Yeah. Because there’s no good answer. Anything you do will be massively unpopular. Trying to get people to stop eating beef or dairy is going to be very difficult.
Once lab grown meat is affordable maybe it’ll help.
Nah, just make the alternatives cheaper and a significant portion of people will switch. The biggest barriers to alternatives are habit and cost.
Yeah, I saw that as well. It’s very neat and I hope that 50% reduction is seen in all cattle breeds with just a small supplement of seaweed. If it’s effective without strong side effects, I imagine we’ll synthesize whatever chemical is inhibiting the methane production and it’ll become a standard feed supplement.
“This could help farmers sustainably produce the beef and dairy products we need to feed the world,” Roque added.
Absolutely not the case for beef cattle. They are far too expensive to raise and feed to be a hunger concern. They take so much land and food compared to how many calories you get from the beef. Pretty much every other animal is easier to raise and feed. There’s a reason pretty much no culture or religion bans consumption of goats or sheep; they are critical. Beef is a luxury food.
There’s a reason pretty much no culture or religion bans consumption of goats or sheep; they are critical.
Not the baseline poor people staple over here either, though, that’d be chickens, as well as one or two pigs, as scrap eaters: One to sell, one to turn into bacon by hanging it into the chimney. Sheep have a crucial role but as lawn mowers and soil compactors on dikes, also wool in the past but nowadays (non-merino) wool is basically worthless, as in often not even recouping the costs of shearing. The meat is certainly eaten but as said it’s neither a staple, or crucial ingredient of some classic dish. Eating game is more common. Heck horse overall might be more common. Goats really aren’t a thing at all.
EDIT: source. You may not like it but I’m not pulling this out of my ass.
Also wild ruminants cause similar, almost identical, CO2 emissions compared to pasture cattle. And if you’re re-wilding all those areas wild ruminants will be exactly who’s going to live on there, burping all that carbon plants sequestered right back up into the atmosphere.
There’s plenty of levers to pull when it comes to climate change, this isn’t one of it. On the contrary, it’s likely to be better to continue managing those ruminants because then we can feed them stuff that makes them burp straight CO2 instead of methane.
The actually big topics are transportation and heating, both should be (almost) completely electrified and electricity production switched to renewables (or nuclear, don’t wanna fight with you guys right now you’re free to pay more for your electricity if you want), and then further on industrial processes. Not doing things like waste heat capture nowadays is plain silly (though we need better district heating infrastructure to enable full penetration), chemical feedstock and things like steel smelting will require a proper supply of green hydrogen. “Muh there won’t be hydrogen cars” I don’t care. We still need the infrastructure.
What are you talking about?
The intensity of dairy and beef farming is magnitudes beyond what any natural population of cattle would look like. Also natural populations are in balance with each other. So if there would be more baby cows more predatory animal babys follow and eat them.
Your argumentation is started on a completely false premise and absurd.
sigh
citation. Things differ a bit depending on exactly what kind of environment you’re looking at but that’s still the rough ballpark. Yes, non-pasture farming looks different – but the area used to grow soy now would still sequester carbon, and it’d still be released back into the atmosphere by animals that eat it. Forests etc. aren’t bottomless CO2 sinks.
The intensity of dairy and beef farming is magnitudes beyond what any natural population of cattle would look like.
I don’t think you have a proper picture of what a natural ruminant population looks like. To give you a proper sense, Imagine a galloping Bison herd stretching, in a not exactly thin line, from horizon to horizon.
There’s green stuff to be eaten. As long as that’s there, the population of animals eating green stuff increases. Simple as that. It’s part of the natural CO2 cycle, to go ahead and say “let’s ‘fix’ the natural CO2 cycle so we don’t have to fix the man-made one” is ecologically naive.
