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Livestock and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Arguments for Nuance [Article]

Livestock wrecks the climate! Meat is the problem you can easily solve at dinner - so what’s stopping you? You have heard the line so often, it now seems self-evident. We are told the Science is settled. But what if it is not? This page cuts through the half-truths and oversimplified narratives.

The food system is responsible for anything between one fifth and one third of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture and fisheries contribute about 40% of these food system emissions, while the remainder is split equally between associated land use and land-use changes (30%) and supply chain activities (30%).

Within the food system, livestock represent the largest source of agricultural emissions, impacting climate and emission budgets. On average, animal-sourced foods have a higher carbon footprint than crops, which is why dietary policies often encourage a shift toward more plant-centric diets.

However, directly comparing individual foods is simplistic and can lead to misguided interventions. Dietary change can involve both benefits and trade-offs. Carbon tunnel vision, focusing solely on carbon reduction, risks ignoring other critical factors, such as water scarcity, biodiversity loss, ecotoxicity, and social impacts, which may arise from prioritizing low-carbon foods. A more effective approach is to assess overall dietary patterns, considering their broader ecological, nutritional, and societal consequences.

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  • Global data should not be used to evaluate local contexts
  • Further mitigation is possible and ongoing
  • Restricting animal-sourced foods only leads to small gains (1-6%)
  • Dietary focus distracts from more impactful interventions
  • Nutrition should be factored in when comparing foods
  • Co-product benefits of livestock should be accounted for
  • Livestock farming also sequesters carbon
  • Rewilding comes with its own climate impact
  • Large-scale afforestation of grasslands: not a panacea
  • Methane should be evaluated differently than CO2
https://www.aleph2020.org/planet/greenhouse-gas-emissionsOpen linkView original on hackertalks.com
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jet
hackertalks.com

Adding seaweed to cattle feed could reduce methane emissions by 82% [Roque et al. 2021]

That is new to me

In the US, avoidable food waste represents 2% of the total GHG emissions [Venkat 2012]. In UK households, >10% of meat purchases that are still safe to eat are thrown away [Taylor 2020].

That's a shame! we have freezers!

The Australian red meat sector considers the possibility of achieving a carbon neutral status by 2030, based on a combination of soil carbon sequestration [see below], vegetation management (trees on farm), and mitigation strategies to decrease emissions [Mayberry et al. 2019; Davison et al. 2020; MLA 2023]

Good on ya, mate!

The carbon benefit of globalized plant-based diets would not simply eliminate the current 12% contribution of livestock greenhouse gas emissions. Increased crop production to replace lost nutrients would offset much of the gain, resulting in a net reduction of only a few percentage points.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Eliminating all U.S. livestock would cut national emissions by only 3% due to substitution effects, while raising concerns about nutrient security.

some vegetarians can have a larger footprint than omnivores when relying on high-impact produce.

heh, importing food across the globe is antithetical to sustainable systems, eat locally produced food!

Livestock serve as convenient scapegoats,

heh

Global tourism accounts for 8% of GHG emissions. The fashion industry alone generates 10% of the global GHG budget, whereas pet food accounts for 1-3% of global GHG emissions. Digitalization and data centres also carry a substantial carbon cost; ICT is projected to account for over 14% of the global emission budget by 2040, with smartphones surpassing the emissions from desktops and laptops. By 2030, communication technologies could represent 23% of the emission budget. The use of email alone can result in 0.1-0.6 t CO2-eq per person per year.

wait, what? email at 0.6t/yr ? that is alot of spam

Using environmental metrics like CO2-eq/kg to compare very different foods is misleading, as it overlooks their nutritional value. The quality of protein and the presence of essential micronutrients should always be taken into account, knowing that animal-sourced foods are crucial sources of these nutrients. Despite their lower carbon impact per kilogram of product, ultra-processed foods offer little nutrition, lead to substantial dietary emissions, and cause health problems.

they never factor in global money spent on NCDs into the plant based cost, but they should.

The MyPlanetDiet randomized controlled trial, which is the first large-scale intervention trial to test if a low-emission diet meets nutritional requirements, revealed higher inadequacies for vitamins B2, B6, B12, iodine, calcium, zinc, selenium than the control diet which contained more dairy, meat, and eggs, but less legumes, nuts, and seeds [Leonard et al. 2025].

i had no idea they already did a trial on a low-emissions diet, this isn't even 100% plant based.... yet

When also accounting for priority micronutrients (vitamins A, B9, and B12, calcium, iron, zinc), the carbon footprints of ASFs are even closer to their plant-source counterparts than what is found in protein-based comparisons, even if animal-sourced foods typically remain still somewhat higher than plant foods [Katz-Rosene et al. 2023].

ohh, i should read that paper

Unhealthy diets lead to enormous health costs as well as important carbon footprints [Eckelman & Sherman, 2016], the pharmaceutical industry being more emission-intensive than the automotive industry [Belkhir & Elmeligi 2019]. Moreover, obesity not only brings carbon costs related to disease but also a 20%-increase due to greater metabolic demands, higher intake of food, and higher mobility costs due to greater body weight [Magkos et al. 2019; Kortetmäki & Oksanen 2020].

ahh, they do speak about food and metabolic health, but don't really generalize to NCD

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aussie.zone

I recently was looking up wombats, an Australian marsupial, wondering what they eat, and found that

  1. It's mostly grass
  2. That have a digestive system much like cattle
  3. They don't make methane, their front stomach bacteria extract everything, leaving acetate

And that's the bacteria they want to use in cattle, wombat front stomach bacteria so cows can get more energy from their grass and not release methane

Kangaroos have similar guts to wombats

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jetreply
hackertalks.com

And that’s the bacteria they want to use in cattle, wombat front stomach bacteria so cows can get more energy from their grass and not release methane

really? thats fascinating... changing the rumin bacteria load.

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psudreply
aussie.zone

I really hope cows can tolerate it, tolerate the different waste product

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jetreply
hackertalks.com

i'm not convinced methane is actually a problem with ruminants, its stable with ruminate population... i.e. it isn't a net creation of greenhouse gases... if the cow doesn't eat the grass, they will ferment out in the open anyway.

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psudreply
aussie.zone

Methane is worse than CO2, so even though it's not fossil carbon and it's part of the carbon cycle it would be good to reduce it. I'd rather the cows convert grass to food without methane than have the grass rot to methane

I wonder if any cows have been inoculated with wombat fermentation bacteria yet, and whether it has worked

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psudreply
aussie.zone

And I looked it up, foreign microbes are usually rejected by the bovine stomach ecosystem, so scientists are engineering the more efficient genes into cow bacteria

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Livestock and Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Arguments for Nuance [Article] | Spyke