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Comment by roflyear | Hacker News Reader

You have to explain to me what this:

> Livestock is grown in parts of the world on stuff which cannot be sold or which grows on its own - example: grass etc.

Has to do with CO2 produced from raising livestock? I can't connect the two in my head, there's some missing information here I don't have.

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The argument seems to be that livestock only eats stuff that would have been grown anyway and therefore has no effect on CO2 emissions. But I think this is wrong for two reasons:

1. The premise is false. Quite a lot of farmland is devoted to growing feed grains. See https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feed-gr... If we had less livestock, we could either grow human-edible crops instead (with much less energy per calorie expended) or leave these fields fallow.

2. It ignores the fact that some livestock (cows) converts feed into methane, which has a disproportionate climate impact—more methane than if the same grain had been produced, but not consumed by a cow. Admittedly, this is less relevant when we're talking about lab-grown chicken meat. But GP's point was about livestock generally, so this is worth considering.

There are at least three categories of land. Land that can be mechanically harvested, land that can be harvested by animals, and land that's neither.

If we stop growing beef on the second category of land that's not suitable for combines but is suitable for bovines, well, that could represent a net loss of food.

Haven't you heard the argument that livestock raising releases methane/CO2 etc?

The argument? It's not an argument - livestock does produce CO2. It is a fact. I don't eat meat partially for this reason.

I still have no idea what it means with regards to your original statement.

Haha, seems like OP randomly chose the wrong argument from the wrong pamphlet. Yes, livestock produces CO2. The part about it feeding on grass is a typical argument against purely plant diet, based on the assumption that if we stop eating meat we'll starve, because we cannot produce enough plant-based food, and meat production helps, because we can turn otherwise useless plants (grass), growing on otherwise useless land, into something we can eat.

> because we cannot produce enough plant-based food,

Livestock eat more plant based food that we will ever need though, it's the most inefficient food production for a reason.

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