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
Three ways: first is the straightforward way. That carbon that they are eating used to be in plants, it no longer is. They fart it our and breath it out at CO2 in quite large quantities. They take away a capture system and turn the captured carbon into another form very inefficiently
Second is measurement way, CH4 (prominent in cow farts) is 20x the greenhouse gas that CO2 is in terms of how much infra red radiation it blocks. Meaning how much it impacts global warming. Certain measures (but not all) count it accordingly, so 20x bonus for cow farts basically in some counts. Some do straight CO2 and will not do this, most ones that say GHG will.
Thirdly the indirect/manufacturing costs. Its just a huge facility with a lot of heating/cooling needs (depending on the time) with a ton of transportation, heavy machinery and processing. Farms are busy places with a lot of trucks and tractors, and there are a lot of them. Depending on the animal/crop greenhouses may also be needed which are again energy intensive. There are also just a lot of them compared to basically any other industry. We eat a lot of food.
Do those make sense?
(The closed loop bit is mostly true but doesn’t account for chemical transformations from straight carbon (or hydrocarbons) reacted with oxygen to make CO2)
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