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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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[–] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (9 children)

Before humans intervened, there weren't so many cows, and other elements of the environment managed to offset their ecological harms.

Now it's not possible. You can't just grow as many cows as you want and say "well, in before times things were alright". They were precisely because there was less cows. The fact that methane doesn't stay in the atmosphere forever doesn't help, because at any given time, there's enough cows to maintain high levels of it. It's not that we keep on accumulating it for all eternity, it's that current levels are not sustainable and we keep on maintaining them (and you seemingly suggest we should have more cows to maintain a carnivore diet, i.e. exacerbate the issue dramatically).

In fact, a lot of the ecological harms will pass once we start producing less of certain chemicals. Take ozone layer as a common example. Ozone holes were spreading rapidly due to use of several interfering chemicals widely used in refrigeration, compression etc. Once they were banned worldwide, ozone layer came back to normal, because these chemicals don't stay there forever. But for the time of their life in the armpsphere they caused massive harm. Same idea.

It is a very well established scientific fact that cows heavily contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution, and that greenhouse equivalent of pretty much any other food that exists is way lower. Like, fifty times lower for some staple plant-based food sources, and 2-4 times lower for other animal-based food. It has been measured many times and is a clear scientific consensus. Claiming cows don't hurt the environment is akin to saying the Earth is flat.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 week ago (8 children)

    It is a very well established scientific fact that cows heavily contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution, and that greenhouse equivalent of pretty much any other food that exists is way lower. Like, fifty times lower for some staple plant-based food sources, and 2-4 times lower for other animal-based food.

    The entire point of this post is to make such reductionist thinking apparent at a foundational level. You can't take a single slice of the biocycle and claim net effect.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

    We can, though. By isolating contributing variables and comparing them to other options, we can isolate the ecological footprint of an animal per unit of body mass or useful produce.

    We know how much methane cows vs other animals produce per unit of body mass, and we know cows are very high methane producers, even by ruminant standards - and cows are the most extensively farmed ruminants, too.

    The carbon that enters the animal ends up either carbon dioxide, methane, or more complex carbon structures that can eventually become one or the other (and, over a very long term, it all eventually becomes carbon dioxide). Humans, for example, lean more on the carbon dioxide side, while cows emit a lot of methane. Advanced farms even use cow manure as a fuel source, though most of methane enters the atmosphere anyway. Natural decomposition of plants in the soil by soil bacteria is, in turn, less methane-emitting than either the processes happening in the rumen, or even in the human digestive system. Add to that all the maintanence overhead of cattle feed and farm management, and the differences will exacerbate even further.

    Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas, even when corrected for it's atmospheric lifespan, and hurts environment more than carbon dioxide.

    All animals have more of such footprint compared to plant-soil bacteria cycle, but cows are exceptionally bad. This is why, from an ecological standpoint, beef and dairy consumption should be reduced, of not eliminated entirely.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 week ago (6 children)

    ecological footprint of an animal per unit of body mass or useful produce.

    Sure, and if you look at unit of bioavailable protein, ruminants win. https://www.aleph2020.org/

    Natural decomposition of plants in the soil by soil bacteria is, in turn, less methane-emitting than either the processes happening in the rumen, or even in the human digestive system.

    except in high water environments (swamps and bogs). You need to also account for wild ruminants who eat the grass even if cattle are not around.

    All animals have more of such footprint compared to plant-soil bacteria cycle,

    You also need to account for the bioavailability disparity between a whole food plant based diet and a whole food animal based diet. 3kg vs 0.5kg in daily food. That is about a 6x food volume difference, lots of people get focused looking on calories, but if we seriously are trying to remove all ruminants from the food supply then we need to look at all essential nutrition, factor in the cost of medical care for people who have issues with plant based nutrition (such as type 2 diabetics who suffer under carbohydrate load, of which there are a billion).

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (5 children)

    Sure, and if you look at unit of bioavailable protein, ruminants win.

    No, they don't. According to this paper:

    • Eggs - 113% DIAAS
    • Beef - 111% DIAAS
    • Soy - 90% DIAAS
    • Pea - 82% DIAAS

    At the same time, the CO2 equivalent per 1kg of product (source):

    • Beef (beef herd) - 99 kg
    • Beef (dairy herd) - 33 kg
    • Eggs - 4,7 kg
    • Tofu (processed soy) - 3,2 kg
    • Pea - 0,98 kg

    Chicken eggs are slightly more bioavailable than beef, while being responsible for 7-21 times less emissions. Peas can be a hundred times less polluting, while being a relatively good protein source.

    Except in high water environments (swamps and bogs).

    Which agricultural lands typically are not.

    You need to also account for wild ruminants

    Total population of wild ruminants sits at around 75 million. The farm count is 3,6 billion, which is 48 times that. Wild rumimants, thereby, constitute around 2% of total ruminant population, the other 98% are domesticated. (source)

    You also need to account for the bioavailability disparity between a whole food plant based diet and a whole food animal based diet. 3kg vs 0,5 kg in daily food.

    Maintaining a vegan diet is more complex than simply removing meat and leaving the rest the same. One of the several points healthy vegan diets focus on is, exactly, gaining enough protein. For that, there are various protein-rich plants and processed products, protein isolates, yeast products. Moreover, vegan diet typically requires adding vitamin B12, as it is the most limiting factor of plant-based diets. Luckily, industrial bacteria can produce it very efficiently.

    That said, eliminating animal food is not necessary. Poultry, pork, eggs, fish are all much better ecologically than beef. Beef is exceptionally bad from an ecological standpoint, and there are other, much better sources of same nutrients.

    Type II diabetics

    Vegan diet is not a contraindication for people with Type II diabetes, although basic meal planning, as always, is advised. In fact, vegan diet can improve cardiovascular health of such patients (source)

    Going forward, I would like to ask you to provide academic/authoritative sources instead of linking to advocacy groups, which are highly biased.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (4 children)

    does anyone else want to explain the problems with poore-nemecek 2018 or....

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (3 children)

    I'm afraid there's only two of us left, so you'll have to.

    In any case, if you have a particular gripe with Poore and Nemecek, there's no shortage of papers coming to similar conclusions, like this one, this other one, and a myriad more. Same can't be said of the opposite.

    As things stand, arguing that beef is eco-friendly is as scientifically fringe as saying the Earth is flat. Certain attempts (nutritional, organizational, technological etc.) are made to reduce the ecological footprint of cows, but it remains huge nonetheless. You can't make cows less cows.

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

    one of them relies directly on poore-nemecek, and the other commits the same blunder as them: combining disparately methodized LCA studies

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago* (1 child)

    Only in one part, while sourcing the rest on other works, of which there's plenty, the other is a review article, and of course methods will have to differ somewhat.

    I specifically go through review articles to show the studies are actually more than plentiful. You can look them up more thoroughly before dismissing. They all speak of the same picture, and it's about as clear as "the water is wet".

    I provided you with a vast pool of studies to confirm what should be obvious to anyone who had at least school-grade biology. I would be much pleased if you could gather scientifically-backed points to the opposite. Show me research that demonstrates cows are actually not ecological disaster and are at least on par with pigs and chicken, or better yet, plant foods on ecological footprint, since that's the basis of your original claim.

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