I truly don't understand the methane issue. Historically worldwide the # of ungulates is probably well below historical averages. It looks like today we have around 98 million head of cattle in the US. Historically we had bison in excess of conservatively 60 million. This doesn't even begin to count all the animals in Africa. Overall wide life is declining.
The point is the amount of large mammal farts, it appears to be burps, going on now is probably not that much higher than it always has been. We have merely swapped out one large untamed mammal for a more domesticated one.
EDIT: I should point out I am not advocating for more cows. I don't think we should be clear cutting forests to raise more of them. Yet I don't think we should be running to get rid of all of them either. Historically beef was quite expensive and was usually reserved for rare occasions or the very wealthy. I can see a path forward where we keep the herd size constant and let prices rise. This would obviously drive people to look for cheaper substitutes.
> large mammal farts going on now is probably not that much higher than it always has been
I believe a big part of it has to do with the feedlot diet— when they're eating a high-calorie diet of mostly corn/grain instead of their natural diet of grass, it puts their digestive system into overdrive.
EDIT: I looked into it a bit more after posting this, and it looks like it's not clear-cut— for example, it takes a cow a lot longer to reach slaughter weight eating grass, so even if they're belching less during that time, it's a long enough time that it may be a wash, or even worse: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/climate/beef-cattle-metha...
The corn consumed by cattle includes the corn stalks which are more or less the same as consuming grass. Corn is after all in the grass family. The actual kernels of corn increase the calories versus grass, but it’s not like cows are just eating corn off the cob all day long. They need to consume tons of roughage to help with their digestion. I think a good argument is that converting grain and grass to beef is inefficient - if you could have consumed the grain yourself, but the nice thing about cows is that they convert very low calorie foods into high calorie meat that we can consume. If we had to eat what cows do, we’d be chewing all day.
It is well documented that once cows are switched to the pure corn diets we now feed them, their health starts immediately declining and they start dying. Factory farms time it so that they grow up on grass and similar, then are switched to grain to fatten them, and are slaughtered before becoming too ill. There are many unhealthy modifications made to their diet and environment to force them to consume corn. This is detailed lots of places including the book The Omnivores Dilemma. The whole book is essentially about corn and what a horror show industrial agriculture/meat is.
Yes. Large parts of North and Central India eat wheat a lot, as chapati, roti, paratha, naan, bhatoora, poori, daliya (broken wheat), rava (semolina), etc. Even in South India a good amount of wheat is eaten as rava (rava upma and rava dosai), chapati, poori, parotta, etc.
Same for monocrop fields of Soy beans, doused in pesticides & chemical fertiliser.
There is a better way all around, with a mixture of animals and crops. And you very much need the animal dung to fertilise if we're talking about doing anything postive for the environment.
They don't get silage unless the farmer makes a point of it. Most of the time the stalks and chaff and spit out the back of the combine and tilled under. Furthermore they'd get penalized for it in weighing if its mixed in with the corn so there's little to no incentive for the extra work of it. If the farmer has a small enough herd though they may let them roam on the field afterward, but the big lots don't do that.
They are constantly feeding the grass with their poo.
Re-generative agriculture using a variety of animal grazing in rotation is more efficient and better for wildlife and the planet than any monocrop vegetable field will every be.
Organic agriculture only works with large amounts of animal dung.
> for example, it takes a cow a lot longer to reach slaughter weight eating grass, so even if they're belching less during that time, it's a long enough time that it may be a wash, or even worse
For that cow, yes. However, the entire herd will reach slaughter faster on a high calorie diet, there's greater turnover in the herd and more methane gets produced for a smaller number of total cows.
If "for a cow" the lifetime emission is the same (say because the daily emission halves but the cow lives twice as much), then the rate of emission "for the entire herd" will also be the same (everyting else being equal). The herd will contain two "low-emissions" cows for each "high-emissions" cow.
>It takes a cow a lot longer to reach slaughter weight eating grass, so even if they're belching less during that time, it's a long enough time that it may be a wash, or even worse.
This would still mean the cows live shorter lives and fart more intensely in that time. So that would destroy a headcount comparison with previous levels of wildlife, since basically now you're comparing one life of a bison with hundreds of cows living in it's lifespan.
EDIT: it must be part of cow digestion. I just remember that cow burbs are bigger methane problems, but cow farts are fine. Still not sure about methane from grass dying normally, and maybe there’s lots extra grass being grown for cows that wouldn’t grow normally?
Aerobic decomposition, exposed to oxygen like dead grass on the ground, produces mostly CO2 and H2O (plus some other O based stuff like SO4, PO4, NO3). Anaerobic decomposition, like in a cow's stomachs, produces mostly CH4 and CO2 (plus some other H based stuff like NH3, H2S, PH3).
This is so misinformed. Much cattle production is in South America yet you cite only US figures which is less than 10% of headcount.[1] Even the US bison figures you cite predate the massive rise in industrial CO2 emissions, greatly reducing our budget. And you claim “wild life” is declining without sources — commercial cattle still number > 1B worldwide.
> One item worth noting is that the decline in U.S. inventory since 2008 – 3.1 million beef cows – has been met with an opposite expansion in Brazil of almost 4 million beef cows during the same period.
>Even the US bison figures you cite predate the massive rise in industrial CO2 emissions, greatly reducing our budget
"Cows are a major driver of climate change" and "Cows are the part of the CO2 budget that is most expendable" are related, but not quite equivalent arguments.
Don't forget the human race also nicely made extinct a whole bunch of mega fauna around in the world. In South America, for example, toxodons, which were the most common ungulate.
I just clicked through that link and there are several hypotheses for what caused the extinction of these animals. You state it was humans alone as if this were fact.
Every greenhouse gas counts, whether it's part of the preexisting baseline or something recent we started emitting. The goal isn't a return to how things were, the goal is to keep the temperature from climbing too high too quickly.
Some problems you can fix in one place and be done with it. Harder problems you gotta work them every place you can make a difference. If livestock accounts for 14% of greenhouse gas, that seems like a viable angle of attack.
Meat has high calories per pound. But a cow must eat 10,000 calories of plants to produce 1,000 calories of beef.
Chickens need as few as 2,000 calories of plant to produce 1,000 calories of chicken.
If they are eating roughage humans can't eat, it's useful. But if we are farming corn to feed cows, we could have been farming something humans (or chickens) can eat instead with less land, fertilizer, etc.
Ok, but the plants a cow is eating are inedible to humans, and they mostly graze on infertile land. Most food they are fed in the finishing stage is farm byproduct that would otherwise get thrown out. Only 7% of a cow's lifetime food intake will be crops that compete with human food demand.
What a cow is really doing is turning inedible sources of food into nutritious human food.
This is true during the first year of life. After that, most cattle are moved to dense feedlots. Further, the infertile land they're grazing on, in many cases, is infertile precisely because of the way it's grazed. In the scenario where herds graze huge tracts of unbroken native grasslands, the result is increasingly fertile soil.
When grazing animals are confined to small lots, the resulting erosion of topsoil and over-grazing reduce the fertility of the land.
> the plants a cow is eating are inedible to humans
> Most food they are fed in the finishing stage is farm byproduct that would otherwise get thrown out.
True in many cases, but missing the larger point. This waste would typically be scattered over huge tracts of land, sequester carbon and re-fertilize the soil over long time horizons. Instead, we turn it into methane and artificially fertilize.
> What a cow is really doing is turning inedible sources of food into nutritious human food.
True, but fails to consider the negative externalities.
There are exceptions where meat makes sense. At higher than 4000 meters, you aren’t going to grow much more than barley, so meat is pretty much it. I’ve never been so sick of meat than during a trip on the Tibetan plateau. Likewise for dry scrub land (Nevada, Wyoming, Arizona, irrigation can only do so much). Then there is the efficiency at which food for livestock can be grown vs for people.
That's interesting, as on the Nepal side you get only Dahl Bhat (rice and lentils), with maybe some pickles and luxury, a fried egg!
However in Mendoza, Argentina near to Aconcagua, you are inundated with beef steak and red wine, which sounds great, but after a few days of that you're feeling pretty heavy!
Nepal has much more agriculture than Tibet given that much of their land is much lower (Kathmandu is 1,400 meters, Lhasa is 3,655 meters). So most Nepalese are Hindu and can be vegetarians, while vegetarianism simply can’t exist in traditional Tibet (you won’t survive, so even Buddhist monks eat meat, incidentally the one thing Tibetans most like about being apart of China is easy access to agriculture imports).
South America I wonder if it’s more about converting nutrient poor jungles to grazing land?
This entire thread is hijacked by talking about "cow farts". Meat, the way it's farmed today, is far more intensive than what meets the eye. There's the land required to raise the crops that feed the animals, there's transportation of this feed and the raw material to grow the feed, there's the deforestation caused by the land requirement, and on and on.
Field corn is grown for the starch, which is turned into ethanol. The remaining bits are turned into animal feed. Those bits are the byproduct. The main product is ethanol, which the government has induced a huge demand for under the pretext of environmental protection.
It is not profitable to grow field corn solely for animal feed.
Right, but humans can't live off grass and grass is produced from photosynthesis which is for all practical purposes an unlimited energy source. Not too worried if we waste grass.
how much of that was human edible callories? free grazing cattle will eat plant humans won't/can't. there is alot of land thats used for grazing that is not suitable for planting crops for a variety of reasons.
The vast majority of cattle are not grazing - instead they are fed farmed grain and soy in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO if you want to search it) where the density of animals is far greater than grazing would ever support.
Essentially most of that soy and corn in the American midwest and the clearcut Amazon are being raised to fatten cattle, not feed people - and it takes a lot of energy to do that.
I agree, but I don't know if it necessarily needs to be very good for us to evolve to eating it. We could have either already been adapted to eating it, or it just needs to be the most viable food source among few. If the only thing around to eat is treebark, there's going to be something that eats it, but not us, so we eat that thing.
Animals bread for slaughter are essentially tools for converting plants we can’t eat into something we can. They’re used when you reach the limit of your usable farmland but still have grasslands.
Yes meat is more caloric than “vegetables” on a per-lb basis but meat gets beat out by oils, nuts and seeds which is why trail mix and unleavened nut breads “lembas bread” exist.
> tools for converting plants we can’t eat into something we can
Yep, but the devil is in the details. How exactly is that conversion happening and what are the side effects? It takes great care to ensure the outcome is a net positive.
The area needed for that kind of farming is prohibitively large if we want to sustain current levels of consumption, though. Those bison the parent poster talks about moved over a pretty darn huge area: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_bison_belt
Prior to the industrial revolution the CO2 in the atmosphere was significantly less than today, around or under 250 ppm, so a bit of methane wasn't a problem. Now even the same amount of methane when added to the 410 or so ppm CO2 we have today and it becomes a problem. Of we can reduce atmospheric methane it takes off a bit of the pressure on us to reduce CO2 levels.
I think a lot of what you're saying makes sense. People tend to lump all types of raising cows together, when it's really only the factory farming type or rainforest clearing kind that needs to be stopped. There's a tremendous amount of dry or hilly land that isn't suitable for other types of agriculture, so it really makes sense to raise cattle on these lands in low density. I drive by a lot of these places regularly, and seeing cows on them looks extremely natural and the animals seem very content.
So we should outlaw factory farming and clearing rainforest for cattle, which will drastically cut the supply and allow prices to settle much higher so it's more of a luxury than an every day thing.
It's worth noting that rain forest is also cleared for palm and soy. I have yet to see a concise study comparing CO2 and general environmental impact of large soy plantations and meat farms. And I totally support getting rif of industrial style meat farms and production.
Of course, if most of that soy is going to feed cattle, then maybe it should be counted towards cattle's impact - especially when that soy could feed many more humans than the cattle that eats it does.
If we can reduce any source with little to no consequences we should do it. The point is we're over capacity because we've added petroleum and other sources, namely large container ships that aren't going to be constrained anytime soon.
> I truly don't understand the methane issue. Historically worldwide the # of ungulates is probably well below historical averages.
It's more that this wasn't so much a problem until we added the 80%+ other emissions on top (and the deforestation/water use/transportation/diversion of food crops/human population).
The best I can figure out there has been a massive increase in global methane levels in the last millenia or so.
I suppose we could argue about the source but livestock is the most obvious candidate.
Edit: Okay turns out fossil fuels are also responsible fro some non-negligible part of the methane emissions, and it's not just livestock but all agriculture and the resulting waste.
This paper shows that humans are evolutionary carnivores. There are 25 points ranging from various fields in science. Our increased brain sizes and large fat stores in comparison to other primates are just some of the clues. We have different colon/intestine ratios because we spend less time fermenting plants and simply digest meats better. Our higher pH in our stomachs also points to it.
Yes, we can eat plants. But it's not optimal. And we're worse at doing it than our evolutionary cousins.
For this to scale properly it would need to rely on creating a new market for seaweed farms with the purpose of sending to feedlots. I have a hard time imagining this actually happening.
Think about it. Cows release carbon based green house gasses. Where does that carbon originally come from? Plants absorbing carbon based green house gasses. I'm not saying that they cancel out, but there must be some consumption of carbon from the atmosphere in order for cows to produce carbon.
If you're an environmentalist trying to convince people to support your cause, you aren't going to talk about the carbon that raising cows removes from the air. You're only going to mention the carbon that gets put back in the atmosphere. That way, the problem seems like a bigger deal. This is not a slight on environmentalists -- its just politics.
If we were just talking about the CO2 exhaled by cows I would agree. Plants consume CO2 to grow, cows release a lot of that CO2 back into the atmosphere. It's a closed loop (if we ignore all the energy we spent on farming).
The problem is that cows also release a lot of methane. Methane is carbon based (CH4), but it acts very different from CO2. It decays faster, but it a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. It's around 80 times more potent in the first 20 years, or 25 times more potent in the first 100 years. So having plants absorb CO2 only for cows to turn it into methane is pretty bad on the timescales we care about.
It's not necessarily the biggest of the problems with cattle, but it's worth preventing on its own.
If methane has bigger effect than the same amount of coal within C02 then your argument fails.
> While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2.
> In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Do you find it strange that an article about methane does not mention what percentage of the greenhouse gas effect that methane accounts for? I'd ask everyone to read this article, write down what percentage you think methane accounts for and then read the wikipedia page on greenhouse gasses.
This is to say nothing other than that more nuance is needed when discussing the environment. It is important to reduce our emissions.
@nightski
Yes, natural gas is about half as bad as burning oil and one third as bad as coal in terms of energy output per tonne of CO2 emitted.
Although methane is usually the largest component, natural gas is typically a mixture of methane, propane and butane. So not quite the came as cow burps.
Not quite. For a power plant the rate is ~0.059 tons CO2 per MMBtu of natural gas, coal is ~0.105 tons per MMBtu (different for bit, sub, etc.), and oil is around ~0.081 (although, like coal, it varies).
Now, in a power plant context, modern gas plants are going to be more efficient and have better heat rates than their coal and oil equivalents, so you do generally need less total MMBtu input to get an equivalent amount of generation out. But if you’re burning the same amount in terms of energy content, the difference when it comes to only CO2 is not as large as you’re saying.
Natural gas burns cleanly and is very effective at heating homes and water. While there are problems with leakage, it's a huge step up from burning coal & oil.
This is what I don't understand about companies planting trees to offset their fossil fuel CO2. Our problems are heavily caused by carbon being dug out of the ground and released. A tree just means that the carbon will be released at a later date
It's mostly feel-good greenwashing, as far as I can tell.
Bill Gates recommends a company for doing offsetting that actually pulls carbon out of the air and sequesters it underground, removing it from the carbon cycle: https://climeworks.com/subscriptions
It appears to cost ~$1/kg, but I'm guessing that will come down substantially if they're able to scale it up.
Good point. Not sure if they're allowed to grow for that long, I think some options are on timberland. But if they are, it seems like a reasonable short-term help.
In order to be usable, you 10+ years anyway. And in case you don't burn the wood, the CO2 stays out of the CO2 cycle for even more years anyway.
And by planting the right kind of trees, we could even go a long way to repair and safe our forests which are suffering from climate change and monocultures.
1. the tree will eventually be replaced by another tree, but more trees are being planted overall than are dying, so their numbers go up
2. the time dimension matters a lot. i.e. sequestering lots of CO2 inside trees now is still useful even if it gets released later because by then maybe technology will have improved to be less fossil fuel dependent.
We also need to be restoring all the tree cover that we’ve been removing. Trees do more than just storing carbon. They provide us with oxygen, hold top soil together, provide natural habitat for various wild life, cool an area enough to attract rain clouds, and much more.
Though, replacing the cover isn’t enough and more needs to be done - such as reducing greenhouse gas emission and removal of greenhouse gasses ( by using Carbon Capture Systems, for example).
I’m gonna guess that wild grazers get predated on by a much more varied species than just carbon polluting humans and their domesticated wolfs. In the wild a bison might get eaten by a pack of wolfs or it might live long and die of old age and be eaten by a host of different scavenges, as well as insects and fungi. All supplying other niches in the ecosystem. I’m guessing that in the wild the methane that gets emitted by grazing herd animals is offset somewhere else in the ecosystem by the niches which these animals create by their behavior.
It might be that allocating all of these grazing animals for just one species destroys most other parts of ecosystems which would otherwise have adjusted for the greenhouse gasses emitted by them.
Or who knows, maybe we fluctuate between warm periods in our ice ages because enough grazing animals have farted enough to start a runaway global warming effects... though I doubt it.
This would only be relevant if all other things were equal. If we can cut methane emissions to below "historical averages" it will at least buy us some time to get CO2 emissions in check.
Today we are not choosing between raising meat animals and restoring land to its pre-industrialization state. So the original GHG emission rate of ancient animals is not important to our decision. We are choosing between raising meat animals and raising crops. Therefore the GHG emissions rate of modern meat animals is important.
From what I read, the contribution of factory farming feed is substantial. Dunno what bison and African wildlife were eating but cows fed a diet that had even a small amount of kelp reduced the methane in their flatus substantially.
The ecosystem the bison were a part of sequestered carbon. They moved over a huge area and grazed just enough for the soil to store carbon. Intensive farming depletes the soil, actually releasing co2 into the air. I don't know why most people replying to you have failed to point this out. Game meat is generally CO2e neutral.
You can of course still find cow meat that comes from farming that sequester enough co2 to mitigate or offset the emissions, but that kind of production would not sustain current consumption levels.
In my home country, very few areas are suitable for intensive grazing from a sequesterin POW. Only about 10% of the current land used for grazing animals sequester any meaningful amount of CO2.
oh, and I saw someone posted the xkcd comic as a reply to you. That one is pretty telling.
> there are massive differences in the GHG emissions of different foods: producing a kilogram of beef emits 60 kilograms of greenhouse gases (CO2-equivalents). While peas emits just 1 kilogram per kg.
> For most foods – and particularly the largest emitters – most GHG emissions result from land use change (shown in green), and from processes at the farm stage (brown). Farm-stage emissions include processes such as the application of fertilizers – both organic (“manure management”) and synthetic; and enteric fermentation (the production of methane in the stomachs of cattle). Combined, land use and farm-stage emissions account for more than 80% of the footprint for most foods.
> Food is responsible for approximately 26% of global GHG emissions.
> Livestock & fisheries account for 31% of food emissions ... This 31% of emissions relates to on-farm ‘production’ emissions only: it does not include land use change or supply chain emissions from the production of crops for animal feed: these figures are included separately in the other categories.
> 21% of food’s emissions comes from crop production for direct human consumption, and 6% comes from the production of animal feed.
> Land use accounts for 24% of food emissions.
Twice as many emissions result from land use for livestock (16%) as for crops for human consumption (8%).
So including land use and crops production, livestock and fisheries account for ~15% of GHG emmissions
https://www.statista.com/statistics/194297/total-number-of-c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison
The point is the amount of large mammal farts, it appears to be burps, going on now is probably not that much higher than it always has been. We have merely swapped out one large untamed mammal for a more domesticated one.
EDIT: I should point out I am not advocating for more cows. I don't think we should be clear cutting forests to raise more of them. Yet I don't think we should be running to get rid of all of them either. Historically beef was quite expensive and was usually reserved for rare occasions or the very wealthy. I can see a path forward where we keep the herd size constant and let prices rise. This would obviously drive people to look for cheaper substitutes.