Kill (but don't eat) a Cow and Save the Planet

[David Blanchard]

Although health care and Afghanistan seem to be dominating the news lately, there is some fascinating, if underreported, news concerning the environment lately. For instance, did you know that the single best thing you can do to prevent the spread of global warming is to stop eating meat and become a vegetarian?

Since the methane gases emitted by livestock is largely responsible for global warming, obviously the answer isn't merely to stop eating these animals, but rather to eat every last one of them, and not allow them to reproduce. In other words, the complete eradication of cows and pigs from the planet will eventually save the planet. Of course, all those whose lives depend on these animals might suffer a bit (farmers, dairy products, restaurants, leather goods, ranchers, not to mention those whose primary diet is in fact meat), but if Lord Stern (who is neither an environmental scientist nor a licensed dietitian but is, in fact, an economist) is correct, going without pizza, ice cream and meatball subs is a small price to pay to ensure the sustainability of Planet Earth.

While you, errrrr, digest that news, on the opposite side of the political spectrum comes the revelation that we have the ability to stop global warming, right here and now, and it won't involve much more than a really big helium balloon, a few miles of hose and a supply of sulfur dioxide. The basic premise, according to the authors of the new book, SuperFreakonomics, is that a single volcano erupting sulfuric ash into the air back in the early 1990s resulted in the entire planet's temperature dropping one full degree. So if we recreate that type of activity, circumventing the whole messy lava flow business and going straight into the clouds with the sulfur dioxide, we can similarly reduce the planet's temperature.

The good news, say the folks who dreamed up this idea, is that the "seeding the clouds" idea would cost only a few hundred million dollars, rather than the trillion dollars per year that a full-scale "reinvention of the way we live" plan advocated by those in the global warming-prevention business. The bad news is that this idea sounds a little too much like the scheme of Hugo Drax in the James Bond film "Moonraker" to make me feel like this project wouldn't go horribly wrong. But then again, even if it does fail, we'll still have our hamburgers cooking on the grill, so the sulfur dioxide plan at least has that going for it.

[CowEater]

100% pure stupidity! I'll keep my burgers, you keep your stupid ideology, man has survived on this planet for millenia thanks to meat consumption. I guess im just a caveman living in a modern society...lol oh well.

[wesdavidson]

Time to look back to Henry Ford. The originator of the Model T was a farmer before he ran away to play with steam threshing engines and power generators.
Later on he started a movement toward "grassland farming". Ford published a manual for several years about how to farm based on grass. Ford was of the opinion that much of the profit of farming was unnecessarily lost when shelled grain was fed to livestock, he proposed that grass and forage be aggressively farmed and then let the animals do the harvesting. Many, if not most, of these methane studies assume that the majority of feed used for beef is harvested and processed, not from pasture and range. They also assume that most pasture and range is readily convertible to crops for human consumption, wrong again.
Kind of an interesting point, well bred Hereford and Angus cattle, the famous beef breeds of Britain, will fatten and finish on grass and hay almost as well as on grain. Also the gut bacteria that flourish in a grass fed steer are different than with a grain fed animal, and are different in an animal grazing succulent eastern grass than drier western grass. Much less methane with grass, especially dry grass or grass hay.
The other point is, are we speaking of eastern US or western US cattle? Or old dairy cattle? a significant number of cattle processed in the US never hit the feedlot, they are dairy cattle sold from the dairies when their production drops off, they go straight from dairy to auction to packing plant with no feedlot fattening in between. This is your typical hamburger cow, they were bred and raised for the dairy farm, the methane increment incidental to the production of beef is quite small. The beef cattle of the warm and humid east generally have a metabolism that seems to require more and "hotter" feed to finish out than the cattle raised on the drier and colder western range. Well bred western cattle raised on grass hay and natural range forage to within a few pounds of desired beef weight will usually finish out to choice with just a few weeks hitting a feedlot. And if I may say so, many times are delicious even without a feed lot finish. Many times cattle are the only practical means of harvesting the vegetation on the majority of western US lands, easily eroded midwest loess and marginal southern pastures. They have the distinct advantage as well of being able to graze on completely native vegetation, thus reducing or eliminating the need to modify the landscape. This grazing gives them a lot of exercise as well, the average range animal walks a several miles a day to reach water, grass and the salt block stations. What about wildlife? the carrying capacity of most of these lands is determined by winter browse forage (the stuff that sticks out of the snow), not summer grass. Grazing can keep grass stressed, allowing browse plants to flourish. Methane? here is what many researchers miss, the grass will grow, die, and be decomposed anyway. It matters little at all whether the decomposing is in a cows stomach or on top of the soil. The end effect and much of the bacteria, is the same.
What does this have to do with manufacturing? Besides the basic harvest of natural resources- sun, rain and minerals and processing them into Big Macs? -Just ask the engineers and workers at John Deere or Cat. The farm market is one of the few almost bright spots in the US economy. US farmers replace a significant percentage of the their equipment every few years. The labor (and now fuel) component of agricultural production declines by about half every 20 years, it takes steel to replace the men that grow the crops. US manufacturing still provides the bulk of the equipment on US farms.
So enjoy your hamburgers, with plenty of onion and tomatoes. They are less harmful than these guys think.