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Let’s get this out of the way: You don’t have to turn vegetarian to make a meaningful dent in your carbon emissions. You don’t have to start eating insects or experiment with precision-fermented plant-based proteins. You don’t even have to eat less meat, necessarily. Just eat less beef — or, if you prefer the idea of “more” to the idea of “less,” you could even say: Eat more chicken.
Either way, the reason comes down to some of the simplest carbon accounting we have. Cows are, by far, our most carbon-intensive protein source. Every kilogram of beef produced in the U.S. emits about 38 kilograms of carbon from cradle to slaughterhouse, according to Gillett. Compare that to roughly 3.8 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of chicken, and even 4.9 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of pork, and you can start to see why even such a small change can have a big impact. A chicken needs to eat just 1.6 kilograms of feed to produce a kilogram of meat.
“1.6 is basically magic, right?” Arthur Gillett, chief research officer at HowGood, an emissions research and data service for the food sector, told me. “Why are we messing with crickets?”
Beyond that, though, the picture gets murkier. Because here’s the thing: Even if you wanted to track every single ounce of carbon related to your food intake, you couldn’t, at least not with any meaningful degree of accuracy. Of all the many systems operating in the global economy, the food system is perhaps the most complex, involving processes we’re still trying to understand, let alone track.
For example: dirt. Essentially all the food we eat depends, at some point in its life cycle, on dirt. One reason beef is such a high-emission product is that it takes a lot of dirt to grow all the feed a typical cow eats over the course of its life — which runs to the thousands of pounds (including byproducts from other agricultural production) — plus a lot more to grow the cow itself. Even in the U.S., where cows are mostly finished on feedlots, livestock occupy 41% of available farmland, but are raised on just 30% of farms. In Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of beef, where cows are mostly grass-fed, cattle graze on somewhere between 189 million and 253 million acres of what used to be the Amazon rainforest, depending on whose estimate you use.
But back to dirt: Climate scientists still don’t really understand how it works, from a carbon perspective. How much carbon is stored in the Earth’s soil? Estimates vary pretty widely, biogeochemist Rose Abramoff told me. How much is it emitting each year? That’s even less clear. Does it make a difference whether that soil is planted with genetically modified soy versus heirloom squash? No idea.
Until seven or eight years ago, it was accepted practice in the life-cycle analysis world to resolve these uncertainties by assuming soil-related emissions were stable and therefore marking them at zero, according to Gillett, “which is incredibly wrong,” he told me. Analyses are starting to be able to account for those emissions now, he said, but to be really meaningful, they would have to be recalculated every year. “So then every LCA, to be worth its salt, has to be a multi-year LCA. That’s impossible.” Gillett said.
In other words, the science is very much still changing, and you could drive yourself crazy trying to keep up with it. These days, Gillett is excited about the potential for regenerative agriculture practices like no-till farming and co-locating livestock with crops to transform dairy into one of our most carbon-efficient sources of protein, he told me — something he never would have expected to say a year or two ago.
Similarly, “Maybe 10 years ago, all of us were talking about food miles,” i.e. the distance from farm to table, according to Minnie Ringland, manager of climate and insights at ReFED, a food waste reduction advocacy group. You may have experienced this in the form of admonishments to “eat local.” Since then, however, cold storage supply chains have gotten a lot better, particularly in the Global South, which means that we’re losing a lot less food to spoilage — compared to the agricultural process itself, shipping represents a negligible portion of the emissions related to just about any given product.
It's also important to remember that not all farming regions are created equal. California, for instance, is a great place to grow lots of things; Arizona, less so. “Depending on the geography where the food is being produced, it can be super intensive in terms of land use change, if land is being deforested in order to make way for agricultural fields or for grazing,” Ringland said. Another factor is the use of nitrogen fertilizer, which is both emissions-intensive to produce and generates carbon dioxide from its use, the environmental effects of fertilizer run-off on nearby land and waterways notwithstanding.
That’s not to say there aren’t other important benefits to eating locally: contributing to your local economy, supporting biodiversity, encouraging holistic farming practices. The farmers at your weekend farmers market are a whole lot more likely to be practicing regenerative techniques and fertilizing with compost instead of industrial chemicals. But they’re also not going to be there at 7:48 p.m. on any given Tuesday when you’re midway through cooking a batch of chicken cacciatore and realize that you forgot the bell peppers.
Speaking of compost, though, here’s a bonus trick to reduce your food-related carbon emissions: Collecting and composting your food scraps is good, but wasting less food is even better. The reason why is pretty obvious: Before it can be composted, food still has to go through the entire supply chain. And while composting food produces fewer emissions than landfilling food waste, it’s not an entirely emissions-free process, and can be more or less carbon-intensive depending on where and how it’s made. Reducing your food waste requires a bit more planning, but it will also save you money and send a more accurate demand signal down the farm-to-grocery-store supply chain.
I could go on and on about things like the relative carbon impact of plant-based proteins and the emissions reduction potential of standardizing expiration dates on food labels, but all of that is still being worked out. If you are fake meat-curious, you can check out our guide on that here. And if you’re already a vegetarian or curious about it for reasons of health, ethics, etc., that’s great. The most important thing you, as a consumer, can do to reduce emissions from the food system is hold companies accountable for their carbon claims, which means not getting sucked into the stuff that sounds too good to be true. There’s plenty of delicious food out there that doesn’t take elaborate math to justify eating.
So to recap: Eat less beef, waste less food. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but everything else is gravy.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”