Recently I've written a number of posts related to the behavioral economics of food choices, beef consumption and climate impacts.
Picture This: Putting Beef and Climate into Perspective. This post summarizes some of the the arguments found below and illustrates the tradeoffs and numerous arbitrary choices we make on a daily basis and their climate impact.
Nudging Back: Turning Off Your Camera May Be Good for the Climate. Beef seems to get a bad rap regarding climate impact and there is a lot of attention being paid to reducing beef consumption. In this post I discuss how many other arbitrary behaviors (based on recent research related to internet usage) we could change that may even be more impactful than dietary changes. This may be especially true when you consider how hard it is to change behavior and the relevant costs and tradeoffs involved.
The Ethics of Dietary Nudges and Behavior Change Focused on Climate and Sustainability. In this post I discuss some recent research related to nudges used to impact food choices favoring vegetarian vs. meat based options. It is important when designing for behavior change that choice architectures reflect the science and honestly represent tradeoffs that are relevant to the context and particulars of circumstances and place and the importance of ethics when it comes to scaling what works.
Canceling Science and Monetizing Outrage. In this post I discuss a recent NYT article's treatment of scientist Frank Mitloehner whose research focuses on the impact of beef related GHG emissions and how changing business models brought on by digital media can bias public perceptions and amplify misinformation.
The discussion in the posts linked above actually get much broader than beef. For more related posts see all posts with the behavioral economics tag.
How many of us have been nudged during a zoom meeting to turn on your camera? In recent research (Obringer, et al. 2021) published in the journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling, they have attempted to quantify the carbon footprint of using your camera during a virtual meeting. Can this new research be used to nudge back and keep your camera off in the name of improving your company's ESG reporting? Should we be putting more energy in nudging this direction vs. focusing on more difficult dietary behavior changes?
Background
In a recent post I wrote about the ethics of dietary nudges focused on meat consumption. Particularly I discussed Blondin et al. (2022). In that article they investigated the use of descriptive messages as a means to nudge consumers to choose plant based foods over meat. Below is one of the messages using small change-big impact framing (which they found to be the most impactful in their research) to nudge consumers to choose a vegetarian dish over meat:
"Each of us can make a positive difference for the planet. Swapping just one meat dish for a plant-based one saves greenhouse gas emissions that are equivalent to the energy used to charge your phone for two years. Your small change can make a big difference."
Over the years I have thought a lot about the focus on meat, and particularly beef consumption, as a way to reduce our carbon foot print. The nudge above gives the impression that you could make a big difference in relation to the climate by choosing a salad over steak. Similarly I've been intrigued by other popular movements with similar goals like Meatless Mondays.
There is a clear ceiling on the impact we can have when it comes to beef consumption. Even if we eliminated from our diets all beef produced and consumed in the U.S. it would reduce global GHG emissions by less than 1/2 of 1%. (EPA GHG Emissions Inventory, Rotz et al, 2018).
Are these movements and the language used above giving people the impression they are making a bigger difference with regard to climate change than they really are? Could they be distractions from more impactful behaviors?
Nudging for Impact
McFadden, et al. (2022) discusses important considerations related to the potential impact of nudges given consumer plasticity (willingness and ability to change) and realistic assessments of climate impact. (Realistic assessments of impact and ethics were the primary focus of my previous post.)
McFadden, et al. discuss how challenging and costly dietary changes can be given strong consumer preferences. They find:
"our estimates imply that it would cost at least $642 per tCO2e to reduce GHG emissions by inducing 50% of our study sample to eliminate beef consumption...currently the price to offset a tCO2e (based on existing markets for carbon offsets) is between $10 to $13."
When thinking about the problem this way, one question that comes to mind is - how many other seemingly arbitrary choices (other than reducing beef consumption) could we make in our daily lives that would have a similar climate benefit?
Let Me Count the Ways (other arbitrary ways to reduce your carbon footprint)
The article mentioned above by Obringer, et al. (2021) provides some interesting insights about the carbon footprint associated with various ways we use the internet:
Globally, the Internet use has a carbon footprint ranging from 28 to 63 g CO2 equivalent per gigabyte (GB)
The world median is 32.3 g CO2 per GB
The U.S. median is 9% higher
Common streaming services require 7 GB per hour of streaming using ultra HD quality video and have a carbon footprint of 441 g CO2e/hr
Streaming 4 hrs/day with HD quality video produces about 53 kg CO2e/month
Streaming at a lower quality SD video would reduce CO2e/month to about 2.5 kg
Standard video conference services use ~ 2.5 GB/hr associated with 157 g CO2e/hr
15 one hour meetings a week equate to a monthly carbon footprint of 9.4 kg
By turning off the video camera at an individual level, monthly CO2e emissions could be reduced from 9.4 kg to 377 g CO2e. This is equivalent to enough emissions savings to offset charging a smart phone each night for over 3 years (1151 days).
Separate research reported in MIT Technology review indicates that training common AI models that underpin a number of the technologies and apps we leverage every day and will continue to use in the future can produce as much as 5 times the lifetime CO2 emissions of a single car (Strubell et al., 2019 & Haoarchive, 2019)
Framing Up the Discussion
Obringer, et al. (2021) certainly motivates us to think of a number of arbitrary ways we can reduce our carbon footprint other than making dietary changes when we think of all the various ways we use internet services in the age of Zoom meetings, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and smart phones. But let's take another look at beef consumption.
In the U.S. the average consumer consumes about 60 pounds of beef/year
On a monthly basis that equates to 5 lbs or about 2.26 kg/beef/person
According to Rotz (2019) 1 kg of U.S. beef produces 22 kg of CO2 equivalent emissions
So if an individual consumer gives up U.S. beef for a month that equates to a reduction of about 50 kg CO2e emissions
It looks like the emissions related to beef consumption may be very similar to streaming HD video on a monthly basis given the assumption above.
Just based on the facts above- it looks like giving up beef for a month would have a much bigger impact on climate than giving up your Zoom camera for a month! More than 2x the impact.
On the other hand - giving up our Netflix binge could have the same climate impact as completely giving up beef!
It's not quite so simple.
While it seems like we are making apples to apples CO2e comparisons we have to consider other differences in the way GHG emissions behave especially as this relates to methane and how it is factored into CO2e calculations. See below:
Methane emissions associated with routine meat consumption do not represent a new net lasting contribution to GHG emissions, but instead are a recycling of already existing methane emissions. However, turning on your zoom camera or streaming HD video is a new behavior that leads to the release of new sources of methane and CO2 with long term permanent warming effects on the climate. The decision to continue with routine beef consumption has different implications for the climate than the decision to pump new methane emissions into the atmosphere by turning on your camera or binging with HD video quality.
We also have to ask ourselves - which behavior is the most impactable? Going back to McFadden, et al. (2022) when it comes to combating climate change, which behaviors and barriers should we be targeting to have the greatest impact? People are already very inclined to turn off their cameras during a meeting - and there is literally and easy button to do that! Reducing how much we stream video is relatively easy change to make. But changing diets is extremely difficult. There is no easy button. When we consider the tradeoffs involved (more discussion below) and fully incorporate the ramifications of the biogenic carbon cycle, in addition to consumer plasticity, reducing beef consumption may not be the top priority.
We could think of it this way. On a given day, if you decide to consume the same average amount of beef you have consumed for decades, that decision is not adding any new net GHG emissions to the atmosphere. But every time you turn on your web cam or stream HD, you are contributing to adding new and permanent long lasting GHG emissions to the atmosphere.
It is certainly true that if you chose NOT to have the beef there is a climate benefit - and the numbers shared above approximately reflect that. If everyone in the U.S. made the same decision 365 days/year there is a minimal upper limit on that impact, but there would certainly be a reduction in GHG emissions. If we stop eating beef, the emissions from the last decade go away with it due to the biogenic carbon cycle. Even if it takes decades to change the behavior this is true (based on beef consumption trends and technological advances and remember with constant levels of beef consumption over time new emissions aren't added and don't accumulate b/c they are simply being recycled)
But if we wait a decade to start turning off our web cams or downgrading to SD all those past emissions stay where they are and continue to warm the planet. From a behavior change perspective the urgency to turn of the camera and downgrade our streaming seems much greater.
Some might agree that it makes sense to do both, but it would seem remiss to focus on beef consumption only while ignoring all the many other arbitrary behaviors we could target that may be more urgent and more impactable from a behavior change perspective.
A Path Toward Better Framing and Nudging
In a previous post, I already covered some of the implications of how we frame food choices and the impact on climate. But perhaps the framing of beef vs. salad is completely wrong to begin with. When framing food choices, are we making a mistake when we discuss what is healthy vs. unhealthy in the context of food groups (meat vs. vegetables) or macro nutrients (fat vs. protein vs. carbs)? When we add climate, ethics, and politics to the recipe do we risk taking this to orthorexic extremes that end up causing as much harm as good?
These kind of broad categorizations can limit our thinking and fail to capture the nuance in the tradeoffs involved. When it comes to balancing these tradeoffs a framing that considers specific context (knowledge of the circumstances of time and place), individual consumer preferences (plasticity), nutrient density (see here and here), climate impact (accurately reflecting the behavior of carbon and methane), and technological change is essential.
Blondin, Stacy & Attwood, Sophie & Vennard, Daniel & Mayneris, Vanessa. (2022). Environmental Messages Promote Plant-Based Food Choices: An Online Restaurant Menu Study. World Resources Institute. 10.46830/wriwp.20.00137.
McFadden BR, Ferraro PJ, Messer KD (2022) Private costs of carbon emissions abatement by limiting beef consumption and vehicle use in the United States. PLOS ONE 17(1): e0261372. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261372
Obringer, R., Rachunok, B., Maia-Silva, D., Arbabzadeh, M., Nateghi, R., & Madani, K. (2021). The overlooked environmental footprint of increasing Internet use. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 167, [105389]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2020.105389
C. Alan Rotz, Senorpe Asem-Hiablie, Sara Place, Greg Thoma, Environmental footprints of beef cattle production in the United States, Agricultural Systems, Volume 169, 2019, Pages 1-13, ISSN 0308-521X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2018.11.005.
Strubell, Emma & Ganesh, Ananya & Mccallum, Andrew. (2019). Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP. 3645-3650. 10.18653/v1/P19-1355.
Notes:
The methodology used by Obringer may be subject to criticism and may not consider long term emission reductions due to efficiencies produced by technological change over time (not unlike beef production). I'm using their results as motivation for a discussion about considering the tradeoffs and nuances often left out of discussions associated with food choices. We can also recognize that zoom and other technologies may have had a significant role to play in reducing travel and related transportation and other emissions related to in person meetings. However, at the margin, these technologies still lead to ongoing permanent emissions and warming effects compared to beef consumption.
