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Cows eat grass which grows on land which used to have rainforest on it but which has been cleared, wiping out thousands of species, to make more cows. (Okay not

by mathw 8y ago

Cows eat grass which grows on land which used to have rainforest on it but which has been cleared, wiping out thousands of species, to make more cows. (Okay not all cows, but rainforest clearance for pastureland is a big problem where there are or used to be rainforests). Cows also produce a massive amount of methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas, and they're not very efficient converters of plants into grass. It is therefore well established that beef production is the least efficient and environmentally friendly form of meat production.

dilap 8y ago
Yes, it's bad to cut down rainforests to raise beef, just like it's bad to cut down rainforests to make palm oil. That's not really a knock against raising cows in natural grassland, though. Re GHGs, you have to weigh the methane against the carbon sequestration the cows promote. These guys are working with local (to me) farms to study and enhance that: https://www.marincarbonproject.org/about https://www.marincarbonproject.org/about It also just doesn't seem to me, on a gut level, that having 90 million cows in the US is our main problem (especially compared to historical levels of 20 million bison). I think we should be much more focussed on the 20 million barrels of oil a day we're burning through (compared to historical levels of basically 0).
- StrictDabbler 8y ago
  Shoot. Wait wait wait. That's a really excellent point. What? We've killed most of the sizable animals on the planet. We really absolutely have. No question. Passenger pigeon flocks, billions of fish, vast populations of whales and bison and all the major megafauna we wiped out. That's a holocaust of farting biomass. Complete slaughter. There's no way that our beef herds offset the megafauna that were here before the landbridge migration to North America when it comes to methane. I haven't heard something genuinely new in this debate for a long time. Thank you.

by mathw 8y ago

dilap 8y ago

Yes, it's bad to cut down rainforests to raise beef, just like it's bad to cut down rainforests to make palm oil. That's not really a knock against raising cows in natural grassland, though. Re GHGs, you have to weigh the methane against the carbon sequestration the cows promote. These guys are working with local (to me) farms to study and enhance that: https://www.marincarbonproject.org/about https://www.marincarbonproject.org/about It also just doesn't seem to me, on a gut level, that having 90 million cows in the US is our main problem (especially compared to historical levels of 20 million bison). I think we should be much more focussed on the 20 million barrels of oil a day we're burning through (compared to historical levels of basically 0).

StrictDabbler 8y ago
Shoot. Wait wait wait. That's a really excellent point. What? We've killed most of the sizable animals on the planet. We really absolutely have. No question. Passenger pigeon flocks, billions of fish, vast populations of whales and bison and all the major megafauna we wiped out. That's a holocaust of farting biomass. Complete slaughter. There's no way that our beef herds offset the megafauna that were here before the landbridge migration to North America when it comes to methane. I haven't heard something genuinely new in this debate for a long time. Thank you.