Cows and Climate Change -- Time To Get Real

[James Anders]

Cows? Why not?

Anything it seems can be linked to climate change today. So much is based on politics instead of science.

MIT Lecture: Is Islamophobia Accelerating Global Warming?

 

[Skotty]

You may want to look at the studies of what eating red meat, and drinking milk, do to your heart. That's probably more of an immediate concern to you than your contribution to climate change. Plus, once you get the heart/meat/milk balance down to a rate that won't affect your health, you'll probably be at a rate that's not too bad for the environment too.

Not necessarily. My philosophy is that when I die, I die. One me doesn't make that much difference in the grand scheme of things. However, I very much want my intelligent species to live on, grow up, and prosper through the ages. That is of far more importance to me.

Interesting question -- Would I stop caring if we encountered another intelligent species in the universe that was morally and technologically superior to ourselves? That would give me some peace of mind for the universe, but at the same time, I can't help but want to root for the home team.

----

As for the continued debate, if you check some of my other postings, I am obviously very concerned about climate change and environment, and believe we need to address these problems that face us. But I also believe it needs to be backed by solid evidence, and that we should always try to solve the problems with our way of life, not abandon our way of life. There are some environmentalists who like to demonize anything and everything mankind does. Often the cows and agriculture arguments seem to fit into this demonizing of mankind. The truth is generally not as severe as they would make it out to be, but that doesn't mean we don't have problems that need solved. There's likely many things in agriculture that need improvement, but it's not like we need to completely abandon modern agriculture.

 

[Canuck]

My philosophy is that when I die, I die.

Me too. That's why it's so important to reduce eating red meat and drinking milk to extend both my time on this planet, and the quality of my time on this planet.

One me doesn't make that much difference in the grand scheme of things. However, I very much want my intelligent species to live on, grow up, and prosper through the ages. That is of far more importance to me.

My legacy is more important to me since it's the only thing I have control over that lives on after I die. That means my obligation is set a good example to my friends and family, and especially to my children and my grandchildren (not yet though my oldest is only 19!). That's the main reasons I want to live a healthy and long life, and I don't eat bacon cheeseburgers even though I really like how they taste. Well, that and I really struggle hard to stay thin since I would blow up like a balloon eating them. The greenhouse gasses I save from not eating them is not the reason I don't eat them. If they were good for me, and not fattening, but bad for the environment, I'd probably go to Fatburger right now and get one! Well, maybe not the bacon since pigs have the temperament of dogs and I can't stand how they are factory raised. So it's a good thing thing they make good veggieburgers!

 

[SageBrush]

1. Methane
2. Extremely wasteful process of energy, source grains, and water
3. Ancillary pollution

A couple moments of Googling should provide more than enough background information for anyone actually interested

 

[SageBrush]

and the quality of my time on this planet.

This is a key point that rationalizers find convenient to ignore. The majority of Americans spend their last couple decades of life a mere shadow of good health and vitality.

 

[Skotty]

Me too. That's why it's so important to reduce eating red meat and drinking milk to extend both my time on this planet, and the quality of my time on this planet.

No, I'm not sure you get what I'm saying. I'm saying other than wanting to live long enough to ensure my kids are okay on their own (need about 15 more years to be comfortable with that), I don't care when I die. I'm happy with what I've experienced in life. I don't need anything more.

 

[Chris TX]

Let's bark up the correct trees, please. This is the same super tired argument that the "Vegan Invaders" used to hijack that earnings call, last year.

Roll those beautiful facts, please:

Methane Emissions | Climate Change | US EPA

And don't forget how much the Earth naturally farts this stuff up via volcanoes and methane pocket burps. Gas Craters Off Norway Linked to Fringe Bermuda Triangle Theory

 

[deonb]

This guy is a crackpot whose theories have been thoroughly debunked.
Eat more meat and save the world: the latest implausible farming miracle | George Monbiot

Monbiot is an armchair environmentalist that is not in a position to call someone a "crackpot". Here is a reply to that Monbiot interview from actual range scientists who use Savory's methods successfully:
Why George Monbiot is wrong: grazing livestock can save the world

A lot of Monbiot's actual complaint stems in a large part on the Briske study, who contended that there isn't a benefit in IRG vs. other grazing strategies (Briske is in favor of 'continuous grazing' - which Savory absolutely disagrees with). Instead Monbiot used that to come to a conclusion that John Oliver would be proud of to hold the Briske study up as a comparison instead of IRG vs. non-grazing, which it never was. Here is more background reading for you on that topic.

Also keep in mind that Monbiot is highly biased on this topic. Monbiot had a very similar 2013 TED talk, and he was promoting his book "Feral" at the time. Both Monbiot and Savory contended that loss of wildlife is very bad (to put it mildly). However, Monbiot's book promote restoring wildlife in order to restore balance, where Savory says it's to late for that, and we have to "do the unthinkable" instead and use herds of livestock in organized and planned migration patterns to mimic the old wildlife patterns.

Savory never even said to eat the lifestock - for his methods to work we could just as well heard them around the land until they all die of old age, and it would serve the same function.

 

[mspohr]

No, I'm not sure you get what I'm saying. I'm saying other than wanting to live long enough to ensure my kids are okay on their own (need about 15 more years to be comfortable with that), I don't care when I die. I'm happy with what I've experienced in life. I don't need anything more.

I think the issue is quality of life. If you eat lots of meat and dairy, you are likely to end up with cardiovascular disease (high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, heart failure) and/or cancer. All of these significantly reduce the quality of life (as well as lifespan). Would you rather live your final days healthy or crippled by chronic debilitating disease?

 

[mspohr]

Monbiot is an armchair environmentalist that is not in a position to call someone a "crackpot". Here is a reply to that Monbiot interview from actual range scientists who use Savory's methods successfully:
Why George Monbiot is wrong: grazing livestock can save the world

A lot of Monbiot's actual complaint stems in a large part on the Briske study, who contended that there isn't a benefit in IRG vs. other grazing strategies (Briske is in favor of 'continuous grazing' - which Savory absolutely disagrees with). Instead Monbiot used that to come to a conclusion that John Oliver would be proud of to hold the Briske study up as a comparison instead of IRG vs. non-grazing, which it never was. Here is more background reading for you on that topic.

Also keep in mind that Monbiot is highly biased on this topic. Monbiot had a very similar 2013 TED talk, and he was promoting his book "Feral" at the time. Both Monbiot and Savory contended that loss of wildlife is very bad (to put it mildly). However, Monbiot's book promote restoring wildlife in order to restore balance, where Savory says it's to late for that, and we have to "do the unthinkable" instead and use herds of livestock in organized and planned migration patterns to mimic the old wildlife patterns.

Savory never even said to eat the lifestock - for his methods to work we could just as well heard them around the land until they all die of old age, and it would serve the same function.

It's always bad form and a weak argument to attack the person rather than the science.
I do think we can agree that we have severely disrupted the environment with industrial cattle and that it would be better to replace cattle with original wildlife. This would mean, of course, that we wouldn't get to eat beef which is the point of this thread.

 

[mspohr]

Let's bark up the correct trees, please. This is the same super tired argument that the "Vegan Invaders" used to hijack that earnings call, last year.

Roll those beautiful facts, please:

Methane Emissions | Climate Change | US EPA

And don't forget how much the Earth naturally farts this stuff up via volcanoes and methane pocket burps. Gas Craters Off Norway Linked to Fringe Bermuda Triangle Theory

Nice graph of methane emissions. Manure and enteric fermentation together are 30% of methane which agrees with other sources. Of course, there is much more to climate damage than methane, notably CO2. Large scale industrial meat production has significant CO2 production from fertilizers, loss of natural grasses, farming machinery, processing and transport. All of these effects together mean that industrial meat production contributes more to climate change than burning fossil fuels for transportation.
The conclusion of any rational person should be to stop eating meat since you can have an immediate beneficial impact on the environment at no cost and as a bonus gain health benefits (reduced cardiovascular disease and cancer).

 

[Topher]

It's part of a shorter term cycle. How is this adding to the problem? Where is the extra carbon coming from?

You have made a grave error in assuming that all carbon is the same. CO2 is a greenhouse gas of a certain potency (for lack of a simpler word) and which persists in the atmosphere for a certain time (roughly centuries). Methane (CH4) has the same amount of carbon per molecule, but about 25 times the greenhouse potency, but it persists fro a shorter time period (roughly decades). Cows produce a lot of methane, particularly if they are fed grains in a commercial feed lot.

Now, there are things which can be done to reduce the methane levels from cows (or to capture it), without reducing the size of the herd. Such as grass feeding, using buffalo instead, rotational grazing. But even after that, it is probably true that we should also reduce the size of the herd. Feedlots are not a viable solution to anything other than converting your costs into the producers profit.

Thank you kindly

 

[jgs]

It's like Cows are the Toyota Mirai of food.

Brilliant.

 

[SageBrush]

Brilliant.

Unfortunately, not even close.

More along the lines of coal -> electricity -> hydrolysis to make hydrogen -> used in a fuel cell to carry coal to the methane reformation plant -> hydrogen.

Are we down to a couple percent efficiency yet ?

 

[Topher]

Cows actually do eat fossilized carbon. Lots of natural gas is used to create fertilizer, to grow grains for feed.

Yup. I am not sure what the figure is for cows, but for humans (in the US) the food we eat has 10 kWh of oil energy in it for every kWh of food energy we get.

Thank you kindly.

 

[Skotty]

Large scale industrial meat production has significant CO2 production from fertilizers, loss of natural grasses, farming machinery, processing and transport. All of these effects together mean that industrial meat production contributes more to climate change than burning fossil fuels for transportation.
The conclusion of any rational person should be to stop eating meat since you can have an immediate beneficial impact on the environment at no cost and as a bonus gain health benefits (reduced cardiovascular disease and cancer).

Much of that is addressable. Machinery and transport can be updated to run off of clean energy (in fact, things like agricultural transportation is often lumped in with agricultural emissions, when it should really just be categorized with transportation emissions, and either gets double counted or arguably counted in the wrong part of the pie chart). The contributions from fertilizers are probably overstated, as they also allow much greater production per unit land, greatly increasing agricultural efficiency. And whether or not meat production contributes more to climate change than fossil fuels for transportation is heavily debated (unlike climate change in general which has real consensus).

You have to consider best case cattle ranching and determine how much of that best case is sustainable, and work towards that level.

I would also caution people from going too extreme. This is not directly in response to mspohr, but saying we should all become vegetarians at this point in history would arguably fit into the too extreme category. When you do that, you start losing potentially interested audience. Too extreme can be self defeating, and, if you can briefly forgive a politics commentary, is the reason why conservatives will see Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States instead of someone like John Kasich.

 

[jgs]

I would also caution people from going too extreme. This is not directly in response to mspohr, but saying we should all become vegetarians at this point in history would arguably fit into the too extreme category. When you do that, you start losing potentially interested audience. Too extreme can be self defeating

Yeah -- to pick an analogy outside the election cycle, it's like telling people to take the bus (or bike, or walk, or stay home) instead of telling them to get an EV. "Perfect is the enemy of good."

 

[mspohr]

Unfortunately, not even close.

More along the lines of coal -> electricity -> hydrolysis to make hydrogen -> used in a fuel cell to carry coal to the methane reformation plant -> hydrogen.

Are we down to a couple percent efficiency yet ?

Cows convert grain to meat with an efficiency of about 3%. This is even less efficient than the HFC.

 

[deonb]

It's always bad form and a weak argument to attack the person

.

I take it this is you apologizing for:

This guy is a crackpot

?

I do think we can agree that we have severely disrupted the environment with industrial cattle and that it would be better to replace cattle with original wildlife. This would mean, of course, that we wouldn't get to eat beef which is the point of this thread.

Wildlife isn't as manageable, which is a requirement at this point for any solution, but if you have a real plan to do that, go for it. I prefer Bison and Kudu to Beef anyway.

 

[jgs]

I prefer Bison and Kudu to Beef anyway.

I'd like to request retroevolved Moa.