All meat is made from recycled carbon dioxide (plants, e.g. corn & grass, take CO2 out of the atmosphere and "recycle" it, that's then fed to animals to grow meat).
As I always like to says, cows are just recycled grass.
Everyone blaming "meat" for global warming is just a shill for the petrol industry, distracting from the real cause (fossil fuels).
How so? Even the article itself brings up various reasons that don't include CO2 emissions; deforestation and water use for example. Cattle in particular are a major source for methane emissions - a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
The direct contribution to global warming (via methane emissions) is very low, yes. The problem arises from feeding and waste removal. It's a multi-dimensional issue and no, cows are not just recycled grass - if that were the case they wouldn't have the same impact. Most dairy cows (appr. half the overall cow population) are fed maize, soy, and high-energy supplements in order increase yield. Silages are also frequently used and the fermenting process also adds to the GHG emissions.
> Everyone blaming "meat" for global warming is just a shill for the petrol industry, distracting from the real cause (fossil fuels).
That doesn't make sense. Modern farm operations rely heavily on fossil fuels and fertiliser. This isn't the 18th century anymore, there aren't herdsmen watching over cows grazing on meadows. This: https://www.agdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/bg-dairy_... is what a modern dairy farm looks like and these feed pellets https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/pellet-feed-for-cows-pi... aren't made of just grass either.
It's a romanticised image that many still have in mind when thinking of meat production, but it's a heavily mechanised industry today and pictures like this https://ak0.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/4426340/thumb/1.jp... don't reflect a large part of the industry anymore.
Maize & soy are also made from captured CO2 like grass.
Yes the remaining CO2 released is from energy & transport (oil) used, but that is solved not by demonizing meat, but by improving energy generation (nuclear & solar instead of oil/coal/gas)
Yes. We pay the third world to do it for us. Lucky we live in different worlds, and what happens there doesn’t impact us, right?
> by improving energy generation
You are still not accounting for the surface used and the long multi-year process that’s growing a cow.
It's not either or. Recognizing the cost in fossil fuels, does not magically reduce the cost in meat production.
Scenario one: CH4 + 2 02
Scenario two: 2 H20 + C + 02
Scenario three: C02 + 2 H2 + 02
All of the above have the same molecules but they have a wildly different impact on from a climate change perspective.
CH4 breaks down into CO2 in a few decades, forming a natural cycle. The only long-term climate impact is from additional CO2 from fossil fuels.
This is without even taking into account whether the increased heating from the "short-term" impact of CH4 over a few decades causes us to hit tipping points sooner than otherwise, or that in the best case scenario we may have been able to avoid hitting at all.
If you keep pumping a constant amount of CH4 into the atmosphere, it keeps degrading into CO2, which is transformed into grass, which is transformed into cows.
It’s a cycle. There is no long-term impact.
If you are performing this action at a rate that keeps replenishing the CH4 as quickly as it is degrading, let alone faster than it's degrading and subsequently increasing the amount of CH4 in the atmosphere, the amount of CH4 in the atmosphere is constantly being kept higher than it would be were you not performing this action, for as long a term as you continue to perform it. So you've now ended up with a planet that is constantly experiencing more warming than you would have otherwise.
If the permafrost requires 1,000 units of warming to melt and release its stores of CO2 and CH4, then this further makes the difference between triggering this tipping point or not.
Am I misunderstanding something?
> There are 30m cows in the US, compared to 60m bison 150 years ago.
We could have had X units of CO2, and Y units of CH4 produced by bison under the past era.
We've eradicated the bison, replaced them with 1/2 their number in cows. We now have X units of CO2, Y/2 units of CH4 produced by cows.
This is still producing more warming than if we eliminated the cows, and went to X units of CO2, 0Y units of CH4 produced by cows.
The existence of the cows still results in more CH4, and more warming, than would be the case if we phased them out, no?
In any case, if we replaced the cows by food sources that produced less than X + Y/2 units of atmospheric CO2 and CH4 respectively, we're better off.
Maybe because most of the petrol industry serves the animal agriculture industry and hundreds of billions of animals it needs to raise and kill annually? Or did you think they don't require any inputs nor produce any outputs other than a corpse?