What makes some GHG solutions like COVID19?

Peter Drucker, management guru, has told us that “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.”

Donella Meadows, in Dancing with Systems, tells us:

“A decision-maker can’t respond to information he or she doesn’t have, can’t respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, can’t respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that 99 percent of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of faulty or missing information.”

However, she also reminds us "Don’t be stopped by the ‘if you can’t define it and measure it, I don’t have to pay attention to it’ ploy." On the other hand, in Leverage Points, Places to Intervene in a System, Meadows proposes a dozen intervention points in increasing order of importance. By my reading, the lowest nine points involve information, data, numbers or measurements. So...

You've no doubt heard or read about the need for and lack of testing for the corona virus in the US. At the moment we can't know how bad the situation is because there has been and remains such a lack of testing of potentially infected people that we don't know who should be quarantined or how widespread the disease is. [See Drucker and Meadows re significance of this.]

Perhaps, before the corona virus story dominated our social and mainstream media, you might have heard or read that human-produced greenhouse gases have created a significant problem for us and our descendants and the other inhabitants of planet earth. Without major interventions, earth could become as inhabitable as Mars.

You might even have read that one of the most significant things you, as an individual, can do is to "eat a plant-rich diet." I've come across this assessment a number of times, often in reference to a "meatless Monday," or something like that. More recently, however, I encountered a number of references suggesting that a plant-rich diet should be either vegetarian or vegan. A review of the primary Drawdown web page on plant-rich diets neither confirmed nor denied the vegetarian or vegan limitation. There is a better explanation in the Technical Summary. Let's start with:

Project Drawdown defines a plant-rich diet as the individual dietary choice: to 1) maintain a 2250 calorie per day nutritional regime; 2) meet daily protein requirements while decreasing meat consumption in favor of plant-based food items; and 3) purchase locally produced food when available.

looking for the right balance is a challenge

Photo by J. Harrington

I can support each of these elements, but, being a typical white, male, meat eater in the US, I've done best with the third one.  I still don't know how much "decreasing meat consumption" is in order. Fortunately, that can be found further down the page:

The adoption of a plant-rich diet assumes the following criteria are met:

1. Adopting an individual daily nutritional regime of 2250 kilocalories per day;
2. Consuming reduced quantities of meat-based protein (particularly red meat, which is constrained to 57 grams per day);[5]
3. Purchasing locally produced food when possible (a 5 percent localization factor is applied globally).

We have made noteworthy progress toward having something we can measure, especially when our computer's handy converter tells us that 57 grams is equivalent to 2 ounces. In the simplest, most basic version, a plant-rich diet allows us two 6 ounce hamburgers or one 3/4 pound steak per week.

are bison equal to beef in the red meat equation?

Photo by J. Harrington

However, although we've heard for years that pork is "the other white meat," we've also recently seen it placed in the red meat class. So there's that uncertainty, plus the question of where in a plant-rich diet chicken, turkey and the various kinds of seafood fall. At this stage of the game, that's probably akin to wondering how many head of beef will fit in a stockyard. To answer the question in today's title, if not obvious, is that as COVID19 management in the US needs lots more testing to permit management of the spread of the disease and related effects, just as a plant-rich diet needs better definitions-explanations if we really want people to believe it doesn't simply mean vegetarian or vegan. The folks at Drawdown are no doubt very correct when they note:

Scaling plant-rich diets globally is a challenge of communication and education as much as it is one of policy. Among the most fundamental research findings on this topic is that healthier diets tend to also be low-emission diets (Bajželj et al., 2014; Tilman and Clark, 2014; Stehfest et al., 2009). While plant-rich diets are not necessarily the lowest-emission diets, they represent a significant improvement over current dietary practices, particularly those in countries like the USA and Australia where meat (and especially beef) consumption is high. This overlap in desirable outcomes (healthier population, lower emissions) is a powerful communication and policy tool, particularly given that individuals are more likely to respond favorably to messaging that affects their health than they are to messaging relevant to their environmental impact.

We might also want to consider how to go about implementing a "cap-and-trade" policy related to red meat reduction in our diets compared to the amount of food waste we process or avoid. And, where does wild game fit into the equation? As POTUS45 is learning, some things aren't as simple as they seem.

On A Diet

By William Matthews

     Eat all you want but don’t swallow it.
     —Archie Moore

The ruth of soups and balm of sauces

I renounce equally. What Rorschach saw

in ink I find in the buttery frizzle

in the sauté pan, and I leave it behind,

and the sweet peat-smoke tang of bananas,

and cream in clots, and chocolate. I give

away the satisfactions of food and take

desire for food: I’ll be travelling light

to the heaven of revisions. Why be

adipose: an expense, etc.,

in a waste, etc.? Something like

the body of the poet’s work, with its

pale shadows, begins to pare and replace

the poet’s body, and isn’t it time?

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