I know that cutting down trees to make way for agriculture is a big factor in the global decline of the environment. And I know the problem with burning fossil fuel is that it is releasing CO2 stored in ground from millions of years ago. What I don’t understand is how a cow or a chicken contributes new greenhouse emissions?
fyi I don’t really eat beef and are trying to be flexitarian so this isn’t about defending eating meat.
In: Biology
Although you can consider it a “closed” system in the sense of the amount of total carbon available, commercial agriculture and raising cows and chickens are not natural in the sense that human intervention and innovation has allowed for a great deal of intensification that could otherwise not happen in nature.
A poor analogy might be a car engine, where if you run it at a constant 2000RPM, it would run as long as you had fuel feeding it. But try running the same engine at 7500RPM and most engines would start to overheat very quickly as the cooling system just could not cope.
Just like a car engine, there is a range where the systems can still find an equilibrium, but past a certain point, there is no equilibrium and the excess temperatures lead to failures in the engine itself.
Latest Answers