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Comment by morganwilde | Hacker News Reader

As far as I know, this issue is not comparable to our carbon economy, I.e. Natural gas extraction, coal mining, oil, etc. Key difference is that agriculture is a closed cycle, animals produce a lot of green house gas, but it's gas that's already a part of our ecosystem. When we did stuff from the ground we add new carbon to the ecosystem, and this feat is what's destabilizing the environment. I heard this argument from an interview Elon Musk did about agriculture after someone posted a tweet at him about the documentary "Cowspiracy".

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> Key difference is that agriculture is a closed cycle, animals produce a lot of green house gas, but it's gas that's already a part of our ecosystem.

How is it a closed cycle? They require a lot of food and water to be grown, all of which has its own greenhouse gas cost to produce, and then they fart methane while they're alive and require more fuel to process/transport. All the while the world demand for meat is increasing pretty quickly, right?

Modern agriculture is part of the carbon economy, especially since the Green Revolution. Inorganic fertilizers are produced using coal and natural gas, and nitrogen-enriched fertilizers emit nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas. These inputs were previously mostly sequestered.

But we do dig stuff from the ground for agriculture. Massive amounts of forestland are cleared, plowed, and massive amounts of inorganic NPK inputs are added. This releases enormous amounts of previously entrapped CO2 to the atmosphere.

It is comparable, and thinking about agriculture as a closed system is not even close to correct. We're mowing down natural carbon sinks to an insane degree to grow crops to feed animals, one of the major reasons of deforestation and land use change in South America, for instance.

And not only that, we grow slow-acting carbon and turn it into fast-acting methane.

I strongly doubt Musk would have such a simplistic view of agricultural emissions, they're a big concern for a reason.

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