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>Much of the land in the United States that is currently occupied in grazing cattle was formerly inhabited by vast herds of American bison, an animal so genetic
by RC_ITR 6y ago
>Much of the land in the United States that is currently occupied in grazing cattle was formerly inhabited by vast herds of American bison, an animal so genetically similar to domestic cattle that they can actually interbreed, yet the methane emissions from the bison didn't bring on a global climate crisis. Why not?
Bro, I'm answering your question as to why cows cause a global warming crisis and bison did not.
You're intentionally being obtuse on that point though, right? Like yeah, cows may be just like bison in a very very narrow frame of reference, but bison did not get their food trucked to them & they did not cut down trees to graze (both of which are things cows require now).
That's why. Period.
EDIT: If you want to narrow your frame of reference even further & just talk about methane, then 1) It's not the main culprit so I guess we agree there. But again, Global Warming is a cumulative thing, so they fact that they product that methane AND require carbon emissions to exist is pretty bad. 2) Yeah, it's a crude estimate, that's why I almost doubled it to give you the benefit of the doubt.
- Turing_Machine 6y agoI'm not being "obtuse" at all, "Bro". I'm addressing the specific, and oft-repeated, claim that cow farts as such somehow magically put more carbon in the air than there was before. Now, there may be other issues associated with cattle raising, but that is not, and has never been, my point. Since you apparently do not dispute my main point, I think we're finished here. P.S. After reading your reference on the pre-European number of bison more carefully, your claim of 30 million is not supported at all by the author. The previous estimates given in the paper range all over the place, up to 1 billion (!). The author is careful to point out that all of those numbers are more or less junk, and the only conclusion the author actually makes is that there were "likely" "tens of millions" of bison. That does not match your claim of a hard 30 million.