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ELI5 - Cows Don't Pollute (hackertalks.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/carnivore@discuss.online
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Explained like I'm 5 - Cows don't pollute

A. Cows don't create carbon, they perform neither nuclear fission or nuclear fusion. They can't create elements.

B. Everything that comes out of a cow, must have gone into the cow.

C. Grass grows using carbon from the environment.

D. Cows eat grass, because they are a ruminant.

E. All the gas that comes out of a cow went into the cow as grass.

F. Therefore all the carbon that come out of a cow first has to be captured by grass to go into the cow.

G. Cows are part of a natural biocycle, they do not create pollution.

H. If cows don't eat the grass something will - animals, fire, microbes, and the biocycle will continue.

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[–] 1 point 1 week ago (7 children)

What's really cool though is Australian marsupials that eat grass (notably kangaroos, Wallabies, and wombats don't make methane. They have more efficient bacteria fermenting their grass so the only gas they emit is CO2

Right now cattle fore gut microbes are being engineered to add the efficient genes from the marsupial microbes. If it works and the cattle tolerate the modified bacteria it will solve the methane problem

I also note that the methane isn't a big problem, cattle methane is probably tiny compared to fossil methane ("natural gas") leaks, but we don't know because leakage is enormously underreported

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (6 children)

    Methane (CH4) is significantly more effective than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere: by a factor of 28 over a 100-year time frame based on the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report estimate (IPCC 2013). Over the last 250 years, the concentration of CH4 in the atmosphere increased by 161.9 percent (IPCC 2013; NOAA/ESRL 2024b). Within the United States, the main anthropogenic sources of CH4 include enteric fermentation from domestic livestock, natural gas systems, landfills, domestic livestock manure management, flooded land, coal mining, and petroleum systems (see Figure ES-8).

    Significant trends for the largest sources of anthropogenic CH4 emissions include the following:

    • Enteric fermentation was the largest anthropogenic source of CH4 emissions in the United States in 2022, accounting for 27.4 percent of total CH4 emissions and 3.0 percent of total gross emissions. Emissions have increased by 5.2 percent (9.5 MMT CO2 Eq.) since 1990. This increase in emissions from 1990 to 2022 generally follows the increasing trends in cattle populations.
    • Natural gas systems were the second largest anthropogenic source category of CH4 emissions in the United States in 2022, accounting for 24.6 percent of total CH4 emissions and 2.7 percent of total gross emissions. Emissions have decreased by 20.9 percent (45.7 MMT CO2 Eq.) since 1990, largely due to decreases in emissions from distribution, transmission, and storage.

    https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-04/us-ghg-inventory-2024-main-text_04-18-2024.pdf

    Methane from cows and other livestock is absolutely a big problem, it's more than all the known gas leaks from fossil fuels in the United States. There are probably a lot more gas leaks we don't know about, but that doesn't diminish just how much methane we know livestock produces.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Did you miss the party where I said it is active research to remove the methane?

    Did you not look into it at all and not find that it is a cheap fix?

    Are you a robot just restating your one factoid ("methane bad") in response to anything?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 child)

    Maybe in the future, cows won't produce methane and we'll just have to worry about land use and the efficiency of raising cows for food. But historically and presently, they produce a huge amount of methane and contribute significantly to climate change.

    I also note that the methane isn’t a big problem, cattle methane is probably tiny compared to fossil methane

    This specifically is why I replied to you: you didn't know something, made a guess, and were very wrong about it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    you didn't know something, made a guess, and were very wrong about it.

    I actually said we don't know, and your response pretended we do. Great job of clearing things up. We don't know because gas extraction companies don't report their leaks

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  • [–] [S] -1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    and yet the methane overhead of a cow is stable, and doesn't grow over time, its not a net contributor.

    If grass based enteric methane was a existential threat to life we would be culling all ruminants, preventing all grassland fires, draining all wetlands... throwing a anthropogenic label on methane like the grass wont grow and be eaten if humans were not involved isn't consistent.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (1 child)

    and yet the methane overhead of a cow is stable, and doesn’t grow over time, its not a net contributor.

    Emissions have increased by 5.2 percent (9.5 MMT CO2 Eq.) since 1990. This increase in emissions from 1990 to 2022 generally follows the increasing trends in cattle populations.

    You really just don't bother reading things if they go against your world view, don't you?

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