For methane produced by farming all components remain in a cycle. Everything released by animals eventually finds its way back to plants, which get eaten, which become exhaust of animals, etc.
This sounds to me more like a spin by big oil to finger point at another industry.
The long run is the thing that really matters. A faster payback only serves to cover the impact of those that want to keep pumping up oil and gas in the meantime(also to make synthetic fertiliser) for a few decades. It shifts focus from that on cow farts. As if the rotting plant matter and wild animal life that could replace it didn't emit any methane.
I would hazard a guess that the incidental methane emissions from one gas extraction field would astronomically dwarf the emissions from cow farts.
fossil fuels contribute 33% farm animals contribute 30%
Not astronomically; marginally. Anyone who's been around herbivore farm animals will tell you they fart. A lot.
Then again, farm plants are a further 18%.
A cow that's fed on gras and farts emits nothing that that gras didn't pick up and contributes virtually nothing to climate change in the long term.
Otherwise, I wonder if non fertilizer supported grass could support sufficient cows to satiate demand (which has not even peaked yet).
but focusing on that is shifting blame in an innefectual way of course. Pointing at cow farts puts the pressure on the individual and seeks to dampen effects in the short term. Pump up less or no fossil fuels with actual long term thinking and those fertilisers will automatically become more expensive. At that point tho our oversized animal herd becomes harder to support and beef becomes automatically a lot more expensive whilst at the same time the manure becomes more important.
Also, from that Wikipedia article:
There is accumulating research and data showing that oil and gas industry methane emissions – or from fossil fuel extraction, distribution and use – are much larger than thought.[35][36][37][38][39]
Still, my “astronomically dwarfs” looks to be overstating it by a wide margin.
Yeah, but they also provide 80% of the world's calories to animals' 20%
Apparently mainly rice growing. I knew paddy fields were bad, but I didn't know they were that bad. Per calorie I am sure it is more like a tenth that of ruminants, perhaps less, but still worth replacing with other carbohydrates.
Grass-fed beef cattle whose dung is "recycled" in a more natural way in the fields produce the same emissions as would wild ruminants such as antelope, bison, etc.
The biodiversity problem in the above refers mostly to new land clearances intended for farming, including for feedstock. This is minor in N. America and Europe, mostly as the clearances were done decades or over a century ago.
Table 3 in this source [0] shows enteric vs manure methane emissions are 158 vs 137 kg CH4/yr for dairy cows, who are mostly fed in feedlots, and 58 vs 2.4 for meat and other cattle, in the US and Canada. So the CH4 emissions range 65-fold from 2.4 to 158 depending on how the cattle are farmed.
[0] Revised methane emissions factors and spatially distributed annual carbon fluxes for global livestock. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/pmid/28959823/
Increasing herd sizes increases that equilibrium level and that is partially responsible for the overall increase.
But there are mitigations that can be applied there are feed additives that reduce the cow related methane emissions to 1%.
Overall point is cow farts can be a drop in the bucket in the overall scheme of things, all we have to do is modify their diet slightly. Should we do it yes. Is it a huge issue no.
Industrial methane leaks are a bigger problem, that methane when it breaks down will turn into co2 that was not there to begin with contributing to global warming permanently.
Cows produce around 50 kg CH4 per head per year. There's around 1.5 billion cattle. That's around 75 teragrams (million metric tons).
Humans release about 410 teragrams altogether. About 40 percent is agricultural. And another 40 percent is from fossils, namely natural gas.
The top 100 natural gas leaks release over 20 teragrams of methane a year. That's just the leaks. That's 400,000,000 cattle worth of methane just pissed into the wind.
Incidentally, I’d love to see the Great Plains return to huge roaming ruminant populations, and find a way to build our meat industry around that.
In natural environment, they cohabitant with other animals. They migrates.
When we farm them, we remove anything not our primary product.
"On average, animal-sourced foods are associated with eight times more carbon loss and 14 times more biodiversity loss per calorie than plant-sourced foods."
is very likely to be countered by listing personal preferences, anecdata, concern for vegans' health or mockery of that lifestyle choice, and generally nitpicking.
Honest admissions like 'I am part of the problem and will maybe try doing something about it' are very rare.
That is until people are faced with stuff like this :D. Then emotions take over.
HN leans strongly reactionary and just likes to dress it up a bit so as to appear more respectable.
/s
You know what’s the best way to combat climate change? Kill yourself.
I understand wanting to restrict private jets and personal cars since these are wasteful polluters not essential to life or human nature, but criticizing meat and milk is just misanthropy.
I'm more triggered by how they count and compare plant and animal-based calories. They ignore one critical detail: human body is not a calorie meter. They don't take into account protein digestibility, phytic acid, phototoxins, non-digestible oligosaccharides that cause bloating. 200kcal of boiled eggs versus 200kcal of peas? Some people just really enjoy their peas and beans, I guess.
Is there really nothing else going on in your life?
I'm sorry.
I'm not criticizing people wanting to eat meat or milk.
I'm criticizing making it ones entire point of living.
Is there really nothing else going on for you? Meat and milk all you have to live for? Surely you must see how that's not good for you?
You seem incapable of understanding rhetorical exaggeration.
Ketogenic diet is a band aid to both, not a solution, and plants are not the cause of either problem, either.
Chicken, for example, produces 10% of CO2 per kg of meat compared to beef.
But mainly, beef and meat is not the same, cattle needs way more ressources than chicken for example, or well, insects.
Hardest part is knowing implicit animal ingredients you might not otherwise guess, which almost tripped me up when I visited the US and (as a vegetarian*) almost bought some yogurt before reading the ingredients list and finding to my surprise that it contained gelatine.
* it's mainly the cheese; I've substituted out other uses of milk. Also, vegan yogurt is a thing now, not sure when that happened, before or after that visit.
Just looked up the Wikipedia page to check on vegan, and… looks like all the animal and plant "sources" actually ingest the stuff from elsewhere?
Since only bacteria and some archea possess the genes and enzymes necessary to synthesize vitamin B12, plant and algae sources all obtain the vitamin secondarily from symbiosis with various species of bacteria,[5] or in the case of fermented plant foods, from bacterial fermentation.[86]
The mean human has approximately one ovary, one testicle. A few hundred million Indians refusing all meat is compatible with the others not doing that.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-and...
If it’s not, it’s probably just poverty holding back consumption.
Edit: upon second reading, I realize techterrier was probably refuting only the steak part of sudo_cowsay’s comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_milk_cons...
There was a research, which I can't be arsed to google with mobile, that compared western vegan diet and Indian omnivore and, yup you guessed it, the western version was less costly in terms of future proof.
But as with the zillionaires the human predicament depends on weather we muster the courage to limit ourselves or die to the extinction that's already manifesting itself in forms like forest fires, droughts and crop losses.
But I think we are making progress, slowly, sadly too slowly, with the current summer we are having in Europe, of the impact of our past actions in the weather. And make no mistake, eating so much meat and drinking so much milk, is a huge impact we are inflicting on our planet.
Please do not comment with "I do X" or "In our house, we avoid doing Y" - it is not about you and me, it is about society. I am convinced, you are convinced, we need everyone to be convinced.
So we can thus incentivise change (things like renewables being far cheaper than fossil fuel) globally, and adapt to reality.
There are a vocal minority whining about how we need to stop eating beef or milk annd stop using energy and there are those who make beef and milk more sustainable and make generating energy sustainable. I have time for the latter. The former can go hand out with the coal rollers.
Fighting climate change is not going to be successful without sacrifice, we tried that for the last decades and fossil fuel consumption has only risen.
Of course people dont want to do that and so instead deny it happening or that it will be magically fixed in the future.
It doesn't change the fact that you're still burning coal, while you could be putting up solar.
Methane breaks down to Co2 in the atmosphere on average in 9.6 years.
Animal rearing does not permanently affect the climate.
Increasing stock sizes does increase the methane level equilibrium but there are mitigations to this, there are additives to feed that can reduce methane emissions to 1%. Last I checked a few years ago, there were pilot programs to determine effects on animal welfare and product quality.
The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.
Despite which, over a 100 year period it has 25 times the warming impact as the CO2 it turns into.
> The problem we should be focusing on is fossil fuels.
Everyone should focus on whatever they know how to make a dent with, the "sustainable" emissions rate is 0.1% of the current rate which is essentially "we need to fix everything everywhere except for pick one of grassland or North Korea".
The CO2 captured by plants and eaten by livestock gets converted in part to methane, a more more potent greenhouse gas. This does eventually degrade back to the original CO2, but on a scale of decades, it's currently too slow to prevent accumulation of methane.
I hold some fringe ideas, e.g. helmets are bad. So I have lots of experience with handling discussion where people close up for any rational argument. Because I am just wrong by definition. That really lets you explore how people react to ideas they do not support.
So of course we are not going to do anything about it, when it is much easier to deny it exists or pretend that it is going to magically fix itself in the future.
Yep, is the miracle of literature. An hectare of cattle allows more biodiversity than the same hectare of lettuce.
The problem is systemic and blaming other people for their lifestyle choices is neither effective nor helpful and just leads to further division. It's exactly this sort of division that helps fossil companies to destroy the planet and keep making money.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-warming-by-gas-and...
https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
More than 70% of CO2 from energy, less than 6% from ALL livestock.
- All emissions from livestock is less than 6%, so going vegan is bounded by 6%
- All road transport is less than 12%, so your electric vehicle is bounded by 12%
- All aviation total is less than 2%, so private jets doesn't matter
Attacking the problem from the consumption side is all virtue signalling and performative shaming. If you want to make a difference, figure out how to produce the energy cleanly.
Global meat production is only increasing.
You're delusional with main character syndrome?
You do realize those soybean plantations are not for human consumption, right? And that that's what is factored into the quoted loss of biodiversity?
And if you're not willing to do your part, that just means the rest of us have to pull double duty.