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Comment by banach | Hacker News Reader

Stop eating animal-based food. See http://www.cowspiracy.com/ for details.

Cowspiracy's points on GHG emission and water consumption are simply illiterate. They don't recognize the concept of a net flow. (e.g.: carbon that comes out of a cow first went into a cow - via its food - which got apprx. all its carbon from the air)

Fertilisers and fuel did not come from the air. There are hundreds of millions of cows (and other livestock) that did not exist before. Landscapes have been sterilised to support them with a massive resulting freeing of previously captured carbon, or carbon trapped in a slow cycle. Methane from ruminants are a significant source of CO2 and are not easily recaptured, not to mention a potent greenhouse gas.

"Fertilisers and fuel did not come from the air."

True, and they are probably at least a small net flow into the atmosphere. But:

"There are hundreds of millions of cows (and other livestock) that did not exist before."

... that part doesn't matter: agriculture is by nature carbon-neutral (except if you count mechanization aspects like fertilizers + fuel).

Agriculture is most certainly not carbon-neutral by nature, even with your exclusions. CH4 is persistent and not readily available for photosynthesis.

It burns back into CO2 before too long.

Carbon dioxide is captured from the air, by plants, and then eaten by cows. So you're saying that any greenhouse gas from cows is that which has been previously captured.

But you're missing the fact that some of the CO2 captured by the grass is farted by the cows as methane, CH4.

About 1% of the CO2 is released as CH4.

CH4 is about 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas. It's one of the most potent greenhouse gases.

Luckily methane has a half life of 7 years in the atmosphere, so anything we do to reduce methane emissions is likely to be helpful.

Most of the science from Cowspiracy is still on point. A percentage was exaggerated but the main point remains persuasive: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KpmTiHjUEBU

Especially as China and other countries continue eating more meat at higher and higher rates.

Given the data, the smart thing to do is to prepare for a world with that many more cows and pigs. The externality of the carbon released when forests are cut down needs to be paid for.

Cows produce a lot of methane, which is far worse than carbon dioxide.

Additionally, something has to ship all that food to the cows.

Often in Texas, it's cheaper to ship the cows to the food than the alternative. Not trying to be pedantic, but it's an interesting factoid.

I did not know that. That is interesting!

Biggest impact livestock has is on the forests leveled for grazing. Such as Amazon in Brazil mostly used for livestock when it was a good carbon store previously.

It actually doesn't matter whether what they say is true or not. Arguing this point won't fix the climate, but supporting it just might because someone paid attention when you were being positive about it.

Ok if we're talking about net flow, lets talk about calories of plant required to get 1 calorie of food for us. Vegetarian, 1000 calories of plants make 1000 calories of food. 4000-6000 calories of plants make 1000 calories of chicken. ~9000 calories of plants make 1000 calories of pork. and ~12000 calories of plants make 1000 calories of beef. So eating 1000 calories of plants instead of 1000 calories of beef requires 1/12 the amount of farmland/deforestation/transportation/harvesting fuel etc.

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