However, it's delicious, comes in stick form, doesn't separate or spoil when I leave it out in a dish at room temperature, and can keep that way long enough for it to be used entirely.

No mediocre substitute holds up to real butter, cow farts and ethics be damned.

This is coming from someone who thought Country Crock was real butter until I was a teenager, because that's what my mother always bought.

I can't even put it in macaroni and cheese these days, let alone on my toast.

Even the expensive stuff like "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" is nearly repulsive compared to real butter IMO.

A drive to a store to buy oil has a larger co2 footprint than the butter producing cow. That make the butter eating cyclist a more ethical person than a oil buying driver, if we are going to argue co2 footprints.

A 500 g packet of butter has a footprint of 4.7 kg of CO2 equivalent. If a car does 200 grams of CO2e / km, distance by car on the store trip would have to be over 23 km to match the butter.

Most atmospheric methane produced photo oxidizes to CO2 after about 20 years though.

CH4 + 2O2 -photons---> C02 + 2H20

I'm not sure what time scale of heat per mass equivalencies are based on in your example; there is approximately 28 : 1 heat/mass eq. ratio at the 100 year scale, during which time the heating effect decreases exponentially with the decrease in methane concentration[0]. After 100 years the ratio is approximately 1:1 since almost all methane has decomposed.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

20 years is a very relevant timescale since we need to prevent the tipping point of melting artcitc methane deposits and loss of reflection from permafrost areas.

Yea, I agree. Cows also live about 20 years, so even not breeding cows wouldn't solve this problem. The morality of eating butter is kind of a moot point when all the production mechanisms are already in place and they aren't flexible.

A possible solution would be methane fixing bacteria (methanotrophs) in the guts of cows or in the ocean where > 75% of the current concentration atmospheric methane originates. The ocean also contains a significant amount in solid form that gets released as temps rise. [0]

[0]http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/12/09/warmer-pacific-oce...

Cows can live that long but after production drops (about 4 years) they will be sold off for beef. Not breeding cows would definitely help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_cattle lists a few sources for the 4 years figure.

I don't wish to argue (I'm a butter eating cyclist after all!) but this seems to be selective, since cows are more known for producing methane than co2 ?

If I recall right, they producer more co2 than methane by a factor of 2. A better measurement is pollution, but then we would need to attribute all the particles which makes it more complex to compare the burning of fossil fuels with gas produce by fermentation.

Not to say that I am not a fan of less selective counting. I in big favor of counting footprint based on a person complete effect on the environment rather than specific choices. If we counted everything from purchases of items, clothes, travel, commuting, diet, and so on, I am convinced that the end result is more enlightening than just looking one diet item vs an other.

That's the rationale for the concept of CO2e, the amount of CO2 that is equivalent to the emission. So emitting 1 kg of CO2 and 1 kg of a GHG that is 2x as potent as CO2 would be expressed as emissions of "3 kg CO2e".

Latter problem can be solved by feeding the cows tiny amounts of seaweed

But would a feed lot likely do that? I doubt it.

And speaking of feed lots ... eeyew.

> It's an animal product

For which you don't kill the animal.

> with the obvious ethics problems

This may or may not be "obvious" decades or more in the future, but I think people who hold this idea are in the minority at the moment.

> cow methane

Point taken.

> For which you don't kill the animal.

I'm not a vegetarian, but I thought dairy necessitated pregnancy, and as such went hand in hand with veal production. Is this incorrect? Input from someone with experience in the domain would be helpful.

(I've googled it but the sources primarily seem to be extremely biased).

IME most people, if they look into it, find ethical problems in industrial dairy/beef production. Maybe most don't care or muster discipline enough to change their consumption, but that is different from thinking it's all fine.

> For which you don't kill the animal.

Milk cows are continually raped for the duration of their lives: http://www.humanemyth.org/happycows.htm

> Milk cows are continually raped for the duration of their lives

This is misleading and utter bullshit (no pun intented). By that reasoning, every routine examination at the gynecologist or proctologist would constitute rape.

We have no reason to suspect that a cow feels "raped" during artificial insemination, or anything more than slight physical discomfort.

Your argument is basically "if it feels good, it's not rape." Disgusting and you should be ashamed of yourself.

> Your argument is basically "if it feels good, it's not rape."

No, you're misreading my post. My argument boils down to "Stop projecting complex human emotions onto bovines without evidence."