Posted by rguiscard 12/12/2025
CO2 is not really a 'sustainability' problem for food production, because food production and consumption is steady state.[1] Methane is somewhat of a problem (Because it's a potent greenhouse gas that is not part of the food chain, but does eventually break down), but also eventually reaches a steady state, where you add emit it as quickly as it breaks down.
The bigger sustainability problem for food production comes from non-steady-state, non-reversible actions. Burning down a rainforest to permanently turn it into pasture[1]. Overfarming a plot of land, and exhausting all the nutrients from it.
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[1] Using fossil-fuel diesel-powered machinery to grow, harvest, and transport food, however, is not steady-state. That is a sustainability issue for food production. Fortunately, it's a very small part of overall human GHG emissions.
[2] Do enough of that, and this is irreversible - you can't ever turn that pasture back into rainforest, because you need existing rainforest to bootstrap new rainforest.
... let's start on tearing down bullshit AI datacenters.
Oh no, a billion Nvidia cards are envronmentally friendly, you say, better to lazer-focus on the cow farts?
In contrast, all data centers (not just AI) currently use less than 1.5% of all electricity, making up less than 0.3% of global emissions [2]. Although recent increases in data center electricity usage is lamentable, even in the short term future, much of this can and more importantly _will_ be low-carbon energy, and the ratio should continue to improve with time.
A 1% reduction in livestock emissions is therefore about the same as a 50% reduction in data center emissions.
[1]: https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...
[2]: https://www.carbon-direct.com/insights/understanding-the-car...
Minimizing cow farts is simply a better focus.
It's a bit extreme to refer to that "climate" summit "guests" as cattle, but I won't deny it gave me a chuckle.
>the inhumane conditions in which the cattle are raised
Gosh, that's sad. One way to go about it is to vote with your hard-earned and only buy meat from the Ethically Raised in the Swiss Alps Cows that look quite happy on the photos then.
In a discussion about genetically modified fungus as a meat substitute?
While billions of Asians would farm and devour everything they can get their teeth on.
It certainly does not look very nice, are you relating this to the "Ethically Raised in the Swiss Alps Cows" in the comment you replied to?
In truth, they just take the calves away from the mothers after a short while, ship them out to the abbatoir. There is no benefit to them being in the same enclosure with a spiky nose ring, it seems that this must have a different purpose than the one you mentioned.
Now? Now meat's mostly a problem, not a good thing. Even if you ignore every ethical argument, regardless of if your concerns are your own health or the environment, meat's not good.
Data centres… well, I think this is a bubble, I also want it to be a bubble for various reasons, but the AI running on them today is in fact already useful.
Even if current AI wasn't at all useful (despite it having about half to one quarter of the market size as meat already), it does so at a cost orders of magnitude lower environmental harm than meat. Convincing half of the population to have "meat-free Mondays" (so, reducing consumption by 1/14th) would do more than switching off all the AI DCs, given the estimates from Greenpeace for AI https://www.greenpeace.de/publikationen/20250514-greenpeace-... and Our World In Data's estimates for livestock and manure https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
I'd like to see meat consumption to something like half to a quarter of its current level rather than eliminate it outright.
Thanks for the quip. Does this come from a Big AI talking points memo?
Judging by the ridiculous and absolutely non-sequitur "one quarter of the market size" phrase, yeah, I think so.
It comes from the evidence I linked you to.
Which includes, to repeat, *Greenpeace*.
Also to repeat: I think this is a bubble, I also want it to be a bubble for various reasons.
As in, I do not buy into Big AI's talking points about how this is "it", and we're on a path to radical AI-based abundance. Not yet. Plus I think it would be bad even if we were on that track at this point, so I want it to be "not it".
> ridiculous
The global meat market is around 1.5 trillion USD, give or take. That is literally the value of meat, which like all things in a free economic sector can be measured in money.
You may also notice from me saying that AI is 0.5-0.25 of that, that I'm not using "Market Cap" of AI in this comparison. Market cap != market size. This is about what revenue AI and meat gets per year.
