Which gets to another question, since I'm not bothering to research before asking... how much worse is methane than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, per carbon atom involved? Because that's basically what cows do. They convert atmospheric CO2 (via plants) into atmospheric methane (via farts).
As far as carbon neutrality goes, you’re drawing a conclusion about the value based only on the first derivative. If you hold livestock numbers constant (they’re increasing, alas, but let’s not worry about that yet) then there will be a rough equilibrium. However, the gas is in the atmosphere for some time until it gets fixed back into the soil, and continues to have a warming effect in the meantime.
Any carbon tax has to punish emissions. Net zero emissions isn’t enough anymore.
And given a 9 year lifespan for methane, it's probably been stable for a long time.
Now, if you're taking the position that "net zero emissions isn't enough" as justification for a carbon tax, you need to focus on the goal. Is it carbon reduction, or puritanical punishment? Need to ask that, because there's a lot of people who want the latter but claim the former.
If the goal is carbon reduction, then a carbon tax is only a means to an end, and we have to ask if it will be effective. Can we carbon-tax beef enough to see a major reduction in its consumption, leading to a major reduction in the number of cattle? (Oh, and you'd better carbon-tax dairy while you're at it.) Does this seem like a reasonable conclusion? And if people aren't eating beef, what else will they eat instead, and what are its carbon costs?
I'm not rejecting the position, but I'm trying to think it through.
> And given a 9 year lifespan for methane
Can you please provide your sources? If this is true, it's not that worrying...
For cattle, got the numbers from the industry, which doesn't seem to have a particular agenda in this link... http://beef2live.com/story-world-cattle-inventory-year-0-111...
There might not be more individual cattle, but they've been engineered to grow bigger - and, by extension, eat bigger meals, poop bigger poops, and fart bigger farts.
https://www.beefmagazine.com/genetics/0201-increased-beef-co...
This would raise the price of beef, sure, but more importantly, it would help break the use of farmed (and heavily subsidized) corn, and the use of antibiotics, which are problematic for reasons that have nothing to do with beef. This gets us to actually solving the carbon problem, not just blunt-object punishment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Methane_as...
So unless I'm missing something (which is very possible), the amount of methane in the atmosphere from cattle is probably static rather than growing, and the amount of carbon consumed by said cattle is also static.
Right now 1billion cows are producing greenhouse gases, but <<1b cows worth of greenhouse gases generated in 1918 are "expiring."
Either way, though, it doesn't seem the problem is getting worse, at least. The question is, can we make it better? Can we reduce the level of greenhouse gasses related to cattle, short of just reducing the number of cattle, which seems more like wishful thinking than a plan.
My thought from earlier is to act to reduce the amount of corn-feeding and encourage pasture feeding, which takes external carbon (fuel and fertilizer from corn farming) out of the equation. Grazing cattle are typically raised on land that isn't useful for more lucrative farming, living on wild pasture or scrub.
The vast majority of beef produced is not carbon neutral. From the Beef Cattle Research Council [1] of Canada (not exactly an anti-beef organization):
"Presently, the economic conditions are favorable for the production of beef from grain in many regions of the world, largely because of the availability of inexpensive fossil fuels"
The plants you are referring to are produced with massive amounts of fossil fuel. By one estimate, each steer "consumes" 284 gallons of oil via feed during its lifetime [2]
On top of this, cows are one of the most inefficient ways to turn energy inputs into protein (10x less efficient than other types of meat, 100x less efficient than grain protein), primarily due to large size of the animals must be grown to before slaughter, which uses wastes a lot of energy. [3]
There is a large variance between the ratio of input energy to protein output of various types of meat, with lamb (57:1) and beef (40:1) being the least efficient, and broiler chickens (4:1) being the most efficient [4]
1. http://www.beefresearch.ca/research-topic.cfm/environmental-...
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/power-steer.html
3. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/beef-uses-ten-...
That is part of the rationale for the current endeavors into creating lab grown meat and passable plant-based meat alternatives.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the anti-meat push is the sort of hairshirt puritanism that is part of the American cultural heritage. Enjoying things is sin.
So even though it's a small part of emissions it's a significant constituent of climate change.
For Betty the cow on a small homestead sure.
Unfortunately modern agriculture is so fubar that it's hard to claim that as true. There are huge fossil fuel energy inputs from everything from chemical fertilisers, herbicides, transportation and processing. Not to mention the damage to the ecosystem that the massive mono-cultures this drives.
Chickens and hogs, on the other hand, those are gross. They're kept in confinement, and fed mostly grain. They can't really graze the way cattle do, not at scale.
Methane in the atmosphere has a fairly short half life of 7 years so the effects of increasing or decreasing the number of cows is felt relatively quickly.
There isn't enough arable farmland in the world to just let cattle and animals graze free range. They're not just eating grass.
Instead they are eating soy beans, corn, hay that is grown with huge inputs of fossil fuels and fertilizer - made worse by effectively converting that fossil fuel into atmospheric methane.
This results in animal products having the highest CO2 equivalent of any food, especially beef and dairy.
http://css.umich.edu/sites/default/files/Carbon_Footprint_Fa...
http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/how-fossil-fuels-a...
One calorie of animal produced requires at least 10 times the plant calorie input.
Some quotes from the above article:
"Feed production accounts for around 75 percent of fossil fuel use in livestock production, so this one is the big kahuna."
"An article from the Food Revolution Network, called on David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist who specializes in agriculture and energy to break down the number of fossil fuels needed to produce the food that livestock consume. According to Pimentel, the process of growing the 35 million hectares of corn, 31.1 million hectares of soybeans allotted for livestock feed in the U.S. (these numbers do not include the soy harvested in South America that feed U.S. livestock), requires an enormous amount of fossil fuel energy in the form of agrochemicals."
“Growing the corn used to feed livestock takes vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which in turn takes vast quantities of oil. Because of this dependence on petroleum,” Pimentel tells Food Revolution Network, “a typical steer will in effect consume 284 gallons of oil in his lifetime.”
"Worldwide, we currently use an average of 180 millions of tons of fertilizer to grow livestock feed and as the population grows and the demand for meat increases, it is projected we’ll need 230 million tons or 7.3 BILLIONS of gallons by 2050."
CARBON SEQUESTRATION AND GREENHOUSE GAS MITIGATION
POTENTIAL OF COMPOSTING AND SOIL AMENDMENTS ON CA RANGELANDS
California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment
Whendee et al
Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and
Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. ASSESSMENT OF CALIFORNIA CROP AND LIVESTOCK POTENTIAL
ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE
California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment
Josué Medellín-Azuara et al
UC Davis, UC Merced