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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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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.

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