pretty bloody thin, but I'll try and explain. CH4 is the chemical formula for methane, 4 hydrogen atoms with one carbon. CO2 is the formula for carbon dioxide, 2 oxygen atoms with 1 carbon atom. Ruminants like cattle have microbes in their guts which generate methane (CH4) during the digestion of food. The Cs and Hs are in the food, but the microbes rearrange them. Even if you don't add any carbon to the atmosphere you could heat up the planet quite well by just changing enough CO2 molecules to CH4. Think of it this way. Dive into a swimming pool. Easy. Now freeze the water. Try the diving thing again ... no? No water has been added but the change of state has altered the resistance. Similarly the more CO2 that is changed into CH4 (by livestock ... or us) the more trouble we are in. Methane from coal mines is slightly worse because it adds new carbon to the atmosphere. The CH4 eventually turns back into CO2 with about half of any tonne of methane emitted reverting in about 8 years.On Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp posted 1 month ago 85 Responses
  • Which produces the most methane, corn fed cattle or grass fed cattle? It pays not to guess but to actually measure: http://jas.fass.org/cgi/reprint/77/6/1392.pdf These researchers found that grass fed cattle emitted MORE, 3 times more, methane than feedlot cattle.On Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp posted 1 month ago 85 Responses
  • The carbon in the CO2 from livestock or human respiration comes from the air, but the carbon in CO2 from tail pipes comes from fossil fuels (ignoring biofuel for now). So the WorldWatch paper (despite having many good points) is simply wrong on that one. If you cut down the Amazon turn it into a biofuel cropping area then there are 4 things going on, 1) huge emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases during the fires (most would end up being burned after the valuable logs were removed). 2) there after the growing biofuel crop would pull some CO2 from the air and 3) using the biofuel would release the same carbon back to the air, 4) the harvesting of the biofuel would use energy and the carbon involved needs to be accounted for. 2),3) and 4) could possibly balance, leaving a net huge positive forcing from 1). As for meat. The carbon in the feed comes from the air, and eventually returns, but some of it returns as methane with a 72 times higher global warming potential than co2 during the next 20 years. i.e., global meat production changes the ratio of methane (CH4) to carbon dioxide (CO2) by converting some of the latter to the former, even if it doesn't introduce new carbon into the air. Plug: I explain this stuff in great detail in my book "CSIRO Perfidy" (http://perfidy.com.au ... also available on Amazon). As a vegan, I'd love to think the World Watch paper was correct about livestock respiration ... but it isn't.On Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp posted 1 month ago 85 Responses

  • Carbon cycle

    Why do people keep saying grass fed beef is
    somehow benign? Grass fed cattle produces Grass about 3 times the methane of grain fed cattle and the cost to global biodiversity is huge. They are responsible for 70% of Amazon deforestation and a less precisely known but huge portion of Indonesian deforestation.

    Livestock's Long Shadow has the following information.
    Animal food production consumes the output of 1/3 of all
    arable land + 3,400 million grazing hectares + the
    entire output of all fisheries and produces just 17% of global calories. Sure you can produce meat sustainably, like you can hunt whales sustainably, the question is how much ... and the answer is very, very little --- which is fine by Pollan, but probably not by people who like to use his views to spruik for the meat industry.

    Lastly, methane levels are now on the rise
    again.On Roni Neff explains how the media miss the story on food's connection to climate change posted 1 year, 1 month ago 5 Responses

  • methane and livestock

    IPCC Assessment Report 4, Chapter 2, page 206,
    has a nice chart which shows 20-year impacts of
    various forcings. Methane drives ozone
    formation in the troposphere --- which kills
    people, and water vapour in the stratosphere,
    which has all sorts of nasty impacts (read
    the report).  In the short term (20yrs), methane
    and side effects has a bigger warming effect than
    CO2. So to have any chance of stabilising climate
    we need to control CO2 for the long run (if you don't do that, then
    it won't matter what you do with methane), and
    methane to reduce temperature in the short
    term. For countries like, Australia, Brazil,
    China, and some others, methane is huge. Australia
    has 1.2 cattle for each person (the US has 1 head
    for every 3 people). On Veganism: All or nothing? posted 2 years, 2 months ago 30 Responses