While methane is 28-times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, methane’s lifespan is just a decade, while CO2 — known as a long-life pollutant — remains in the atmosphere for 1000 years.
After ten years, methane is broken down in a process called hydroxyl oxidation into CO2, entering a carbon cycle which sees the gas absorbed by plants, converted into cellulose, and eaten by livestock.
In the first paragraph, it says methane isn't so bad because it lasts only 10 years, unlike CO2 which lasts 1000 years. In the very next paragraph it says the methane is broken down into CO2 which is then absorbed by plants and recycled. Wait, you just said it lasts 1000 years.The next two paragraphs say that livestock accounts for 33% of the total methane released and blithely states that it all gets broken down and reused. If no additional animals are introduced, then net release equals net absorption. That is not very insightful -- eventually an equilibrium will be reached. This glosses over the real data that CO2 levels are rising, it is having measurable consequences, and is pushing control loops to new, worse states.
Citing one article written for the "Farm Business" trade publication isn't as conclusive as you seem to state.
When you burn oil, you take carbon from the ground and introduce it into the atmosphere. This increases the total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere.
When you grow plants, you take carbon out of the atmosphere. When you eat it, you release it back into the atmosphere. The total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere does not change.
Grass grows more vigorously when regularly pruned, for example by a grazing animal. Farms also make a point of planting thing which grow quickly and efficiently. Thus it's reasonable to expect that farming could increase the rate of carbon turnover in the atmosphere, which would create the appearance of increased carbon emissions without a corresponding increase in the amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere.
In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged. But the cow itself only causes a short lived, fixed increase in atmospheric methane and an increased rate of carbon turnover.
So the electricity and diesel that are involved in growing plants come from the atmosphere? That's new to me.
> In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged.
I cannot say anything wherever cows really are inconsequential wrt the warming effect, but it definitely goes against what's generally said by climate scientists.
To phrase it differently:
Climate scientists generally think that cows are an issue, but I do not have the qualification to judge wherever Dojis claim (that they don't matter) has any truth to it, as I'm not informed enough to form an opinion on the matter.
Doji did not claim that modern agriculture isn't harmful, they just addressed cows specifically.
Compare this to cars. Even if the number of cars remains constant, their contribution to the C02 pool grows every day.
So we should avoid increasing cattle population 100x, but we wouldn't want to do that anyway because we'd have nowhere to put them, and I certainly wouldn't support deforestation.
> fortunately if cattle population stays constant, their portion of the atmospheric resident methane will also remain constant
I have the impression (as a person uneducated in this topic) that current levels are already too high, and the world population is only going up.
Is there a way to produce more food with lower emissions or should the main target be a steady population? Or both?
I know some people who started eating insects and stopped planning for kids because of this. Me? I'm just confused.
1. Current consumer habits change.
2. Rapidly developing countries decide not to increase the animal proportion in their diet, which has happened in every single culture so far.
And producing food for cows causes more damage than making same food for humans. (Deforestation, Soy plants, etc emitting more carbon)
Most popular meat labels here would not even allow buying external food, if not absolutely necessary.
I was wrong, correction below
https://schweizerfleisch.ch/herkunft/facts-figures-schweizer...
Even if it was, grass-fed beef is about 1% of the supply in the US. It has also been shown that grass-fed beef on average causes more environmental degradation than conventionally fed beef, due to the deforestation required to create grazing areas
Deforestation is a real problem. How do you address this from a policy perspective? If you ban beef, that is only a temporary band-aid on the real problem of deforestation, which both fails to address deforestation properly, and which prevents beneficial uses of livestock such as for reuse of food waste products, grazing of natural grasslands, production of natural fertilizer, etc.
When measured over 10 years, it's more like 81 times.
So the "28 times" already allows for the fact that it's mostly only there for 10 years.
https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/methane-vs-c...
Am I missing something? How can methane be a more potent GHG if it has lower IR absorption AND a shorter lifespan?
Edit: found spectra here (not the data that i took, obviously):
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/methane_...
CO2 has a big fat band that blows out the absorption at 4.5 um in a region untouched by water (and one that is overwhelmed by water); methane has two spiky bands both of which are partially occluded by water.
What do you mean by a fairly developed country? McDonald's was selling hamburgers for 15 cents in 1955 (roughly the same as the price of a loaf of bread at the grocery store).
Catholics eating fish on Friday (instead of meat) I believe goes back many generations.
See also this article about historical meat consumption in the U.S.[0]:
"“These sources do give us some confidence in suggesting an average annual consumption of 150–200 pounds of meat per person in the nineteenth century.”
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-ameri...
Yes, I realize it's still death and pollution but the scale of modern farms is simply mindboggling.
Grow and slaughter your own pigs and hens and then decide if you still want to do it for the meat (or the money from selling the meat).
In this story the supermarkets say "We'll give consumers the choice", but for them that means choosing eco products that have ~40% higher price and they don't do that (~5% of sales is eco-friendly), so this doesn't work.
Once again it is politicians who need to take some tough measures, but they find powerful lobbies in their path plus they do not dare to take impopular measures that make products more expensive, for fear of losing votes. So for 50 years things got worse and worse.
One solution mentioned was what social enterprise True Price [0] is trying to establish: explicitly pricing the detrimental externalities that until now are shoved as costs to future generations. A pack of regular coffee with externalities priced in would go from, say, $5 to become $10, while a pack of eco-friendly coffee would go to $6.50. The surplus to the price should be reserved in a fund with which farmers can make the transition to sustainable agriculture.
It varies a lot by country, pretty sure there's a lot more overlap between pasture land and arable land in Europe, but for example in USA not so much.
Considerable amount of animal food also involves byproducts of food production for humans, or plants used in cycling the fields (that's made worse with preference to just put ton of artificial fertilizer)
The grains are not the issue, the subsidies in the US are so strong that they are not a real factor. There is so much excess food produced they export it to other countries for instance. https://modernfarmer.com/2019/01/congress-finally-passed-a-n... https://abcnews.go.com/US/dairy-farmers-dumping-milk-amid-co... https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/15/business/milk-dumping-cor... Fresh food is often wasted, and the dumping of milk is to prevent the prices from going too low. This was happening before corona as well, this paper is a pretty good summary from a marxist perspective on overproduction. https://www.e-ir.info/2016/07/07/agricultural-overproduction...
Nice reference to Marxism.
Deforesting the amazon to grow corn for cows is something I'm sure we can all agree is bad.
Should we use livestock to eat cover crops and waste products like corn husks and cobs? This way we reuse waste and produce high quality protein to supplement our diets.
Should we graze cattle on natural grasslands like the great plains? Especially in rotation with human foods, like the cover crops mentioned before?
So sure, go for 100%-grass-and-not-human-edible-food-fed beef, but that's not the current system.
Here's a quote from the Economist article citing two recent scientific studies: "It takes 33 plant calories to produce one calorie of beef."