4 ms·

> Cattle are a huge source of methane; in fact, if they were a country, they would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases! Imagine how opposed to a c

by dmm 8y ago

> Cattle are a huge source of methane; in fact, if they were a country, they would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases! Imagine how opposed to a carbon tax the beef industry would be.

beat 8y ago
Legit question, though - are cattle actually carbon-neutral? I mean, where does their carbon come from? Eating plants, that were grown specifically to feed the cattle. Which gets to another question, since I'm not bothering to research before asking... how much worse is methane than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, per carbon atom involved? Because that's basically what cows do. They convert atmospheric CO2 (via plants) into atmospheric methane (via farts).
- plopz 8y ago
  From wikipedia: Methane has a large effect but for a relatively brief period, having an estimated lifetime of 9 years in the atmosphere, whereas carbon dioxide has a small effect for a long period, having an estimated lifetime of over 100 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Methane_as_a_greenhouse_gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Methane_as...
  - beat 8y ago
    Based on this, it suggests that cattle, while problematic, are carbon-neutral and have been for a long time. I did bother to google about the number of cattle on Earth, which has bee stable at around one billion since the 1970s. The sharp increases in both global population and global wealth haven't changed that for decades. So unless I'm missing something (which is very possible), the amount of methane in the atmosphere from cattle is probably static rather than growing, and the amount of carbon consumed by said cattle is also static.
    - totoglazer 8y ago
      Methane has reached a steady state. However, if CO2 lasts 100 years, and methane -> CO2 takes 9 years, only in 2079 will we have equilibrium. Right now 1billion cows are producing greenhouse gases, but <<1b cows worth of greenhouse gases generated in 1918 are "expiring."
      - beat 8y ago
        Well, yeah. How many cattle did we have then? The numbers I found go back to 1960, which was about 750M. Has it doubled in the last century, or quadrupled? Either way, though, it doesn't seem the problem is getting worse, at least. The question is, can we make it better? Can we reduce the level of greenhouse gasses related to cattle, short of just reducing the number of cattle, which seems more like wishful thinking than a plan. My thought from earlier is to act to reduce the amount of corn-feeding and encourage pasture feeding, which takes external carbon (fuel and fertilizer from corn farming) out of the equation. Grazing cattle are typically raised on land that isn't useful for more lucrative farming, living on wild pasture or scrub.
- kurthr 8y ago
  The problem is that the methane is a much more (30x) potent, although shorter term (10 year decay lifetime) than CO2. So although CO2 is absorbed methane is produced.
- mattygh 8y ago
  Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than co2, traps about 30x more heat per molecule. On the flip side, it’s half life in the atmosphere until it gets re-absorbed by the earth is on the order of decades, while co2 is on the order of millennia, so if you take the long view it’s not as bad.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  (Also without searching first) Methane is something like 50 times more effective as a greenhouse gas. That's after allowing for the fact it dissipates far more quickly, initially it's even more. So even though it's a small part of emissions it's a significant constituent of climate change.
- mistrial9 8y ago
  CARBON SEQUESTRATION AND GREENHOUSE GAS MITIGATION POTENTIAL OF COMPOSTING AND SOIL AMENDMENTS ON CA RANGELANDS California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment Whendee et al Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. - ASSESSMENT OF CALIFORNIA CROP AND LIVESTOCK POTENTIAL ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment Josué Medellín-Azuara et al UC Davis, UC Merced
- seabee 8y ago
  About 30x worse: https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2014/03/26/a-more-potent-greenhouse-gas-than-co2-methane-emissions-will-leap-as-earth-warms-nature/ https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2014/03/26/a-more-poten... As far as carbon neutrality goes, you’re drawing a conclusion about the value based only on the first derivative. If you hold livestock numbers constant (they’re increasing, alas, but let’s not worry about that yet) then there will be a rough equilibrium. However, the gas is in the atmosphere for some time until it gets fixed back into the soil, and continues to have a warming effect in the meantime. Any carbon tax has to punish emissions. Net zero emissions isn’t enough anymore.
  - beat 8y ago
    Actually, they're not increasing. I looked it up. The number of cattle in the world has held steady (about one billion) since the 1970s. Given that the population has from about 4B to 7B in that time, and incomes have increased substantially as well, it suggests that beef consumption is level (which means per-capita consumption is shrinking). And given a 9 year lifespan for methane, it's probably been stable for a long time. Now, if you're taking the position that "net zero emissions isn't enough" as justification for a carbon tax, you need to focus on the goal. Is it carbon reduction, or puritanical punishment? Need to ask that, because there's a lot of people who want the latter but claim the former. If the goal is carbon reduction, then a carbon tax is only a means to an end, and we have to ask if it will be effective. Can we carbon-tax beef enough to see a major reduction in its consumption, leading to a major reduction in the number of cattle? (Oh, and you'd better carbon-tax dairy while you're at it.) Does this seem like a reasonable conclusion? And if people aren't eating beef, what else will they eat instead, and what are its carbon costs? I'm not rejecting the position, but I'm trying to think it through.
    - tomp 8y ago
      > Actually, they're not increasing. I looked it up > And given a 9 year lifespan for methane Can you please provide your sources? If this is true, it's not that worrying...
      - 8y ago
- VBprogrammer 8y ago
  > where does their carbon come from? Eating plants For Betty the cow on a small homestead sure. Unfortunately modern agriculture is so fubar that it's hard to claim that as true. There are huge fossil fuel energy inputs from everything from chemical fertilisers, herbicides, transportation and processing. Not to mention the damage to the ecosystem that the massive mono-cultures this drives.
  - beat 8y ago
    I live in the midwest, home of the most sophisticated factory farming operations in the world. Chicken and hog factories are way more FUBAR than large cattle operations. Cattle are range animals; they need to move around, so they're usually in pasture for at least part of their diet. In Wisconsin dairy farm country, you see pastures full of cows all the time. And I recently drove through the giant beef farm areas of western Nebraska, which was enlightening. It's dry, arid, sandy land, generally unsuitable for farming. Nothing but scrub grass. Cattle are fine with that. So while the herds are large, the areas they live in are large as well. Chickens and hogs, on the other hand, those are gross. They're kept in confinement, and fed mostly grain. They can't really graze the way cattle do, not at scale.
- danans 8y ago
  > Legit question, though - are cattle actually carbon-neutral? The vast majority of beef produced is not carbon neutral. From the Beef Cattle Research Council [1] of Canada (not exactly an anti-beef organization): "Presently, the economic conditions are favorable for the production of beef from grain in many regions of the world, largely because of the availability of inexpensive fossil fuels" The plants you are referring to are produced with massive amounts of fossil fuel. By one estimate, each steer "consumes" 284 gallons of oil via feed during its lifetime [2] On top of this, cows are one of the most inefficient ways to turn energy inputs into protein (10x less efficient than other types of meat, 100x less efficient than grain protein), primarily due to large size of the animals must be grown to before slaughter, which uses wastes a lot of energy. [3] There is a large variance between the ratio of input energy to protein output of various types of meat, with lamb (57:1) and beef (40:1) being the least efficient, and broiler chickens (4:1) being the most efficient [4] 1. http://www.beefresearch.ca/research-topic.cfm/environmental-footprint-of-beef-production-6 http://www.beefresearch.ca/research-topic.cfm/environmental-... 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/power-steer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/power-steer.html 3. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/beef-uses-ten-times-more-resources-poultry-dairy-eggs-pork-180952103/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/beef-uses-ten-... 4. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/660S/4690010 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/660S/4690010
  - beat 8y ago
    These are really great links, thanks! This put me on a different solution path - reducing the amount of corn-feeding and making cattle feed (especially beef cattle) primarily natural pasture. Get fuel and fertilizer out of the chain.
    - danans 8y ago
      Glad you found them informative. A solution would have to figure out how to get off the fossil fuels without sending the price of the end product through the ceiling. That is part of the rationale for the current endeavors into creating lab grown meat and passable plant-based meat alternatives.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  In the steady state cows are carbon neutral. CO2 form the air forms grass, cows turn grass into methane, methane decays into CO2, repeat. But increasing the number of cows increases the amount of methane in the air at any given time and methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Likewise, reducing the number of cows would lead to a reduction in the amount of greenhouse gas in the air. Methane in the atmosphere has a fairly short half life of 7 years so the effects of increasing or decreasing the number of cows is felt relatively quickly.
  - dashundchen 8y ago
    Except animal agriculture is not that simple. There isn't enough arable farmland in the world to just let cattle and animals graze free range. They're not just eating grass. Instead they are eating soy beans, corn, hay that is grown with huge inputs of fossil fuels and fertilizer - made worse by effectively converting that fossil fuel into atmospheric methane. This results in animal products having the highest CO2 equivalent of any food, especially beef and dairy. http://css.umich.edu/sites/default/files/Carbon_Footprint_Factsheet_CSS09-05_e2018_0.pdf http://css.umich.edu/sites/default/files/Carbon_Footprint_Fa... http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/how-fossil-fuels-are-used-to-produce-meat/ http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/how-fossil-fuels-a... One calorie of animal produced requires at least 10 times the plant calorie input. Some quotes from the above article: "Feed production accounts for around 75 percent of fossil fuel use in livestock production, so this one is the big kahuna." "An article from the Food Revolution Network, called on David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist who specializes in agriculture and energy to break down the number of fossil fuels needed to produce the food that livestock consume. According to Pimentel, the process of growing the 35 million hectares of corn, 31.1 million hectares of soybeans allotted for livestock feed in the U.S. (these numbers do not include the soy harvested in South America that feed U.S. livestock), requires an enormous amount of fossil fuel energy in the form of agrochemicals." “Growing the corn used to feed livestock takes vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which in turn takes vast quantities of oil. Because of this dependence on petroleum,” Pimentel tells Food Revolution Network, “a typical steer will in effect consume 284 gallons of oil in his lifetime.” "Worldwide, we currently use an average of 180 millions of tons of fertilizer to grow livestock feed and as the population grows and the demand for meat increases, it is projected we’ll need 230 million tons or 7.3 BILLIONS of gallons by 2050."
WorldMaker 8y ago
*Has been. Koch Industries, the company of huge climate change denying lobbyists the Koch brothers has some major investments in cattle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Industries#Matador_Cattle_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Industries#Matador_Cattle... That's just one easy example; the beef industry has long been associated with the oil industry by simple virtue of being relatively co-located in states like Texas and Oklahoma.
fallingfrog 8y ago
OK, but the carbon in that methane (CH4) comes from plant sources, which comes from the air. So that is net carbon neutral (except to the degree that methane is a stronger greehouse gas than the carbon and hydrogen it is composed of).

by dmm 8y ago

> Cattle are a huge source of methane; in fact, if they were a country, they would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases! Imagine how opposed to a carbon tax the beef industry would be.

beat 8y ago

Legit question, though - are cattle actually carbon-neutral? I mean, where does their carbon come from? Eating plants, that were grown specifically to feed the cattle. Which gets to another question, since I'm not bothering to research before asking... how much worse is methane than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, per carbon atom involved? Because that's basically what cows do. They convert atmospheric CO2 (via plants) into atmospheric methane (via farts).

plopz 8y ago
From wikipedia: Methane has a large effect but for a relatively brief period, having an estimated lifetime of 9 years in the atmosphere, whereas carbon dioxide has a small effect for a long period, having an estimated lifetime of over 100 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Methane_as_a_greenhouse_gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Methane_as...
- beat 8y ago
  Based on this, it suggests that cattle, while problematic, are carbon-neutral and have been for a long time. I did bother to google about the number of cattle on Earth, which has bee stable at around one billion since the 1970s. The sharp increases in both global population and global wealth haven't changed that for decades. So unless I'm missing something (which is very possible), the amount of methane in the atmosphere from cattle is probably static rather than growing, and the amount of carbon consumed by said cattle is also static.
  - totoglazer 8y ago
    Methane has reached a steady state. However, if CO2 lasts 100 years, and methane -> CO2 takes 9 years, only in 2079 will we have equilibrium. Right now 1billion cows are producing greenhouse gases, but <<1b cows worth of greenhouse gases generated in 1918 are "expiring."
    - beat 8y ago
      Well, yeah. How many cattle did we have then? The numbers I found go back to 1960, which was about 750M. Has it doubled in the last century, or quadrupled? Either way, though, it doesn't seem the problem is getting worse, at least. The question is, can we make it better? Can we reduce the level of greenhouse gasses related to cattle, short of just reducing the number of cattle, which seems more like wishful thinking than a plan. My thought from earlier is to act to reduce the amount of corn-feeding and encourage pasture feeding, which takes external carbon (fuel and fertilizer from corn farming) out of the equation. Grazing cattle are typically raised on land that isn't useful for more lucrative farming, living on wild pasture or scrub.
kurthr 8y ago
The problem is that the methane is a much more (30x) potent, although shorter term (10 year decay lifetime) than CO2. So although CO2 is absorbed methane is produced.
mattygh 8y ago
Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than co2, traps about 30x more heat per molecule. On the flip side, it’s half life in the atmosphere until it gets re-absorbed by the earth is on the order of decades, while co2 is on the order of millennia, so if you take the long view it’s not as bad.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
(Also without searching first) Methane is something like 50 times more effective as a greenhouse gas. That's after allowing for the fact it dissipates far more quickly, initially it's even more. So even though it's a small part of emissions it's a significant constituent of climate change.
mistrial9 8y ago
CARBON SEQUESTRATION AND GREENHOUSE GAS MITIGATION POTENTIAL OF COMPOSTING AND SOIL AMENDMENTS ON CA RANGELANDS California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment Whendee et al Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. - ASSESSMENT OF CALIFORNIA CROP AND LIVESTOCK POTENTIAL ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment Josué Medellín-Azuara et al UC Davis, UC Merced
seabee 8y ago
About 30x worse: https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2014/03/26/a-more-potent-greenhouse-gas-than-co2-methane-emissions-will-leap-as-earth-warms-nature/ https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2014/03/26/a-more-poten... As far as carbon neutrality goes, you’re drawing a conclusion about the value based only on the first derivative. If you hold livestock numbers constant (they’re increasing, alas, but let’s not worry about that yet) then there will be a rough equilibrium. However, the gas is in the atmosphere for some time until it gets fixed back into the soil, and continues to have a warming effect in the meantime. Any carbon tax has to punish emissions. Net zero emissions isn’t enough anymore.
- beat 8y ago
  Actually, they're not increasing. I looked it up. The number of cattle in the world has held steady (about one billion) since the 1970s. Given that the population has from about 4B to 7B in that time, and incomes have increased substantially as well, it suggests that beef consumption is level (which means per-capita consumption is shrinking). And given a 9 year lifespan for methane, it's probably been stable for a long time. Now, if you're taking the position that "net zero emissions isn't enough" as justification for a carbon tax, you need to focus on the goal. Is it carbon reduction, or puritanical punishment? Need to ask that, because there's a lot of people who want the latter but claim the former. If the goal is carbon reduction, then a carbon tax is only a means to an end, and we have to ask if it will be effective. Can we carbon-tax beef enough to see a major reduction in its consumption, leading to a major reduction in the number of cattle? (Oh, and you'd better carbon-tax dairy while you're at it.) Does this seem like a reasonable conclusion? And if people aren't eating beef, what else will they eat instead, and what are its carbon costs? I'm not rejecting the position, but I'm trying to think it through.
  - tomp 8y ago
    > Actually, they're not increasing. I looked it up > And given a 9 year lifespan for methane Can you please provide your sources? If this is true, it's not that worrying...
    - 8y ago
VBprogrammer 8y ago
> where does their carbon come from? Eating plants For Betty the cow on a small homestead sure. Unfortunately modern agriculture is so fubar that it's hard to claim that as true. There are huge fossil fuel energy inputs from everything from chemical fertilisers, herbicides, transportation and processing. Not to mention the damage to the ecosystem that the massive mono-cultures this drives.
- beat 8y ago
  I live in the midwest, home of the most sophisticated factory farming operations in the world. Chicken and hog factories are way more FUBAR than large cattle operations. Cattle are range animals; they need to move around, so they're usually in pasture for at least part of their diet. In Wisconsin dairy farm country, you see pastures full of cows all the time. And I recently drove through the giant beef farm areas of western Nebraska, which was enlightening. It's dry, arid, sandy land, generally unsuitable for farming. Nothing but scrub grass. Cattle are fine with that. So while the herds are large, the areas they live in are large as well. Chickens and hogs, on the other hand, those are gross. They're kept in confinement, and fed mostly grain. They can't really graze the way cattle do, not at scale.
danans 8y ago
> Legit question, though - are cattle actually carbon-neutral? The vast majority of beef produced is not carbon neutral. From the Beef Cattle Research Council [1] of Canada (not exactly an anti-beef organization): "Presently, the economic conditions are favorable for the production of beef from grain in many regions of the world, largely because of the availability of inexpensive fossil fuels" The plants you are referring to are produced with massive amounts of fossil fuel. By one estimate, each steer "consumes" 284 gallons of oil via feed during its lifetime [2] On top of this, cows are one of the most inefficient ways to turn energy inputs into protein (10x less efficient than other types of meat, 100x less efficient than grain protein), primarily due to large size of the animals must be grown to before slaughter, which uses wastes a lot of energy. [3] There is a large variance between the ratio of input energy to protein output of various types of meat, with lamb (57:1) and beef (40:1) being the least efficient, and broiler chickens (4:1) being the most efficient [4] 1. http://www.beefresearch.ca/research-topic.cfm/environmental-footprint-of-beef-production-6 http://www.beefresearch.ca/research-topic.cfm/environmental-... 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/power-steer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/power-steer.html 3. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/beef-uses-ten-times-more-resources-poultry-dairy-eggs-pork-180952103/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/beef-uses-ten-... 4. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/660S/4690010 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/660S/4690010
- beat 8y ago
  These are really great links, thanks! This put me on a different solution path - reducing the amount of corn-feeding and making cattle feed (especially beef cattle) primarily natural pasture. Get fuel and fertilizer out of the chain.
  - danans 8y ago
    Glad you found them informative. A solution would have to figure out how to get off the fossil fuels without sending the price of the end product through the ceiling. That is part of the rationale for the current endeavors into creating lab grown meat and passable plant-based meat alternatives.
Symmetry 8y ago
In the steady state cows are carbon neutral. CO2 form the air forms grass, cows turn grass into methane, methane decays into CO2, repeat. But increasing the number of cows increases the amount of methane in the air at any given time and methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Likewise, reducing the number of cows would lead to a reduction in the amount of greenhouse gas in the air. Methane in the atmosphere has a fairly short half life of 7 years so the effects of increasing or decreasing the number of cows is felt relatively quickly.
- dashundchen 8y ago
  Except animal agriculture is not that simple. There isn't enough arable farmland in the world to just let cattle and animals graze free range. They're not just eating grass. Instead they are eating soy beans, corn, hay that is grown with huge inputs of fossil fuels and fertilizer - made worse by effectively converting that fossil fuel into atmospheric methane. This results in animal products having the highest CO2 equivalent of any food, especially beef and dairy. http://css.umich.edu/sites/default/files/Carbon_Footprint_Factsheet_CSS09-05_e2018_0.pdf http://css.umich.edu/sites/default/files/Carbon_Footprint_Fa... http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/how-fossil-fuels-are-used-to-produce-meat/ http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/how-fossil-fuels-a... One calorie of animal produced requires at least 10 times the plant calorie input. Some quotes from the above article: "Feed production accounts for around 75 percent of fossil fuel use in livestock production, so this one is the big kahuna." "An article from the Food Revolution Network, called on David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist who specializes in agriculture and energy to break down the number of fossil fuels needed to produce the food that livestock consume. According to Pimentel, the process of growing the 35 million hectares of corn, 31.1 million hectares of soybeans allotted for livestock feed in the U.S. (these numbers do not include the soy harvested in South America that feed U.S. livestock), requires an enormous amount of fossil fuel energy in the form of agrochemicals." “Growing the corn used to feed livestock takes vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which in turn takes vast quantities of oil. Because of this dependence on petroleum,” Pimentel tells Food Revolution Network, “a typical steer will in effect consume 284 gallons of oil in his lifetime.” "Worldwide, we currently use an average of 180 millions of tons of fertilizer to grow livestock feed and as the population grows and the demand for meat increases, it is projected we’ll need 230 million tons or 7.3 BILLIONS of gallons by 2050."

WorldMaker 8y ago

*Has been. Koch Industries, the company of huge climate change denying lobbyists the Koch brothers has some major investments in cattle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Industries#Matador_Cattle_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Industries#Matador_Cattle... That's just one easy example; the beef industry has long been associated with the oil industry by simple virtue of being relatively co-located in states like Texas and Oklahoma.

fallingfrog 8y ago

OK, but the carbon in that methane (CH4) comes from plant sources, which comes from the air. So that is net carbon neutral (except to the degree that methane is a stronger greehouse gas than the carbon and hydrogen it is composed of).