[seabee]

About 30x worse: https://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2014/03/26/a-more-poten...

As far as carbon neutrality goes, you’re drawing a conclusion about the value based only on the first derivative. If you hold livestock numbers constant (they’re increasing, alas, but let’s not worry about that yet) then there will be a rough equilibrium. However, the gas is in the atmosphere for some time until it gets fixed back into the soil, and continues to have a warming effect in the meantime.

Any carbon tax has to punish emissions. Net zero emissions isn’t enough anymore.

[beat]

Actually, they're not increasing. I looked it up. The number of cattle in the world has held steady (about one billion) since the 1970s. Given that the population has from about 4B to 7B in that time, and incomes have increased substantially as well, it suggests that beef consumption is level (which means per-capita consumption is shrinking).

And given a 9 year lifespan for methane, it's probably been stable for a long time.

Now, if you're taking the position that "net zero emissions isn't enough" as justification for a carbon tax, you need to focus on the goal. Is it carbon reduction, or puritanical punishment? Need to ask that, because there's a lot of people who want the latter but claim the former.

If the goal is carbon reduction, then a carbon tax is only a means to an end, and we have to ask if it will be effective. Can we carbon-tax beef enough to see a major reduction in its consumption, leading to a major reduction in the number of cattle? (Oh, and you'd better carbon-tax dairy while you're at it.) Does this seem like a reasonable conclusion? And if people aren't eating beef, what else will they eat instead, and what are its carbon costs?

I'm not rejecting the position, but I'm trying to think it through.

[bunderbunder]

For estimating emissions, a better proxy is probably the mass of all the cattle in the world.

There might not be more individual cattle, but they've been engineered to grow bigger - and, by extension, eat bigger meals, poop bigger poops, and fart bigger farts.

[beat]

Has that actually changed much in the past several decades, though?

[bunderbunder]

By about 30% between 1975 and 2005.

https://www.beefmagazine.com/genetics/0201-increased-beef-co...

[tomp]

> Actually, they're not increasing. I looked it up

> And given a 9 year lifespan for methane

Can you please provide your sources? If this is true, it's not that worrying...

[beat]

Someone else referenced wikipedia on methane in the thread somewhere. Surprised me, too.

For cattle, got the numbers from the industry, which doesn't seem to have a particular agenda in this link... http://beef2live.com/story-world-cattle-inventory-year-0-111...

[Symmetry]

According to this[1] the half life of methane in the atmosphere is 7 years.

[1]https://phys.org/tags/methane/

[beat]

Looking more into this, it seems to me a carbon tax is not an effective approach at all. Instead, we should be looking at the cattle/feed lifecycle. Encourage totally or mostly pasture-fed beef, and discourage corn feeding. That could be done in part by more strictly limiting use of antibiotics, which are used to make cattle tolerate the corn-feed diet without it completely wrecking their digestive systems.

This would raise the price of beef, sure, but more importantly, it would help break the use of farmed (and heavily subsidized) corn, and the use of antibiotics, which are problematic for reasons that have nothing to do with beef. This gets us to actually solving the carbon problem, not just blunt-object punishment.

[ams6110]

Atmospheric methane is short-lived compared to CO2 however.