Cows and Climate
Last November, British environmental journalist, George Monbiot wrote that two actions are needed to prevent catastrophic climate breakdown: leave fossil fuels in the ground and stop farming animals.
Monbiot said food, especially livestock, will be the biggest single cause of the sixth extinction of the globe.
Wow.
That is a big accusation to lay on cows, bison, sheep and goats.
I agree with Monbiot that our earth is warming quickly and it won’t be long before we leave our climatic sweet spot that allows us to feed ourselves.
As we leave that sweet spot, more and more people will starve to death.
Worse, right when people are starving, Monbiot’s call to eliminate livestock production ignores meat’s nutritional power, packing more nutrition into each calorie than any other food.
As always, the devil is in the details.
Scientists measure both the total quantity and the rate of increase in greenhouse gasses that warm our earth.
Like measuring my weight, where I start on the bathroom scale and how much I gain create different consequences.
If I start at 200 pounds and can maintain that weight, I’m too heavy for my knees, but I’m not getting worse.
If I lose 10 then gain 50 pounds, I’m far worse off.
Monbiot argues that livestock release a lot of methane, the Snickers bars of climate change.
Our atmosphere doesn’t have nearly as much methane as it has carbon dioxide, but methane has
more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide.
Even though carbon dioxide has a longer-lasting effect – it’s more like the Dairy Queen Dilly Bar of climate change -- methane warms air faster within the first 20 years of its escape from the ground.
Monbiot cites research that declares livestock production is responsible for 16 to 28 percent of all greenhouse gas, more than the entire world’s transport emissions of about 20 percent.
But Monbiot ignores earth’s healthy baseline weight of 140 pounds.
The number of wild and domestic ungulates in the US has risen only 14 percent in the last 530 years, long before industrialization kicked in.
Meanwhile, the number of US cars and trucks has increased from zero to 275,913,237 in the past 530 years.
That means the transportation industry emits 16 million tons of Snickers bar- and Dilly Bar-laden greenhouse gas over and above its baseline healthy meat, fruits and vegetables diet.
Humans release carbon dioxide and methane, too.
US citizens release about four times as much as the global average because we eat a lot more Snickers bars and Dilly Bars.
Collectively, we release 5,264 million tons a year from digestion alone, up from 376 million tons in 1850.
Both wild and domestic ungulates release an estimated 78 million tons, only about 10 million tons more than they did 530 years ago.
Our atmosphere is fat and quickly getting fatter.
But what goes up into the atmosphere can go back down into the ground.
Livestock also contribute to storing carbon dioxide and methane by feeding soil microbes that carry greenhouse gasses down deep into the soil.
US beef cattle alone sequester up to 68 million tons of carbon per year.
That does not include wild or other domestic ungulates.
Research demonstrates that agriculture could easily increase carbon sequestration by 10 percent by managing for healthy soil microbes.
That’s 78 million tons emitted by ungulates and 75 million tons sequestered by beef cattle.
Darn close to a wash.
The knees of our 200-pound earth can barely carry us.
We need to reduce the number of Snickers bars and Dilly Bars we throw up into the atmosphere.
We don’t need to quit raising and eating healthy meat.