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1. The CO2 issue is not that the cow eats carbon and its manure turns back into CO2. The issue is the land use changes and fossil fuel-derived energy used in t
by jlmorton 10y ago
1. The CO2 issue is not that the cow eats carbon and its manure turns back into CO2. The issue is the land use changes and fossil fuel-derived energy used in the production and transportation of feed. Because the feed to usable meat ratio of beef is somewhere between 7:1 to 20:1, this is significantly more impactful than other foods.
2. CH4 may not have a long half-life, but it has 29x the warming potential of CO2. Methane is thought to contribute about 20% of the current anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing. Because of the anticipated positive feedbacks from warming, this is very important indeed.
- zardo 10y ago>CH4 may not have a long half-life, but it has 29x the warming potential of CO2. To be clear, methane has 451x the heat trapping ability, the 29x figure is the 100year impact that takes into account the methane breaking down.
- thisrod 10y agoThanks, that makes a big difference. Apparently you can't trust newspapers even on the orders of magnitude for these things.
- thisrod 10y agoI'm sure that's true, but the article explicitly says that 60% of the emissions it quotes are from digestion. It's hard to tell if there is a real problem hidden under the irrelevant data, or if this is propaganda from the animal welfare or energy industry lobbies. It would be great if we could make a material difference to the greenhouse effect just by eating less meat, but that sounds a bit too good to be true.