There is a certain amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and a certain amount of carbon in the ground.
When you burn oil, you take carbon from the ground and introduce it into the atmosphere. This increases the total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere.
When you grow plants, you take carbon out of the atmosphere. When you eat it, you release it back into the atmosphere. The total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere does not change.
Grass grows more vigorously when regularly pruned, for example by a grazing animal. Farms also make a point of planting thing which grow quickly and efficiently. Thus it's reasonable to expect that farming could increase the rate of carbon turnover in the atmosphere, which would create the appearance of increased carbon emissions without a corresponding increase in the amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere.
In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged. But the cow itself only causes a short lived, fixed increase in atmospheric methane and an increased rate of carbon turnover.
Grass grows more vigorously but also consumes more nutrients when regularly pruned, other plants also "grow more vigorously" e.g get replanted when harvested by humans. This does not seem unique to grass or animal feeding.
Even if it was, grass-fed beef is about 1% of the supply in the US. It has also been shown that grass-fed beef on average causes more environmental degradation than conventionally fed beef, due to the deforestation required to create grazing areas
Buffalo is a very obvious harm reduction option that would create less harmful externalities but it’s not at all suggested, only lab grown meats and removing all meats from diet.
I never claimed the phenomena was unique to this situation - it's a general phenomena.
Deforestation is a real problem. How do you address this from a policy perspective? If you ban beef, that is only a temporary band-aid on the real problem of deforestation, which both fails to address deforestation properly, and which prevents beneficial uses of livestock such as for reuse of food waste products, grazing of natural grasslands, production of natural fertilizer, etc.
It's a concern, but fortunately if cattle population stays constant, their portion of the atmospheric resident methane will also remain constant, because methane degradation will keep pace with emissions.
Compare this to cars. Even if the number of cars remains constant, their contribution to the C02 pool grows every day.
So we should avoid increasing cattle population 100x, but we wouldn't want to do that anyway because we'd have nowhere to put them, and I certainly wouldn't support deforestation.
World population is largely a strayman, it's mostly about rising standards of living. Animal consumption per capita increases drastically as poverty dissipates, and sharply declines as people get educated about health and the environment. It's a race between those two pressures that determines the cattle population.
Projections are that it will increase very, very drastically as middle eastern and african countries soon escape the poverty line
> In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged.
I cannot say anything wherever cows really are inconsequential wrt the warming effect, but it definitely goes against what's generally said by climate scientists.
I suppose you could grasp at that straw, but the reality is that grain farms always use diesel and electricity, not just "heavy, oil burning equipment", no matter how much you might think they don't, and that's multiplied by a factor of 10 when you feed that grain to a cow.
You're clearly misunderstanding what I wrote, which is likely because of my poor phrasing.
To phrase it differently:
Climate scientists generally think that cows are an issue, but I do not have the qualification to judge wherever Dojis claim (that they don't matter) has any truth to it, as I'm not informed enough to form an opinion on the matter.
Doji did not claim that modern agriculture isn't harmful, they just addressed cows specifically.
When you burn oil, you take carbon from the ground and introduce it into the atmosphere. This increases the total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere.
When you grow plants, you take carbon out of the atmosphere. When you eat it, you release it back into the atmosphere. The total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere does not change.
Grass grows more vigorously when regularly pruned, for example by a grazing animal. Farms also make a point of planting thing which grow quickly and efficiently. Thus it's reasonable to expect that farming could increase the rate of carbon turnover in the atmosphere, which would create the appearance of increased carbon emissions without a corresponding increase in the amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere.
In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged. But the cow itself only causes a short lived, fixed increase in atmospheric methane and an increased rate of carbon turnover.