Yeah, or some udder thing!

Ah, okay, interesting ... thanks!

This is where I am on this topic Jean....

Funny that people who write about cows and methane gas aka cow farts as some call it, have never even had a cow and really don't know what they do!
For me, I take good care of my cows, I treat them humanly, water and feed them well. They were put on this earth to feed us and that's where I am on that subject!

For many thousands of years, herd animals ate grass and we ate the herd animals. And to think it was ruining the planet all this time!

/sarcasm

Hello Glenn. The article is essentially correct. Once upon a time I did such calculations in my career. It's really hard to nail down the carbon impact of various food sources. The reason is figuring out where to stop calculating. For instance for corn feed beef, do you count the corn they eat as "sequestered"? Of course. What about the ammonia used as a corn fertilizer? Hmm. No because ammonia doesn't have carbon. What about the natural gas used to make ammonia? Of course. Well what about the natural gas that leaks from the pipelines? Probably.... and so on. It's an endless rabbit hole.

You can tell the scientists have this problem when they say, "plants on pastures capture carbon from the air, especially when fertilized by manure." I would not count the manure as the grass is going to capture the same amount of carbon regardless of the fertilizer choice. Well you may say, if they don't use manure then they use ammonia with its impacts. I would respond that the carbon capture by the lawn is the same. So again, it's endless.

By far the quickest and most effective way to figure out our carbon impact is to just look at the cost of an item. A good rule of thumb is that things that cost more take more human effort and resources and have a higher carbon impact. Sure there are some exceptions like mining diamonds and making steel but these are big large choices and easy to identify. Oddly, mining diamonds has a much lower carbon impact per dollar as the high cost is due to legal rights and a lack of competition and not how much energy and human effort it takes to get a diamond. Making steal specifically uses lots and lots of carbon so it's at the other end of the carbon per dollar spectrum.

So in the end, grass feed beef is more expensive so it has (with confidence) a higher carbon impact.

I get it now. It's a convoluted argument meant to confuse, then convince. I don't bite.

First, it's about methane from cattle, right? That's where the goal posts are initially - blame the cattle for methane, greenhouse effect, global warming, etc. Then, it's about deforestation, transform forests into grain-crop land for cattle - less forest for carbon capture, more carbon released from deforestation directly, greenhouse effect, global warming, etc. Now here's the point where the goal posts are moved.

In comes Allan Savory and his crazy idea to use more cattle to restore desert land, to re-greenify land that once turned from vast green pastures into equally vast deserts. Don't see it? Look, Allan is talking about transforming land that can only be used for grazing, not agriculture, not forests, just grazing - and that used to be grazing land, turned into desert. But more than that, he also shows large trees can grow back on that land, and many trees make a forest. And he shows agriculture benefits directly from planned grazing of large herds. And he shows that cattle doesn't need to be fed while they graze on that land, so no extra grain crops - therefore land area - needed for that. So it's more than re-greenification of desertified land, it's also reforestation of deforested land and improvement of existing crop land and increase in overall land available for agriculture.

But now the FCRN only talks about the methane aspect of Savory's crap - i.e. let's do the methane math.

The report is meant as a rebut of Allan's stuff, but in fact he's only a red herring cuz everything else besides methane is simply ignored, once the goal posts have been moved from all that stuff to Allan's work. Then, he's converted into a lamb for the slaughter, or a witch as in witch hunt - let's blame Allan for all that methane - as if the rebut was successful. Maybe even as if Allan was to blame in the first place cuz he's restoring land, and doing so in the only possible way is more harmful than letting that land die, as if wild flourishing land was to blame.

Maybe the methane math is true, I dunno but I doubt it. Maybe Allan's been lying to us about the impressive results he got, but I doubt that too. Between the two, the Law of Likelihood favors Allan in my eyes.

Methane has a much higher impact than carbon dioxide which is why so many take time to study methane production as a separate topic.

Problem is the cattle make (probably) just as much methane regardless of corn or grass fed. *

The real impact of methane from beaf production is through ammonia based fertilizers and all the externalities of making those.

* Here's an example of the rabbit hole.... Do grass feed cows require more farmers to tend? If so do we add the carbon impact of those extra farmers?

Right, but then focusing on methane - on the potential effect on climate - is the wrong factor to focus on. The correct focus is the land itself. That's because the effect on climate and climate itself are merely intermediates.

Also, I use boolean logic and truth value to look at the problem, not math. For example, which is more likely, that we got perfect climate and nothing to eat, or perfect climate and plenty to eat? We could call this the Gaia principle, where Gaia provides for all, but only if it remains Gaia, and this can only happen if all are provided for. It's a loop, not end-points.

Also, it's not a closed system where only events on the planet have any effect on the planet. There's the sun, the single most powerful entity (or factor) not on the planet. There's cosmic rays, the second most powerful entity (or factor) not on the planet. Combine the two, nothing on the planet can beat that, or more to the point, nothing on the planet can have any effect stronger than that either way for better or worse. Indeed, it's thought that there's a very strong correlation between cosmic rays, solar wind, Earth magnetic field, cloud cover, and Earth climate especially land/surface temperature where it matters most for our purpose. It's even possible that this correlation is an a priori to the whole problem - it starts with cosmic rays, ends up with greenhouse gases, hence the other correlation between greenhouse gases and climate. We can even see this with other planets where there's extreme greenhouse effects like Venus for example, where the impetus isn't greenhouse gases, but the planet's position closer to the sun.

Taubes often explains how obesity is not a cause of the diseases associated with it, it's a parallel effect of the same cause. Well, maybe that's what's happening with climate too - parallel effects of the same cause. Of course, we can't blame that for the fossil fuels we dig up, cuz we dig them up, ya? We can't blame that for CAFOS cuz that's also our own doing. But then we're just a speck compared to the sun and cosmic rays.

Since we're just specks in the grand scheme of things, maybe we should focus on our own state of being instead of the planet's. So, eat meat or not, choose according to what's best for you directly. Based on that alone, it's much more likely that meat raised on pasture and grassland is just the way to go. So even here, based on the same boolean logic and truth value I use to look at the problem but from a different angle, I end up with the same solution.

I'm just speaking to grass vs. corn fed cows.

Cows may come and cows may go, but the bull goes on forever.

Are cows still sacred in India?

One thing I've learned is that things are a lot different on the ground in reality than they are on paper in the abstract.

Cow poop actually fertilized the pastures, it also feeds coyotes, wolves, fox, bobcats, cougars, raccoons, opossums etc... so it disappears quickly..

Carbon Dioxide is what plants and trees consume.

It's Carbon Monoxide you need to worry about and cows don't produce that.

~also support your local farmer and rancher because they are the 1% who feed the world.

The carbon came out of the atmosphere and made grass and when the grass died, the carbon went back to the atmosphere.

or

The carbon came out of the atmosphere and made grass and fed the cows and when the cows pooped, the carbon went back to the atmosphere.

or

The carbon came out of the atmosphere and made grass and fed the cows and when the cows died, the carbon went back to the atmosphere.

or

The carbon came out of the atmosphere and made grass and fed the cows then fed the coyotes and when the coyotes died, the carbon went back to the atmosphere.

so....

The carbon came out of the atmosphere and made grass and fed X then fed Y then fed Z and when Z died, the carbon went back to the atmosphere.

That's the carbon cycle. Figuring out where the carbon goes while it's not in the atmosphere is an endless trail. It starts with the extraction of fossil fuels. It ends with sequestration back to the ground. That's what's important.

I see it as more vegan BS. Which is virtually unlimited.

I agree!