Why we can’t be kind to animals and combat global warming at the same time?
Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed cows. Pastured organic chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming. It requires 2 to 20 acres to raise a cow on grass. If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs). A tract of land just larger than France has been carved out of the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle. Nothing about this is sustainable.
More on this issue by James McWilliams in the NYT.
Ergo population control.
I think I am going to go have a steak.
Factory farming leads to huge amounts of methan production, like it or not.
Environmentalists face numerous dilemmas – this is just one of them.
10 acres a cow? really? That’s assuming some crappy pasture. Try 2. If you augmented their diet with grain without resorting to CAFO-style feedlot operations, that can be shrunk further.
Then there’s this paragraph:
Aren’t we doing the exact same thing with plants? Isn’t this an argument for the eradication of humans because we interrupt the nutrient cycle period no matter what we eat? Unless we start fertilizing with human feces and dead bodies, this is the case no matter what you eat. He even acknowledges the stupidity of the paragraph within the paragraph?
This guy doesn’t know crap about farming. He’s absorbed some pro-CAFO statistics (10 acres, really?) and turned them into a poorly-researched and absurd argument against humans eating meat.