Also, it's not about the planet, it's about us. The planet obviously will be fine, but a lot of humans won't be.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha...
I don't buy the future decarbonization transport argument. It is a mirage. But put that aside.
Cows are incredibly powerful creatures. Their uses were in not just taking up a lot of land but also moving lots of farm equipment and cultivating land. With machinery, they are displaced and no parallel uses are found.
The huge consumption of meat has incentivized capitalist industries to destruct land for profit. Blaming this on cows is like blaming a worker instead of the boss. Blame the overly large consumers who cannot forgo meat, and blame the capitalists for feeding that frenzy. How despicable have we become if our arguments are now based on “lab grown meat" being a solution. Like we refuse to see our own feces as a stinker.
I do agree that there are many problems with our food system beyond climate change, and replacing Big Ag with Big Lab-grown Ag would leave almost all of those problems in place. It's not my preferred solution.
This is typical vegan misinformation to appeal to people who are concerned about global warming (as we should).
Land that's used for grazing is typically land which can't be used for other purposes. People don't grow grass on flat fields of black soil because it doesn't make economic sense.
Additionally, animals are also fed the leftovers that people don't eat. That is, when you grow corn, we eat the grain, and the rest of the plant (leaves and all) is given to animals. Without livestock that food would just be wasted.
These are just some of the many ways vegans mislead.
Most deforestation of the Amazon is done to create more land for cattle, to give you one example. It is by far the largest driver of tropical deforestation, and almost all global deforestation is tropical. Grazing land that can't support anything else is by definition not included in statistics on deforestation or loss of biomass and biodiversity.
https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-drivers-deforestation
It's true that a lot of cow feed is stuff humans won't eat, but it's not true that it would all be wasted if we stop raising cows. We can grow less of it, we can throw the scraps in anaerobic digesters to generate power, we can simply feed it to other animals, as a last resort we can use it for compost.
I'm pretty sure vegans are less than 1% of the world, and I don't think they have some special influence over the IPCC and most climate scientists on the planet.
So were the bodily functions of the wild bison, and a boatload of other species that have disappeared or shrunk togheter with their methane output in rough equivalence to the growth in livestock and it's methane output (at least in the US tho I assume such calculations would be similar elsewhere.) Additionally anything they put out is a temporary problem part of a carbon cycle. The shit they fart out was once gras and will go back to it a few decades down the line. Wish to reduce that ouput to buy ourselves some time (to excuse pumping up more oil and the like for a little longer) and you basically end up with chicken and similar animals as the acceptable solution.
So yeah cow farts are not the factor to look at when looking at the relentless increase in CO2 ppm. Similarly most sequestration investments and drives are often little more than a scam, copium, equivalent to the push malicious push for single use plastics recycling by plastic manufacturers or at worst a push down the price of co2 for EHR. There is one source we keep making excuses for ad nauseum that is a new introduction into this all and it's the hydrocarbons sequestered for untold years that we pump up(and methane from tundra now defrosting oh and the reduction in boglands.)
No replacing those fields with forest won't be your cure. Sadly they barely sequester anything at all compared to what we're putting out even if we'd severely reduce it. They largely take it up, die, rot and release it again in the process. We can rely on it if we accept our solution to take thousands of years.
>it's the enormous amount of land we clearcut and leave basically empty so they can graze.
I agree it's an issue. However remove it and you'll have a different one. The fertilizer their manure makes up a significant portion of will probably be drawn even more from hydrocarbons (and rather finite resources like cheap phosphorus from morocco). The same hydrocarbons that produce an actual very long term issue. I have little trust in incentives leading us elsewhere. Perhaps you wish to avoid this by forcing techniques that will generally ... require more land for the same output or for land to be left "basically empty".
I'd see some good things coming from such harsh increase in food prices and availability at least. Some negative pressure on our relentless population growth, perhaps we'll learn to more often ditch some silly concepts such as unused lawns.
1. Cows emit a lot of methane
2. Methane warms the planet
3. Warming the planet is bad for humans
4. We can easily replace cows with other animals and plants that warm the planet a lot less
It doesn't matter that wild bison used to do the same thing, this is the situation we're in. Unlike with wild bison, we are in full control now and we can simply stop making more cattle without any negative environmental effects. It is a factor to look at. We are not in a position to be ignoring big factors because they taste good.
> most sequestration investments and drives are often little more than a scam, copium, equivalent to the push malicious push for single use plastics recycling by plastic manufacturers
I agree but it's totally irrelevant to this conversation.
> There is one source we keep making excuses for
Counterpoint: no we don't. Who is we? I challenge you to find a single person who both advocates for less cow consumption because of the climate impact and promotes more fossil fuel consumption. I don't think such a person exists.
> Wish to reduce that ouput to buy ourselves some time [strawman removed] and you basically end up with chicken and similar animals as the acceptable solution.
Yes, exactly, I'm glad we're on the same page. Quickly phasing out cattle would buy us a LOT of time, like decades.
> I agree it's an issue. However remove it and you'll have a different one.
I mean, ok, if you want to give up I guess I can't stop you, but can you at least keep it to yourself and not try to bring everyone else down with you? "We should just stop burning oil, nothing else matters" is a) not true, and b) equivalent to giving up, unless you have some secret plan to accomplish that extremely quickly. "Go back in time and keep all the hydrocarbons in the ground" is not an option, they've already been burned and they're already warming the planet and we're in a crisis now.
So does CO2 (to a much lesser extent per quantity yes) Yet the issue we have today is not due to countless forest fires for hundreds of thousands of years. Because that CO2 too is part of a carbon cycle. And if those trees rotted instead they'd still largely release that co2. It is still accurate to say the CO2 of those fires warms the planet. It is inaccurate to say it is part of the cause of global warming. It is thus inaccurate to claim that stopping those fires would have been a viable part of a solution to stopping global warming even if we could.
After all the co2 ppm has shot up insanely since the start of the industrial revolution. Those first engines on coal and oil contributed to our issue today and anything similar has done the same since. The large amount of cows and their farts back then did not.
So....If we stopped introducing new hydrocarbons, didn't set off feedback loops and kept the livestock and their farts and manure would temperatures go up due to the lifestock? We could reasonably assume no.
>Counterpoint: no we don't. Who is we? I challenge you to find a single person who both advocates for less cow consumption because of the climate impact and promotes more fossil fuel consumption. I don't think such a person exists.
I don't think they're advocating for more fossil fuel use. That's not what I said. The person you should challenge me to find is easily found in the majority of people. I've saw plenty of people at my previous workplace (recent job change) saying they tried to eat less meat. Few even stopped it. We were/are well off so no qualms about the price in that calculation i'd say. If you'd ask em a plain question like should we strive to stop using hydrocarbons altogether few might even answer yes without delving too deep into the implications They still drove to work every day and would continue to do so indefinitely. They still worked for a massively polluting corporation. Still traveled by plane and had a carbon footprint that's ridiculous in contrast to the situation or that of many people in less developed countries and they all patted themselves on the back for contributing their part in stopping climate change whilst contributing massively to it barreling onwards. The bit they did do not actually affecting long term results.
Now take the situation where we stop pumping up oil, gas and such and you get an even better sample because it's a lot more tactile of a matter when almost every damn industry heavily depends on fossil fuels in various ways leading to massive layoffs and degrowth, foodprices skyrocket, etc I dare say finding support for an actual solution among them given that case becomes difficult.
Is that me arguing for continued use of fossil fuels? No. Is that me giving up? No. But it does remind me of scenes in 'Don't look up' where they suggest trying alternative solutions first until it's too late ...and it's extremely frustrating.
>I mean, ok, if you want to give up I guess I can't stop you, but can you at least keep it to yourself and not try to bring everyone else down with you?
I don't want to give up in finding a solution but when a big part of the stuff put forward is not a solution at all it becomes discouraging.
In my country for example our greens championing climate change want to phase out nuclear powerplants which provide the majority of power and phase em out all together. Their proposed solution has been to build gas plants to provide variable output to encourage renewable investment however the plan requires it to be main output for a very very long time and even then cause a shortage. The massive subsidy contract to get companies to build these gas plants span decades with no scaledown.
Pointing out the likely fossil fuel use and/or land use implications that'll stem from what you champion is not me giving up. It's more like you don't want to address it.
>Yes, exactly, I'm glad we're on the same page. Quickly phasing out cattle would buy us a LOT of time, like decades.
The atmospheric halflife of methane is 9 years for one.
>Go back in time and keep all the hydrocarbons in the ground" is not an option, they've already been burned and they're already warming the planet and we're in a crisis now.
We are still doing it. We are still doing it on a massive. insane. scale. We are not stopping. Hell there's no clear indication we're slowing down nearly enough When we will it will probably be because we reached peak oil. In the meantime we do a lot of bs revolving around it.[1]
And this is why i brought up things like the sequestration projects and plastics recycling scam that you considered totally irrelevant. Because it feels to me like another non solution being popular because it is les opposed (because we don't want to touch actual ones too much and harm our standard of living drastically in the process, etc) making us all feel like we're doing something about the problem whilst long term it does little to nothing.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/sep/16/iraq.iraqtimel...
Trivial counterexample: humanity
I think you have a definition of good/bad w/r/t the planet different from the mainstream.
I'm calling Bs on the whole cow industry being bad for the planet because of their bodily functions. Any cows, any animals, any living creatures are never going to be bad for the planet.
There is more resource consumption and harm in transferring the livestock as meat and farming livestock than there is in the methane gas. And lab grown meat is not going to change that.