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Comment by cjblomqvist | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought along the same lines. But whatabout methane being 10 times the pollutant?

It's a concern, but fortunately if cattle population stays constant, their portion of the atmospheric resident methane will also remain constant, because methane degradation will keep pace with emissions.

Compare this to cars. Even if the number of cars remains constant, their contribution to the C02 pool grows every day.

So we should avoid increasing cattle population 100x, but we wouldn't want to do that anyway because we'd have nowhere to put them, and I certainly wouldn't support deforestation.

I think there lies the problem:

> fortunately if cattle population stays constant, their portion of the atmospheric resident methane will also remain constant

I have the impression (as a person uneducated in this topic) that current levels are already too high, and the world population is only going up.

Is there a way to produce more food with lower emissions or should the main target be a steady population? Or both?

I know some people who started eating insects and stopped planning for kids because of this. Me? I'm just confused.

World population is largely a strayman, it's mostly about rising standards of living. Animal consumption per capita increases drastically as poverty dissipates, and sharply declines as people get educated about health and the environment. It's a race between those two pressures that determines the cattle population. Projections are that it will increase very, very drastically as middle eastern and african countries soon escape the poverty line

The methane stays constant because it gets broken down into CO2 which thusly increases.

But all that CO₂ was captured from the atmosphere in the first place

Projections point to greatly increasing cattle population, unless:

1. Current consumer habits change.

2. Rapidly developing countries decide not to increase the animal proportion in their diet, which has happened in every single culture so far.

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