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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26048 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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I don't think the main point against eating animal meat is the fact that it kills animals, but the impact on environment and the land efficiency. To eat a pound of beef, you need the cow to eat a lot of grass, which takes a lot more land than producing a pound of vegetables. Moreover, cows produce a lot of CO which has a huge climate impact.

Cows don't "produce" CO2, they're part of the biological carbon cycle, like rotting leaves and compost piles. All the carbon a cow emits comes from vegetation that got it from the air only a few months before. It neither adds nor removes carbon from the cycle.

Intentionally conflating the exogenous release of geologically sequestered carbon through fossil fuels with the natural carbon cycle is unforgivably dishonest vegan propaganda that needs to be stomped out thoroughly.

Whoever told it to you is a malicious liar you should hunt down and punish for trying to fuck with your understanding of the world.

Can I see your source? I’m getting serious mixed signals when I try to search this.

Cows don't "produce" CO2, they're part of the biological carbon cycle, like rotting leaves and compost piles. All the carbon a cow emits comes from vegetation that got it from the air only a few months before. It neither adds nor removes carbon from the cycle.

Intentionally conflating the exogenous release of geologically sequestered carbon through fossil fuels with the natural carbon cycle is unforgivably dishonest vegan propaganda that needs to be stomped out thoroughly.

Whoever told it to you is a malicious liar you should hunt down and punish for trying to fuck with your understanding of the world.

Hey I was asked to look at your comment by the volunteer quokka report thing and I assumed you were bullshitting but decided to look at the actual science just in case. To my shock, you are correct, despite all the things I've read online, the science suggests that cows largely maintain the current CO2 levels as opposed to adding on to them. So kudos for calling attention to a very important fact and I apologize for having been successfully brainwashed up to this point.

Isn’t the cow complaint usually about methane? I assume that isn’t automatically sequestered by plants like CO2 is.

Wait, apparently methane tends to turn into CO2. If that’s accounted for in your net calculation, then yeah, it sounds like the effect is neutral. That’d be interesting.

So, the way methane works is: it lasts about 12 years in the atmosphere, during which it gets completely broken down. But you have a lot of cows (~1.5B) constantly producing methane so you can think of the situation as a submarine that is constantly losing oxygen because of a leak but is also constantly getting air because of an open air tank. The overall result amounts to about a 0.5° increase in the planet's heat because of these cows. In other words, if you had a magic wand and made all the cows disappear, global temperatures would drop by about half a degree over the course of the next decade.

So methane has a significant negative impact on the climate but it can largely be managed and ameliorated through good policies. Proper manure storage can cut emissions by 50%, for example. Which is still worth discussing and thinking about, of course. But my priors were "cows are objectively bad, we need to cull the vast majority of them if we want humans to continue existing on this planet" which is very far from "the ecological impact of cows is a solvable problem".

Methane breaks down in the atmosphere quite rapidly. Going from 10mil cows to 20mil cows will increase the equilibrium, but not cause an ongoing buildup. Notably the billions of majestic bison that once covered the great plains farted almost as much as cows, but they were "natural" so it doesn't count.

They want you to see cows like a coal plant that continuously spews "new" carbon into the atmosphere. That's because they want to ban them.

Yes it is a cycle, but if you replace a cycle where the carbon exists 500 years as a tree and 70 years as CO2 by a cycle where it exists 1 year as corn, 14 years as a cow and 70 years as CO2 it has a huge impact on the quantity of CO2 in the air.

Anyway oil is also natural, it did not magically appear under the ground. It's just a very long cycle.

And by the way I don't care about vegans, anyone thinking bees should consent to give you their honey is dumb

Yeah, the geological carbon cycle is still a cycle, but slow enough there's no equilibrium at human timescales.

At least when I was in college the geo cycle, rock weathering, and vulcanism was considered the most probable driver of temperature over geologic time. Burning coal is basically short-circuiting that cycle by releasing fossil carbon that wouldn't have subducted and come out of a volcano until a hundred million years from now.

It's like comparing surface eddies with a deep ocean current.

Cows don't eat trees (much) though -- they eat grass, and after a year that grass is turning back into CO2 one way or another.

The land used for the grass and the cereals could be used for something else (growing trees, for example). And by eating the grass and anything green in the grass cow do prevent trees to grow.

Moreover the grass produces CO2 if it's not eaten by some other animal while the cow produces CH4. CH4 has a stronger greenhouse effect than CO2 and then it quite rapidly degrades and becomes CO2.

Again, biological carbon cycle. Even the massive reforestation of agricultural land in the last century has only been a one-time temporary reduction in atmospheric CO2. Trees don't magically suck carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it out of the biosphere; only some species of shelly plankton do that. And the very, very slow work of bogs creating coal deposits.

The land used for the grass and the cereals could be used for something else (growing trees, for example).

No, it couldn't -- cows (in the US) primarily graze in a place that has been know for hundreds (maybe more) of years as "The Great Plains" -- trees don't grow there.

Anyways, trees don't fix carbon either -- it doesn't really matter what you grow there, it's going to rot eventually.

Moreover the grass produces CO2 if it's not eaten by some other animal while the cow produces CH4. CH4 has a stronger greenhouse effect than CO2 and then it quite rapidly degrades and becomes CO2.

Actually proving that this made any difference would require writing out (and balancing) all of the reactions involved, including the ones taking place in the cow -- just saying "cows produce methane and that's even worse than CO2" doesn't really say anything about the quantities involved. I'm not going to do that work, because I'd be quite surprised if it didn't pencil out as a wash -- but you are welcome to write it up and if the methane from a cow's farts ends up significantly more impactful than all of the carbon contained in the grass a cow would eat over the course of a year I will eat a steak my words.

Much of the land used for grazing would be unsuitable for other agricultural purposes. Without the ranching the land would be unproductive. How do cows produce carbon monoxide?

I meant CH4, and the problem is not the ranching it's the cereal production to feed cows.

The beef lobby claim

7% of total corn produced in the U.S. is fed to feedlot cattle

Corn acreage used to feed feedlot cattle is 0.2% of total U.S. land area, 1.4% of total U.S. cropland acres, and 7% of total U.S. harvested corn acres.

The problem is the 7% of corn acres?

Does the bacteria in the cow that releases methane, release more methane than would be released by the natural decomposition of the forage material?

I don't know how the beef lobby computes it (and whether they import cereal from foreign countries) but if you take account for all animal feed (not just beef) it is more than 7%:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-cereals-animal-feed?tab=chart

release more methane than would be released by the natural decomposition of the forage material?

Honestly I don't know but the point is not to let the cereal decompose, that would be dumb. It's to use those lands to produce something else, something that wouldn't produce any CH4 and ideally that would absorb a bit of it. Anyway it would be better to burn the cereals and to produce energy with it (we get no CH4 - worse than CO2 - and more energy).

This paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00589-6

has a nice visualization of the flows of inputs.

/images/1714930968548955.webp

I believe the bacteria in cows produce less methane when fed corn than their typical forage. The forage would decompose releasing methane if not eaten by cows. Cattle graze and forage on land unsuitable for other uses. We may get the CH4 anyway and there would be no beef. Deer, elk, bison and moose may then forage the areas with the cow deficit.

Yes but we wouldn't produce the forage in the first place. Or you can burn it to produce energy (and CO2 is still better than CH4)

Much of the the forage would exist in any event.

You can feed it to some other animal then, the cow is the worse.

https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane

More comments

So that's two constituencies for banning real meat, one small but very tenacious (moral vegetarians/vegans) and one large and powerful (environmentalists). Seems to me that meat eaters have plenty to worry about and acting proactively to make such bans more difficult makes strategic sense.

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