Nature needs animals as well. In fact it is essential.
Agricultural reform or innovation is certainly an avenue to explore; but this strange obsession with "stop eating red meat" is a bit too much.
Nature needs animals as well. In fact it is essential.
Agricultural reform or innovation is certainly an avenue to explore; but this strange obsession with "stop eating red meat" is a bit too much.
That most red meat is very co2 expensive compared to getting the proteins from other sources is a relevant argument for many of us, and not a particularly 'strange obsession' for those of us caring about reducing our co2 footprint.
Grazing animals are part of a cycle. Any methane from digestion is broken down in the atmosphere and bound again to plant life and recycled. This is vastly different from drilling rock and letting out new carbon into the atmosphere at a drastic rate.
That goes to my second point; if you keep cows (or other animals) and feed them grain, and use artificial fertilizer and add other fossil-fuel dependent machinery on top of that - yes then that becomes a problem.
But it is mainly a problem if e.g. the population of cows drastically increases. In Europe and North America, it has decreased since at least the 50s; increasing in other parts of the world.
So regardless of the downvotes - "we have to stop eating red meat due to co2" is way too simplistic.
Even ignoring methane gas releases the production of red meat causes higher emissions of co2 than comparable plant-based proteins. These emissions originate from feed crop production, synthetic and organic fertilizer application, manure storage, land-use changes like deforestation for pastures, on-farm energy use, and meat processing and transport. As you see most of these are 'running costs', and reducing global meat consumption would reduce emissions.
The whole of life, plants and animals - depend on the "cutsy" parts.
Basic atmospheric science.
Anyway, feel free to make an actual argument. Both of the claims above of is contrary to established science, so you must say something more than 'you are wrong'.
Methane traps 81 to 84 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, but drops to 28 to 30 times more heat over a 100-year period.
Cows create methane (or rather the microbes in their bellies) from co2 and hydrogen, they do not 'capture' it from somewhere. More cows -> more methane, which heats the world more than the co2 used to create that methane would have heated the world.
Most of the people pushing it are doing so because they believe it's immoral to eat meat, so they'll latch onto whatever excuse they can to try to stop people.