Iâ(TM)m seeing a LOT of R vs D finger pointing, and what little is actually about truancy, as opposed to other culture war topics, still misses an obvious explanation

I get at least one letter each year from my local school district over absenteeism for my kids. (Got this years first one just last week) It warns me about possibly being visited by a truancy officer if one of my kid misses too many more days.

Iâ(TM)m not poor, discouraged by the quality of the local education, afraid of them being indoctrinated, or any of the other culture war explanations Iâ(TM)ve seen. My kids miss more school than they used to because our school district has a stay home policy that results in an extra day home (on average) every time they get sick.

Used to be they stayed home if they looked sick in the morning. Now, if they have a fever at any point within 24 hr before first bell, they are supposed to stay home. That means if they are sick Monday morning, and they are not recovered before the bus comes, then they are expected to stay home Tuesday as well. Every 1-day absence due to illness almost automatically becomes a 2-day absence. Apply that to every family and student in my district, and we appear to have suddenly developed an absenteeism problem.

Now, I donâ(TM)t know if the policy actually changed, or if it is more a matter of the school being more insistent with compliance post-COVID, but the net effect is the same. Each time one of my kids gets sick, they have a full day at home with no symptoms during which they would have gone to school pre-2020

I don't see how you can rationally reconcile those first two statements.

If you believe that AGW is real, then you must acknowledge the role of carbon emissions in how it works. The impact of agriculture is simply a matter of adding up the carbon emissions due to agriculture.

1. Do you somehow imagine that no fossil fuels are used to plant, care for, harvest or transport those crops (they do)??
2. Or maybe you imagine that animal digestion is perfectly efficient (it is not even close)??
3. Or maybe you are unaware that the carbon sequestered by crops is re-released when it is metabolized by humans an animals?? After all, the energy in our diet comes from breaking those carbon bonds in food and exhaling the resulting CO2.

I recommend you read up on how a life-cycle-analysis is done. Particularly the various scopes. This article here has a quick summary of scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, with a much longer explanation of scope 4. Parts of agriculture may be neutral or net sequestering in terms of their scope 1 emissions, but account for the other emissions that are made to facilitate the farm operating almost always end up driving them to be net emitters in the end. And when you look to animal agriculture specifically, the carbon impact is at least the feed efficiency ratio multiple of the emissions liked to the grain production.

If you find yourself angry and dismissing what I'm saying, without bothering to consider it, I would argue that you are not engaging with the material intellectually, but emotionally. and that Emotion is blinding you to reality. As I said before, I work in animal agriculture. My paycheck (and by extension my ability to provide for my large family) is ENTIRELY DEPENDENT upon continued animal agriculture. if *I* can see it, inspite of the very real and powerful financial incentives for me to deny it, you should be able to as well. So long as you remove your anger and hostility over unfair policy from the equation.

That is not how that works in practice, regardless of what the intention is

If I can buy something from outside the US today for $1, and the American-Made version is $2. And, If I have a need for 100 of those items a year, then my annual cost is $100.

If a Tariff is applied to artificially inflate the price for foreign made products to match the domestic price, I may start buying US made, but I'm also going to double my cost from $100 to $200. Sure some portion of that money stays in the economy domestically, and there is value to that, but *I* am the one paying an extra $100 a year. Not the foreign country. They are simply selling their product somewhere else in the world, or for less profit to stay competitive in the US market.

Now, if a Tariff is applied that brings the price ABOVE the cost of a foreign supplier. Say to $2.50, the foreign supplier may or may not bow out, but the domestic supplier now has more head room. They can increase their price to something approaching that "foreign cost + Tariff" and pocket the extra cost. Once again, the foreign supplier is not paying that money. *I am*. And now I'm out $250/year for what used to only cost me $100.

There are justifiable debates to be had about the benefits of that to the economy, or to preventing off-shoring of jobs, or of off-shoring environmental impacts (foreign products are often cheaper due to lax regulations on labor, emissions, quality, etc.). But what is not debatable is who pays for that benefit. The consumer in the country buying those goods are the ones paying that cost. Which is why Tarriffs on necessities (food being a primary example) are bad, becuase they hurt the poorest citizens in the country with the Tariff. Now, tariffs on Luxury Goods? (high end cars, jewelry, exotic fabrics etc.) That is a tax on the rich, and I'm all for that.

The impact of poultry is only 1.5x that of the grain itself based on FCR. Round up to 2x or 3x for convenience, and youâ(TM)ll still see a lot of meat consumption at that price point. It will just shift from beef (which is much higher than that) to chicken. We see that all the time during periods of rapid inflation in meat price

that said, I agree. The cost should account for the environmental impacts. I approve of cap and trade for carbon, including for meat production. However, if we get that, itâ(TM)ll drive the use of the very products I was talking about by farmers to try and improve the price point of their beef and milk. Mandating carbon accounting is one way to achieve what I proposed, AND what you want as an outcome.

I think you are misunderstanding quite a bit here:

Meat production is far MORE dependent upon those inputs than the crops. After all, what do livestock eat? In the US, most of them eat those very same crops. In essence, the environmental impact of animals will ALWAYS be worse than grain, because of the inefficiency of producing meat from grain. The benefit to those diets isn't that the grains are perfectly sustainable, but that you are cutting out the middle man (the animals we like to eat) who - like all middle men - adds inefficiency.

Depending on the animal, the feed efficiency of animal production ranges between ~ 1.5:1 modern broiler chickens; to 3:1 for modern commercial swine; to between 4.5:1 to 7.5:1 for beef (range depends on ratio of concentrated feed to forage, and market weight). That means for every lb of meat generated, there are anywhere between 1.5 to 7.5 lbs of feed consumed, with around 80% of that feed being those intensively produced grains (corn and soy). And that is BEFORE we get into the problems raised by the tendency for carbon absorbed by grains to be re-emitted as methane by cattle, with methane having a ~20x larger impact on global temperatures than the carbon it began as before it was sequestered by the plants in the first place.

That said, I'm not opposed to animal production, as some are. after all I'm an animal nutritionist, working in the animal feed industry. No meat = no feed industry = I don't have a job. But we don't get to pretend they are wrong when they rightly criticize the role we play in global carbon emissions. Fortunately, a lot of smart people who like to eat meat have developed tools that can help reduce carbon and methane emissions by cattle. Asparagopsis seaweed (containing bromoform), Bovaer (new drug from DSM), Garlic oil, Statin drugs, iodoform (similar active to that in the seaweed) are all potential tools to reduce methane emissions from livestock.

Farmers are correct that they are getting shafted, but not because of initiatives to combat climate change. They are shafted becuase they are expected to bare the costs of those initiatives almost entirely by themselves. In the US, farms can lose money while the packers that buy their products pocket huge profits. This is due in part to consolidation, and in part to lobbying. Most farmers I know will produce their animals how ever you tell them to, just so long as they can keep their farm and provide for their families while they do it. The issue isn't even that there isn't money being paid out to help, it is that it isn't making it to them, and is instead getting captured by those controlling the choke points in their industries, and they are routing those profits up to their shareholders instead. They are even complaining to the right people, the politicians, but they are asking for the wrong solutions.

The article I linked to is for a different compound from the active in seaweed (specifically the bromoform found in Asparagopsis). They are using what is referred to as 3-NOP. Both Bromoform and 3-NOP inhibit methane synthesis by impacting the final enzyme in the process, but by different means.

As I understand it, bromoform binds to the active site and stick there. Preventing new CH4 from being produced. 3-NOP, otoh, binds to a different spot on the enzyme in question, reducing its efficiency dramatically

Much of the methane is produced by a class of organisms called Archaea, and they can be preferentially killed by use of garlic oil or statin drugs. Both of which interfere with the Arcahea's ability to produce their cell membranes, which in turn reduces the amount of methane they can produce due to inhibiting their abundance in the rumen.

At the end of the day, you are not a dictator, and we are all having a hard enough time getting people on board with the idea that they should make ANY changes to how they live their lives to combat climate change. Calling out an obvious approach as the only approach, particularly when the vast majority of people whom you need to help you advance your agenda have made it clear they consider it to be too much of a change, is setting us all up for defeat. The easiest changes to make are those that require the least conscious effort by the largest number of impacted people. Regulating methane emissions will be essentially invisible to everyone who eats meat, and would require no conscious effort on their part. Reducing demand for meat requires changing the mind of virtually every meat eater in the world. One of those is orders of magnitude easier, and faster than the other. And I'd argue a partial win today is worth more than a complete victory the day after never.

No, you can't get money for that, but not for the reasons you suggest.

Fact is, climate change is real, we have known about it for decades, and all the hand-waiving in the world about alternative explanations for the observed phenomenon have failed to hold up to scrutiny... repeatedly. We need to do something about it, and anyone trying to debate that is not being a serious person.

That said, there is absolutely room to negotiate over who is to bear the brunt of the cost of decarbonizing our economy and food production system. Or, bout the trade off between making meat production more efficient (which I favor) and pushing people to be more vegetarian (which I opposed) or some combination of the two (which I'd settle for). However, any rhetoric around "is it real" or "is it our fault" is an instant disqualification from the discussion as far as I'm concerned.

And for the record, I'm in the animal production industry. Much of the future policy around carbon and food is going to directly impact me and my customers, and I am not really looking forward to it. But I'm also a father of 4, and I'd like my kids to NOT see themselves as the last generation of a failed civilization. I'd like for my prospective grandchildren to enjoy a world that isn't accelerating towards terminal heat death.

When they talk about emissions, they are talking about net emissions, which accounts for sequestration as well.

Crops are themselves largely carbon neutral (they absorb carbon when growing, but that is all released again when they are consumed and metabolized for energy by humans and other animals), but how we get those crops is not.

- Diesel fuel to sow the seeds, spread the fertilizers/pesticides, harvest the final crop, and to transport it where it needs to go to be used.
- Energy cost of creating and transporting the fertilizers and pesticides
- Energy for processing raw grains into the things we (or our animals) actually eat

To some extent, emissions are inevitable part of feeding ourselves. However, there are ways to make that more efficient seeing as we have likely surpassed the normal human carrying capacity of the planet by several multiples at this point.

Regarding the methane bit...

Canada announced the approval of a new product there that can massively reduce the methane produced by cattle (where most of the animal food supply chain emissions arise). Report I read this morning put the amount as high as 45% reduced. TO the best of my knowledge, the company is already pursuing regulatory approval in the US and EU.

Now that there are effective tools, I anticipate that the governments are going to take more of a free-hand with regulating methane emissions directly from livestock. That will, I expect, be far easier to achieve practically speaking, than expecting everyone everywhere to stop eating soo much meat. There are those who are willing, but far more who view meat as a cultural and class identifier. Better to mandate the use of this product (or something like it) than to try and push up hill the boulder that is cultural norms around food. Particularly in the EU, where legislators have used food policy (anti-gmo, labelling laws, etc.) as campaign issues for a generation or two.

As an American, I'm reminded of all the tariff talk when Trump was running for president. It was true then, and it is still true now, that the citizens of your country are the ones who pay for tariffs. Not the foreign countries.

The whole piece seems like it was written by either Koch brothers.

The EU is by no means perfect, but Iâ(TM)d much prefer a nation with an effective social safety net, generous holiday and leave policies, and free healthcare over the rotting den of iniquity that is the US these days.

you can have advancement AND workers protections. Just look at the German engineering and chemical industries. However, if you force me to choose, Iâ(TM)d say fuck our corporate overlords in every open orifice of it means kids are not dying due to lack of free healthcare and food assistance programs at schools

Couple of things to keep in mind

1. Science is about far more than one study. The preponderance of the evidence is generally the abated for experts in the field. Not a handful of outliers that contradict the majority of the evidence.

2. Organic in this context is a marketing claim. Like all new or best in class, it exists to sell you something more expensive by creating the perception of higher value, regardless of whether or not it actually is better in any empirical sense.

organic is a process certification, NOT a quality certification. It is run by the same arm of the USDA as Kosher and Halal. The Agricultural Marketing Service. NOT the FDA, who oversees food quality. There CAN be a quality difference between Orgsnic and conventional, but for most categories the natural variability is such that the differences are well within the normal variation.

put it this way, I have 4 kids. I also have a PhD in nutrition. I take my kids nutrition VERY seriously. And I never buy organic as a general rule. Of course, you are free to do what you wish. My company sells more than a few organic certified products, and I thank you (and those like you ) for your business.

Highly bio available is sufficiently vague as to allow a marketer to say that about just about anything. Someone with the right science training and background may offer and be put off by âoehighâ bioavailability claims that are unjustified, but most consumers donâ(TM)t know enough to be skeptical. As such, it really dosed not mean anything specific.

now, if they say âoehigherâ bioavailability it may mean something, but only if there is a footnote linking to a study or data of some sort. Otherwise it is just marketing bs. It may be better, but you canâ(TM)t verify that without data

High levels of vitamins can be a problem, but that is more a matter of total vitamin activity than form.

vitamins are chemicals. The process to end up with the particular chemical does not matter so long as it is the correct shape/structure (go far enough down, and biology and chemistry just become physics). Vitamins with chiral carbon atoms (such as vitamin E, which has 3 if I remember correctly) can be the correct structure, but the wrong stereoisomer, when synthesized synthetically. That can affect their exchange rate (a racemic mixture of all possible stereoisomers of vitamin E has less activity per gram than all rac-vitamin E) but only to a degree. But others that lack multiple stereoisomers (like vit A I think) are 1:1 identical in how the body metabolizes/stores/excretes them.

natural vs synthetic can make a difference, but it is not universal. And even when it does make a difference, it is not some huge problem for the system. There is a lot of noise made by the organic folks about synthetics, but that does not really tell you as much about the final product as they pretend it does. As for making vitamin supplements (which most people DO NOT need), it is practically irrelevant. What ever dose you take is likely to be far more than you need, and if you genuinely need supplementation to overcome a deficiency, getting synthetics will still be far better than nothing.

synthetics is simply not that important a distinction.

To be fair to the families, it's not like this is the only thing they were in denial about.

For some people, simply denying the harsh realities around them is how they cope with problems they cannot fix. And frankly, it does work for many people, in a sick/twisted way. It is likely not the most productive way, but it does seem to work for some people.

My great aunt denied that my great grandmother was declining, that she had Alzheimers, and that she was dying. It made her life much more enjoyable for the last decade of my great grandmother's life, because she didn't have to deal with that reality. It shifted the responsibility onto my mother, but for my great aunt, it "worked" in a way. Since my mother was a hospice nurse, it stressed her out far less than it would have for literally anyone else in my family, but the only reason she took that on herself was because he aunt was in denial. It certainly wasn't pretty (great aunt tried climbing down INTO the grave when they buried my great grand mother, becuase she always has to be the center of attention), but there is a case to be made that my great aunt is much happier, on the whole, due to her tendency to ignore and thus avoid dwelling on things that she cannot change and might stress her out.

Contrast that with my wife, who tends to obsess over things she can't control, to the extent she is always questioning her fitness to do just about any task. Sure, she's not denying what's going on around her, but she's making herself miserable in the process. Frankly, I wish she'd try denialism a bit more often. Particularly when I'm trying to sleep and we are rehashing for the eleventyith billion time whether or not she is a good mom (she is).

I don't tend to deny, nor do I tend to obsess. I expect that you and I are alike in that regard, but not everyone is wired the way we are.