[Rury]

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.

[karmakurtisaani]

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.

[Rury]

>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)?

That depends. If I take a forest which stores X amount of carbon, and replace it with farmland which has .1X the carbon. The remaining .9x carbon would have gone in the atmosphere. But now I can take that .1x carbon, put it into some cows, and grow another .1x on the farm, and now we're at .2x carbon (.1x in some cows + .1x in the plants on the farmland). I can do this and grow the population of cows, and eventually have a denser store of carbon than the forest alone originally had, but also eventually hit a sustainable limit.

But what I'm really saying is: focusing on stuff like this is not what we should be doing, as it's negligible and doesn't address the root of the problem. We need to look at the bigger picture. Which is: where is the problematic carbon ultimately coming from? Changing forests into farmland? Okay that can be easily changed in 100 or so years (and nature naturally does it for us). Burning a tank of gas in a few minutes? It takes millions of years for nature to reverse that... (not to mention that oil is an even denser store of carbon than trees).

[tmitchel2]

Definition of strawman.