[himinlomax]

Carbon emissions from cattle comes from their feed. They're not fed petroleum. There is some incidental fossil fuel consumption involved particularly in producing industrial feed (corn), but that doesn't really apply for pasture-fed cattle. All that carbon was just captured by the grass or otherwise corn used to feed them.

CH4 is another issue, but again, unless I'm missing something, total CH4 from cattle in the atmosphere should be proportional to the average number of heads alive. If we don't increase herd size, it won't go up — unlike CO2 from fossil fuel use.