Meet Daisy the cow – global climate’s enemy number one. (BBC)

Talk about Newsnight

Ethical Man - Justin Rowlatt

Meet Daisy the cow – global climate’s enemy number one.

* Newsnight
* 2 Feb 07, 03:52 PM

When I started to investigate the impact of food on the environment a month ago I thought I would find myself fretting over food miles. In fact transport is a tiny component of agriculture’s worldwide contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.

No, the main culprit is out there in the fields, chewing her cud. It turns out that livestock – predominantly cattle – are responsible for an astonishing proportion of global warming gases - 18 per cent of the total, to be precise.

That’s right, almost a fifth of all emissions which is more greenhouse gas emissions than all the transport on earth – planes, trains, cars, skidoos the lot.

You’ll be wondering how I reach that staggering conclusion. Indeed, regular readers of this blog may be worried that my decision forgo flesh and become a vegan during January has fostered an irrational hatred of animals.

Not so. The research implicating Daisy and her bovine brothers and sisters in global warming is very well sourced. A good start is “Livestock’s Long Shadow”, a report by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation.
***
more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2007/02/meet_daisy_the_cow_global_climates_enemy_number_on.html

:popcorn:

Is popcorn vegan approved?

--p!
What else do they eat on Vega?

Een feit is een feit
Dat een koe meer scheit dan een geit.
Nou had hij dat geweten
Dan had hij vast veel meer gescheten
Nou had hij dat gedaan
Dan had hij een meter diep in de stront gestaan.

(It's a comparison between cows and goats)

In the Netherlands for years the amount of cow manure overburden was a national discussion. On the radio news while we had dinner.

http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/reports/beyond.html

Ask Americans to give up there beloved burgers? I think most would prefer to give you their firstborn! Beef is more sacred to many people than, well, living at all.

I quit eating hamburgers one day because I just decided I was sick and tired of them. Meat was never my favorite food but ecological concerns finally made a complete vegetarian out of me.

I got an A on my college term paper with this book as one of my sources.

That was the year I gave it up.

Wow.

You know, a lot of "Christians" -- like Fred Phelps -- have said the same thing about gays and anal sex. That gays would prefer to die than to give up their allegedly required form of sex.

Cats are carnivores, right?

How many cats are there in North America? I think it was 76 million domestic or so, possibly half again as many feral, in 2004.

Most cats eat "red meat", right? That's 30 million pounds of meat a day, based on the standard 5.5 ounce cat food can. No dogs, or ferrets, or pot-bellied pigs, or sugar gliders -- just for cats.

I hope they aren't into anal sex, or they'll have the Fundies to worry about, too.

--p!

an out gas more carbon then the cow belches, because she is converting some of that carbon into flesh and milk. But then when she dies it too will be emited. It's not cows it's cars and power plants using fossil fuels that are adding carbon to the system.

Some of the vegetation would decompose and release CO2, but a good portion of it would remain locked up in the soils as organic matter. For example, the Great Plains before we began plowing them up was composed of rich black soil several feet thick in many areas. Also, a good portion of land that currently raises cattle was once forest. The trees were clearcut and the wood burned to provide pasture for the cattle, freeing up CO2 that was locked up for centuries in large tree trunks.

Secondly, the cattle release huge amounts of methane from the digestion of vegetation, as well as CO2. Methane is a greenhouse gas 20X more potent than CO2, so a slight increase in atmospheric methane levels could be far more devastating than a CO2 increase.

decomposing vegetation out here in the country side. It is not blown in from the cities but occurs naturally. You may be right about the methane from cows but you get the same from all ruminants like bison, buffalo,elk, moose, deer, reindeer, camels, llamas, goats, sheep, antelopes and others. These animals have been belching out methane for a long time and not been the problem and I doubt that they are now. They are part of a closed system that has been relatively stable. It is fossil fuels that are dragging up carbon from where it was safely buried that is the problem. The system has not been closed since the industrial revolution.

are probably supporting a LOT more animals than could exist in a natural ecosystem in balance. I don't think the methane issue should be used to divert attention from the CO2 issue. But we can't ignore methane either.

There were huge herds of wild ruminants not so very long ago.

prairie grass. With grass alone the same total body mass would not be possible. And more bodies --> more farts.

OTOH, maybe all those ruminants helped bring about post-glacial warming... you may have created a new scientific theory!

"It is fossil fuels that are dragging up carbon from where it was safely buried that is the problem."

You are completely correct with that assessment. However, you have to remember that we have artificially boosted the number of cattle and pigs by using fossil fuels to grow more biomass per acre of land in the form of fertilizers and diesel-powered tractors, and in the form of irrigation pumps to water otherwise dry soils. The number of bison at their peak in North America was ~70 million. Wikipedia currently lists these numbers from 1997:

99,500,000 cattle
59,900,000 hogs
7,600,000 sheep

They also show:

For the three major goat-producing states (AZ, NM, and TX) there were 1,200,000 goats at the end of 2002 (note that those are just for 3 states, so that number is probably quite a bit higher)
5,300,000 horses in the United States at the end of 1998

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_States#Livestock

So, there are 170+ million ruminants present today in the US, whereas the largest ruminant species, the bison, numbered less than half that. If we add in whitetail deer numbers at 25 million (which are artificially high due to human intervention and historically were closer to 10 million), a few million in pronghorns and bighorn sheep, mule deer, etc, we still don't come close to the current population of ruminants human farmers raise in the US today.

I think your first statement is not quite correct - the majority of most plants are above ground and I don't see how they would 'remain in the soil' - surely they would just decompose above it? I have also read that grasslands reflect more heat, similar to glaciers, whereas forests tend to absorb more.

I personally can't see how cows emit 18% of greenhouse gases than transport - everything I have read has indicated that transport accounted for around 1/3 of CO2.

Some species of grasses can put down roots up to 20 ft into the ground, thus burying most of their biomass far below the usual decomposition zones.

Methane's lifespan in the atmosphere is short by geological terms, but fairly long by human terms, on the order of 9-15 yrs. That is not nearly fast enough to negate it's effects on global climate change.

One of the other CO2 sources associated with cattle I didn't think to type was that we don't graze most of the cattle raised in this country anymore. They are fattened up using corn and soybeans grown through the use of diesel fuel, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. The fossil fuel imputs into a farm are enormous; my dad uses up several thousand gallons of gasoline and diesel per year in the tractors and trucks to grow corn, soybeans and alfalfa on 100 acres of land. Much of that is then fed to our cattle and pigs. He then uses propane to heat the barns in the winters to keep the livestock warm.

Are you trying to tell me the dinosaur's blew themselves away?

that is causing the catastrophe, is the emissions at high altitude from jet travel.

because the CO2 diffuses throughout the atmosphere pretty quickly.

had you been tracking the high altitude testing sites like Rocky MnTn Nat Park, like I have over the years, you would see that the lower tudes have been trending a little better and the higher ones trending worse.

And as for diffusion there is a finite amount of space and little by little it is filling up with CO2. On the ground CO2 is absorbed but in the sky there is nothing to absorb it. And in the higher tudes is where the greenhouse effect has the most effect.

Jack Kerasote in his "Bloodties: Nature, Culture and the Hunt" (Random House, 1993) makes the point that pursuing game animals, elk in his instance, can reduce the fossil fuel costs of eating both store-bought meat and vegetables, when measured in kilocalories. He estimated that the 150 pounds of elk meat he used cost "...the planet seventy-nine thousand kilocalories of fossil fuel energy." He includes the energy to produce his vehicle, gas, gun, ammo, electricity for the refrigerator, etc. He compares the caloric value of 150 pounds of elk with the caloric value of eating potatoes (near his residence) and calculates costs of "...151,000 kilocalories of fossil fuel energy." He also calculates a "...calorically equivalent amount of rice and canned pinto beans...imported a thousand miles from California 477,000 kilocalories."
We should reduce the fossil fuel costs by limiting our damage when eating. I hunt and fish locally (within 200 miles) and try to keep commercial food purchases down.

Beef does not cause heart attacks, increase climate change or destroy environments; global agribusiness does.

Start here:http://www.polyfacefarms.com/
Look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Commons
and here: http://www.csuchico.edu/agr/grassfedbeef/health-benefits/

The whole point of agribusiness is to separate the farmer and the consumer from their money and keep it for themselves. The farms of our great-great grandfathers produced yellow butter, yellow cheese and golden egg yolks because there were vitamins in them.

When a cow is encouraged to go out into a field every day to find it's food it fertilizes the field it walks on. With proper crop rotation soils build carbon content and depth. Crop and grazing rotations are proven to be a low energy way to maintain soil fertility.

Beef, buffalo,sheep, goats, poultry and game can all provide food for humans off land that would otherwise be unable to grow or sustain crops. They are usefully in rotation of crops and elimination of crop wastes. The tall-grass prairie was a carbon sink until farmers started plowing it for marginal crops. If it had been left to the prairie dogs and buffalo we would harvest meat every year and it could continue as a carbon sink.

Don't blame the cow.

would have made the original headline unwieldy. :) I personally avoid eating meat. But others insist on beef in their diet. I'd just like them to commit as little harm to the environment in the process as can be managed.

(BTW: According to the EPA, pigs produce about as much methane as cows in this country. And I don't think we'll ever see free-range pigs.)

A return to natural prairie is something I'd like to see (book plug: PrairyErth, by William Least Heat-Moon); thanks for the links there. Without corn-based feedlots, a lot of the problems would go away.

Scientists estimate that feral hogs will be firmly established in all of the lower 48 within two decades. I think that's a little conservative. These hogs not only compete with native species of flora and fauna, they spread disease and do considerable damage to watersheds, water quality and water control projects (earthen dams, levees, etc.). There is little to stop them; hunters are hamstrung by legal regulations (on public property usually one cannot hunt at night and these guys go nocturnal at the first sign of day-time hunting pressure), and private "game ranches" still insist on charging folks to come and "thin" their herds lest they damage the eco-system. Here in Texas, some public lands must be culled of feral hogs by use of helicopter and automatic rifle -- a temporary solution at best. These critters cover many miles in one night, rooting and foraging the whole way. They are nature's own backhoe.

Of course they are just as likely to try and eat you and are hard as hell to hunt but plenty of pig out there.