These guys imagine that if the cows were exterminated the emissions would go away. It's like they haven't heard of nature. The cows' niche will quickly be filled by feral deer which are exactly as bad as cows for methane
If you kill all the deer and leave the land empty of animals you still get the emissions as the grass rots in the open air (rotted by the same bacteria the cows and sheep use)
You can't save emissions by reducing cattle numbers, you can just move the emissions from "farming" to "nature"
People on lemmy are more likely to be left wing. More likely than average to be vegan.
Can't you believe that a meat eater might be at the ethical end of meat eaters? I eat local, I care about food miles, permaculture, grass fed beef and lamb.
What do you drive? A bicycle, or do you want climate change?
Worse than that. We could ban beef, have all the cows killed and the farms turned to national parks, but then deer would replace them and have exactly the same emissions
Remember you can't grow crops on the land we run most cattle on, it's marginal or steep.
If we remove cows from the marginal land, and sheep from the steep land deer and goats move in
Deer and goats are ruminants like sheep and cows. They will have the same emissions
Presumably we won't be farming the land, it'll be national parks or similar
So with cows and sheep we have a chance of improving their emissions, because we can inoculate them with specific methane eating bacteria, we can feed them supplements that let the existing bacteria crack methane.
Do you drive an electric car and charge it on solar or wind? Or an ICE car and run it on alcohol?
Personal transport is about the same as red meat emissions-wise. Red meat is getting better though, because farm animals are in the control of farmers (unlike wild animals that might replace them) the farmers can try different things to reduce the cow's emissions. So far they have had success, with fairly light public pressure the good practices will spread.
Now replace the cows with wild deer. Try to fix their methane emissions. All ruminants make methane in their fore gut.
Incidentally I lost the most weight on a very low carb diet. Lower carb, better weight loss (and weight gain – muscle). You can go low carb as a vegan, but not very.
Agriculture (fertiliser, wild rodents, diesel, animals, rotting plants, not including plants wasted by consumers) is only 10%
We're making the best inroads into electricity. It is clearly possible and economical to convert all electrical grids to carbon neutral technology
We're starting to convert residential and commercial to entirely electric (except for the carbon and methane emissions from humans and pets, especially ones that eat beans) so that 13% is solvable
So at the moment 38% of greenhouse gases are easy, just needing political will
Another 23% is harder, industry needs some inventions, especially a green steel making process, and a green concrete making process. Both are years away and probably possible
Transport is hard. 6% is personal transport. That's easy to electrify. Trucking is harder, planes are harder still. I don't know how feasible wind power is for shipping, at least the trade winds blow the right way for Asia to America
The best bet for transport was a green liquid fuel, but the company trying to grow diesel from bacteria folded several years ago.
We are never going to decarbonise agriculture by abandoning any part of it. We can do a bit by practicing permaculture - that keeps more carbon in the ground; we can clean up animal agriculture by not feeding cattle human food, let them eat grass, and there is promising technology for reducing their (and other ruminants') methane emissions by feeding them seaweed
If we waved a wand and removed all farm animals from the world it wouldn't make a dent in carbon emissions or methane, cows would be replaced by deer which also make methane in exactly the same way cows do, but with no one feeding them seaweed
Uneaten grass would rot and be turned into methane (it's the same bacteria that work in cow and deer guts to break down grass). No one's treating rotting grass with seaweed.
Our best bet is to keep the marginal lands occupied by cattle and regulating people running cattle, requiring them to minimise their animals' emissions, or offset them
One place individual action worked was when people started making a thing of divesting from coal power plants. It worked because the pension funds followed the popular lead. With investors fleeing it is hard for coal power plants to maintain themselves, jars to get loans. It shortened many power plants' lives significantly
Remember to supplement the missing vitamins. I think B12 is the big one, but also about 40% of people can't turn beta carotene into vitamin A (retinol) and need to supplement it. If you run into odd vision problems, try vitamin A - the first sign of a deficiency is night blindness
(Hardly a full diet when one supplement is needed for everyone, and several more for some)
Note that there are developments in reducing the methane production of cattle. Supplementing their food with seaweed lets the bacteria in their gut fully digest the grass, breaking the methane to CO2
As it is if you removed the cattle and re-wilded the land they were on, that land would produce as much methane and CO2 as the cows did, as the same bacteria would break down fallen grass, or work in deer guts and no one will feed the wild land and deer seaweed
These guys imagine that if the cows were exterminated the emissions would go away. It's like they haven't heard of nature. The cows' niche will quickly be filled by feral deer which are exactly as bad as cows for methane
If you kill all the deer and leave the land empty of animals you still get the emissions as the grass rots in the open air (rotted by the same bacteria the cows and sheep use)
You can't save emissions by reducing cattle numbers, you can just move the emissions from "farming" to "nature"