this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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Beef produces 85 kg CO2e per kg of food. Tofu produces 2.9 kg CO2e per kg of food. (ourworldindata.org)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The original paper says that they weighted each measure to the country's national production and then weighted those by the country's share of global production. They didn't just average each result they got for beef with no regard for location.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I think their point is that scaling to the volume of beef production of other countries isn't correct because the methods of production vary widely enough to produce much different results. As in, some countries likely produce more or less CO2/kg of beef so it makes no sense to simply scale the number they got from a single county to global scales.

Not the guy you're replying too though, so I'm not certain.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Right, but they didn't do that. It's a meta-analysis, so they took the value that each study got for a given crop in a specific country and then weighted all of the values by the share of global production that that country is responsible for. So if we pretend that the only three countries are Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, they did the following:

  • Found three studies from Estonia, two from Latvia, and two from Lithuania
  • Averaged the values of the three Estonian studies
  • Did the same for the two Latvian ones and the two Lithuanian ones
  • Found that Estonia is responsible for 60% of the world's beef, Latvia 25%, and Lithuania 15%
  • Took their three national averages and weighted them 0.6 for Estonia, 0.25 for Latvia, and 0.15 for Lithuania to get the final value for beef
  • Repeat for each other crop

The dataset was 1530 studies across 39,000 farms in 119 countries

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Yes I was wildly oversimplifying the methodology using a hypothetical intended to help people who might not have a background in either research or beef production understand.