I question the methodology of that 100kg (per kg) figure for beef, for several reasons:
1. It's not the true Carbon or CO2 figure. It's weighted for other greenhouse gases. That's kind of an issue because methane naturally breaks down (into CO2 and water) over time. The methane issue comes up all the time in such estimates (eg leaks in natural gas pipelines) where methane is a worse greenhouse gas but temporary (7-12 years) and CO2 is essentially forever (until sequestration or photosynthesis);
2. Production method really matters here. American beef, for example, is primarily grain fed. That grain requires fertilizer (more natural gas) and distribution. Australian beef, for example, is largely fed on natural grasses and vegetation, typically until the last 60-120 days where it's transitioned to grain for marbling. American cattle is also heavily fed on corn, which really shouldn't exist in the quantities it does;
3. Ecosystems are complex. One of the big causes of the dust bowl, for example, was the destruction of the great bison herds. Replacing the natural grasses with crops like wheat was just the last straw. The point of the bison is that they're heavy, like up to 2000+ lb heavy, and they leave deep hoof prints on the plains. Water collects there when it rains and feeds cgrasses and the aquifers.
This has been backed up elsewhere too. China has had long projects to stop the desertification of the Gobi and spent a ton on planting trees with varied successes. You know what did work? Horses. They released horses and the same thing happened. Horse hoof prints allowed water to collect and grasses to grow and spread. Grasses, as it turned out, were key to stopping desertification, not trees.
So the point is that certain ecosystems need large herd herbivores to survive. So if you got rid of cattle entirely, what other second order effects would there be?
More practically, people just arne't going to give up meat. Sorry. Unless it become sprice prohibitve (as beef arguably is rapidly becoming now).
On the ecological point, the difference is whether the grassland would naturally support that number of bison. Or if bison (or cows) are continually being grown, killed, grown killed at industrial scale beyond the normal bison lifecycle. With many carbon inputs (fossil-fuel based fertilizer, etc) and production costs (slaughtering, transport, etc).
Wild bison live 15-20 years.
Cattle raised for beef ~18 months.
That's beyond the natural carbon cycle an existing ruminant population.
Also horses, in my reading of the data, actually have less of a methane impact. They have a different digestive system entirely.
On the methane point, methane, yes, is a greenhouse gas that breaks down over years (~12 years). But has far worse impact on climate while its in the atmosphere.
It’s completely made up. All meat is carbon neutral because animals don’t produce carbon atoms from nothing. They get them from the plants they eat which in turn get their carbon from the atmosphere.
The carbon cycle is basic scientific fact yet confidently ignored by people who hate things like logging and meat.
I'm not an expert here, but I see what you're saying. Is the carbon calculation from the meat _processing_??? Every year I hunt a buck and carry it off the mountain. So the carbon footprint for getting that meat for my family is really the drive up to and from wherever I'm hunting from, plus a few other small things that probably amount to almost nothing.
I live close to a large meat processing facility, and it appears to be quite an energy intensive operation from the outside. Never been inside though, so I can't say for sure. But transporting live cattle, feed, water, slaughter, freeze, freeze+transport all might be pretty carbon heavy.
All of that would go away with renewable energy and therefore reducing meat consumption would not be "the next frontier" in the battle against climate change as the original poster said.
But the supply of herd animals is essentially fixed. There isn’t infinite growth. Eating meat therefore does not increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, no matter what vegans who want to ban meat for personal moral reasons assert.
If humans stopped eating meat, the only way to reduce the amount of carbon that animals “emit” would be to kill all of them and bury their carcasses underground where they can’t decompose (as that would turn them into CO2).
Burning oil introduces new carbon into the cycle, animals existing does not.
That's a fairly simplistic argument though. Deforestation converts forest into a cattle feed monoculture. That plant material locks in less co2 than a forest.
There's the extra CO2 emitted from growing cattle feed as opposed to growing food for humans directly (via fossil fuels used in production).
And then there's methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas.
It's a topic that's way more complex than you seem to think. Climate scientists did not miss the simple fact that all carbon in a cow originates from the atmosphere. That's understood. But there's all the other stuff.
For the record I'm not vegan or even vegetarian. Attacking vegans for their beliefs is poor formimo
Cows eat wild grass for most of their lives. There is zero deforestation to feed cattle in the US. The amount of methane is also fixed as it gets broken down into CO2 which is later absorbed by plants.
Scientists didn't miss this; there's just a lot of grifters trying to use people's desire to fight climate change to get them to support unrelated issues.
The supply of herd animals very obviously isn't fixed. Humans breed them for resources, and since the world population has more than doubled over the last 50 years, the supply of herd animals has also increased a lot. If humans stopped breeding cattle for resources, there'd be far less cattle.
The amount of atmospheric methane also very obviously isn't fixed. Increases in production result in a higher concentration of methane, since it takes ~a decade to break it down. As long as you keep increased output of methane, the baseline concentration will also stay increased.
Your point about "kill[ing] all of them and bury[ing] their carcasses underground where they can’t decompose" also shows that you really don't understand that 1) different animals produce different greenhouse gases that may have weaker or stronger effects, and 2) that we're actively causing far more cattle to exist than would without us continuously breeding them.
The only way I can see your points making sense is if you're literally approaching the topic from an absolutist binary perspective (as in, "either we keep going exactly as before, or we have to literally kill all animals, no middle ground possible").
1. It's not the true Carbon or CO2 figure. It's weighted for other greenhouse gases. That's kind of an issue because methane naturally breaks down (into CO2 and water) over time. The methane issue comes up all the time in such estimates (eg leaks in natural gas pipelines) where methane is a worse greenhouse gas but temporary (7-12 years) and CO2 is essentially forever (until sequestration or photosynthesis);
2. Production method really matters here. American beef, for example, is primarily grain fed. That grain requires fertilizer (more natural gas) and distribution. Australian beef, for example, is largely fed on natural grasses and vegetation, typically until the last 60-120 days where it's transitioned to grain for marbling. American cattle is also heavily fed on corn, which really shouldn't exist in the quantities it does;
3. Ecosystems are complex. One of the big causes of the dust bowl, for example, was the destruction of the great bison herds. Replacing the natural grasses with crops like wheat was just the last straw. The point of the bison is that they're heavy, like up to 2000+ lb heavy, and they leave deep hoof prints on the plains. Water collects there when it rains and feeds cgrasses and the aquifers.
This has been backed up elsewhere too. China has had long projects to stop the desertification of the Gobi and spent a ton on planting trees with varied successes. You know what did work? Horses. They released horses and the same thing happened. Horse hoof prints allowed water to collect and grasses to grow and spread. Grasses, as it turned out, were key to stopping desertification, not trees.
So the point is that certain ecosystems need large herd herbivores to survive. So if you got rid of cattle entirely, what other second order effects would there be?
More practically, people just arne't going to give up meat. Sorry. Unless it become sprice prohibitve (as beef arguably is rapidly becoming now).