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by karmakurtisaani 1512 days ago
This is talked about literally daily. Unfortunately your message comes off as whataboutism in disguise. Let's focus on the fact that milk alternatives are good and cow farming is problematic in this thread.
2 comments

In the other hand, it may be about shifting blame. Sugar industry did that with fat.
Can you explain why cow farming is bad?
Methane emissions and ethical reasons (if you care about such things).

Edit: also they take a lot of land to feed. Soy grown in where Amazon rainforest used to be and so on.

If you eat meet which has been raised on ground where trees have been felled for the sole purpose of creating that meat then yes the amount of carbon released is going to be insane. Here in the UK (nearly?) all the meat we consume is grown nationally, i.e. doesn't originate from places like the Amazon.

And on the methane front, they eat the carbon in the grass which has literally just captured a bit of carbon from the atmosphere. They fart it up and then it comes back down in a reasonable period of time and goes back into the grass they are grazing upon.

The cycles and definitely complex and opaque but we need to get better at working with nature rather than engineering new ways to ignore the real issues.

The amount of resources, e.g. land, water etc. you need to raise cows is about 10 times more than what you'd need to grow the same calorie content of vegetables.

It actually doesn't matter if you grow the feed nationally or import from Amazon, the fact remains that those fields replace a natural ecosystem that could be contributing to biodiversity and much more efficient carbon capture.

Grass captures CO2 from the air, and the cows fart (actually mostly burp) out methane that is about 25 times worse GHG over a 100 year period.

You want to get better at working with nature? Hunt your own meat from the wilderness.

You're ignoring that cows are also carbon stores (and relatively dense ones as far as biodiversity goes).

Look, the problem is real simple. Simple math says that we can do this:

Carbon(in atomosphere) + Carbon(biomass) + Carbon(underground) = Carbon(total on earth)

Biomass gets it's carbon from atomosphere, and releases (most) of it back to atmosphere, and hence not a real problem as it undergoes a stable cycle and is limited by the total carbon between the two. Even if it's form changes, it's not a real problem as the math shows it's inherently limited. Additionally, some carbon does escape this cycle and ends back in underground stores - but it's an extremely slow process.

The real problem is taking carbon from underground, and putting it into the atmosphere - via an unnaturally rapid process. Anything else, is comically trivial to the problem that is the fossil fuel industry.

So by your logic we could just turn all forests to farmland and use it to raise cows without any noticeable impact on climate (or I guess environment in general)? And before you say you wouldn't turn ALL the forests to farmland, I'd like to point out that we've already done so to a massive amount of the planet. Forest coverage went from 60% of land area to just 30% in the last 70 years.