Even completely eliminating methane will not reduce warming, it will only reduce (slightly) the rate of acceleration of the rate of warming. There are really 2 viable strategies here: Do nothing, or so something effective. The world refuses either.
EDIT:
Since people have asked, this is my logic...
The amount of warming depends on the amount of gas (CO2, CH4 or other) in the atmosphere. Stopping all emissions today would not change the huge amounts all ready up there. They will remain there and active for decades-centuries. So we are locked in for a certain amount of warming (2 degrees so far last I checked), it just has not happened yet.
The rate of emissions just controls how much more warming and how much sooner the existing warming will occur.
This is one of the core problems with Human responses to the problem: people think they can wait until it gets 'bad enough' then stop their emissions and things will improve. But they will actually keep getting worse because of the lag between emissions and effects.
As for CO2 vs Methane, Methane is responsible for about 20% of all man made warming (1). So eliminating it completely would still leave 80% of (future) warming... This is because we emit a lot, lot more CO2 than Methane.
The division is really a false one IMHO, because a lot of methane comes from coal mining and oil/gas extraction. So unless you stop using fossil fuels (the number 1 CO2 source) you cannot stop methane emissions...
What all this really comes down to is that people really really want a magic bullet that will make climate change disappear. But just because you really want one doesn't mean it exists...
Reducing emissions does not make you go backwards. You are still hurting forwards, you are even still accelerating. You're just not accelerating as rapidly...
> Methane accounts for half of the average 1.0 degrees C of warming the world suffered over the past decade and reducing methane is the fastest strategy available to reduce warming.
The other half of the warming will continue even without Methane.
You are both right. What you say is true, and yet removing all that would still not reduce warming, it would only reduce the acceleration of the rate of warming.
Because we're still increasing the rate at which we emit other greenhouses gases, and even if we emitted none anymore a lot of warming is already locked in.
I don't really see the distinction here (other than in an uber pedantic sense).
All efforts to combat global warming about reducing or eliminating the acceleration. If one of those methods is both cheap and has a fairly high impact (which, methane reduction appears to be) then why are we focusing on "but this doesn't eliminate global warming"?
Adding renewables and nuclear to the grid won't eliminate global warming, but they slow it down. Eliminating methane appears to be a route where we can more aggressively stomp on the breaks.
I think it's important to avoid saying doing X will reduce warming if it doesn't do that, so that people don't start believing that it will be sufficient to do only this.
I've never seen anyone insinuate that eliminating methane emissions would fix global warming.
The only time I've seen that argument raised is for the opposite "Because this won't fix global warming, we shouldn't do it?".
Global warming will require a multifaceted approach to be solve. No one solution will fix it, so literally any solution is going to have a detractor that says "This won't fix it, so why bother with it?"
> Reducing methane is the fastest strategy available to reduce warming
Reducing and fixing or eliminating are not the same thing. How could they have worded the title better? "Limiting methane emissions will have an outsized impact given the cost"?
Reducing global average warming is not the same as reducing global average temperature, although that can be the result over time if the rate of warming is reduced below 0. 'X will reduce warming' is describing a reduction to the positive rate of change.
It's also true that increasing global average warming can result in reduced warming and temperatures in some geographic areas so it is important to be specific with terminology depending on which aspect of the climate change debate we're talking about. You are right that the title is unintentionally misleading in this regard.
Methane has a pretty easy resolution as well. Capture and burn it. Even if you simply emit the resultant CO2 in the atmosphere you've drastically decreased the impact.
> Methane is generally a secondary byproduct in the industrial processes from which it is emitted. Coal mines, for example, seek to vent methane from the mine workings because it can cause explosions. Historically, mining companies have not viewed the associated methane as an energy resource in its own right.
It's mostly associated with fossil fuel extraction so the other solution to the methane problem is decreasing fossil fuel consumption in general.
The amount of warming depends on the amount of gas (CO2, CH4 or other) in the atmosphere. Stopping all emissions today would not change the huge amounts all ready up there. So we are locked in for a certain amount of warming.
The rate of emissions just controls how much more warming and how much sooner the existing warming will occur.
This is one of the core problems with Human responses to the problem: people think they can wait until it gets 'bad enough' then stop their emissions and things will improve. But they will keep getting worse because of the lag between emissions and effects.
As for CO2 vs Methane, Methane is responsible for about 20% of all man made warming (1). So eliminating it completely would still leave 80% of warming... This is because we emit a lot, lot more CO2 than Methane.
The division is really a false one IMHO, because a lot of methane comes from coal mining and oil/gas extraction. So unless you stop using fossil fuels (the number 1 CO2 source) you cannot stop methane emissions...
> As for CO2 vs Methane, Methane is responsible for about 20% of all man made warming (1). So eliminating it completely would still leave 80% of warming... This is because we emit a lot, lot more CO2 than Methane.
> The division is really a false one IMHO, because a lot of methane comes from coal mining and oil/gas extraction. So unless you stop using fossil fuels (the number 1 CO2 source) you cannot stop methane emissions...
But if you can eliminate that 20% with minimal effort or expenditure, why wouldn't you?
Most of that is coming from emissions related to fossil fuel extraction. Which is a perfect opportunity for capture.
CO2 emissions, on the other hand, is coming from a million different sources and doesn't have a single clean solution. There's not a one step process for eliminating 20% of CO2 emissions.
I think you need to consider that methane has a half-life of about 10 years in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide on the other hand is one order of magnitude higher than that. I understand now that what you are trying to say is that CO2 will still be a problem, that's a fact that nobody is denying here, but the way you stated your original post makes it sound like reducing CH4 emissions would be meaningless in regards to global warming.
You have to account for reversing all of the profligate methane producing swampland, turning it back into swampland, to fully account for this as part of the calculation.
We've done planetscale engineering already by how much methane we've reduced by converting swamp to farm/urban land.
> Methane has accounted for roughly 30 per cent of global warming since pre-industrial times and is proliferating faster than at any other time since record keeping began in the 1980s. In fact, according to data from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, even as carbon dioxide emissions decelerated during the pandemic-related lockdowns of 2020, atmospheric methane shot up.
That statement directly contradicts the claim made in that article:
Methane accounts for half of the average 1.0 degrees C of warming the world suffered over the past decade and reducing methane is the fastest strategy available to reduce warming.
Yes but nobody is claiming that warming will be eliminated without methane -- just reduced. GP claims that warming will not even be reduced, but the article claims that it will.
It feels a bit like celebrating reducing pressure on the gas pedal in a car, one that is currently approaching a wall. You need to 1) stop accelerating 2) deccelerate and 3) have enough distance to come to a stop. Regarding climate change, i neither see 2 or 3, so the collision is as inevitable as it was before. And what this article describes isn't even doing half of 1.
That 1 degree isn't due to current CH4 emissions, it's due to CH4 already up there. So we will get it whether we emit more CH4 or not.
Plus there is another 1-1.5 degrees from CO2 and other sources. And that will also still be there.
So the planet WILL keep warming and that includes the amounts being listed...
It's a bit like if you stop turning the tap on a bath tub: it's still quite full AND it's still filling, it's just no longer filling FASTER than it was before (from that tap, the other tap is still being opened further...)
So CH4 breaks down rather quickly in the atmosphere. If we were to eliminate CH4 emissions completely, then within a decade there would be virtually no CH4 left in the atmosphere.
Also when you say "reduce warming" do you mean "reduce global temperatures" or "reduce the rate of increase in global temperatures?" I think the article means the latter..
The only sensible thing is to keep the carbon (and methane) in the ground, which is the only thing we _won't_ do. The only reasonable conclusion I can draw from the fact that we intend to keep polluting is that the problem will get worse. I'm happy to be wrong, but there's nothing I'm seeing in mainstream media to suggest we're doing anything to actually reduce pollution (like implementing a global carbon tax, which is the easiest and most effective thing that should have been done 20+ years ago).
The hard truth is that capitalism (and infinite growth) is at odds with a stable climate. We've enjoyed a goldilocks period in the Earth's history of unusually stable climate, and now humans have decided to upset the balance.
We might be able to adapt, but we might not. This is the 6th mass extinction event in Earth's history, and I'm not convinced we're so special that we can somehow engineer our way to survival, especially since our ability to engineer depends on doing the things that have all but guaranteed our demise (i.e., most economic growth is powered by fossil fuels).
Your position/speed/acceleration analogy is misleading from a physics perspective. The amount of GHG in the atmosphere determines an equilibrium point. More GHG corresponds to a hotter equilibrium. There's some delay in moving to the new equilibrium, so even if we stopped all emissions, the world would keep getting hotter for a little while before settling at the new equilibrium. But removing GHG from the atmosphere does lower the equilibrium temperature, even if we don't get it all the way back to pre-industrial levels.
Methane (CH4) causes 80-100X the radiative forcing than CO2. So even though CO2 levels are >400 ppm and CH4 is "only" 2 ppm (natural levels are about 1/3 of that) the rise of methane levels is estimated to be responsible for a temperature rise of about 0.5 C -- in other words a third of anthropogenic temperature rise.
Which is why the carbon needs to stay in the ground. But we're taking it out and pumping it into the atmosphere as fast as we can so that we can get a new iPhone every year.
This, so much. All efforts are futile if we continue to dig out extra carbon (oil, coal, limestone) and insert it into the carbon cycle, making the whole climate situation worse every day.
If you want something immediately actionable you can do, cow farming is a major contributor of global methane (as well as deforestation). Cutting out beef shows a personal commitment to sustainability.
A couple years ago my son and I watched the Mark Rober video "Feeding a fake burger to Bill Gates to save the world" [1], and one of the takeaways from that is "you don't have to go full vegetarian, you can take a step by doing Meatless Mondays".
I don't recall if his video talked about Methane, I do recall it talking about the staggering amount of water that is involved in making meat, and I live in a high plains desert, so water is something on my mind.
The wording of the article - and also of the title here - is very misleading.
> Methane accounts for half of the average 1.0 degrees C of warming the world suffered over the past decade and reducing methane is the fastest strategy available to reduce warming. The United States, in partnership with the European Union, is leading the Global Methane Pledge to reduce overall methane emissions by 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030.
Reducing yearly methane emissions will NOT reduce warming. The article is about reducing the amount of additionally emitted methane in the future.
When I read "reduce warming" I interpret that as slow the rate of future warming, not reverse the warming of the past.
Since methane is a drastically more potent warming gas than C02, but eventually degrades into C02 on the scale of decades, skipping the decades of heightened warming effect in the atmosphere by burning emitted methane to C0w will have the effect of reducing the rate of future warming, and importantly buy us more time to ultimately solve the problem.
The warming caused by methane is proportional to the exponential average of emissions, with a ~20 years half-life. Reducing the rate of emissions literally reduces the total warming from methane.
The one point where the article is misleading is that it reduces the warming as long as you keep the effort. If you stop doing it, the warming comes back in ~40 years as if you never did anything.
Methane is very different from carbon dioxide, because it doesn't accumulate forever. It tends to break people's intuition.
Fortunately, satellite based CH4 detection is now becoming precise and reliable enough to be usable in the search for methane sources. GHGSat satellites have a 25m resolution, and their sensor equipped airplanes can narrow it down to <1m.
In the meantime, beef alternatives are quite convincing these days. It’s a fairly small step to take that can dramatically lower your individual footprint.
The people preaching to us about reducing our footprints, are the same ones taking their private jets to Davos, and emitting a lifetime of CO2 in the process.
Sorry, going to skip the highly processed chemicals plants that is fake meat, and will pass on the bug burgers too.
I mean, the vast majority of vegans and vegetarians I know own zero private jets.
That said, even if they did, and we all took the route of dismissing any change on the basis that the advocates of that change aren't perfect, as no advocates ever are, well then it seems that nothing would ever change.
It's said because meat consumption is a blip compared to all the things people do, most of those vegans and vegetarians included. It's also difficult for anything lacto-ovo vegetarian to get all they need without relying on imports way away from their home country.
You'd arguably do more staying flexitarian but getting your produce as local and seasonal as possible to cut out the emissions caused by transport. And maybe not taking that second transatlantic flight. Notice how neither of those are pushed half as hard as "go vegan and save the planet".
>It's said because meat consumption is a blip compared to all the things people do, most of those vegans and vegetarians included.
I mean, animal agriculture accounts for 14.5% of GHG emissions, roughly more than all global transport according to the IPCC.[1]
Few of us have the ability to unilaterally shut down a coal plant or an oil company, but a large number of us do have the ability to change our consumption habits to be less destructive.
>It's also difficult for anything lacto-ovo vegetarian to get all they need without relying on imports way away from their home country.
>You'd arguably do more staying flexitarian but getting your produce as local and seasonal as possible to cut out the emissions caused by transport.
Just to address the notion about food transport GHG emissions, you'd actually have a bigger impact on your emissions by eating vegan once a week than if all your food was entirely locally grown for the entire week.[2] Food miles are a very small fraction of the emissions of food production, especially that of animal products.
Finally, it doesn't have to be either or. People can ride their bicycles, eat local, take fewer flights, as well as reduce their meat consumption.
One source doesn't equate consensus. Given the myriads of criticisms among diets, food production and emissions, I'd ask you to remain skeptical of anything advocating for more open loops. Plenty of sources put transport far higher than agriculture, and many of the differences are based on methodology. No, this doesn't mean the critics are right.
>Finally, it doesn't have to be either or.
Not the point. One of these is pushed aggressively. The others aren't. That alone should warrant enough skepticism regarding the entire thing. Even if we don't agree on what is the worst, it's ridiculous to push one but not the other. That's how you create political friction.
>Few of us have the ability to unilaterally shut down a coal plant or an oil company, but a large number of us do have the ability to change our consumption habits to be less destructive.
You can't keep compensating for a few unwilling individuals taking advantage of the breathing room opened up. Playing a game prisoner's dilemma should be the first thing to get your head closer on the wanted list. How this is even negotiable in the face of a global threat is beyond me.
I've attached a few more sources to this post, but it does seem to be the general consensus as far as I've seen. Do you have any sources that contradict this?
It's pretty wild, but the emissions from transportation just so happen to be completely dwarfed by the emissions from the actual food production itself, especially when it comes to animal products.
"We find that although food is transported long distances in general (1640 km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average) the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption. Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%.
[...]
Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food."[1]
>Even if we don't agree on what is the worst, it's ridiculous to push one but not the other.
I mean, what is the solution? People are supposed to always talk about everything, instead of a specific thing, every single time they talk about mitigating climate change? I don't think that's an effective communication strategy.
As for the validity of talking so much about reducing meat consumption, study[2] after study[4] shows that "Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet."[3] and "“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use. It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car.”[5]
It makes sense to talk about it as it's also one of the easiest, highest impact, most tangible changes to make.
>You can't keep compensating for a few unwilling individuals taking advantage of the breathing room opened up. Playing a game prisoner's dilemma should be the first thing to get your head closer on the wanted list. How this is even negotiable in the face of a global threat is beyond me.
Sorry, I don't understand what you're saying here.
> I mean, animal agriculture accounts for 14.5% of GHG emissions, roughly more than all global transport according to the IPCC.[1]
If you are doing full accounting though, that iceberg lettuce that required cold shipping, and extensive plastic packaging, moved 500 miles from growth to consumption point, is not any more or less "green".
That is the whole point of being a locavore - consuming foods grown closest to you so we are not spending huge amounts on shipping, but then greenwashing it when it goes into the supermarket refrigerator.
So the thing is that that iceberg lettuce, even if traveling 5,000 miles, with all that plastic packaging etc etc... actually is more green in that it results in fewer emissions than locally sourced animal products.
It's pretty wild, but the emissions from transportation just so happen to be completely dwarfed by the emissions from the actual food production itself, especially when it comes to animal products.
"We find that although food is transported long distances in general (1640 km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average) the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption. Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%.
[...]
Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food."[1]
Basically you are counting GHG emissions as anything emitting, but, you are actually discounting the fossil fuel perspective which is heavily utilized for one, but not the other.
This data is also being based on comparing conventional produce raising vice feedlot style farming
> to put these figures into perspective, when combined with the fact that the average household consumes around 5 kg of food per day (29), average final delivery of food is 1640 km (1020 mi), and the total supply chain requires movement of 6760 km (4200 mi). Food groups vary in these average distances from a low of beverages (330 km delivery, 1200 km total) to a high of red meat (1800 km delivery, 20 400 km total).
and is heavily biased based on over-generalization which does not apply to many types of food production, as this assumes heavy fertilization, grain-feeding, etc.
> We estimate the average household’s climate impacts related to food to be around 8.1 t CO2e/yr, with delivery “food-miles” accounting for around 0.4 te CO2e/yr and total freight accounting for 0.9 t CO2e/yr. To put these figures into perspective, driving a 25 mi/gal (9.4 L/100 km) automobile 12 000 miles/yr (19 000 km/yr) produces around 4.4 t CO2/yr. Expressed in this manner, a totally “localized” diet reduces GHG emissions per household equivalent to 1000 miles/yr (1600 km/yr) driven, while shifting just one day per week’s calories from red meat and dairy to chicken/fish/eggs or a vegetable-based diet reduces GHG emissions equivalent to 760 miles/yr (1230 km/yr) or 1160 miles/yr (1860 km/yr), respectively. Shifting totally away from red meat and dairy toward chicken/fish/eggs or a vegetable-based diet reduces GHG emissions equivalent to 5340 mi/yr (8590 km/yr) or 8100 mi/yr (13 000 km/yr), respectively. Which of these options is easier or more effective for each climate-concerned household depends on a variety of factors, though given the difficulty in sourcing all food locally, shifting diet for less than one day per week may be more feasible.
> Within food production, which totaled 6.8 t CO2e/household-yr, 3.0 t CO2e(44%) were due to CO2 emissions, with 1.6 t (23%) due to methane, 2.1 t (32%) due to nitrous oxide, and 0.1 t (1%) due to HFCs and other industrial gases. Thus, a majority of food’s climate impact is due to non-CO2 greenhouse gases. Nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, mainly due to nitrogen fertilizer application, other soil management techniques, and manure management, are prevalent in all food groups but especially in animal-based groups due to the inefficient transformation of plant energy into animal-based energy. Methane (CH4) emissions are mainly due to enteric fermentation in ruminant animals (cattle, sheep, goats) and manure management, and are thus concentrated in the red meat and dairy categories.
Similarly, other of these are all about dense feedlot operations
>We obtain animal feed requirements using the database from Herrero et al. (2013). This data set provides feed requirements for 30 world regions, which are mapped to the country level. Aggregated feed concentrate requirements per animal production system are distributed into individual crops, such as oil crops to rapeseed and others, based on feed crop consumption statistics (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations FAO, 2017). For consistency, feed use numbers from Herrero et al. (2013) are rescaled to match country-level feed use totals in FAOSTAT 2009–2011 (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations FAO, 2017). Feed crop emissions are then added to the consumption emissions of animal products.
As I have worked on a ranch like this that did not regularly use fuel, did not fertilize, basically grass pastured cattle, I found this material to be incredibly skewed. Maybe it is accurate talking about feedlot commercial cattle production. Maybe.
For smaller organic pastured husbandry that is not fuel intensive, ...
>This data is also being based on comparing conventional produce raising vice feedlot style farming
Given that 96%[5] of beef sold in the US is grain fed, it seems as if it would make sense to base the data on that.
Not only is it the norm, but it's apparently the best case scenario in terms of emissions. If you're trying to make an argument for beef being less emission intensive, you want to use CAFO numbers as grass fed numbers are worse.
According to these studies, grain fed cattle are slaughtered at 14 - 22 months of age, while grass fed cows are kept alive longer because they gain weight more slowly, leading them to be slaughtered at 20 - 26 months of age.[4]
Their extended lifespans lead to greater emissions even if they were to emit the same amount of CO2 + methane per day, but a diet of grass itself leads to higher methane emissions than grain, resulting in overall methane emissions being about 43% higher for grass-fed beef.[1]
Methane traps about 80 times more heat than CO2 over the first 20 years, before it degrades into CO2 and then overall ends up trapping about 25 times more over the first 100 years.[2]
Now, some of that may be offset by by soil carbon sequestration in the grass fed beef, but according to the Oxford study below -
“This report finds that better management of grass-fed livestock, while worthwhile in and of itself, does not offer a significant solution to climate change as only under very specific conditions can they help sequester carbon. This sequestering of carbon is even then small, time-limited, reversible and substantially outweighed by the greenhouse gas emissions these grazing animals generate.”[3]
Finally, grass fed beef not only grow more slowly but they end up at a lower final weight when they’re slaughtered, ~1100 lbs vs ~1300 lbs. After they’re butchered, this leaves 638 lbs vs 832 lbs of beef per animal. This means that to meet the same amount of demand, we’d require increasing the total number of cattle raised by about 30%, further increasing emissions and overall environmental impacts.[4]
Further - “The required 30% increase in the overall cattle population must be accompanied by large increases in the productivity of existing pastures, on the order of 40%–370%, to avoid clearing additional native vegetation or competition with the human food supply.”[1]
If I took your logic and extended it, that means you'd would be against the gigantic bison herds that existed in early American history (50-100M animals), which are within the size ranges of the complete American cattle herds.
Given other large sources of animal protein, you'd likely be against vibrant fish, & oceanic mammal populations toon.
You're against animal husbandry and animal protein sources because they produce methane.
Whether or not it is tied to fossil fuel usage and pollution.
> while grass fed cows
wrong. The industry raises steers. Neutered male cattle.
> Further - “The required 30% increase in the overall cattle population must be accompanied by large increases in the productivity of existing pastures, on the order of 40%–370%, to avoid clearing additional native vegetation or competition with the human food supply.
That is utter idiocy. The question is always which thing a farmer is going to raise. Given that the US has supported wild animal populations of equivalent large cattle, which thing to grow is always a question. However, it was done previously without farming.
> Given that 96%[5] of beef sold in the US is grain fed, it seems as if it would make sense to base the data on that.
No. That is highly regionalized. You have to ask instead what is consumed, and exported. Do you know how much of that is destined for other markets? Many markets are selling >50% grass fed now, and the grass-fed farms have incredible demand with backlogs on animals now.
>If I took your logic and extended it, that means you'd would be against the gigantic bison herds that existed in early American history (50-100M animals), which are within the size ranges of the complete American cattle herds.
The bison talking point has already been addressed elsewhere on this post, but copying and pasting the other commenter's info -
> ~60,000,000 Bison in North America in 1600 [1]
> 94,400,000 cattle and calves in USA in 2017. [2]
Which represents an increase of 50%. Not to mention that if we look at global cattle numbers, those have exploded to 1,000,967,000 Livestock Cattle worldwide in 2021, far above historical numbers.[3]
In fact, cattle make up more of the biomass on Earth than any other species, at 650 million tonnes.[4]
So yeah, the current state of the world does not compare in any way to the 1600s and the 60 million bison in NA.
>Given other large sources of animal protein, you'd likely be against vibrant fish, & oceanic mammal populations toon.
Huh? What does this have to do with atmospheric methane and CO2?
>wrong. The industry raises steers. Neutered male cattle.
This seems like a non-sequitor, how is this relevant to the discussion?
>Given that the US has supported wild animal populations of equivalent large cattle,
This is false, and especially misleading when taking a global view. Please feel free to show me sources that contradict the ones I've provided.
>That is utter idiocy. The question is always which thing a farmer is going to raise.[...] which thing to grow is always a question. However, it was done previously without farming.
Sorry, how is this a response to the required increase in cattle population if we were to transition to 100% grass-fed beef, and the required increase in pasture productivity or expansion of pasture?
>No.
I've provided a source that says yes. Do you have a source saying that more than 4% of beef sold in the US is grass-fed?
> Many markets are selling >50% grass fed now, and the grass-fed farms have incredible demand with backlogs on animals now.
Please define "many" and quantify the total impact of their grass-fed sales on total sales in the US. The source I've provided shows that to be 4%.
Further, again, grass-fed beef is actually worse for the climate as I've demonstrated by citing a number of sources, so it's not like this is a good argument to pursue if your goal is to try to rationalize beef consumption as being good for the climate.
> I mean, the vast majority of vegans and vegetarians I know own zero private jets.
That is a personal anecdote.
Many prominent folks are painting themselves as green activists telling us how to live
While they take private jets everywhere
Own huge yachts
Own multiple huge houses
Giant consumers of fossil fuels, 1000x regular folks.
> That said, even if they did, and we all took the route of dismissing any change on the basis that the advocates of that change aren't perfect, as no advocates ever are, well then it seems that nothing would ever change
Who said anything about private jets? Who said anything about crickets? Since when are meat alternatives any more full of "highly processed chemicals" than ordinary meat products? Why does this read like a Facebook comment?
Meat substitutes sure. No one is trying to normalize crickets, don't be dramatic. And I say that as someone always searching for new vegetarian or vegan recipes and ideas.
I'll bite - suppose that the only people supporting lower carbon output are jetsetting cosmopolitan filthy commy lib-ruhls. If one person convinces a thousand people or ten thousand people or a hundred thousand people to support systems that reduce those emissions and offsets their personal use by orders of magnitude would you still scoff?
I don't expect a sincere response since this seems to me to be just parroting of cable news talking points which tends to be a predictor of discourse level but I'd love to be surprised.
I’m a bike riding hippie that doesn’t own a car and I haven’t flown in close to a decade.
Given that people like me exist that support reducing pollution from fossil fuels (climate change is a silly term), we don’t need to speculate that only the jet setting elites are interested in saving the planet.
I do question the entire movement when the leaders are hypocrites and i sometimes think it’s a wasted effort for the average person.
that's what Elon Musk would say, or most people who still live their overpolluting lifestyle and watch climate change like another of their daily entertainment
Our individual lifestyle and footprint is like a vote, it looks inefficient but it works as a whole (I know about the huge inertia of global warming, but definitely still worth to do something)
There is a huge amount of food options before you get to crickets. Plant based meat didn't come before tofu, chickpeas, lentils, beans, and so many other ingredients and options.
That ecosystem is gone and gone with it are elements of that ecosystem that would’ve prevented our climate situation. The land and the grasslands those bison inhabited has been destroyed. The massive forests of that day are gone.
You cannot cherrypick one element of the past and use it’s isolated existence as an argument against steps taken in our current situation
your comment suggests a misunderstanding. Cows convert inert carbon from feed into methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas. Not all carbon is created equal from the perspective of climate.
While you're correct that fossil fuel control is crucial, livestock emissions are also an important part, and it's a false dilemma to solely focus efforts on one issue.
You are not looking at the cycle in its entirety. Cows convert carbon from their biomass feed into methane as a part of digestion, but absent the cow, that same biomass would still at some point decompose on its own, releasing methane in the process.
Doesn't this presume that we would continue to grow the same amount of feed and then allow it to decompose?
Whereas a reduction in meat consumption would mean a reduction in total global land use for agriculture, allowing that land to be rewilded. Trapping carbon over a longer term and potentially providing numerous environmental benefits.
The vast majority of cattle are raised on grain, not grass.
"The researchers report that grass-fed beef contributes very little to the global protein supply, accounting for just one gram of protein, per person, per day. In comparison, ruminants as a whole contribute 13g of protein to the global average protein intake, per person, per day."
"Despite making only a marginal contribution to global protein intake, grazed beef accounts for between a quarter and a third of all greenhouse emissions from ruminant livestock."
Thank you, I actually didn't know this! I'd always heard about the proportion of animals that were raised on grain, as well as the percentage of crops used for animal feed, and concluded that in the US at least the majority of cattle were raised in feedlots their entire lives.
Turns out you're right, the majority start out on pasture and then are transported to feed lots to fatten up once they reach maturity.
According to this[1], due to the fact that grass fed beef fatten up more slowly, end up at a lower overall weight at slaughter, and are kept alive and emitting longer, "a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%", and "the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle)".
Further -
"Emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas with a large warming effect relative to carbon dioxide per molecule, come from beef cattle in the forms enteric fermentation and manure emissions. We calculated a 43% increase in methane from enteric fermentation (table 2), assuming that cattle finishing on grass had the same daily methane emissions as present-day stocker cattle, who have nearly identical ADG and are fed primarily on roughage."
Either way it seems as if grain is an indispensable part of animal agriculture currently, so we have to take that into account when talking about what would happen to land use with or without the cows around. Additionally, it seems that moving away from grain would potentially have even worse impacts on the climate.
And your point is? So it's grains or shrooms, or whatever. Something else will grow and die and be broken down into methane its place. Things don't magically stop growing just because the area is no longer used for cattle grazing. Yet it's often magically missing from statistics and calculations when all is said and done...
If you look at the other replies in this thread, there are a number of people pointing out how aerobic decomposition tends to produce primarily CO2, and far less CH4.
"In aerobic composting, the more oxygen that is available, the more carbon dioxide (CO2) produced, the less methane (CH4), and the more complete the decomposition. As biological activity progresses, the oxygen concentration falls and CO2 concentration increases."
You’re assuming the current owners of the land are also going to disappear? If not then why wouldn’t they use the land for other productive purposes. If it’s currently farm land then they would simply change crops. Or maybe they would sell it to a developer who will build a car dependent suburb.
If they could find other productive purposes sure, but the point of the change from the environmental perspective is that it would reduce demand for agriculture as a whole, that's the heart of why it would be such a big boon for the environment.
According to the FAO[1], grazing land for animals and cropland dedicated to producing animal feed represent almost 80% of all agricultural land globally. "Feed crops are grown in one-third of total cropland, while the total land area occupied by pasture is equivalent to 26% of the ice-free terrestrial surface"
Given food conversion ratios[2], where you lose roughly 90% of the energy you put into each step up the food chain, the lower we eat on it the lower the amount of energy input we need, which at the bottom of our food chain are those crops and grasslands.
Once we remove the heavily inefficient middlemen which are animals, we are left with a drastic reduction in the amount of agricultural land and output needed.
I'm not sure how many of these companies and farmers could find another use for their grassland and farmland, as it's not like people will be able to just up their consumption of food by several multiples, and I'm not sure what other sort of productive purposes beyond food production the majority would be able to find.
So yeah, once there's no demand and it's no longer profitable, a large amount of that agricultural land seems like it would just be allowed to lay fallow or be rewilded, which would be really beneficial to the environment for many reasons.[3]
Anaerobic decomposition mostly produces methane, but aerobic decomposition mostly produces CO2. What happens in nature is mostly aerobic. If you have a compost pile, you turn it periodically to keep it aerobic.
It would release a greater portion of CO2 and a smaller portion of methane if converted by anything other than a cow. Plus, if we didn't deforest as much land to support our least efficient farm animals (cows eat 25 calories for every calorie of meat produced, vs 15 for pigs and 9 for chickens), more of that carbon would be sequestered in trees. Obviously this doesn't apply to sustainably raised cows which are fed primarily from naturally occurring pasture land.
We don't really deforest in the U.S. for animals from what I understand. This takes place in places like South America. We could control imports/exports and I'd be all for that.
As far as feed though, not all feed is grown exclusively for cattle. I've worked with sugar companies in the past and the by-products of sugar production (molasses, raffinate, etc..) are sold as cattle feed. This is a billion dollar industry. These by-products are being produced regardless of whether we feed cattle or not.
We don't anymore, because we already managed a lot of deforesting in our past.
> The 2005 (FAO) Global Forest Resources Assessment ranked the United States as seventh highest country losing its old growth forests, a vast majority of which were removed prior to the 20th century.[3]
>For the 300 years following the arrival of Europeans, land was cleared, mostly for agriculture, at a rate that matched that of population growth.[7] During the 19th century, while the U.S. population tripled, the total area of cropland increased by over four times, from seventy-six million to three hundred nineteen million acres. For every person added to the U.S. population during this period, farmers put another three to four acres under the plow.[8] This trend continued until the 1920s when the amount of crop land stabilized in spite of continued population growth. As abandoned farm land reverted to forest the amount of forest land increased reaching a peak in 1963 of 753,000,000 acres (3,050,000 km2).[4]
It was estimated that there were 1,023,000,000 acres of forest in 1630, compared to 766,000,000 acres in 2012.
> It would release a greater portion of CO2 and a smaller portion of methane if converted by anything other than a cow.
I would guess all cellulose-digesting animals (cow, sheep, goat, deer, elk, moose, antelope, buffalo, camel, rabbit, termite, ...) should produce about the same amount of methane the amount of cellulose they digest.
Cattle feed left to decompose on its own won't release nearly as much methane as the cattle. The methane produced will also end up released over a longer period of time. A ton of methane released in a day is far worse than a ton released over a year.
> your comment suggests a misunderstanding. Cows convert inert carbon from feed into methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas. Not all carbon is created equal from the perspective of climate.
Your comment also suggests a misunderstanding. Methane has an atmospheric lifetime of only ca. 10 years. A constant source of methane will not lead to increasing atmospheric methane levels, nor to continuous warming. Whereas a constant source of CO2 will.
Yeah, but that is mostly beside the point. In pure carbon, anthropogenic CO2 emissions are about 12 GtC/year, and CH4 emissions (from fossil fuel, agriculture, waste) about 0.27 GtC/year. So CO2 from methane emissions is only 2% of all CO2 emissions.
Assuming these numbers are correct - given that CH4 traps 80x more heat than CO2 over the first 20 years[1], it would be the equivalent of adding another 21.6 GtC per year for those first 20 years. Over the span of 100 years, that CH4 degrades into CO2 but still ends up trapping 25x more heat than the same amount of CO2 emitted at the outset, resulting in the same impact as releasing another 6.75 GtC/year over the next century.
Nothing to dismiss, especially because that extra boost to heating in those first 20 years could be the difference between us hitting various tipping points, like melting permafrost and releasing yet another 185 GtC[2] into the atmosphere, and not.
Methane is like 80x worse than CO2 in terms of greenhouse effect. So that 0.27Gt of CH4 has the GHG effect of 22Gt of CO2. When it decomposes to CO2 it then still has the greenhouse effect of gigs tons of CO2.
Methane traps about 80 times more heat than CO2 over the first 20 years, before it degrades into CO2 and then overall ends up trapping about 25 times more over the first 100 years.
Sure, but that methane + CO2 has been in a steady cycle (cow -> air -> grass -> cow) and fairly constant quantity (before mass agriculture there were e.g. numerous bisons in the US), so they’re not contributing to “global warming” (i.e. a rise in temperature).
My final thoughts are, what my original comment (2-3 comments up the chain) was.
Your “solution” doesn’t solve anything, but merely delays the inevitable.
There is only one solution to global warming, which is stopping fossil fuels.
Deleting all cows is not a solution, therefore it is promoted simply as a distraction, and a way to let people hate each other, via “sin taxes” (very similar to “paper straws” drive a few years back, which also had a zero-to-negative effect on pollution and global warming)
No, it's correct to say that cattle don't contribute to climate change, but clearly I haven't managed to explain it properly.
Let's try with an analogy.
You have a lake, that has an inflow (river) and an outflow (river and/or solar evaporation). They are in equilibrium, and the lake has existed for thousands of years, never overflowing, never drying out.
Then you build a factory/farm that takes some water out of the lake.
If the amount of water is sufficiently small, the ecosystem can adapt (e.g. less outflow and/or evaporation).
But if the amount of water you take out is over that "adaptable" threshold, then the lake WILL eventually dry out.
Blaming the outflowing river is non-sensical; it didn't contribute anything to the drying of the lake, the entire fault lies with the factory. Note that the amount of water the factory takes is irrelevant (as long as it's over the "adaptable" threshold); the lake will dry regardless, the amount only influences when, not if.
river->natural CO2 + methane cycle, lake->climate, factory->fossil fuels, less outflow->plants growing more because of extra CO2, lake drying->climate change (could work the other way as well, lake overflowing...)
If you have an hourglass that allows sand to flow through it out into a sandbox at a rate of 1kg per day, yet you actively shovel 2kg per day of sand into it, you are going to be accumulating 1kg of sand per day in your hourglass.
Regardless of the fact that the sand will eventually all flow back out into the sandbox over a long enough timeline.
I think the overall question is whether the decrease in bison is offset by the increase in cattle. Bison primarily decreased in NA, but cattle increased worldwide.
I'm talking from the PoV of someone asking a question, rather than making a statement - since I did not study the subject. I merely noticed it on the side, without investigating deeper.
What I find missing in all the cow discussions is any mention of the huge number of bovines that roamed suitable areas of the planet, such as the North American plains, before they were mostly killed off and made room for cows.
For how long and how many animals similar to cows were there before we killed them in most places?
Why are the cows such a climate catastrophe now, but the previous gigantic wild herds were not? (An actual question, not a rhetorical one, as I said, I did not study or investigate this, only noticed it)?
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As far as my thinking goes, the main problem is and has been that we dig up ancient buried biomass (coal, gas, oil). We have an above-ground carbon cycle, and it does not really matter that much if there is stuff burned and carbon shifting around various forms, as long as it's in the above-ground cycle.
The problem, to my knowledge, is that we fed gigantic amounts of below-ground carbon into the above-ground cycle.
I did not check the numbers (someone, please?), I think below ground we have far more biomass than we could ever plant as forests above ground? That's why I'm not excited about tree-planting projects as "solution". As far as my understanding goes, only a complete shutdown of all coal, oil and gas extraction can even begin to address our problem. And then we still need to get a lot of carbon back underground.
Cows act solely within the above-ground cycle, so I don't see them as a valid focus, but as a distraction. My focus would be on the processes that add below-ground carbon to the above-ground cycle.
If the above-ground carbon cycle only has prehistoric amounts of carbon to begin with, would cows, burning forests, etc., still be a global climate problem? As far as I know, that's not the case (independent of local deforesting issues, just looking at the "global warming" problem).
I know I'm ignoring always present movement - without humans - between above and below ground - only counting safely long-term stored carbon, not sure what those net movements are (without human activity)?
I also ignore "details"; such as if carbon is in CO2 or CH4 in the atmosphere. I think that evens itself out longer term and would be enough for an above-ground cycle that is not increased artificially. Our problem is the speed with which we add below-ground sources to the above cycle.
Have you ever looked at a pie chart of mammal biomass by species. It goes Humans then cows then everything else is way back. I strongly strongly doubt that big dumb slow cows would be number 2 in biomass absent our loving burgers.
Uhm... I don't understand what the connection to my comment is?
I did not (and did not intent to) make any reference to biomass, not indirectly either. At most, maybe cows now bs. wild bovine herds of the ancient past, which even if we only look at the number of buffalo killed in the US must have been gigantic, so no less than we have cows now, at worst only slightly less but I doubt we have reliable figures about the size of herds before humans killed many e.g. for Africa, Asia or India. As a Middle European, I know we had plenty of large bovines but killed them quickly early on, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs.
You mentioned the huge number of bovines in the past. I strongly doubt there were anything like the 1.5 billion cows there are now. One reason it’s impossible is that we have literally transformed huge land areas from forests and other types into land for cows. If you don’t get how what I’m saying related that is fine.
There is no reason to assume the herds on other continents - before human hunting - were any less than the ones in NA. And bovines were not limited to the savannahs and steppes, just that there were the largest herds. Just look at the distribution map for the aurochs -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs#/media/File:Aurochs_di... -- it is much larger than just the steppe areas.
It is not just bovines either - other groups of which include animals like deer, giraffes, elephants and many others are also plant eating large mammals.
Also, I don't understand this modern need of saying things like "I honestly believe" and, in your case, "I strongly doubt". Feeling "strongly" does not improve the quality of your argument.
In your first reply you even used "I strongly strongly doubt " - riiiight... I would like to see more focus on the facts than on the feelings. Or do you feel that we are in some sort of competition here?
> If you don’t get how what I’m saying related that is fine.
You still did not explain what your comparison of human to bovine biomass was supposed to be about, which was your original reply.
A good chunk of the carbon in livestock feed was pulled from the atmosphere via photosynthesis.
Hence the "cycle" part of carbon cycle.
We're not feeding cows liquified dinosaurs.
A grass fed cow is basically carbon neutral. Grass pull carbon from the air, cows eat that carbon turn it into protein, methane, CO2, we eat the protein turn it into more methane, CO2.
Neutral in terms of moles of carbon atoms maybe, but not neutral in terms of kg-CO2e (CO2 equivalent), because methane is much, much more potent as as greenhouse gas than CO2.
On a 100 year horizon, it's about 30 times worse than CO2, and over 20 years, 80 times worse.
You're conflating renewables with climate science.
Given the planet has been on a global warming trend SINCE the last Glacial Maximum, it is pretty safe to say that fossil fuels has little to do with it.
But if you want to make the case for antediluvian petro-economy, I am all ears.
It takes a ton of farm equipment to grow all the feed for cow, and they burp out a ton a methane. I think you're understating how much fossil fuel gets used in industrial animal agriculture. If everyone switched every calorie of beef/dairy they consumed with one of chicken/eggs, there would absolutely be a marked decrease in greenhouse gases being added to the atmosphere.
This might be true, but without quantifying everything you've said, nobody can make a value judgment.
The essential point is that the livestock emissions are already part of the carbon cycle, and don't 'contribute to emissions' in the way most people think, especially activists.
Cows feed on plants, plants got their carbon from the atmosphere. So all the carbon they emit, technically, got caught in previously. The implication is that cows themselves are carbon neutral, their damage comes from the extra greenhouse effect the carbon has while its methane.
How about this [1], which shows that producing a calorie of beef produces about 7x as much CO2 as one of chicken (not even including methane), and 30x as much CO2 as one of rice. And this [2] which shows that methane emissions are roughly twice as high per calorie from beef vs soy.
Also, saying "already part of the carbon cycle" about factory farmed cows is nonsense, because the sum totality of carbon in the atmosphere is the problem being discussed. It's part of the carbon cycle which is currently bad.
Rice is nutritiously void though. You can make healthy things with rice, but rice itself (especially polished rice - vs whole) is an extremely poor source of macronutrients. It's more or less straight carbs and starch.
As such it's not really the most useful point of comparison to other nutrient-rich foods. A valuable filler/staple certainly, but you can't live on rice alone.
Perhaps a better point of comparison would be soy as it's much more nutrient-rich. According to this[1], beef emits 31 times more CO2 per calorie of food than tofu does.
Sure, but it's also the biggest single source of calories in the world (wikipedia says 1/5 of globally consumed calories, citing a book), making it a good point of comparison.
And on top of that, if you look at the linked data, rice isn't even the most efficient (in terms of CO2/calorie) food source. I'm not suggesting everyone switch from beef to rice, I'm just saying that beef is egregiously inefficient. For comparison, even rice is 17 as bad as nuts, and beef is over 500x as bad as nuts. Also you basically can live on potatoes, and the chart shows root vegetables as basically on-par with rice for CO2/kcal. Beef is just so bad that any other diet looks fantastic in comparison.
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...
Livestock emissions are not a closed cycle in terms of heat. The methane produced by livestock is much more potent of a greenhouse gas than the CO2 captured by the plants grown for livestock. This might not be a big deal normally, but seeing as how we're maintaining at least 500x the normal cow population, it's a big deal now.
Fun fact, methane traps so much more heat than CO2, we'd actually be better off burning methane rather than releasing it directly. That's probably not a viable option for livestock, so it seems like reducing livestock is the most viable thing to do.
It's also misunderstanding that livestock are not just a simple closed cycle of "soil + sun + water = grass => cow".
Modern industrial ag is a chain of fossil fuel inputs via fertilizer to grow soy and corn quickly as possible, to maximize output over what land would naturally support.
The vast majority of meat raised in the US is from industrial consolidated feed lots.
We know cattle and agriculture produce methane and have a reasonable idea of the amount, but that's only 1/3 of the problem.
Satellites are being used to identify industrial scale leaks that were previously unknown or more likely unreported. SoCal gas had a storage facility that was leaking methane in quantities that accounted for 1/4 of the state of California's methane emissions.
Similarly they've been able to identify the sources of rogue CFC emissions in China.
In the US at least there are tons of farming subsidies (not sure about cattle specifically). So the way to do this is via policy, not nerd outreach. Plenty of levers to incentivize the right behavior.
CO2 is not the only molecule that causes the greenhouse effect. Methane is far more effective at heating up the atmosphere despite its short half life. That is why it is so dangerous.
So, every bit of methane in the atmosphere spends decades as a drastically more potent warming gas than C02 (25x more), and then becomes C02 to continue warming at a lower potency.
Methane, molecule per molecule, has an infrared-cross section about 20 times that of carbon dioxide. However, the current ratio of methane (1.9 ppm) to CO2 (420 ppm) is only ~ 1/220, so the total methane forcing is about 10% that of CO2, very roughly. (Pre-industrial methane was only 0.6 ppm as per ice core data)
Note also Arctic permafrost is going to be a steady source of methane as it thaws, at a relatively slow rate, currently only 1% of the total atmospheric methane budget. Shallow marine sediments are another likely source, although that methane might get gobbled up by marine bacteria before it exits to the atmosphere, to some extent.
In any case the stated goal of 'a rapid reduction in methane emissions to 30% below 2020 levels' would have little noticeable effect on warming rates over the next century. Just look at the global trend rate as well, methane's at record levels and the rate is steepening, not flattening.
Thanks for actually using data and thoughtful comment. This thread is a microcosm for HN's decline - loads of flip comments and even more supposition without any sources.
> In any case the stated goal of 'a rapid reduction in methane emissions to 30% below 2020 levels' would have little noticeable effect on warming rates over the next century.
> Just look at the global trend rate as well, methane's at record levels and the rate is steepening, not flattening.
^ This is the problem! Methane is 25x worse than CO2. Exponential growth instead of a 30% reduction (and then flat or still declining) makes a big difference!
Over the span of 3 years - not really. Over the span of 30 years, yes!
Methane decomposes into CO2 over centuries. So CO2's atmospheric forcing is a constant over time, while methane forcing starts 100s of times worse but decays over time.
Over 100 years the forcing is on average about 30x higher, over 20 years on average about 84x higher[1].
I think that's mostly the effect of methane oxidation in the stratosphere delivering water vapor to the stratosphere, plus reduction of the concentration of OH radical in the atmosphere, and some effects on stratospheric ozone:
> "Methane enhances its own lifetime through changes in the OH concentration, it leads to changes in tropospheric ozone, enhances stratospheric water vapour levels, and produces CO2. The GWP given in Table 2.14 includes the first three of these effects. The lifetime effect is included by adopting a perturbation
lifetime of 12 years." - IPCC Report
(That report indicates the radiative factor is more like 26:1 for CH4:CO2)
Not just permafrost. Due to increased temperatures wetlands are emitting more methane (https://cires.colorado.edu/news/new-analysis-wetlands-other-...). That is another positive feedback loop, besides the permafrost one, that is increasing the amount of methane in the atmosphere.
Since the Last Glacial Maximum >20k years ago, the trend has been a warming one, and this predates our oil based economy, and the rise of largescale human population.
We are likely heading to reversion to the mean around temperature, water levels, CO2, and others
This is simply not true. There is absolutely nothing about current climate change that can be explained as merely continued epoch-scale changes. There has been a very sharp and very pronounced hook in the temperature curve over the last few decades (and a bleedingly obvious hypothesis as to why) that matches almost nothing in the geological record (supervolcano eruptions and global-scale impacts are the only things that happen on this kind of time scale, not ice ages!).
There is absolutely zero scientific basis behind the idea you're positing here. Please stop.
Yet, many of these same swamplands are also sequestering carbon at a prodigious rate. People dig up and burn the peat they once sequestered it all in, for fuel.
So, we would probably be better off with more of even-though-methane-burping swamplands than less.
> While there might exist a lot of smelly swamps, CH4 is odorless so not a super stinky swamp smell substance
Swamp gas has its smell from the associated compounds made with it, just like the methane we use has its stink from Ethanethiol additives, similarly, sulfur based. Still methane though!
That is because Asia started adding more cattle. USA and Europe are not the biggest factors here unlike other global warming sources, since the amount of meat each person can consume is limited. Convincing Americans to stop eating meat wont do much when India and Brazil has twice as much cattle as USA does and continues to add more.
You'd need to convince India to stop having so many cows, good luck with that.
Some bitcoin mining startups are looking to start providing a strong economic incentive to collect and efficiently burn waste methane that you can't otherwise do anything with. Since vented methane eventually degrades into C02 anyway, after decades of 25x more potent warming, this a strong net positive for tackling climate change.
In some cases, we can use the stick of regulation to require organizations to efficiently burn their methane at a pure cost to themselves, but that may not work on a global scale in a places with weak governance. But the carrot of profit may be extremely effective at proliferating waste methane burning worldwide.
When byproduct methane is conveniently located (like in the middle of a city) it often is piped through gas lines to be sold, or a power plant is built on site and connected to the grid. Many landfills already have power plants built on them, https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/california-power-gene...
The problem is when it is very remotely located, and the amount of gas is far too low to economically justify building out gas pipes or electric transmission lines.
You can still have all that stuff. We have stripped far more trees than nessesaary without realizing that they were keeping us alive. There are plenty of voids in between highway lanes, in the middle of parking lots etc.
If you want an example of what it should look like check out Hilton Head island or Washington state. Shaded parking lots and you can't find Walmart through all the trees without a map.
sure, and we could go a few steps further because trees tolerate but are not fond of asphalt, concrete, gum, oil of parking lots. We could reduce the dependance to cars, cars take up to 26% of the space in cities, and more in pollution (25-45% of pollution), most of if isn't even from exhaust, it's from tires and dust put back in the air, they participate a lot in the heat islands phenomenon. Let's turn to small and light vehicles, designed for cities
I agree. I was looking at parking lots and realized the surface areas of the vehicles multiply the size of the heat island effect. I estimated that a typical vehicle increases the surface area by 1.5-2 times the surface it covers.
According to this youtube video on the new climate bill analysis [1], the Methane is (1) entirely usable fuel, (2) 80x (IIRC) more greenhouse causing than other carbon molecules and (3) leaking from infrastructure, so the climate bill includes provisions to track down leaks from infrastructure and encourage the fixing of those leaks.
This stuff is really low hanging fruit from a climate perspective. It is quite shocking that the US is only now beginning to look at dealing with fugitive methane emissions.
It's a bit ironic to frame this as calling for "death to cows", given the purpose that cows are often being kept for. But in any case, people have been calling for sustainable food sources and transportation methods for a long time, neither are a new "fad".
> Where will they stop?
Once our usage of the planet's resources settles at a sustainable level?
> Once our usage of the planet's resources settles at a sustainable level?
Even if that means less and worst food for the masses? Who decided that? The hypocrisy and paternalism on display in this whole climate change discussion is through the the roof.
"Natural Gas" is 70% to 90% methane. The naming "Natural" is mostly a PR gimmick.
Burning it in power plants, industry, and households is definitely part of the problem. Everywhere in the infrastructure from extraction to transport to use, to all the abandoned wells everywhere a long the way it is leaking.
This a very large gap in all these government/corporate actions.
> NASA conducts periodic methane studies using the next-generation Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS-NG) instrument. These studies are determining the locations and magnitudes of the largest methane emission sources across California, including those associated with landfills, refineries, dairies, wastewater treatment plants, oil and gas fields, power plants, and natural gas infrastructure.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadEDIT:
Since people have asked, this is my logic...
The amount of warming depends on the amount of gas (CO2, CH4 or other) in the atmosphere. Stopping all emissions today would not change the huge amounts all ready up there. They will remain there and active for decades-centuries. So we are locked in for a certain amount of warming (2 degrees so far last I checked), it just has not happened yet.
The rate of emissions just controls how much more warming and how much sooner the existing warming will occur.
This is one of the core problems with Human responses to the problem: people think they can wait until it gets 'bad enough' then stop their emissions and things will improve. But they will actually keep getting worse because of the lag between emissions and effects.
As for CO2 vs Methane, Methane is responsible for about 20% of all man made warming (1). So eliminating it completely would still leave 80% of (future) warming... This is because we emit a lot, lot more CO2 than Methane.
The division is really a false one IMHO, because a lot of methane comes from coal mining and oil/gas extraction. So unless you stop using fossil fuels (the number 1 CO2 source) you cannot stop methane emissions...
What all this really comes down to is that people really really want a magic bullet that will make climate change disappear. But just because you really want one doesn't mean it exists...
1: https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane
Second Edit:
Temperature is like distance
Gas levels is like speed
Gas emission rates is like acceleration.
Edit 2:
Reducing emissions does not make you go backwards. You are still hurting forwards, you are even still accelerating. You're just not accelerating as rapidly...
Can you share some references?
> Methane accounts for half of the average 1.0 degrees C of warming the world suffered over the past decade and reducing methane is the fastest strategy available to reduce warming.
The other half of the warming will continue even without Methane.
- Methane is more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
- Methane is the second most abundant anthropogenic GHG after carbon dioxide (CO2), accounting for about 20 percent of global emissions.
https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
Because we're still increasing the rate at which we emit other greenhouses gases, and even if we emitted none anymore a lot of warming is already locked in.
All efforts to combat global warming about reducing or eliminating the acceleration. If one of those methods is both cheap and has a fairly high impact (which, methane reduction appears to be) then why are we focusing on "but this doesn't eliminate global warming"?
Adding renewables and nuclear to the grid won't eliminate global warming, but they slow it down. Eliminating methane appears to be a route where we can more aggressively stomp on the breaks.
The only time I've seen that argument raised is for the opposite "Because this won't fix global warming, we shouldn't do it?".
Global warming will require a multifaceted approach to be solve. No one solution will fix it, so literally any solution is going to have a detractor that says "This won't fix it, so why bother with it?"
Reducing and fixing or eliminating are not the same thing. How could they have worded the title better? "Limiting methane emissions will have an outsized impact given the cost"?
It's also true that increasing global average warming can result in reduced warming and temperatures in some geographic areas so it is important to be specific with terminology depending on which aspect of the climate change debate we're talking about. You are right that the title is unintentionally misleading in this regard.
> Methane is generally a secondary byproduct in the industrial processes from which it is emitted. Coal mines, for example, seek to vent methane from the mine workings because it can cause explosions. Historically, mining companies have not viewed the associated methane as an energy resource in its own right.
It's mostly associated with fossil fuel extraction so the other solution to the methane problem is decreasing fossil fuel consumption in general.
The rate of emissions just controls how much more warming and how much sooner the existing warming will occur.
This is one of the core problems with Human responses to the problem: people think they can wait until it gets 'bad enough' then stop their emissions and things will improve. But they will keep getting worse because of the lag between emissions and effects.
As for CO2 vs Methane, Methane is responsible for about 20% of all man made warming (1). So eliminating it completely would still leave 80% of warming... This is because we emit a lot, lot more CO2 than Methane.
The division is really a false one IMHO, because a lot of methane comes from coal mining and oil/gas extraction. So unless you stop using fossil fuels (the number 1 CO2 source) you cannot stop methane emissions...
1: https://www.epa.gov/gmi/importance-methane
> The division is really a false one IMHO, because a lot of methane comes from coal mining and oil/gas extraction. So unless you stop using fossil fuels (the number 1 CO2 source) you cannot stop methane emissions...
But if you can eliminate that 20% with minimal effort or expenditure, why wouldn't you?
Most of that is coming from emissions related to fossil fuel extraction. Which is a perfect opportunity for capture.
CO2 emissions, on the other hand, is coming from a million different sources and doesn't have a single clean solution. There's not a one step process for eliminating 20% of CO2 emissions.
You have to account for reversing all of the profligate methane producing swampland, turning it back into swampland, to fully account for this as part of the calculation.
We've done planetscale engineering already by how much methane we've reduced by converting swamp to farm/urban land.
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/methane-emission...
Methane accounts for half of the average 1.0 degrees C of warming the world suffered over the past decade and reducing methane is the fastest strategy available to reduce warming.
Why do you think this claim is wrong?
That 1 degree isn't due to current CH4 emissions, it's due to CH4 already up there. So we will get it whether we emit more CH4 or not.
Plus there is another 1-1.5 degrees from CO2 and other sources. And that will also still be there.
So the planet WILL keep warming and that includes the amounts being listed...
It's a bit like if you stop turning the tap on a bath tub: it's still quite full AND it's still filling, it's just no longer filling FASTER than it was before (from that tap, the other tap is still being opened further...)
Also when you say "reduce warming" do you mean "reduce global temperatures" or "reduce the rate of increase in global temperatures?" I think the article means the latter..
The hard truth is that capitalism (and infinite growth) is at odds with a stable climate. We've enjoyed a goldilocks period in the Earth's history of unusually stable climate, and now humans have decided to upset the balance.
We might be able to adapt, but we might not. This is the 6th mass extinction event in Earth's history, and I'm not convinced we're so special that we can somehow engineer our way to survival, especially since our ability to engineer depends on doing the things that have all but guaranteed our demise (i.e., most economic growth is powered by fossil fuels).
EDIT: Fix the words.
I'm hopeful we will engineer our way out of it.
It worries me that people don't "get" this. They think it's a matter of doing a few small things and celebrating. And it's not.
On a systemic level, you need products like Mootral that help cut the methane emitted by cows.
I don't recall if his video talked about Methane, I do recall it talking about the staggering amount of water that is involved in making meat, and I live in a high plains desert, so water is something on my mind.
It's been fun taking small steps.
[1] https://youtu.be/-k-V3ESHcfA
The rain will continue to fall there without the cows
> Methane accounts for half of the average 1.0 degrees C of warming the world suffered over the past decade and reducing methane is the fastest strategy available to reduce warming. The United States, in partnership with the European Union, is leading the Global Methane Pledge to reduce overall methane emissions by 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030.
Reducing yearly methane emissions will NOT reduce warming. The article is about reducing the amount of additionally emitted methane in the future.
Since methane is a drastically more potent warming gas than C02, but eventually degrades into C02 on the scale of decades, skipping the decades of heightened warming effect in the atmosphere by burning emitted methane to C0w will have the effect of reducing the rate of future warming, and importantly buy us more time to ultimately solve the problem.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
The warming caused by methane is proportional to the exponential average of emissions, with a ~20 years half-life. Reducing the rate of emissions literally reduces the total warming from methane.
The one point where the article is misleading is that it reduces the warming as long as you keep the effort. If you stop doing it, the warming comes back in ~40 years as if you never did anything.
Methane is very different from carbon dioxide, because it doesn't accumulate forever. It tends to break people's intuition.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-new-generati...
https://www.ghgsat.com/en/
Roughly 1/3rd of emissions are from livestock. Hopefully the research into seaweed additives for feed pan out with their estimated 75% reduction.
https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/feeding-cattle-seaweed-reduces...
Sorry, going to skip the highly processed chemicals plants that is fake meat, and will pass on the bug burgers too.
No crickets for dinner here!
That said, even if they did, and we all took the route of dismissing any change on the basis that the advocates of that change aren't perfect, as no advocates ever are, well then it seems that nothing would ever change.
You'd arguably do more staying flexitarian but getting your produce as local and seasonal as possible to cut out the emissions caused by transport. And maybe not taking that second transatlantic flight. Notice how neither of those are pushed half as hard as "go vegan and save the planet".
I mean, animal agriculture accounts for 14.5% of GHG emissions, roughly more than all global transport according to the IPCC.[1]
Few of us have the ability to unilaterally shut down a coal plant or an oil company, but a large number of us do have the ability to change our consumption habits to be less destructive.
>It's also difficult for anything lacto-ovo vegetarian to get all they need without relying on imports way away from their home country.
>You'd arguably do more staying flexitarian but getting your produce as local and seasonal as possible to cut out the emissions caused by transport.
Just to address the notion about food transport GHG emissions, you'd actually have a bigger impact on your emissions by eating vegan once a week than if all your food was entirely locally grown for the entire week.[2] Food miles are a very small fraction of the emissions of food production, especially that of animal products.
Finally, it doesn't have to be either or. People can ride their bicycles, eat local, take fewer flights, as well as reduce their meat consumption.
[1]https://www.fao.org/3/i3437e/i3437e.pdf
[2]https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
One source doesn't equate consensus. Given the myriads of criticisms among diets, food production and emissions, I'd ask you to remain skeptical of anything advocating for more open loops. Plenty of sources put transport far higher than agriculture, and many of the differences are based on methodology. No, this doesn't mean the critics are right.
>Finally, it doesn't have to be either or.
Not the point. One of these is pushed aggressively. The others aren't. That alone should warrant enough skepticism regarding the entire thing. Even if we don't agree on what is the worst, it's ridiculous to push one but not the other. That's how you create political friction.
>Few of us have the ability to unilaterally shut down a coal plant or an oil company, but a large number of us do have the ability to change our consumption habits to be less destructive.
You can't keep compensating for a few unwilling individuals taking advantage of the breathing room opened up. Playing a game prisoner's dilemma should be the first thing to get your head closer on the wanted list. How this is even negotiable in the face of a global threat is beyond me.
I've attached a few more sources to this post, but it does seem to be the general consensus as far as I've seen. Do you have any sources that contradict this?
It's pretty wild, but the emissions from transportation just so happen to be completely dwarfed by the emissions from the actual food production itself, especially when it comes to animal products.
"We find that although food is transported long distances in general (1640 km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average) the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption. Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. [...] Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food."[1]
>Even if we don't agree on what is the worst, it's ridiculous to push one but not the other.
I mean, what is the solution? People are supposed to always talk about everything, instead of a specific thing, every single time they talk about mitigating climate change? I don't think that's an effective communication strategy.
As for the validity of talking so much about reducing meat consumption, study[2] after study[4] shows that "Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet."[3] and "“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use. It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car.”[5]
It makes sense to talk about it as it's also one of the easiest, highest impact, most tangible changes to make.
>You can't keep compensating for a few unwilling individuals taking advantage of the breathing room opened up. Playing a game prisoner's dilemma should be the first thing to get your head closer on the wanted list. How this is even negotiable in the face of a global threat is beyond me.
Sorry, I don't understand what you're saying here.
Sources -
[1]https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es702969f
[2]https://josephpoore.com/Science%20360%206392%20987%20-%20Acc...
[3]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
[4]https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/
[5]https://unfccc.int/blog/we-need-to-talk-about-meat
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221191241...
If you are doing full accounting though, that iceberg lettuce that required cold shipping, and extensive plastic packaging, moved 500 miles from growth to consumption point, is not any more or less "green".
That is the whole point of being a locavore - consuming foods grown closest to you so we are not spending huge amounts on shipping, but then greenwashing it when it goes into the supermarket refrigerator.
It's pretty wild, but the emissions from transportation just so happen to be completely dwarfed by the emissions from the actual food production itself, especially when it comes to animal products.
"We find that although food is transported long distances in general (1640 km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average) the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption. Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. [...] Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food."[1]
[1]https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es702969f
Here's a few more sources if you're interested, in addition to the pretty accessible source in the comment you responded to:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221191241...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181023110627.h...
This data is also being based on comparing conventional produce raising vice feedlot style farming
> to put these figures into perspective, when combined with the fact that the average household consumes around 5 kg of food per day (29), average final delivery of food is 1640 km (1020 mi), and the total supply chain requires movement of 6760 km (4200 mi). Food groups vary in these average distances from a low of beverages (330 km delivery, 1200 km total) to a high of red meat (1800 km delivery, 20 400 km total).
and is heavily biased based on over-generalization which does not apply to many types of food production, as this assumes heavy fertilization, grain-feeding, etc.
> We estimate the average household’s climate impacts related to food to be around 8.1 t CO2e/yr, with delivery “food-miles” accounting for around 0.4 te CO2e/yr and total freight accounting for 0.9 t CO2e/yr. To put these figures into perspective, driving a 25 mi/gal (9.4 L/100 km) automobile 12 000 miles/yr (19 000 km/yr) produces around 4.4 t CO2/yr. Expressed in this manner, a totally “localized” diet reduces GHG emissions per household equivalent to 1000 miles/yr (1600 km/yr) driven, while shifting just one day per week’s calories from red meat and dairy to chicken/fish/eggs or a vegetable-based diet reduces GHG emissions equivalent to 760 miles/yr (1230 km/yr) or 1160 miles/yr (1860 km/yr), respectively. Shifting totally away from red meat and dairy toward chicken/fish/eggs or a vegetable-based diet reduces GHG emissions equivalent to 5340 mi/yr (8590 km/yr) or 8100 mi/yr (13 000 km/yr), respectively. Which of these options is easier or more effective for each climate-concerned household depends on a variety of factors, though given the difficulty in sourcing all food locally, shifting diet for less than one day per week may be more feasible.
> Within food production, which totaled 6.8 t CO2e/household-yr, 3.0 t CO2e(44%) were due to CO2 emissions, with 1.6 t (23%) due to methane, 2.1 t (32%) due to nitrous oxide, and 0.1 t (1%) due to HFCs and other industrial gases. Thus, a majority of food’s climate impact is due to non-CO2 greenhouse gases. Nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, mainly due to nitrogen fertilizer application, other soil management techniques, and manure management, are prevalent in all food groups but especially in animal-based groups due to the inefficient transformation of plant energy into animal-based energy. Methane (CH4) emissions are mainly due to enteric fermentation in ruminant animals (cattle, sheep, goats) and manure management, and are thus concentrated in the red meat and dairy categories.
Similarly, other of these are all about dense feedlot operations
>We obtain animal feed requirements using the database from Herrero et al. (2013). This data set provides feed requirements for 30 world regions, which are mapped to the country level. Aggregated feed concentrate requirements per animal production system are distributed into individual crops, such as oil crops to rapeseed and others, based on feed crop consumption statistics (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations FAO, 2017). For consistency, feed use numbers from Herrero et al. (2013) are rescaled to match country-level feed use totals in FAOSTAT 2009–2011 (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations FAO, 2017). Feed crop emissions are then added to the consumption emissions of animal products.
As I have worked on a ranch like this that did not regularly use fuel, did not fertilize, basically grass pastured cattle, I found this material to be incredibly skewed. Maybe it is accurate talking about feedlot commercial cattle production. Maybe.
For smaller organic pastured husbandry that is not fuel intensive, ...
Given that 96%[5] of beef sold in the US is grain fed, it seems as if it would make sense to base the data on that.
Not only is it the norm, but it's apparently the best case scenario in terms of emissions. If you're trying to make an argument for beef being less emission intensive, you want to use CAFO numbers as grass fed numbers are worse.
According to these studies, grain fed cattle are slaughtered at 14 - 22 months of age, while grass fed cows are kept alive longer because they gain weight more slowly, leading them to be slaughtered at 20 - 26 months of age.[4]
Their extended lifespans lead to greater emissions even if they were to emit the same amount of CO2 + methane per day, but a diet of grass itself leads to higher methane emissions than grain, resulting in overall methane emissions being about 43% higher for grass-fed beef.[1]
Methane traps about 80 times more heat than CO2 over the first 20 years, before it degrades into CO2 and then overall ends up trapping about 25 times more over the first 100 years.[2]
Now, some of that may be offset by by soil carbon sequestration in the grass fed beef, but according to the Oxford study below -
“This report finds that better management of grass-fed livestock, while worthwhile in and of itself, does not offer a significant solution to climate change as only under very specific conditions can they help sequester carbon. This sequestering of carbon is even then small, time-limited, reversible and substantially outweighed by the greenhouse gas emissions these grazing animals generate.”[3]
Finally, grass fed beef not only grow more slowly but they end up at a lower final weight when they’re slaughtered, ~1100 lbs vs ~1300 lbs. After they’re butchered, this leaves 638 lbs vs 832 lbs of beef per animal. This means that to meet the same amount of demand, we’d require increasing the total number of cattle raised by about 30%, further increasing emissions and overall environmental impacts.[4]
Further - “The required 30% increase in the overall cattle population must be accompanied by large increases in the productivity of existing pastures, on the order of 40%–370%, to avoid clearing additional native vegetation or competition with the human food supply.”[1]
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
[2] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-do-we-compare-methane-ca...
[3] https://tabledebates.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/fcrn_gn... [4] https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/carbon-footprint-c...
[4] https://extension.okstate.edu/fact-sheets/carbon-footprint-c...
[5]https://extension.sdstate.edu/grass-fed-beef-market-share-gr....
Given other large sources of animal protein, you'd likely be against vibrant fish, & oceanic mammal populations toon.
You're against animal husbandry and animal protein sources because they produce methane.
Whether or not it is tied to fossil fuel usage and pollution.
> while grass fed cows
wrong. The industry raises steers. Neutered male cattle.
> Further - “The required 30% increase in the overall cattle population must be accompanied by large increases in the productivity of existing pastures, on the order of 40%–370%, to avoid clearing additional native vegetation or competition with the human food supply.
That is utter idiocy. The question is always which thing a farmer is going to raise. Given that the US has supported wild animal populations of equivalent large cattle, which thing to grow is always a question. However, it was done previously without farming.
> Given that 96%[5] of beef sold in the US is grain fed, it seems as if it would make sense to base the data on that.
No. That is highly regionalized. You have to ask instead what is consumed, and exported. Do you know how much of that is destined for other markets? Many markets are selling >50% grass fed now, and the grass-fed farms have incredible demand with backlogs on animals now.
The bison talking point has already been addressed elsewhere on this post, but copying and pasting the other commenter's info -
> ~60,000,000 Bison in North America in 1600 [1]
> 94,400,000 cattle and calves in USA in 2017. [2]
Which represents an increase of 50%. Not to mention that if we look at global cattle numbers, those have exploded to 1,000,967,000 Livestock Cattle worldwide in 2021, far above historical numbers.[3]
In fact, cattle make up more of the biomass on Earth than any other species, at 650 million tonnes.[4]
So yeah, the current state of the world does not compare in any way to the 1600s and the 60 million bison in NA.
>Given other large sources of animal protein, you'd likely be against vibrant fish, & oceanic mammal populations toon.
Huh? What does this have to do with atmospheric methane and CO2?
>wrong. The industry raises steers. Neutered male cattle.
This seems like a non-sequitor, how is this relevant to the discussion?
>Given that the US has supported wild animal populations of equivalent large cattle,
This is false, and especially misleading when taking a global view. Please feel free to show me sources that contradict the ones I've provided.
>That is utter idiocy. The question is always which thing a farmer is going to raise.[...] which thing to grow is always a question. However, it was done previously without farming.
Sorry, how is this a response to the required increase in cattle population if we were to transition to 100% grass-fed beef, and the required increase in pasture productivity or expansion of pasture?
>No.
I've provided a source that says yes. Do you have a source saying that more than 4% of beef sold in the US is grass-fed?
> Many markets are selling >50% grass fed now, and the grass-fed farms have incredible demand with backlogs on animals now.
Please define "many" and quantify the total impact of their grass-fed sales on total sales in the US. The source I've provided shows that to be 4%.
Further, again, grass-fed beef is actually worse for the climate as I've demonstrated by citing a number of sources, so it's not like this is a good argument to pursue if your goal is to try to rationalize beef consumption as being good for the climate.
[1]https://allaboutbison.com/bison-in-history/bison-timeline/
[2]https://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_health/nahms/downloads/Dem...
[3]https://beef2live.com/story-world-cattle-inventory-1960-2014...
[4]https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/what-animal-collectively...
Your data is absolute trash.
There was no objective accurate measurement of bison in 1600, that is why you see ranges of 50 to 100M animals.
You've been pretty hostile but you've yet to cite any sources, while I've provided a plethora. Got anything to back up your statements?
Also, is there any point to the hostility?
Not really. As first thing, you can try beans. We can go from there...
That is a personal anecdote.
Many prominent folks are painting themselves as green activists telling us how to live
While they take private jets everywhere Own huge yachts Own multiple huge houses Giant consumers of fossil fuels, 1000x regular folks.
> That said, even if they did, and we all took the route of dismissing any change on the basis that the advocates of that change aren't perfect, as no advocates ever are, well then it seems that nothing would ever change
Basically, you are giving them a pass.
[1] https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/1558014404855209986
[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/good-grub-why-we-migh...
[3] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/07/why-we-need-to-give-i...
I don't expect a sincere response since this seems to me to be just parroting of cable news talking points which tends to be a predictor of discourse level but I'd love to be surprised.
Given that people like me exist that support reducing pollution from fossil fuels (climate change is a silly term), we don’t need to speculate that only the jet setting elites are interested in saving the planet.
I do question the entire movement when the leaders are hypocrites and i sometimes think it’s a wasted effort for the average person.
Our individual lifestyle and footprint is like a vote, it looks inefficient but it works as a whole (I know about the huge inertia of global warming, but definitely still worth to do something)
it's cutting most animal farming and keeping/improving biodiversity
Neither of those questions is based in reality, so the answers don’t really matter.
You cannot cherrypick one element of the past and use it’s isolated existence as an argument against steps taken in our current situation
If you literally killed and deleted all cows from the planet, you’d get a slight delay in global warming, but wouldn’t solve it.
The real and only issue are fossil fuels.
While you're correct that fossil fuel control is crucial, livestock emissions are also an important part, and it's a false dilemma to solely focus efforts on one issue.
Whereas a reduction in meat consumption would mean a reduction in total global land use for agriculture, allowing that land to be rewilded. Trapping carbon over a longer term and potentially providing numerous environmental benefits.
"The researchers report that grass-fed beef contributes very little to the global protein supply, accounting for just one gram of protein, per person, per day. In comparison, ruminants as a whole contribute 13g of protein to the global average protein intake, per person, per day."
"Despite making only a marginal contribution to global protein intake, grazed beef accounts for between a quarter and a third of all greenhouse emissions from ruminant livestock."
https://tabledebates.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/fcrn_gn...
A related interesting fact - 77% of the world's soy is used for feed:
https://ourworldindata.org/soy#:~:text=The%20majority%20(77%....
[1] https://extension.sdstate.edu/grass-fed-beef-market-share-gr....
Turns out you're right, the majority start out on pasture and then are transported to feed lots to fatten up once they reach maturity.
According to this[1], due to the fact that grass fed beef fatten up more slowly, end up at a lower overall weight at slaughter, and are kept alive and emitting longer, "a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%", and "the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle)".
Further -
"Emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas with a large warming effect relative to carbon dioxide per molecule, come from beef cattle in the forms enteric fermentation and manure emissions. We calculated a 43% increase in methane from enteric fermentation (table 2), assuming that cattle finishing on grass had the same daily methane emissions as present-day stocker cattle, who have nearly identical ADG and are fed primarily on roughage."
Either way it seems as if grain is an indispensable part of animal agriculture currently, so we have to take that into account when talking about what would happen to land use with or without the cows around. Additionally, it seems that moving away from grain would potentially have even worse impacts on the climate.
[1]https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
"In aerobic composting, the more oxygen that is available, the more carbon dioxide (CO2) produced, the less methane (CH4), and the more complete the decomposition. As biological activity progresses, the oxygen concentration falls and CO2 concentration increases."
https://www.co2meter.com/blogs/news/8056965-co2-in-aerobic-a....
According to the FAO[1], grazing land for animals and cropland dedicated to producing animal feed represent almost 80% of all agricultural land globally. "Feed crops are grown in one-third of total cropland, while the total land area occupied by pasture is equivalent to 26% of the ice-free terrestrial surface"
Given food conversion ratios[2], where you lose roughly 90% of the energy you put into each step up the food chain, the lower we eat on it the lower the amount of energy input we need, which at the bottom of our food chain are those crops and grasslands.
Once we remove the heavily inefficient middlemen which are animals, we are left with a drastic reduction in the amount of agricultural land and output needed.
I'm not sure how many of these companies and farmers could find another use for their grassland and farmland, as it's not like people will be able to just up their consumption of food by several multiples, and I'm not sure what other sort of productive purposes beyond food production the majority would be able to find.
So yeah, once there's no demand and it's no longer profitable, a large amount of that agricultural land seems like it would just be allowed to lay fallow or be rewilded, which would be really beneficial to the environment for many reasons.[3]
[1]https://www.fao.org/animal-production/en/
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level
[3]https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/explore-rewilding/what-i...
https://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/earthkind/landscape/dont...
As far as feed though, not all feed is grown exclusively for cattle. I've worked with sugar companies in the past and the by-products of sugar production (molasses, raffinate, etc..) are sold as cattle feed. This is a billion dollar industry. These by-products are being produced regardless of whether we feed cattle or not.
Import control is an interesting idea, I haven't heard that before.
> The 2005 (FAO) Global Forest Resources Assessment ranked the United States as seventh highest country losing its old growth forests, a vast majority of which were removed prior to the 20th century.[3]
>For the 300 years following the arrival of Europeans, land was cleared, mostly for agriculture, at a rate that matched that of population growth.[7] During the 19th century, while the U.S. population tripled, the total area of cropland increased by over four times, from seventy-six million to three hundred nineteen million acres. For every person added to the U.S. population during this period, farmers put another three to four acres under the plow.[8] This trend continued until the 1920s when the amount of crop land stabilized in spite of continued population growth. As abandoned farm land reverted to forest the amount of forest land increased reaching a peak in 1963 of 753,000,000 acres (3,050,000 km2).[4]
It was estimated that there were 1,023,000,000 acres of forest in 1630, compared to 766,000,000 acres in 2012.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2020/08/19/...
I would guess all cellulose-digesting animals (cow, sheep, goat, deer, elk, moose, antelope, buffalo, camel, rabbit, termite, ...) should produce about the same amount of methane the amount of cellulose they digest.
Your comment also suggests a misunderstanding. Methane has an atmospheric lifetime of only ca. 10 years. A constant source of methane will not lead to increasing atmospheric methane levels, nor to continuous warming. Whereas a constant source of CO2 will.
Which Methane is. It decomposes into CO2 and Water.
Nothing to dismiss, especially because that extra boost to heating in those first 20 years could be the difference between us hitting various tipping points, like melting permafrost and releasing yet another 185 GtC[2] into the atmosphere, and not.
[1]https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-do-we-compare-methane-ca...
[2]https://www.carbonbrief.org/imminent-tipping-point-threateni...
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-do-we-compare-methane-ca...
All of that warming is caused by fossil fuels.
Your “solution” doesn’t solve anything, but merely delays the inevitable.
There is only one solution to global warming, which is stopping fossil fuels.
Deleting all cows is not a solution, therefore it is promoted simply as a distraction, and a way to let people hate each other, via “sin taxes” (very similar to “paper straws” drive a few years back, which also had a zero-to-negative effect on pollution and global warming)
I also didn't state that eliminating animal agriculture was the singular solution to climate change.
All I was pointing out was that it doesn't seem correct to say that cattle do not contribute to climate change, as you seemed to be saying.
Let's try with an analogy.
You have a lake, that has an inflow (river) and an outflow (river and/or solar evaporation). They are in equilibrium, and the lake has existed for thousands of years, never overflowing, never drying out.
Then you build a factory/farm that takes some water out of the lake.
If the amount of water is sufficiently small, the ecosystem can adapt (e.g. less outflow and/or evaporation).
But if the amount of water you take out is over that "adaptable" threshold, then the lake WILL eventually dry out.
Blaming the outflowing river is non-sensical; it didn't contribute anything to the drying of the lake, the entire fault lies with the factory. Note that the amount of water the factory takes is irrelevant (as long as it's over the "adaptable" threshold); the lake will dry regardless, the amount only influences when, not if.
river->natural CO2 + methane cycle, lake->climate, factory->fossil fuels, less outflow->plants growing more because of extra CO2, lake drying->climate change (could work the other way as well, lake overflowing...)
If I eat food at a rate of 2 kg per day, after 10 days I will not be 20 kg heavier.
If I shovel sand into a box at a rate of 2 kg per day, after 10 days the box will be 20 kg heavier.
Regardless of the fact that the sand will eventually all flow back out into the sandbox over a long enough timeline.
One thing I figured was worth checking was how many bison there were pre-industrialization, and how many cows there are now.
Some quick googling seems to say:
~60,000,000 Bison in North America in 1600
~1,000,967,000 Livestock Cattle worldwide in 2021
https://allaboutbison.com/bison-in-history/bison-timeline/ https://beef2live.com/story-world-cattle-inventory-1960-2014...
94,400,000 cattle and calves in USA in 2017.
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_health/nahms/downloads/Dem...
What I find missing in all the cow discussions is any mention of the huge number of bovines that roamed suitable areas of the planet, such as the North American plains, before they were mostly killed off and made room for cows.
Was the mass slaughter of buffalo that happened on 19th century USA good for climate? --Photo of a gigantic skull pile, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bison_skull_pile-restored...
For how long and how many animals similar to cows were there before we killed them in most places?
Why are the cows such a climate catastrophe now, but the previous gigantic wild herds were not? (An actual question, not a rhetorical one, as I said, I did not study or investigate this, only noticed it)?
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As far as my thinking goes, the main problem is and has been that we dig up ancient buried biomass (coal, gas, oil). We have an above-ground carbon cycle, and it does not really matter that much if there is stuff burned and carbon shifting around various forms, as long as it's in the above-ground cycle.
The problem, to my knowledge, is that we fed gigantic amounts of below-ground carbon into the above-ground cycle.
I did not check the numbers (someone, please?), I think below ground we have far more biomass than we could ever plant as forests above ground? That's why I'm not excited about tree-planting projects as "solution". As far as my understanding goes, only a complete shutdown of all coal, oil and gas extraction can even begin to address our problem. And then we still need to get a lot of carbon back underground.
Cows act solely within the above-ground cycle, so I don't see them as a valid focus, but as a distraction. My focus would be on the processes that add below-ground carbon to the above-ground cycle.
If the above-ground carbon cycle only has prehistoric amounts of carbon to begin with, would cows, burning forests, etc., still be a global climate problem? As far as I know, that's not the case (independent of local deforesting issues, just looking at the "global warming" problem).
I know I'm ignoring always present movement - without humans - between above and below ground - only counting safely long-term stored carbon, not sure what those net movements are (without human activity)?
I also ignore "details"; such as if carbon is in CO2 or CH4 in the atmosphere. I think that evens itself out longer term and would be enough for an above-ground cycle that is not increased artificially. Our problem is the speed with which we add below-ground sources to the above cycle.
I did not (and did not intent to) make any reference to biomass, not indirectly either. At most, maybe cows now bs. wild bovine herds of the ancient past, which even if we only look at the number of buffalo killed in the US must have been gigantic, so no less than we have cows now, at worst only slightly less but I doubt we have reliable figures about the size of herds before humans killed many e.g. for Africa, Asia or India. As a Middle European, I know we had plenty of large bovines but killed them quickly early on, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs.
I made no comparisons human-bovine.
Based on what?
https://www.flatcreekinn.com/bison-americas-mammal/
"The Bison: from 30 million to 325 (1884) to 500,000 (today)"
So the estimate for the number of buffalo only in North America alone already includes hundreds of millions. Then we have Africa, Asia and Europe.
That is easily that many bovines. The Eurasian steppes are (and were) even more vast than the ones in NA (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Steppe_P...). Map for Africa, steppe and savannah: https://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/20... (also remember Africa is much larger than shown on our common Mercator maps, so those areas are even larger than they appear)
There is no reason to assume the herds on other continents - before human hunting - were any less than the ones in NA. And bovines were not limited to the savannahs and steppes, just that there were the largest herds. Just look at the distribution map for the aurochs -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs#/media/File:Aurochs_di... -- it is much larger than just the steppe areas.
It is not just bovines either - other groups of which include animals like deer, giraffes, elephants and many others are also plant eating large mammals.
Also, I don't understand this modern need of saying things like "I honestly believe" and, in your case, "I strongly doubt". Feeling "strongly" does not improve the quality of your argument.
In your first reply you even used "I strongly strongly doubt " - riiiight... I would like to see more focus on the facts than on the feelings. Or do you feel that we are in some sort of competition here?
> If you don’t get how what I’m saying related that is fine.
You still did not explain what your comparison of human to bovine biomass was supposed to be about, which was your original reply.
Hence the "cycle" part of carbon cycle.
We're not feeding cows liquified dinosaurs.
A grass fed cow is basically carbon neutral. Grass pull carbon from the air, cows eat that carbon turn it into protein, methane, CO2, we eat the protein turn it into more methane, CO2.
On a 100 year horizon, it's about 30 times worse than CO2, and over 20 years, 80 times worse.
Not all carbon is equal.
You're conflating renewables with climate science.
Given the planet has been on a global warming trend SINCE the last Glacial Maximum, it is pretty safe to say that fossil fuels has little to do with it.
But if you want to make the case for antediluvian petro-economy, I am all ears.
The essential point is that the livestock emissions are already part of the carbon cycle, and don't 'contribute to emissions' in the way most people think, especially activists.
Also, saying "already part of the carbon cycle" about factory farmed cows is nonsense, because the sum totality of carbon in the atmosphere is the problem being discussed. It's part of the carbon cycle which is currently bad.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore the data looks fairly well sourced
[2] https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/what-is-the-climate-impa...
As such it's not really the most useful point of comparison to other nutrient-rich foods. A valuable filler/staple certainly, but you can't live on rice alone.
[1]https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/10/02/treating...
And on top of that, if you look at the linked data, rice isn't even the most efficient (in terms of CO2/calorie) food source. I'm not suggesting everyone switch from beef to rice, I'm just saying that beef is egregiously inefficient. For comparison, even rice is 17 as bad as nuts, and beef is over 500x as bad as nuts. Also you basically can live on potatoes, and the chart shows root vegetables as basically on-par with rice for CO2/kcal. Beef is just so bad that any other diet looks fantastic in comparison.
Fun fact, methane traps so much more heat than CO2, we'd actually be better off burning methane rather than releasing it directly. That's probably not a viable option for livestock, so it seems like reducing livestock is the most viable thing to do.
Agreed that fossil fuels are also an issue.
Modern industrial ag is a chain of fossil fuel inputs via fertilizer to grow soy and corn quickly as possible, to maximize output over what land would naturally support.
The vast majority of meat raised in the US is from industrial consolidated feed lots.
Sounds amazing then, let's do it
Why would we care for single perfect solutions rather than many small imperfect ones?
If anything this would buy us time, that to me sounds amazing
I guess I should expect a visit from the EPA next time I have the guys over for chili.
We know cattle and agriculture produce methane and have a reasonable idea of the amount, but that's only 1/3 of the problem.
Satellites are being used to identify industrial scale leaks that were previously unknown or more likely unreported. SoCal gas had a storage facility that was leaking methane in quantities that accounted for 1/4 of the state of California's methane emissions.
Similarly they've been able to identify the sources of rogue CFC emissions in China.
Nerd with satellite data: Hello Mr. Farmer, while scanning the region for increases in methane, I noticed a spike coming from your farm.
Farmer: ok, go fuck yourself.
Nerd: ....well ok.
Russia: ok, go fuck yourself
So, every bit of methane in the atmosphere spends decades as a drastically more potent warming gas than C02 (25x more), and then becomes C02 to continue warming at a lower potency.
In each molecule of CO2:
* "C" is carbon. There is one (implied) carbon atom.
* "O" is oxygen. There are two oxygen atoms.
Note also Arctic permafrost is going to be a steady source of methane as it thaws, at a relatively slow rate, currently only 1% of the total atmospheric methane budget. Shallow marine sediments are another likely source, although that methane might get gobbled up by marine bacteria before it exits to the atmosphere, to some extent.
In any case the stated goal of 'a rapid reduction in methane emissions to 30% below 2020 levels' would have little noticeable effect on warming rates over the next century. Just look at the global trend rate as well, methane's at record levels and the rate is steepening, not flattening.
https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/increase-in-atmospheric-me...
> Just look at the global trend rate as well, methane's at record levels and the rate is steepening, not flattening.
^ This is the problem! Methane is 25x worse than CO2. Exponential growth instead of a 30% reduction (and then flat or still declining) makes a big difference!
Over the span of 3 years - not really. Over the span of 30 years, yes!
How do you square that with the IPCC estimate that methane is 84 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period?
[1] https://unece.org/challenge
Maybe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential#Calcu...
> "Methane enhances its own lifetime through changes in the OH concentration, it leads to changes in tropospheric ozone, enhances stratospheric water vapour levels, and produces CO2. The GWP given in Table 2.14 includes the first three of these effects. The lifetime effect is included by adopting a perturbation lifetime of 12 years." - IPCC Report
(That report indicates the radiative factor is more like 26:1 for CH4:CO2)
We are likely heading to reversion to the mean around temperature, water levels, CO2, and others
Hence why you provide a graphic that selectively cut it out.
10º C in just a few decades
Checkmate!
There is absolutely zero scientific basis behind the idea you're positing here. Please stop.
Nor is oceanic rise. Just look at Doggerland!
Sea levels were what, 300-400 feet below now during the Younger Dryas?
> There is absolutely zero scientific basis behind the idea you're positing here. Please stop.
Poppycock.
There is plenty of evidence of oceanic increase and decrease as a part of longterm global trends around freezing and warming cycles.
Nope, no widespread climate trend around oceanic rise. Doesn't exist. A fabrication.
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4/
Many swamps produce an obnoxiously huge amount of methane, so much so you can smell it everywhere "Swamp gas".
Across the planet we have turned profligate methane producing swampland into land for cities and farmland.
So, we would probably be better off with more of even-though-methane-burping swamplands than less.
Swamp gas has its smell from the associated compounds made with it, just like the methane we use has its stink from Ethanethiol additives, similarly, sulfur based. Still methane though!
You'd need to convince India to stop having so many cows, good luck with that.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cattle-livestock-count-he...
https://www.mswmanagement.com/home/blog/21277137/editors-blo...
In some cases, we can use the stick of regulation to require organizations to efficiently burn their methane at a pure cost to themselves, but that may not work on a global scale in a places with weak governance. But the carrot of profit may be extremely effective at proliferating waste methane burning worldwide.
Edit: Oh, here it's literally being released by rotting garbage, the idea is to harvest it.
When byproduct methane is conveniently located (like in the middle of a city) it often is piped through gas lines to be sold, or a power plant is built on site and connected to the grid. Many landfills already have power plants built on them, https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/california-power-gene...
The problem is when it is very remotely located, and the amount of gas is far too low to economically justify building out gas pipes or electric transmission lines.
If you want an example of what it should look like check out Hilton Head island or Washington state. Shaded parking lots and you can't find Walmart through all the trees without a map.
[1] https://youtu.be/qw5zzrOpo2s
> Where will they stop?
Once our usage of the planet's resources settles at a sustainable level?
Even if that means less and worst food for the masses? Who decided that? The hypocrisy and paternalism on display in this whole climate change discussion is through the the roof.
Are you against killing cows?
Burning it in power plants, industry, and households is definitely part of the problem. Everywhere in the infrastructure from extraction to transport to use, to all the abandoned wells everywhere a long the way it is leaking.
This a very large gap in all these government/corporate actions.
"NASA Instrument Tracks Power Plant Methane Emissions" (2020) https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia24019-nasa-instrument-tra... :: https://methane.jpl.nasa.gov/ (California,)
> NASA conducts periodic methane studies using the next-generation Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS-NG) instrument. These studies are determining the locations and magnitudes of the largest methane emission sources across California, including those associated with landfills, refineries, dairies, wastewater treatment plants, oil and gas fields, power plants, and natural gas infrastructure.
"NASA 3D Printed Habitat Challenge" (2019) @CentennialChallenge: 3d print [habitats] with little to no water and local ~soil. https://www.google.com/search?q=NASA+3D+Printed+Habitat+Chal...
What about IDK ~geodesic domes for capturing waste methane from abndanoned wells?