The largest solar grazing project in the U.S. will reduce mowing costs and emissions — and make for some happy sheep.
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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When I saw your post, I initially dismissed it entirely and thinking how embarrassing it was for you to take a story that does produce a positive net benefit for climate and try to turn it negative from a completely unrelated view. Obviously I assumed from your statements that your opposition was due to you being vegan. A 5 second view of your post history confirms this. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and understand where you're coming from and what you want to accomplish. It got me thinking about what your thought process was when you posted here on this story. I have some questions about your motives and methods I wouldn't normally ask, but you're putting yourself in the spotlight for your cause so you might be open to a discussion. If so my questions are:
You clearly support veganism, and I assume you would want others to adopt it too. Did you think your delivery here here would make omnivores suddenly abandon their diets and adopt yours? Did you consider that your message (while containing some accuracy) would actually turn people off from veganism because they didn't want to be associated with people that do what you did here and crap all over otherwise good news?
How did you decide to just inject your veganism into this story? What criteria did this one meet that you thought "this one, this one needs to have passive aggressive veganism representation"? Was it just random that you saw this one and weighed in with veganism or do you spend lots of time scouring for all stories that don't have an unrelated vegan view and then you inject one? It makes me wonder how effective that is for your movement. Or is this more of a act of martyrdom? Are you "fighting the good fight" whenever and where ever it can be?
If your overall goal is reducing livestock agriculture have you considered your highly negative approach actually working against your goal? Alternatively, are you intentionally cultivating the negative stereotype against vegans for some reason I don't understand? If so, can you explain so I can gain understanding?
Different vegan here. I'll be blunt about it: There's facts about animal agriculture, which are uncomfortable, if you're not vegan.
Actually being ignorant about them rarely happens as a conscious decision, it's more a matter of it just not making for a great smalltalk topic when you're not vegan.
I'm not saying this from some smug position either, as I was non-vegan at some point, too (like the vast majority of vegans), and I know how much shit I didn't know back then.
Animal agriculture organizations will also gladly add to the confusion, by talking only about CO2 emissions, when they should be talking about CO2-equivalents.
This post has too little info to really know what's going on, but it happens that people think grazing animals are 100% climate-neutral, so it mentioning lots of grazing animals and a reduction in emissions also had me wondering, if that is actually true.
If some of these sheep would not have otherwise been raised, then it's possible that mowing the fields with a CO2-exhausting mower would be less bad for the climate. Of course, electric mowers would be even better.
Thats just it. This isn't an article about animal agriculture. Its an article about solar power first, and reduction of carbon from mowing second. Both of these are good things! What the OP vegan did was look past all of that positive to try an extra a negative from it.
Strange phrasing, but I believe you're describing "willful ignorance".
That can be true of lots of distasteful, but necessary topics necessary for life. I don't usually engage in small talk about mortuary science, sewage treatment, or surgical removal of tumors, but all of those are certainly incredibly important to life as we are biological animals ourselves.
Assuming the sheep are only fed from the grass they eat on-site, how are they NOT carbon neutral?
This sounds like a "perfect is the enemy of good" situation. Saying using sheep used here to eat the grass around solar panels is not good enough encourages abandoning the idea and going back to fossil fuel based mowing. Or worse, that this is a "problem with solar" and "solar should be abandoned".
If you google the title you find this article which is the one I assume OP used.
Yes, but we have experts for these topics, like we also do for animal agriculture. It's just that the broad public has relatively much knowledge for certain topics, like sports, whereas it's quite natural that most non-experts are relatively ignorant of less sexy topics. That's all I wanted to say with that, that I'm not berating anyone for not being an expert here.
You're correct that they take in the same number of carbon atoms as they eventually exhale/excrete/etc.. So, in that sense, they are carbon-neutral.
But that doesn't mean they're climate-neutral, because when you combine carbon atoms with 4x hydrogen, you get methane, which for physical reasons has a significantly stronger greenhouse effect than CO2.
And ruminants (like sheep and cows) belch out lots of methane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruminant#Ruminants_and_climate_change
That's why even people who would immediately choke to death, if they ate a vegetable, could still help out on the climate front, if they switched from beef (and mutton) to poultry and pork.
See this graph, for example: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/food-footprints
And yeah, reading through the article, I'm happy that it's being used for solar, I'm happy that if we're already raising sheep, they're at least being used relatively efficiently, I'm even happy that the sheep are living a relatively happy life.
What I'm less happy about, is that OP vegan was pretty spot on.
They're raising additional sheep for this endeavour. And no one had the expert knowledge to ask, if the belching sheep maybe somewhat undermine the climate advantages of solar.
I wondered if you were going to go the methane angle. Like most of the points here, you're not wrong, but focusing on it negates the overall good.
But every conversation has to be injected with this message?
Because that wasn't the choices. It was mow with fossil fuels or mow with sheep. This is what becomes so tiresome about the vegan injection. Yes things can be better. Yes this isn't perfect. No, veganism isn't the only way to achieve improved results.
Cool. So, why did you pretend to not know about methane? Was it really necessary to waste my time explaining it?
They didn't do that. They were talking about other aspects of the situation that make this preferable to people mowing the fields. You just assumed that, since they didn't specifically discus methane emissions, they didn't know about it, or pretended not to. This is weird.
I wrote:
To which they responded:
Then follows my lengthy explanation about methane. And then they write:
So, they knew that climate-neutral ≠ carbon-neutral.
They knew that "Assuming the sheep are only fed from the grass they eat on-site, how are they NOT carbon neutral?" is just the wrong question to ask.
I cannot see how I should have not interpreted that as a technical question by someone who does not know about methane.
I wouldn't care, if they didn't now also tell me off for giving a technical answer.