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Comment by gregwebs | Hacker News Reader

Cows and ruminants have been roaming the Earth for a long time. If they were a huge contribute to global warming, it would be pretty hot already. Focusing on methane emission omits the fact that grasslands absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and that a properly managed grassland actually sequesters carbon dioxide. Whereas factory farming breaks this cycle. We need to think in more nuanced ways if we’re going to solve global warming.

https://www.agriculture.com/livestock/cattle/methane-and-gra...

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I think the major point that people miss is that there is a thing called the "Carbon Cycle"[0] which basically stipulates that all carbon that already exists in the system will continually be transformed into different things and then back into carbon (and the inverse). This is pretty ordinary and cows are a part of that. Though the effects of transforming a lot of carbon at once might be profound and dangerous.

The major issue is that we're digging up shit loads of carbon and releasing it, which is the much more dangerous thing and reframing the argument to be against meat because meat has a carbon cost is like saying that the mountains are causing water levels to rise because "water comes from the mountains" (though, as part of the water cycle).

[0]: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/carbon-cycle.html

The problem is the animals eating feed grown with fossil fuel derived fertilizers: https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/fertilizer-and-climate-ch...

Cattle eating grass is one thing- industrial feed lots are another and they're needed to produce beef at the scale humans are eating it.

It cant possibly be as simple as that can it?

What’s wrong with banning those feeds and letting the price normalise causing the rate of consumption to drop to sustainable levels?

I must be missing something?

You're missing politics.

Oil+gas companies, and fertilizer producers, are deep in the supply chain and are thus embedded in the governing bodies (because no country is very good at preventing corruption). Things only change when those companies let them change.

that. is… upsetting.

The people that like cheap meat won't like that, a lot.

Ag lobbies are powerful enough no one in the US would dare propose anything like that. Even in climate conscious EU a much more modest, roundabout way of addressing part of the problem of ag emissions (nitrate levels) has been met with massive farmer protests.

> Cows and ruminants have been roaming the Earth for a long time. If they were a huge contribute to global warming, it would be pretty hot already.

The number of cows has of course massively increased over time.

I’m inclined to think so but wasn’t America full of hundred of millions of bison at one point.

80 million before 1850 according to Wikipedia. Now we're at about 1 billion cows worldwide, so it would depend on the number of cows/bison in the rest of the world at that time.

https://animalclock.org/

As a slight diversion from the carbon focus, the proportion of animals that is cows has increased drastically, as well. Look up the animal biomass proportions. It's shocking (sickening, even) to learn what proportion of the mammal biomass is cows and humans, and what proportion of the animal biomass is cows, chickens, and humans.

Have cows been fed corn for thousands of years too? Most nitrogen that is bio available today stems from human fertilizer production [0]. Its the only thing allowing orders of magnitude more human, cows and farmland in the first place to exist. No natural fixation process can hold up with human output of carbon gases.

[0] veritassium video about german haber-bosch process, which is the basis for 2/3 of humans existing today. Fuck jesus, these guys are your literal daddies!!

sometimes people forget the quantity of farm animals nowadays: https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass#:~:tex.... it's nothing close to natural anymore

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