[Doji]

A common misconception which I frequently see when this topic arises is the failure to distinguish carbon cycles and one-way carbon emission.

You exhale carbon dioxide. However, this carbon dioxide comes from the carbon in the food you eat, and the food you eat obtained it from the atmosphere. Thus, it's a cycle. As a system (ignoring food transportation, deforestation, etc.) it's effectively carbon neutral.

By contrast, when we dig up oil and burn it, there is no cycle. It's a one way street.

Methane production from cattle is slightly more complicated instance of a carbon cycle. The cows produce methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. However, it degrades in the atmosphere into C02. Since this C02 was obtained from the food the cattle ate, this is another cycle.

Since the methane released from cattle is continually degrading, it does not accumulate. The total amount of bovine methane resident in the atmosphere is ultimately a function of herd size, or perhaps more accurately quantity of feed consumed.

You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time. Additionally our planet was once host to wild ruminants like Buffalo which no longer exist in large numbers. As a result I would be very surprised to learn that bovine methane production is completely out of historical context.

As a result I see this as a topic which generally serves to distract from the root cause and real problem associated with climate change - fossil fuel usage.

[belorn]

The start of the carbon cycle is one which I have found to be very unpopular to discuss, and it has a direct connection to methane in the atmosphere. Artificial fertilizers is produce through a process which takes in natural gas as its primary ingredient. The process is also a major source for methane leaks, with a large variance in claimed contribution for the global methane pollution.

For a large portion of the global Methane pollution from cattle, the carbon cycle started out with natural gas being used to produce artificial fertilizer. If we wanted to address methane pollution it would make sense to start there in order to address both leaks and the introduction of carbon into the system, but this is where politics comes in. Artificial fertilizer is not just the building block for most cattle farmers, it is also the building block for most meat alternatives and the so called "renewable and carbon free" biomass industry.

On my free time I often spend time diving in the Baltic sea, and every time I go below the surface I see the effect that artificial fertilizer has. The excess nutrient is killing the whole area, which in turn release more methane from the ocean bottom. Currently the area is around of 60,000 km2, but the effect can easily be seen in nearby "healthy" areas.

[epistasis]

It will be fairly straightforward to decarbonize fertilizer production, using electrolyzed hydrogen rather than natural gas. As the industry matures, it's likely to be even cheaper than naturals gas derived ammonia. Here's a pilot project in Spain, for example:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-28/spain-cou...

However, misapplication of fertilizer, and the resulting destruction of aquatic ecosystems, will take other fixes, and strong penalties on farmers that do this sort of damage.

[iamthemonster]

You are right, in the longer term, but hydrogen from electrolysis comes at a levelised cost approximately four times grey hydrogen. Of course that is comparing apples and oranges a bit (the grey hydrogen externalises some of its costs) but I think it is still over double as expensive as blue hydrogen. I would be delighted if electrolysis becomes two to four times cheaper than it is today but for a relatively mature chemical process I'm just not sure I see it happening in the next couple of decades.

[sdenton4]

Or else make the natural gas based fertilizer 4x more expensive through taxes...

[Ericson2314]

This is why the Carbon and other externalities taxes always have to come as soon as possible. They are not just good ideas in themselves, but the resulting price corrections will make further investigation and planning easier.

No only is trying to do all subsidy non tax embarrassingly weak politics, it's a stupid game of whac-a-mole a market can just route around.

[Doji]

This is a very insightful comment, thank you!

[ZeroGravitas]

That fertilizer accounts for about 2% of global carbon output, but it does seem on track to be replaced with ammonia made from green hydrogen rather than steam reformed from fossil gas.

Probably won't help with runoff issues though, as it'll be chemically identical, just with a lower carbon footprint.

[xyzzy21]

Does that include all the supply chains required? You have to deal in EROEI not specific process steps.

[heavyset_go]

Fertilizer runoff has absolutely decimated the fresh and brackish water systems that I'm familiar with, even in protected areas.

[titzer]

> Since the methane released from cattle is continually degrading, it does not accumulate.

That's like saying lakes are impossible because of rivers.

If you look at historical methane concentrations in our atmosphere, they are already almost 3x of pre-industrial levels, and over 3x of mean historical levels over the past ~1 million years [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane

[agurk]

Interestingly only about 1/4 of today's emissions are directly caused by all agriculture according to NASA[0]. A decent chuck of modern emissions are caused by other human activities.

> Across the study years, wetlands contributed 30 percent of global methane emissions, with oil, gas, and coal activities accounting for 20 percent. Agriculture, including enteric fermentation and manure management, made up 24 percent of emissions, and landfills comprised 11 percent. Sixty-four percent of emissions came from tropical regions of South America, Asia, and Africa, with temperate regions accounting for 32 percent and the Arctic contributing 4 percent.

[0] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146978/methane-emis...

[cwkoss]

I suspect that methane emission levels from energy industry are likely downplaying and underestimating total methane emissions from fracking and similar activities because they have a strong financial/political interest in doing so.

[pharke]

The wikipedia page you link to clearly shows that enteric fermentation accounts for 16% vs Coal and Oil at 19%. There is also another 36% anthropogenically produced methane in that chart so I think that easily accounts for the 3x increase without pinning it on cows. Interestingly rice cultivation contributes a whopping 12%.

[titzer]

It's like we got shot by a firing squad of 6 people and we're arguing about which one of them had the blank.

[pharke]

Not really, we're trying to do some important math to figure out how to balance a carbon budget. We need to know what options are on the table and how much each of them contribute. It's the same as balancing a household budget, you don't just flail wildly about slashing costs and enduring privation. You reduce expenditures in areas where they are unnecessary and try to cause the least disruption to your life.

[titzer]

I get what you are trying to say, but we don't have a carbon budget, nor a methane budget. Maybe attitudes need to shift gradually to make other people feel more comfortable, but the fact is that we need to make radical changes to all areas of human existence in order to deal properly with the magnitude of the crisis. It seems like...smart...to be rational, and weigh costs and impact and supposedly choose the smartest strategy and all, but it's mostly just a vehicle for one sector to shift the blame on another and try to make it someone else's problem. I know you specifically aren't doing that, but the end result is that nothing will ever get done, as we will be in analysis paralysis even as it all comes unraveled.

[Retric]

Natural CO2 sinks that absorb carbon from volcanos exist. As such we can have some net human CO2 production without making things worse than they are today.

An 80% reduction in CO2 isn’t quite enough, but it would avert most issues for a long time. More importantly doing something is much more productive than saying we need to change everything on day one which just promotes paralysis.

The obvious step one is to get cars and electricity to ~zero. That’s achievable in 20 years especially when you consider gas stations closing are going to make ICE engines unappealing.

[pbhjpbhj]

FWIW, IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) reports gather statistics and best practice across science and engineering and produce reports at multiple levels to detail pertinent statistics on this area.

This seems to be a good review, https://www.c2es.org/content/ipcc-fifth-assessment-report/.

The sixth report is due soon. Everyone should read the policymakers summary IMO.

[graeme]

Is that from cow herd size increases or other causes? OP’s point was that with q fixed herd size the amount of methane accumulating in an atmosphere is stable.

Lakes don’t grow and grow and consume the world.

[titzer]

> Lakes don’t grow and grow and consume the world.

No, they don't usually grow forever, that's true. But floods happen, and that's bad. Last time methane was this high it was millions of years ago, and Earth had no ice caps. We have already flooded the atmosphere with methane, and the consequences of this will take decades, if not centuries, to play out. Contrary to our current instant-gratification dopamine loops of today, the lag between cause and effect isn't two damn seconds or even one frickin year. So stay tuned.

Was it all from agriculture? We don't know. There's plenty of methane coming from fossil fuel production. Just go read the Wikipedia article I linked. We do know that we are getting close to setting off some very bad feedback loops, as arctic permafrost is starting to thaw, and it's going to produce gobs of methane.

[8note]

Floods tend to come from melt or tonnes of heavy rain.

That's much more akin to digging carbon out of the ground to run processes than steady state cow methane production/degradation

[zackees]

Going to chime in here - ice ages cause extinctions, not warm ages.

We are in the knifes edge of too cold. A little extra green house gas to buffer out the ice age is a good thing.

[howlin]

The problem is the millions to billions of people who are living in areas that will become virtually uninhabitable due to temperature changes and sea level rise. The first way climate change will seriously negatively impact humanity is through geopolitical conflict and a massive refugee crisis.

[zackees]

Yet that hasn’t happened despite all the warnings in the media for 3 decades of my life and no significant rise in sea level in my lifetime.

The alarmism is more likely propaganda than legitimate scientific inquiry.

[dTal]

Change causes extinctions. If the temperature suddenly swings down, things die. If it subsequently swings back up, do they come back? No! More things die.

[sampo]

Methane from human activities:

    Methane leaks from fossil fuel systems: 30%
    Methane from landfills: 20%
    Animal agriculture, including also manure management: 30%
    Plant agriculture: 15%
    Other: 5%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_emissions

Plant agriculture is especially rice paddies, I guess.

[graeme]

If methane is only 3x larger than before, that suggests animal husbandry is only a small part of the increase.

The first two categories are almost entirely new. Especially given human population is way bigger than it was in past ages, so past landfills likely weren’t so large.

This is surprising to me as I has figured ruminants caused more of an increase. If we could cut their emissions by 80% with seaweed this analysis suggests their overall contribution would be lower than it historically was.

[LetThereBeLight]

Let's not forget that all the grain those cattle are eating were grown in nitrogen fixed soil produced via fossil fuels. Nor that roughly 40% of the world's crops are used to feed cattle. Or the other detrimental environmental effects to the land such as feedlot runoff that pollute streams and rivers. The environmental impact of raising cattle is by no means something we should ignore.

[Doji]

I agree we should not ignore detrimental environmental effects. However we should strive for a nuanced view which attempts to determine root causes.

The root cause of artificial fertilizers is fossil fuels.

The root cause of feedlot runoff is... feedlots? I'm not sure if there's something more fundamental at play here. I'd like to see a fundamental analysis of this.

Cattle feed is generally not human edible, that's the beauty of ruminant animals. Even conventionally raised cattle usually grow up on grass, only to be finished on grain. Granted as cattle are slaughtered at younger and younger ages, the grain finishing portion is consuming a larger percentage of their overall lifetime feed stuff. But even so the grain they're eating wasn't going to just end up on your dinner plate. They eat the husk and all. And besides this is only bad insofar as growing food in general is bad, so that's the root cause.

You missed deforestation, which we discussed elsewhere in the comments. I recommend to check it out.

[josefresco]

> distract from the root cause

It's all hands on deck dude. Do you think we have the luxury to focus on just the worst offender? People (society) can work on more than one problem at-a-time, it's not a "distraction" it's doing anything and everything we can to prevent extinction of our species. Meat consumption and the environmental damage caused by it's infrastructure AND fossil fuel usage need to be addressed, not one or the other.

[codr7]

One alternative would be accepting that the climate has always changed, regularly dramatically so, and focus on adapting to survive the inevitable.

It sucks, but it is what it is, and it's not going anywhere.

The environmental movement was fully compromised a long time ago, it has absolutely nothing to do with the environment anymore, it's all about profit and shame.

[adgjlsfhk1]

The geological record is quite clear that the climate has never changed like this without extinction events that kill 75% of all life on earth. Personally, I don't like those odds, especially since we have an alternative (keep the climate from changing). Furthermore, the climate has never changed anywhere near this quickly before. Natural warming and cooling happens over 100s of thousands of years, not a lifetime. This is unprecedented and preventable.

[codr7]

My point exactly, so we're better of figuring out how to survive it asap.

Remains to be proven, it's never a linear process, once certain critical masses are reached it will happen more or less instantly. We're about due for an ice age, and from what I understand this is possibly how they start.

[greenshackle2]

> Additionally our planet was once host to wild ruminants like Buffalo

Not at anywhere near the density you find in modern agriculture. Domesticated cattle and pigs alone are 15x the biomass of all wild mammals combined. Wild ruminants are somewhat insignificant compared to that.

https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506

[Doji]

This article measures current biomass distribution. Given that Bison herds in North America has reduced from 60 million to 30 thousand, and I suspect other species have seen similar changes, I'm not surprised by the result.

Also as a point of nuance, I'd like to say that I'm sure we have actually increased biomass density. If we had not, our farms wouldn't be doing their jobs very well. I'm not trying to say no increase has occurred, simply that it is less than one might expect. Unfortunately I don't have exact numbers to back this up though. I wasn't planning on writing all this when I woke up today, and it's admittedly not my field. Here's to hoping more informed people take over!

[eigenket]

60 million to 30 thousand is a rounding error, there are 1.5 billion cattle in the world.

[krrrh]

Bison have never roamed outside of North America, so let’s look at local cattle numbers instead of worldwide populations if we want to compare.

There are 94.4 million cattle in the United States and around 4.5 million in Canada according to a quick web search.

A full grown Bison weighs 1600kg, and the average weight of a steer at slaughter is 600kg or so.

There was likely a dip between the virtual wiping out of Bison in the 19th century and the re-establishment of large herds of ruminants across the Great Plains via ranching, but in terms of biomass I think we can at least say that they are in the same ballpark.

(this puts aside the extirpation of antelope and deer species from large areas of their previous ranges. There were for instance 10 million elk in North America prior to European contact compared to 1 million today at 400-500kg fully grown).

(edit: according to statista your headline number of 1.5 billion is also off: “ The global cattle population amounted to about 989.03 million head in 2019, down from over one billion cattle in 2014.” — https://www.statista.com/statistics/263979/global-cattle-pop... )

[Doji]

You're comparing north america to the world, and the American Bison are only one species while cattle have displaced many species.

[krrrh]

> I'd like to say that I'm sure we have actually increased biomass density. If we had not, our farms wouldn't be doing their jobs very well.

As you stated, this doesn’t need to be the case since a lot productivity gains come down to more frequent harvesting. The natural lifespan (not average due to low survival rates in the first year) of a Bison can be up to 18-20 years, while a typical beef cow is slaughtered at 18 months. Ruffed grouse have an average lifespan of 1.5 years or so, but can make it up to 7 years or more. Chickens are typically slaughtered at 8 weeks.

As for crops, large swathes of them replaced forest which were larger pools of biomass that still cycled into the atmosphere through decay and fire.

[hinkley]

> You exhale carbon dioxide. However, this carbon dioxide comes from the carbon in the food you eat, and the food you eat obtained it from the atmosphere. Thus, it's a cycle. As a system (ignoring food transportation, deforestation, etc.) it's effectively carbon neutral.

All of modern agriculture and food science has been about turning inedible calories into edible ones (think: cooking meat with wood, baking bread). There is almost no food you eat that isn't touched by fossil fuels at some point in the process.

The cows are eating grain raised using anhydrous ammonia (made with natural gas) and processed using diesel/gas/electricity to be edible before the cow ever sees it. That cow is 'eating' all of those fossil fuels. Only silvopasture cows wouldn't be, but have methane emissions from those cows been studied?

[fred_is_fred]

The Haber process which you mentioned is really key here. It uses a lot of natural gas - more interesting than cow methane might be using nitrogen fixing bacteria or crop rotation (legumes) to reduce it's usage.

[analog31]

From what I've read, you can't grow enough legumes to fix the needed amount of nitrogen for high intensity agriculture. The Haber process sustains a sizable fraction of the world's animal population.

[seunosewa]

Human urine would be a sufficient source of nitrogen but it ends up in sewage nitrification-denitrification reactors that eventually turn most of the urea back into nitrogen gas so that the effluent can be safely discharged into water bodies.

[analog31]

I guess that makes sense, the nitrogen has to go somewhere.

[hinkley]

I'm not sure what it does to their methane output, but can't you feed legumes straight to cows? You definitely can to chickens and pigs.

[oivey]

It’s kind of irrelevant whether or not a cow is carbon neutral by some definition. The point is that greenhouse gas emissions are effectively reduced using this feed. Sure, it isn’t as great as getting rid of all fossil fuels, but it’s something relatively easy we could do.

[Doji]

If the seaweed is a pure win, then I agree with this. I just think a deeper understanding is also worthwhile.

[8note]

As long as it doesnt add another carbon producing supply chain along the way...

Certainly the neutrality matters - that makes it a O(1) process, where as we have somewhere between O(n) to O(e^n) emissions.

[samatman]

This is the wrong way to look at it.

Atmospheric forcing doesn't distinguish between "natural" and "unnatural" causes. Let's grant that methanogenesis from ruminant bellies has been a constant throughout history (unlikely, but as we'll see, irrelevant): that methane contributes a certain amount to the greenhouse effect.

That amount is non-trivial, because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and there are a lot of cattle out there. It does break down, but more is constantly being emitted: all of this is factored in to calculations giving cattle's contribution to warming.

A cheap mitigation which eliminates this source of methane is great news, because it reduces the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere: which is the only thing we care about, certainly not whether that gas is au naturale.

[8note]

Being steady state is what matters about the boivne methane production, rather than if it's natural.

Our problem isn't the steady state processes, it's the growth ones, and we won't be able to solve our growth problems by reducing the steady state ones.

[samatman]

No this is wrong.

It's a simple "shut up and calculate" situation, any reduction of greenhouse gasses is equally to be esteemed in proportion to the amount of forcing effect it eliminates from the atmosphere.

It's true that removing all "natural" emissions is both impractical and insufficient (I don't intend to stop exhaling!), but reduction is reduction, full stop.

Besides which, what you said is wrong on the face of it: turning the year-over-year growth in carbon emissions into a plateau is woefully insufficient to mitigate warming. Besides, we're well on track to achieve it, though some of that is due to the pandemic. We have to reduce emissions substantially below current levels, and find a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere faster than natural processes will do it for us.

In no conceivable way is drastically reducing bovine methane anything but assistance in that goal.

[eightysixfour]

> You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time. Additionally our planet was once host to wild ruminants like Buffalo which no longer exist in large numbers. As a result I would be very surprised to learn that bovine methane production is completely out of historical context.

I think historical context is useful information, but just because it was fine at some point in the past does not mean it is fine in the current context. There are new sources of greenhouse gases and, as the dominant species, we have to make decisions about which ones are most important to us and make trade offs. Reducing the emissions from farmed biomass means we have to make less of a tradeoff.

[titzer]

> You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time.

Do you have a source for this? Wikipedia says there are an estimated 75 million ruminants worldwide, while there was a peak of 1 billion cows on Earth in 2014.

[agurk]

I've been doing some research on this lately.

US Numbers [0] direct from USDA and World Numbers [1] who claim to be from USDA but I haven't been able to confirm that yet.

[0] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Cattle/inv.php

[1] https://beef2live.com/story-world-cattle-inventory-1960-2014...

[mogadsheu]

That’s a great start to understanding flows of carbon and other substances through the ecosystem!

I’d like to add that much of the feed is grown using fertilizer, which is often/typically produced via fossil-fuel consuming processes (see Fischer Tropsch).

Where carbon is stored in the system is another major consideration.

Great post!

[Doji]

I wasn't aware that fertilizers are commonly produced from fossil fuels. That's definitely a problem!

I'll add some additional caveats myself. In certain areas of the world (South America comes to mind) cattle production is driving deforestation.

Food transportation and farming equipment generally consumes fossil fuels.

I'm sure we can think of more!

[samuelbalogh]

I don't think it's fair to treat deforestation as a local issue. Cattle production drives deforestation - whether it's in Brazil or the USA or China, doesn't matter, because we share the atmosphere.

Three-quarters [of global deforestation] is driven by agriculture. Beef production is responsible for 41% of deforestation [...]

https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-drivers-deforestation

[Doji]

I'm likewise unsure if it's fair to treat cattle production which did not engage in deforestation (perhaps located on the great plains or similar) the same as cattle production which did. However I find your argument interesting. I will spend more time brooding on it.

[samuelbalogh]

Thanks for the thoughtful comment!

It's true, not all cattle production can be held accountable for deforestation. For example, here in the UK, it's supposed to be a less carbon-intensive industry than in South America, because the grasslands on which cattle graze are good for little else - they are not really suited for crops. I agree on that point.

However (and from this point, it's speculation from my part), I am very skeptical about that grassland being grassland before agriculture arrived. Eg. was it part of the ancient forest that largely covered Britain? If so, it was indeed deforestation, only it was around 500-1000 years ago.

And this gives a whole other dimension to the discussion - we are OK with our deforestation here in Europe, because it happened a long time ago, but we are not OK with deforestation in Indonesia to produce palm oil (which WE consume) because it's happening now. Strangely, we are not that keen on re-forestation and we just want to push the burden to developing nations (a form of de-humanizing the poor, in my opinion).

I don't have any argument here, I just thought I would share my thoughts.

[8note]

How relevant is deforestation to our shared atmosphere though?

Forests are largely steady state. They're carbon sinks when you go from no forest to forest, but not just keeping the forest around

[samuelbalogh]

I think that in the systemic terminology, a mature forest is a carbon "stock". Deforestation means getting rid of that stock and putting all of its CO2 into the atmostphere by burning it. Unless you use all that wood for something else (buildings or whatever) which is possible but I think it's unlikely. I might be wrong though!

[lofi_lory]

The carbon cycle is rather irrelevant. The trophic pyramid is what's to argue about. All the energy food provides comes from the sun hitting the land. We need to start there. Meat still only conserves 10% of the energy the plants provided to the animal. Therefore meat consumption is insanely wasteful use of land and resources. We could grow soy for human consumption on a fraction of the land for meat production and reforest the remaining space for carbon capture.

Natural ecosystems tend to not exploit resources to the point of collapse. Large herds of bisons may have roamed the lands, but their existence wasn't borrowed from erroded soils, drained sources, globalized deforestation and synthetic fertilization from mined minerals. They were bound to what their local ecosystem could provide.

[samuelbalogh]

> You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time

This doesn't seem to be true, at all.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cattle-livestock-count-he...

This data goes back to 1962 and shows a trend. I suspect that if we had data from before the advent of industrial agriculture, that curve would tend to approximate lower and lower numbers as we go back in time.

[jillesvangurp]

You are half right about that. It also matters how these gases are released. Intensive cattle farming involves a lot of CO2 and methane that has more to do with supply chain of the food for the animals than it has to do with the animals themselves. Think soil erosion due to tilling (which emits massive amounts of C02 & methane), fertilizers, pesticides, etc. needed to compensate for that. Transporting of the animal food and the rest of the supply chain. And getting rid of the excrement and methane.

Compare that with regenerative farming where if done right, the cattle actually captures more carbon in the soil than is released as co2 or methane. Even just having animals not taking a leak where they dump their manure makes a difference. Amonia is nasty and gets created when you mix the two. That's why cattle farms smell so nasty: it's the urine and manure mixing when they shouldn't.

Same steak but completely different from a sustainability point of view. Expensive but tasty. Might actually scale if farmers were incentivized to try this. There's no shortage of land to restore.

Feeding cattle seaweed might help a little. But maybe let's not intensively farm oceans to feed land animals. That sounds like a net loss.

[frederikvs]

Even if atmospheric methane has not increased in recent times, it may be a good idea to try and reduce it.

We have too much of one greenhouse gas, and so far we've been unable to change that. Reducing another greenhouse gas could partially compensate for that.

[Doji]

Sorry I didn't mean to say that atmospheric methane has not increased. It definitely has, as other commenters have pointed out. However, I contend that most of this increase is likely from other factors. Melting of the polar ice caps, factory emissions, etc.

[thealienthing]

I never knew/considered this. I wanted to clarify something. What you mean when you say that there is no cycle in the burning of fossil fuels, do you just mean that it is a net positive gain of carbon in the atmosphere because the carbon did not originate from the atmosphere? Plants can still process the carbon put there by the burning of fossil fuels but there is an excess because that carbon does not originate from living things? I guess I’m just trying to clarify that there isn’t something about the carbon from fossil fuels that makes it impossible for plants to consume it.

[Doji]

Yes that's right, plants can't tell the difference between a carbon atom which came from fossil fuels, and a carbon atom which came from an animal. It's all mixed together / fungible. Nevertheless, there's an important distinction here, because emissions from food are fundamentally limited by how much food we can produce, so it's carbon balanced on an extremely short time horizon. Meanwhile fossil fuel emissions are uncoupled from any sort of sequestration, and if it balances on any time horizon at all it will be a very very very long one.

[eecc]

Yes but also no... while it's true that it doesn't accumulate in the long term, in the short one it does induce a dynamic equilibrium with a higher concentration of greenhouse gasses that do contribute to atmospheric heating and the approach to potentially catastrophic tipping points... so no.

[brnt]

Even more precise: gasses in the atmosphere convert and stabilize at an equilibrium concentration, depending on their marginal rate of production versus conversion. Therefore, an increased production van lead to an increased equilibrium level.

Also biomass is a better proxy, and here the presence of cattle has increased significantly.

[bjoli]

What you are saying is true, of course, but you are overlooking the fact that cattle that graze on large enough areas (like the buffalo of historical time) are a part of an ecosystem that sequesters carbon dioxide.

Game meat is often carbon neutral because of that, whereas very little meat produced today is.

[asciimo]

> You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time.

Absolutely surprised. Do you have science to back up this claim? ... That goes back more more than a couple decades?

[tomnipotent]

Per capita red meat consumption has been declining in the U.S. for decades from ~130lbs/yr in 1960 to 112lbs in 2020. At the same time, chicken went from 34lbs/yr to 113lbs so overall meat consumption has actually increased.

https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/st...

[Doji]

agurk found some nice charts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26542283

I suppose some people may consider stable to be overstating this situation. Nevertheless, when put into context of natural wild herd sizes as done by krrrh https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26543346 , I believe my overall point stands.

[acchow]

So you’re saying if we want reduced methane in the atmosphere to help alleviate the climate situation, we need to reduce herd size.

Isn’t that what reducing beef consumption does?

[hcarvalhoalves]

> By contrast, when we dig up oil and burn it, there is no cycle. It's a one way street.

It’s also a cycle, the period takes some million years though.

[Doji]

Yes this is correct, I'm guilty of oversimplifying.

[vkou]

> You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time.

It hasn't, though. You need to be comparing pre-industrial herd sizes (Which fed less than a billion people) to modern herd sizes (Which feed nearly 8 billion people.)

The per-capita beef consumption was not 8 times larger back then.

It's true that there were large herds of wild ruminants wandering around, hundreds of years ago. However, the increase in the biomass of domesticated cattle vastly overshadows the decrease in biomass of all wild land animals.

[sandworm101]

There are more pounds of live cattle today than there ever were wild bison. There are close to 94,000,000 cows in the US right now.

[Maursault]

I apologize in advance for my bad math. Please adujust and correct if any have the inclination. Thank you.

My Google results say 94.4M cows in the US. Assume a quarter of those are milk cows, leaving 70.8M beef cattle. Assume a ratio of 1:1 cows to calves, leaving 35.4M adult cows for slaughter. 1000lbs. of cow will will average around 430 pounds of retail cuts. So, with 1/4 lb. servings, one cow will feed 1720 people. Contrary to beef sellers' belief that eating red meat every day is good, one should not consume more than 3 portions of beef a week if one hopes to live to old age. Population of US is 328.2M people, assuming they all eat precisely maximum amount of beef a week to remain healthy, that is about 51.2B servings (let's say 1.4 lb. each serving) of beef a year consumed, which is about 7.4M cows per year. There appears to be a needless surplus of 28M head of cattle.

So many things bother me about the cattle industry. The horror of it, the cruelty, the waste, the destruction of wild habitat, the environmental impact, the greed, and the bullshit idea that we as a society need to do anything to preserve the way of life for rich ranchers (such as the Bundy's, et al).

[mrfusion]

Very well explained! This is the kind of insight I signed up for.

[psychiatrist24]

Oil and coal also used to be organic matter, so it also is a cycle. Just a much longer one.