G7 nations are ignoring the "cow in the room"—beef and dairy emissions
G7 nations are ignoring the "cow in the room"—beef and dairy emissions
It was also a missing topic at the Bonn climate conference.
Yeah. Because there's no good answer. Anything you do will be massively unpopular. Trying to get people to stop eating beef or dairy is going to be very difficult.
Once lab grown meat is affordable maybe it'll help.
Nah, just make the alternatives cheaper and a significant portion of people will switch. The biggest barriers to alternatives are habit and cost.
Nah, just make the alternatives cheaper
Or make the animal stuff more expensive; same difference.
Chicken is already significantly cheaper. People still buy tons of beef.
Mostly cost tbh
EDIT: source. You may not like it but I'm not pulling this out of my ass.
Also wild ruminants cause similar, almost identical, CO2 emissions compared to pasture cattle. And if you're re-wilding all those areas wild ruminants will be exactly who's going to live on there, burping all that carbon plants sequestered right back up into the atmosphere.
There's plenty of levers to pull when it comes to climate change, this isn't one of it. On the contrary, it's likely to be better to continue managing those ruminants because then we can feed them stuff that makes them burp straight CO2 instead of methane.
The actually big topics are transportation and heating, both should be (almost) completely electrified and electricity production switched to renewables (or nuclear, don't wanna fight with you guys right now you're free to pay more for your electricity if you want), and then further on industrial processes. Not doing things like waste heat capture nowadays is plain silly (though we need better district heating infrastructure to enable full penetration), chemical feedstock and things like steel smelting will require a proper supply of green hydrogen. "Muh there won't be hydrogen cars" I don't care. We still need the infrastructure.
What are you talking about?
The intensity of dairy and beef farming is magnitudes beyond what any natural population of cattle would look like. Also natural populations are in balance with each other. So if there would be more baby cows more predatory animal babys follow and eat them.
Your argumentation is started on a completely false premise and absurd.
I wonder if fossil fuel companies are pushing these stories to undermine support for climate change policies.
I wonder if dairy and beef companies are funding these sorts of dismissive replies
Lots of different estimates, but looks like between 11% and 20% of ghg emissions are livestock. That's way higher than I thought.
And that’s without accounting for the feed iirc, which is the majority of our farmland. Then we have to water that shit, grow it, transport it to the livestock so they can eat it, etc.
It’s incredibly resource intensive to raise a living being.
Edit: I didn’t even touch on all the deforestation for livestock feed, which is a whole other conversation
I didn’t even touch on all the deforestation
the paper does, and it's deeply flawed. no one should trust these over simplifications of our vastly complex agricultural systems.
that’s without accounting for the feed
it's not, and the methodology is flawed.