4 ms·
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
by 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 agoShoot. 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.