While you're correct that fossil fuel control is crucial, livestock emissions are also an important part, and it's a false dilemma to solely focus efforts on one issue.
Whereas a reduction in meat consumption would mean a reduction in total global land use for agriculture, allowing that land to be rewilded. Trapping carbon over a longer term and potentially providing numerous environmental benefits.
"The researchers report that grass-fed beef contributes very little to the global protein supply, accounting for just one gram of protein, per person, per day. In comparison, ruminants as a whole contribute 13g of protein to the global average protein intake, per person, per day."
"Despite making only a marginal contribution to global protein intake, grazed beef accounts for between a quarter and a third of all greenhouse emissions from ruminant livestock."
https://tabledebates.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/fcrn_gn...
A related interesting fact - 77% of the world's soy is used for feed:
https://ourworldindata.org/soy#:~:text=The%20majority%20(77%....
[1] https://extension.sdstate.edu/grass-fed-beef-market-share-gr....
Turns out you're right, the majority start out on pasture and then are transported to feed lots to fatten up once they reach maturity.
According to this[1], due to the fact that grass fed beef fatten up more slowly, end up at a lower overall weight at slaughter, and are kept alive and emitting longer, "a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%", and "the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle)".
Further -
"Emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas with a large warming effect relative to carbon dioxide per molecule, come from beef cattle in the forms enteric fermentation and manure emissions. We calculated a 43% increase in methane from enteric fermentation (table 2), assuming that cattle finishing on grass had the same daily methane emissions as present-day stocker cattle, who have nearly identical ADG and are fed primarily on roughage."
Either way it seems as if grain is an indispensable part of animal agriculture currently, so we have to take that into account when talking about what would happen to land use with or without the cows around. Additionally, it seems that moving away from grain would potentially have even worse impacts on the climate.
[1]https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
"In aerobic composting, the more oxygen that is available, the more carbon dioxide (CO2) produced, the less methane (CH4), and the more complete the decomposition. As biological activity progresses, the oxygen concentration falls and CO2 concentration increases."
https://www.co2meter.com/blogs/news/8056965-co2-in-aerobic-a....
According to the FAO[1], grazing land for animals and cropland dedicated to producing animal feed represent almost 80% of all agricultural land globally. "Feed crops are grown in one-third of total cropland, while the total land area occupied by pasture is equivalent to 26% of the ice-free terrestrial surface"
Given food conversion ratios[2], where you lose roughly 90% of the energy you put into each step up the food chain, the lower we eat on it the lower the amount of energy input we need, which at the bottom of our food chain are those crops and grasslands.
Once we remove the heavily inefficient middlemen which are animals, we are left with a drastic reduction in the amount of agricultural land and output needed.
I'm not sure how many of these companies and farmers could find another use for their grassland and farmland, as it's not like people will be able to just up their consumption of food by several multiples, and I'm not sure what other sort of productive purposes beyond food production the majority would be able to find.
So yeah, once there's no demand and it's no longer profitable, a large amount of that agricultural land seems like it would just be allowed to lay fallow or be rewilded, which would be really beneficial to the environment for many reasons.[3]
[1]https://www.fao.org/animal-production/en/
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level
[3]https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/explore-rewilding/what-i...
https://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/earthkind/landscape/dont...
As far as feed though, not all feed is grown exclusively for cattle. I've worked with sugar companies in the past and the by-products of sugar production (molasses, raffinate, etc..) are sold as cattle feed. This is a billion dollar industry. These by-products are being produced regardless of whether we feed cattle or not.
Import control is an interesting idea, I haven't heard that before.
> The 2005 (FAO) Global Forest Resources Assessment ranked the United States as seventh highest country losing its old growth forests, a vast majority of which were removed prior to the 20th century.[3]
>For the 300 years following the arrival of Europeans, land was cleared, mostly for agriculture, at a rate that matched that of population growth.[7] During the 19th century, while the U.S. population tripled, the total area of cropland increased by over four times, from seventy-six million to three hundred nineteen million acres. For every person added to the U.S. population during this period, farmers put another three to four acres under the plow.[8] This trend continued until the 1920s when the amount of crop land stabilized in spite of continued population growth. As abandoned farm land reverted to forest the amount of forest land increased reaching a peak in 1963 of 753,000,000 acres (3,050,000 km2).[4]
It was estimated that there were 1,023,000,000 acres of forest in 1630, compared to 766,000,000 acres in 2012.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/08/19/...
I would guess all cellulose-digesting animals (cow, sheep, goat, deer, elk, moose, antelope, buffalo, camel, rabbit, termite, ...) should produce about the same amount of methane the amount of cellulose they digest.
Your comment also suggests a misunderstanding. Methane has an atmospheric lifetime of only ca. 10 years. A constant source of methane will not lead to increasing atmospheric methane levels, nor to continuous warming. Whereas a constant source of CO2 will.
Which Methane is. It decomposes into CO2 and Water.
Nothing to dismiss, especially because that extra boost to heating in those first 20 years could be the difference between us hitting various tipping points, like melting permafrost and releasing yet another 185 GtC[2] into the atmosphere, and not.
[1]https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-do-we-compare-methane-ca...
[2]https://www.carbonbrief.org/imminent-tipping-point-threateni...
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-do-we-compare-methane-ca...
All of that warming is caused by fossil fuels.
One thing I figured was worth checking was how many bison there were pre-industrialization, and how many cows there are now.
Some quick googling seems to say:
~60,000,000 Bison in North America in 1600
~1,000,967,000 Livestock Cattle worldwide in 2021
https://allaboutbison.com/bison-in-history/bison-timeline/ https://beef2live.com/story-world-cattle-inventory-1960-2014...
94,400,000 cattle and calves in USA in 2017.
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_health/nahms/downloads/Dem...
Hence the "cycle" part of carbon cycle.
We're not feeding cows liquified dinosaurs.
A grass fed cow is basically carbon neutral. Grass pull carbon from the air, cows eat that carbon turn it into protein, methane, CO2, we eat the protein turn it into more methane, CO2.
On a 100 year horizon, it's about 30 times worse than CO2, and over 20 years, 80 times worse.
Not all carbon is equal.
What I find missing in all the cow discussions is any mention of the huge number of bovines that roamed suitable areas of the planet, such as the North American plains, before they were mostly killed off and made room for cows.
Was the mass slaughter of buffalo that happened on 19th century USA good for climate? --Photo of a gigantic skull pile, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bison_skull_pile-restored...
For how long and how many animals similar to cows were there before we killed them in most places?
Why are the cows such a climate catastrophe now, but the previous gigantic wild herds were not? (An actual question, not a rhetorical one, as I said, I did not study or investigate this, only noticed it)?
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As far as my thinking goes, the main problem is and has been that we dig up ancient buried biomass (coal, gas, oil). We have an above-ground carbon cycle, and it does not really matter that much if there is stuff burned and carbon shifting around various forms, as long as it's in the above-ground cycle.
The problem, to my knowledge, is that we fed gigantic amounts of below-ground carbon into the above-ground cycle.
I did not check the numbers (someone, please?), I think below ground we have far more biomass than we could ever plant as forests above ground? That's why I'm not excited about tree-planting projects as "solution". As far as my understanding goes, only a complete shutdown of all coal, oil and gas extraction can even begin to address our problem. And then we still need to get a lot of carbon back underground.
Cows act solely within the above-ground cycle, so I don't see them as a valid focus, but as a distraction. My focus would be on the processes that add below-ground carbon to the above-ground cycle.
If the above-ground carbon cycle only has prehistoric amounts of carbon to begin with, would cows, burning forests, etc., still be a global climate problem? As far as I know, that's not the case (independent of local deforesting issues, just looking at the "global warming" problem).
I know I'm ignoring always present movement - without humans - between above and below ground - only counting safely long-term stored carbon, not sure what those net movements are (without human activity)?
I also ignore "details"; such as if carbon is in CO2 or CH4 in the atmosphere. I think that evens itself out longer term and would be enough for an above-ground cycle that is not increased artificially. Our problem is the speed with which we add below-ground sources to the above cycle.
I did not (and did not intent to) make any reference to biomass, not indirectly either. At most, maybe cows now bs. wild bovine herds of the ancient past, which even if we only look at the number of buffalo killed in the US must have been gigantic, so no less than we have cows now, at worst only slightly less but I doubt we have reliable figures about the size of herds before humans killed many e.g. for Africa, Asia or India. As a Middle European, I know we had plenty of large bovines but killed them quickly early on, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs.
I made no comparisons human-bovine.
Based on what?
https://www.flatcreekinn.com/bison-americas-mammal/
"The Bison: from 30 million to 325 (1884) to 500,000 (today)"
So the estimate for the number of buffalo only in North America alone already includes hundreds of millions. Then we have Africa, Asia and Europe.
That is easily that many bovines. The Eurasian steppes are (and were) even more vast than the ones in NA (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Steppe_P...). Map for Africa, steppe and savannah: https://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/20... (also remember Africa is much larger than shown on our common Mercator maps, so those areas are even larger than they appear)
There is no reason to assume the herds on other continents - before human hunting - were any less than the ones in NA. And bovines were not limited to the savannahs and steppes, just that there were the largest herds. Just look at the distribution map for the aurochs -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs#/media/File:Aurochs_di... -- it is much larger than just the steppe areas.
It is not just bovines either - other groups of which include animals like deer, giraffes, elephants and many others are also plant eating large mammals.
Also, I don't understand this modern need of saying things like "I honestly believe" and, in your case, "I strongly doubt". Feeling "strongly" does not improve the quality of your argument.
In your first reply you even used "I strongly strongly doubt " - riiiight... I would like to see more focus on the facts than on the feelings. Or do you feel that we are in some sort of competition here?
> If you don’t get how what I’m saying related that is fine.
You still did not explain what your comparison of human to bovine biomass was supposed to be about, which was your original reply.