specifically, it's 20x a GHG compared to C02, and I don't really know what you mean by it being part of carbon cycle.
This is because the methane from the cows has a half life of between six and eight years [2]. Given a fixed population cows, the amount of GHG going into the atmosphere is the same as the amount of GHG coming out of the atmosphere.
The problem with run away climate change is oil. Given a fixed consumption of oil, the amount of GHG in the atmosphere increases over time.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
[2] https://sealevel.info/methane.html#:~:text=Various%20sources....
in a frictionless vacuum...
perhaps some kind of financial incentive to curb and eventually reverse the artificially inflated population of cows whose emissions, while part of the closed carbon cycle, increase the greenhouse gas effect of our atmosphere during their half lives, would be a simple and effective step we could take towards increasing the odds we survive the next few centuries that is not at all at odds with also tackling our reliance on fossil fuels?
>in a frictionless vacuum...
This is a factual matter. Why be snarky when you can instead lookup the answer? The population of cows in the EU has been relatively constant with a slight downward trend. [1]
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
The fossil fuels did the same but on a grander scale and longer timeline where the carbon becomes sequestered. Carbon taxes on that make sense.
I’m not seeing the benefit to taxing the cattle.
Plants breath in co2 from the atmosphere and bind the carbon in their structure. Cows eat the plants and turn some percentage of the bound carbon into cow meat, the rest they poop or fart or breath out. Eventually all that carbon ends up back in the atmosphere where plants again can bind it. This is the carbon cycle. Thus the point is that cows existing do not increase the carbon in circulation. (As opposed to digging up coal or drilling for oil/gas which liberates carbon which used to be in circulation but become bound in fossils.)