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Comment by quantumwannabe | Hacker News Reader

It’s completely made up. All meat is carbon neutral because animals don’t produce carbon atoms from nothing. They get them from the plants they eat which in turn get their carbon from the atmosphere.

The carbon cycle is basic scientific fact yet confidently ignored by people who hate things like logging and meat.

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I'm not an expert here, but I see what you're saying. Is the carbon calculation from the meat _processing_??? Every year I hunt a buck and carry it off the mountain. So the carbon footprint for getting that meat for my family is really the drive up to and from wherever I'm hunting from, plus a few other small things that probably amount to almost nothing.

I live close to a large meat processing facility, and it appears to be quite an energy intensive operation from the outside. Never been inside though, so I can't say for sure. But transporting live cattle, feed, water, slaughter, freeze, freeze+transport all might be pretty carbon heavy.

All of that would go away with renewable energy and therefore reducing meat consumption would not be "the next frontier" in the battle against climate change as the original poster said.

By that same logic, fossil fuels are carbon neutral because they come from living things.

The problem is we have too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not too much of various assorted carbon-based compounds on the planet.

But the supply of herd animals is essentially fixed. There isn’t infinite growth. Eating meat therefore does not increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, no matter what vegans who want to ban meat for personal moral reasons assert.

If humans stopped eating meat, the only way to reduce the amount of carbon that animals “emit” would be to kill all of them and bury their carcasses underground where they can’t decompose (as that would turn them into CO2).

Burning oil introduces new carbon into the cycle, animals existing does not.

That's a fairly simplistic argument though. Deforestation converts forest into a cattle feed monoculture. That plant material locks in less co2 than a forest. There's the extra CO2 emitted from growing cattle feed as opposed to growing food for humans directly (via fossil fuels used in production). And then there's methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas.

It's a topic that's way more complex than you seem to think. Climate scientists did not miss the simple fact that all carbon in a cow originates from the atmosphere. That's understood. But there's all the other stuff.

For the record I'm not vegan or even vegetarian. Attacking vegans for their beliefs is poor formimo

Cows eat wild grass for most of their lives. There is zero deforestation to feed cattle in the US. The amount of methane is also fixed as it gets broken down into CO2 which is later absorbed by plants.

Scientists didn't miss this; there's just a lot of grifters trying to use people's desire to fight climate change to get them to support unrelated issues.

Doing an appeal to authority is poor form.

The supply of herd animals very obviously isn't fixed. Humans breed them for resources, and since the world population has more than doubled over the last 50 years, the supply of herd animals has also increased a lot. If humans stopped breeding cattle for resources, there'd be far less cattle.

The amount of atmospheric methane also very obviously isn't fixed. Increases in production result in a higher concentration of methane, since it takes ~a decade to break it down. As long as you keep increased output of methane, the baseline concentration will also stay increased.

Your point about "kill[ing] all of them and bury[ing] their carcasses underground where they can’t decompose" also shows that you really don't understand that 1) different animals produce different greenhouse gases that may have weaker or stronger effects, and 2) that we're actively causing far more cattle to exist than would without us continuously breeding them.

The only way I can see your points making sense is if you're literally approaching the topic from an absolutist binary perspective (as in, "either we keep going exactly as before, or we have to literally kill all animals, no middle ground possible").

You don’t seem to understand the carbon cycle.

It is basic scientific fact and denying it is the same level of ignorance as denying that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

You don't seem to understand that carbon have different effects depending on the molecule and location.

You don't even seem to understand that the amount of cattle changes when humans breed more cattle.

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