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Comment by greenonions | Hacker News Reader

There are so many lower hanging fruit for reducing emissions of and sequestering existing carbon.

If you simply restored the majority of the US great plains back to a bison centered ecosystem instead of cattle, you'd produce a similar resource (bison meat) in large quantity while reducing emissions, and the tall grass would sequester an enormous amount of carbon.

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I was about to say most of the plains are used for growing corn and not grazing land but I was wrong, partly. Its mostly cropland in the Northern/Central plains, but mostly grazing/pasture land otherwise.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/major-land-uses/maps-...

Worth noting also is that major crops grown there, like corn and soybeans, are primarily used as animal feed [1][2]. A decent chunk of corn is also used for ethanol additives to gasoline. The best thing we can do for the environment by far is reduce consumption of beef and dairy products.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feedgra...

[2] https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten...

If you are interested in the environmental impact of what you eat this resource is great:

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#you...

Note that you don't need to go vegan or vegetarian to reduce the impact, e.g. replacing any beef with pork or chicken is huge! It's way more important than cutting out milk.

If you primarily eat ground beef consider trying impossible, there are good vegan butters at this point and some okay attempts at cheese. All of those reduce the impact.

  The best thing we can do for the environment by far is reduce consumption of beef and dairy products.

This is very false.

Source: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...

Maybe not the best overall, but definitely the cheapest and easiest thing a consumer can do, right now, today, is eat less red meat.

There are already subsidies which incentivize the production of cattle. Just like with corn, if demand goes down, they'll just find a way to use cattle for something else (like turning it into feed or some energy source). The average citizen has very say in macro-economic supply chains.

I highly doubt ranchers would turn to grinding up beef herds just to make more feed. They would just grow more forage/feed crops. But they really wouldn't since it's the beef that needs the absurd volume of feed, so ideally they would just go out of business.

Yes I should have pointed that out too. Thank you.

Would it though? I don't see how because if it did sequester a lot of carbon (not just a one time chunk but over time) then the world would have way less carbon in the atmosphere than it did before industrialization.

Most of the effect is just that plants are mostly made out of carbon, so having more plant mass means more carbon in plants and less in the atmosphere. It's the same for trees.

It's a sink of fixed size, not a bottomless barrel we can dump infinite amounts of CO2 into. That doesn't make it useless though.

"simply"

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