Undoubtedly, by this time in your life you have read a hundred times, or maybe a thousand, that beef production is a “major contributor” to climate change. It’s one of those narratives that has become a continuous drumbeat in the progressive press. Probably, you have had no reason to question it. Without thinking about it, you likely assume that this narrative is probably true.
But there is good reason to think critically about this one. Among the various scare stories used to take further control of your life, this is one of the more important. With the war against fossil fuels, there is at least the pretense that their use can be reduced or eliminated without major effect on your lifestyle — i.e., just replace the energy from fossil fuels with “cheap” electricity from wind and sun. There is no such pretense with the war on beef. The end game is unabashedly to reduce your standard of living by taking away one of the most important and best parts of your diet.
So is it true that beef production is a major contributor to climate change? If you give the subject a moment’s critical thought, you will quickly realize that the proposition is wrong. And you will come to that conclusion even if you fully accept that methane gas in the atmosphere is a major contributor to climate change, and that cattle raised to produce beef emit large amounts of methane gas. There is an obvious logical flaw in the reasoning that is used to accuse beef production of being a major contributor to climate change.
But before getting to that, let’s look at one of my lists of the usual fools (and power-hungry government functionaries) repeating the narrative:
- From the UN Environmental Program, August 2021: “Methane emissions are driving climate change. . . . A recent assessment from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition found that cutting farming-related methane emissions would be key in the battle against climate change. . . . Methane has accounted for roughly 30 per cent of global warming since pre-industrial times.”
- From PBS, March 6, 2022: “Livestock production—primarily cows—produce 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The majority of that is in the form of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is a natural byproduct of how some livestock process food.”
- From the World Resources Institute, March 7, 2022: “How does beef production cause greenhouse gas emissions? . . . Cows and other ruminant animals (like goats and sheep) emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as they digest grasses and plants. This process is called “enteric fermentation,” and it’s the origin of cows’ burps. Methane is also emitted from manure.”
- From Scientific American, November 7, 2023: “Cattle play a colossal role in climate change: As the single largest agricultural source of methane, a potent planet-warming gas, the world’s 940 million cows spew nearly 10 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions — much of it through belches and droppings.”
There is an endless supply of similar pieces should you have the time to look for them.
But what are these propagandists leaving out? Here’s the missing piece: the methane emitted by cattle comes from the digestion of the grass that they have eaten. But what happens to the grass if the cattle don’t eat it? The answer is, it dies anyway, and decays in the soil by bacterial action. That decay also produces methane. Is the amount of methane produced in this natural process more or less than the amount produced from digestion by cattle? I can’t think of any reason why it would be much different. It might even be more. The propagandists make the error of counting the methane emissions from beef cattle as “human” emissions, but the methane emission from decay of the same grass in the soil as “natural” emissions.
Kevin Killough at Just the News on May 13 has a report on the latest research. The researchers were Dr. Vaughn Holder of Alltech and Dr. Betsey Boughton of Archbold. Granted, these are agribusiness people, so take that into account if you want. The two studied the question of whether methane emissions from a pasture were greater or less depending on whether beef cattle were present on the pasture or not. The research took place at Buck Island Ranch, a wetland pasture about 150 miles outside Miami, Florida. Key result:
The researchers found that 19%-30% of methane emissions were from the cattle, but the rest was from the wetland soils. If the cows are removed, their research shows, it actually increases the amount of methane the wetland ecosystems give off.
Here is part of the explanation provided to Killough by the researchers:
When cattle graze on land, the plants prioritize root growth over the plant matter above the surface. The deeper the roots, the more plants sequester carbon in the soil through the photosynthesis process. Grazing also removes grasses from a pasture, which reduces the dead plant matter that falls to the soil and decomposes, which also produces greenhouse gasses.
That makes perfect sense. And in fact, wasn’t the part about “plant matter that falls to the soil and decomposes” already completely obvious?
Don’t expect the anti-meat activists to back off any time soon. Their real goal is to make your life worse, as punishment for your sins.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
And the same time, it’s assessed that bisons could help capture CO2 !!
Are Bisons a specie who don’t produce methane and/or CO2 ??
Or maybe our “elites” wants to keep bison meat for their own pleasure and convert us (the mass) at synthetic hamburgers and bugs ?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/15/bison-romania-tarcu-2m-cars-carbon-dioxide-emissions-aoe
No. Next stupid question, please.
The idea that humans eating beef affects the climate by way of methane emissions from belching animals is nonsensical. The huge numbers of rampaging bison in the plains of 19thC America show that the resulting methane has been far higher than now. Methane is produced around the world from under sea and under land sources. You can even see it bubbling up to the surface of the sea in many places. For example in the Gulf of Mexico where this has gone on for millennia. There was/is a suspicion that some of the historic shipping losses in the Bermuda Triangle were caused by massive methane bubbles that destroyed the ships’ ability to float. Any examination of deep undersea vents shows huge methane emissions – among other noxious compounds. Now in only the past twelve months or so we have the discovery of a massive world wide underground vegetative layer which clearly must be a cause of permanent and extensive methane emissions.
Estinated number of beef cattle today in the USA is something like 92 million. In the 18th century we had something like 60 million buffalo ( now gone) and somewhere around 105 million other grass eaters (now largely gone).
I don’t see that cow farts come close to the 18th century farts.
Plus millions of hooves and droppings contribute immensely to the overall ecology of grasslands.
A Bill gates meat plant will do more ecological harm then all the cows we eat.
Now that the article has aged and received lots of comments:
Everything you never wanted to know about cattle and corn:
The article compares meat, mainly from steers, with grasses that cows eat rather than the corn that steers eat.
The grass that would rot and release CH4 if not eaten by cows … has nothing to do with almost all the meat, which is from steers than do not have grass diets. Corn is the primary food for steers.
Cows or heifers as they are referred to are too valuable for breeding and continuing the herd or milking depending on the breed. Once these are no longer viable for this purpose. they are not very good for steaks though sometimes acceptable for hamburger or dog food.
COWS (female) mainly for milk
Cows’ natural diet consists mainly of grasses, legumes, alfalfa, clover, and hay. They are grazing animals, after all. Many cows also enjoy fruits as delicious snacks. In fact, the average cow eats 2% of their body weight a day, which averages out to 24-26 pounds of food each day.
STEERS (castrated males) for meat
Corn is the most common ingredient in steer rations. Corn is a feed high in energy and moderate as a protein source for finishing steers. Steers like to eat corn and will do best when it is cracked or very coarsely ground. If you live on a farm, you will probably have homegrown corn available.
The difference between cows and steers was pointed out in a much earlier comment.
I mentioned in an early comment that the arguments against methane scaremongering should be based on the very tiny effect as a greenhouse gas in an atmosphere that contains water vapor. That ends all claims that CH4 is dangerous.
Sweet corn is the main kind of corn people eat. This is the type you’ll find in the produce aisle of your grocery store.
The vast majority of corn grown is for feeding livestock, ethanol production or other uses in manufacturing—creating everything from crayons to soda. This type of corn is known as field corn.
People don’t eat field corn directly from the field because it’s hard and certainly not sweet. Instead, field corn must go through a mill and be converted to food products and ingredients like corn syrup, corn flakes, yellow corn chips, corn starch or corn flour.
On average, U.S. farmers plant about 90 million acres of corn each year, with the majority of the crop grown in the Heartland region. Most of the crop is used domestically as the main energy ingredient in livestock feed and for fuel ethanol production.
Out of all corn produced in the U.S., only 1% is made for human consumption.
An area the size of Montana is planted in corn every year in the United States; less than 1 percent of that is sweet corn eaten by humans. Farmers talk of crops and equipment and prices, but not of food. (Well, except for when they claim to be “feeding the world,” which simply isn’t true.)
The largest United States crop in terms of total production is corn, the majority of which is grown in a region known as the Corn Belt. The second largest crop grown in the United States is soybeans. As with corn, soybeans are primarily grown in the Midwestern states.