Livestock Emissions Debate

Where are the downvotes coming from here? This comment is correct! Per one quick google, I found a number claiming that livestock agriculture constitutes 14.5% of global carbon output, with beef specifically being the bulk of that: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/21102019/climate-change-m...

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.<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding-meat-

A few of things:1) Even if cows would only eat the grass that was there (and we would not have converted any forest or other vegetation into grazing lands), the methane and CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time before being used by plants again, contributing to the greenhouse effect in that time. The reality is, we can only cover a very small percentage of the demand with this "3 happy cows on a vast pasture" phantasy. Most cow feed is planted additionally, often in countries

Only if you kill all cows. Or most farmed animals. I'd be interested in numbers around emissions created by now trying to produce enough produce for the world.

Cows, lambs, pigs, goats produce a lot of methane. The contribution to total greenhouse emissions is another hidden cost people don't normally account for. We clear forests to make room for more farms to feed the growing demand for meat around the world. If a plant-based diet doesn't become more popular and mainstream, we are headed for trouble by mid century.

The most effective step you can take to reduce your carbot footprint is to stop eating beef. http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/food-carbon-footprint-dietTo satisfy our consumption of beef using grass-fed grazing, we'd need surface area of like 2.5x of earth just dedicated to that. Most beef is not grazing, it's kept in intensive farms and being fed factory produced feed,

Do you eat meat? Because if you do, the meat and dairy industry has a much bigger impact ecologically than a car does, at least in the USA. Raising beef or dairy cows requires orders of magnitude more water, land, corn feed (or even grass feed) for less calories than growing plant based sources of food would. Not to mention the conditions these animals are raised in (USA being the worst affender). So next time you take a bite of your steak, think how much ecologically impact that bite cost the w

The ever growing demand for meat is a leading cause of deforestation. Forests remove far more CO2 than grasslands (think 3 dimensions vs 2 dimensions).Cows require orders of magnitude more land to be devoted to them than plant based food, simply due to the inefficiencies of the sunlight -> plant -> meat -> food production process. If you cut the middle-man out (meat), then the process becomes orders of magnitude more efficient.This reminds me that if by "better farms with b

The really relevant thing is not the farts but 1. the CO_2 emissions for feedstuff production and transport, plus 2. the deforestation for said feedstuff production, plus 3. the insane ratio of agricultural surface requirements of plants-needed-to-feed-humans vs plants-needed-to-feed-cattle-to-feed-humans (which is approx. 1:10)For these very reasons organic meat is much better for CO_2 reduction. It doesn't use fossil fuels just to feed cattle, it limits the area foodprint of cattle pr

You mean reducing meat consumption? Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world’s supply of calories. It would even have a big positive environmental impact.