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Comment by Negitivefrags | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me how beef actually contributes to climate change more than any other food activity?

If you have a big open plain full of grass, does it change how much carbon is emitted if a cow eats it versus being left alone, dying, and rotting?

You have farm machinary involved I guess, but I would think actually more of it for plants than for beef especially when you consider fertiliser.

I understand that it’s possible to do worse than this though using feed lots because then you are effectively having to grow more crops (using more farm machinary and fertiliser) which basically increases the amount of carbon use versus just plants.

But then rather than saying “no meat” shouldn’t we just be saying “no feed lots”?

Shouldn’t there just be a push towards grass fed beef?

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If we actually just ate free-ranging, naturally occurring herds, then it wouldn't contribute to climate change. What contributes is clearing 70% of Brazil to raise imported cattle at a population density hundreds to thousands of times what they would ever achieve without feedlots.

A push toward grass-fed beef is fine, but you can't feed the world by eating grass-fed, local food only, nor organic, nor non-GMO, nor even sustainably raised. There isn't enough of it.

So there is a difference between meat that was farmed in a manner that is no more carbon unfriendly than vegetables, and meat that is not.

We could have marketing campaigns for “green beef” and I’m suprised we don’t. It seems very strange.

My country doesn’t import beef, and all of the beef here is grass fed. Nor do we cut down any forests since they are all now protected.

Eating meat here is just fine then right?

And yet a significant number of people here are going vegetarian for climate change reasons.

Cows produce tons of methane as they digest grass, which is a very potent greenhouse gas.

Also, farming doesn’t only happen on natural open plains. Trees get cut down to make farmland.

Please see the data [1]. Out of the 99 kgCO2eq emitted per kg of beef, about 56 are due to methane emissions by cows and other emissions on the farm, and 23 kg are because of land use change (clearing forests)

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-cha...

So we could agree that the methane is irrelevant because it would be emitted anyway by the rotting grass.

And we could also agree that clearing forests is a different thing than farming meat, which we could separately campaign against and prevent.

After all, the great grasslands of America are not turning into forests, and cattle farmed there doesn’t result in further forests being cut down.

> So we could agree that the methane is irrelevant because it would be emitted anyway by the rotting grass.

Natural forests and grasslands don't decay in a manner that emit a lot of methane. Cows on the other hand emit a lot of methane, due to how they digest their food.

> And we could also agree that clearing forests is a different thing than farming meat, which we could separately campaign against and prevent.

The data is about where current emissions come from. It is not directly suggesting any policy prescriptions, or directly stating what emissions will be under alternate food choices.

Yes, clearing forests is different from farming meat. But the best place to plant new trees in sustainable manner, in order to capture some of excess CO2 human activity causes, is where forests grew a few decades or centuries ago. Many of these places are currently occupied by cattle ranches or farms that grow food for cattle. One reasonable policy prescription would be to reduce beef demand/supply, and then incentivize tree plantation in those areas.

If a herd of deer moves into that fallow pasture do they fart?

Cows make methane.

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