[kazinator]

But at least that alfalfa gobbles up CO2 from the air.

[malfist]

Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes. Not saying this like we should ignore the co2 impact from data centers, but biomass is a pretty poor co2 absorber unless its cyano and falls to the ocean floor before decomposing

[thaumasiotes]

> Until people/animals eat it, or it decomposes.

Well, if you want to think about it that way (perfectly reasonable), you'd also want to consider the production of new alfalfa. Figure that at any given time, the world contains X amount of alfalfa, and that amount determines how much carbon is absorbed by the alfalfa industry.

[malfist]

I'm not sure any carbon is absorbed even by this metric. Unless were growing alfalfa and sequestering it below ground.

You should probably also consider inputs to growing that alfalfa too. Even single order inputs like transportation, fertilizer, water, etc would likely have more carbon release than the carbon mass of the alfalfa.

Is alfalfa even one of the plants that will nitrogen fix from the air? Or is it all pulled from the growing medium?

[thelastgallon]

Goes into cow, comes out as methane. cow dies/meat --> co2. All the fossil fuel transportation for alfalfa to cow to brisket --> co2. Lot more co2 generated than absorbed.

[kazinator]

But burning fossil fuels makes water, and also CO2 for the plants. The white, visible part of what you see coming out of a tail pipe is water vapor.

The main thing is, we are not making any new carbon that was not already here billions of years ago.

:)

[da_chicken]

Animals eat it and turn it into methane, which is arguably worse than CO2.