It is my understanding that land use (eg cutting down rain forest, draining wetlands) for pasture and soy are a big contributor to the carbon footprint of meat.
What's "funny" is that rain forest land being destroyed for pastures has terrible yield. We would be better off paying the people using them to keep the forest intact.
Could be true, in the countries I am most faniliar with (UK, Sweden) there’s no rainforest and a good chunk of the land used for rearing cattle couldn’t be used for farming Soy.
The cattle doesn't have to _be_ on the same wasted land that is used to feed it. Soy is imported from other countries to feed cattle in the UK (around 2M tons of soy per year[0]).
It is a common and convenient misconception that raising cattle is not bad for the environment because it is raised on non-arable land -- the cattle still gets fed imported soy.
Then the solution is fairly simple. Make the soy more costly than a lesser emission heavy alternative. Cows only need imported soy in order to be marginally cheaper.
But now we're returning to the assumption that everything thats fit for cows is fit for human edible crops.
Cows aren't often eating the "human grade" crops, to my understanding.
I'm not making an argument that we shouldn't scale back cattle-rearing, if anything my personal preference would be to eliminate all oil-based feed and see how sustainable we can make things; I just think we've got a real convenient scapegoat here when the largest polluter is definitely car dependence as it's adding carbon to the carbon cycle.
The cows aren't the scapegoat (no pun intended), it's the human entitlement of expecting cheap hamburgers without paying for the externalities of using the sky as a sewer.
Cows eat "cow corn" (yellow dent corn). 5% of every bit of America is used to grow the stuff; only a tiny fraction is used to grow sweet corn. That's an absurd amount of overproduction thanks to subsidies. It gets inefficiently turned into ethanol and steaks. Instead, in most areas, that land could be used to grow healthier human crops like quinoa, lentils, or sorghum. Commercial sorghum is grown about 2 blocks from where I live.
They don't emit CO2 or Methane in any way that can run out of control unless we pour carbon into the system externally (by digging up oil and feeding it to them for example, or transporting them using cars that run on fossil fuels, or heating them with fossil fuels).
They are a scapegoat, because they can't by themselves emit anything that can't be captured and returned and reused by cattle for essentially perpetuity, yet we as humans are doing things that are not sustainable and contribute to tipping the scales.
> They don't emit CO2 or Methane in any way that can run out of control unless we pour carbon into the system externally (by digging up oil and feeding it to them for example, or transporting them using cars that run on fossil fuels, or heating them with fossil fuels).
The economic incentives combined with political corruption will continue FF extraction. The root problems are human nature and political in origin and require leadership to pull back on grain subsidies, tax CAFO-grown meat, tax fossil fuels (none of this "carbon offsets" in Africa fraud), and pass on the real future decline in GDP from climate change-driven floods, famines, and wars.
FWIW I don't think your points are totally invalid, and it is not me (and maybe not GP) that is flagging you.
That aside, your primary argument if I understand it right is that there is no (or at least diminished) cost to cattle raising because the emitted carbon came from food that was sequestered as part of a cycle.
The problem I would call attention to is that the planet's carbon capacity is simultaneously nerfed by the land required for feed. About 40% [0] of arable crop land is used to feed cattle, a process which faces huge caloric efficiency losses (consider that the caloric output of meat cannot be higher than the input).
It is pretty well understood at this stage that meat consumption is a gigantic contributor to climate change. Anyway, I _also_ agree about cars. We don't need to rely on whataboutism here: we have a common objective. And, by the way, I still eat meat, but much much less than I used to, so I don't mean any of this as an attack on meat eaters.
Where land is converted there can be an increase. But for an existing farm with stable herd numbers the emission produced around (Methane > Carbon Dioxide > Grass > Methane > etc.).
There's industrial beef and there's grass fed beef. Grass feed one preserves pastures which are amazing and rich ecosystems, much more valuable than soya monocultures.
