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Comment by ginja | Hacker News Reader

I can’t read the full article because of the paywall but the main argument seems to be that cows emit a lot of CO2.

Ruminants eat plants, which contain carbon captured from the atmosphere. They then release most of that carbon back to the atmosphere, from where it will be eventually absorbed by plants again. So it’s a cycle where no new carbon is really being introduced (unlike burning fossil fuels that would otherwise stay in the ground).

Am I missing something or is the seriousness of this issue blown way out of proportion?

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* a lot of energy is used to farm the cows, e.g. growing their food, fertilizers, butchering, shipping, etc

* Cow methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than co2, orders of magnitude worse

* Land that would capture a lot more CO2 and keep water in the environment is chopped down or otherwise destroyed to make pastures, the worst being rainforests.

* Orders of magnitude more water is used to raise cows vs the equivalent calories in plants.

> Cow methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than co2, orders of magnitude worse

But it's also released in much lower quantities, and has a much faster half life. Let's be clear: carbon dioxide, not methane, is responsible for the overwhelming majority of long term warming.

The point about the extra energy is potentially valid, although it would need data.

Methane being worse than CO2 doesn't change the fact that it's a cycle and thus it's not causing extra warming as long as the amount of animals is constant.

Alternative forests, etc, is equally a one off thing. Keeping the pastures doesn't make anything worse, and reverting them back would only be a one off improvement.

To be fair, it could be as easy as banning cows and using buffalo for better ruminant yields.

To be fair, that has nothing to do with the current economy, where almost all cows go to feed lots to be fed human food (corn) to double their weight.

>To be fair, that has nothing to do with the current economy, where almost all cows go to feed lots to be fed human food (corn) to double their weight.

Have you travled outside the US? This is not true in most parts of the world, I wouldn't be suprised to see it only being a US practice.

Yes, I've visited several dozen countries, and I assure you that the practice of using feedlots has spread to most developed countries, and is being spread to the less developed world as a way to increase incomes.

Nice insult, btw. I had to send my passport to get more pages sewn in.

that seems like a waste of time, here they just give you a new one.

Don’t they feed the whole corn plant though, not just the grain? I could be totally wrong about this.

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