Do Cows or Cars Hurt the Planet More?
EPA and UN eclipse logic with methane gaslighting.
(Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The slander of cows for their existential threat to humanity has focused on methane emissions, which allegedly warm the planet unsustainably. This dubious claim is premised on the sketchy logic that methane production negates any beneficial bovine ecological impacts (especially of urine and manure) and ignores the effects on the environment and food system if cows were to be eliminated. Recent claims that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from cattle and other livestock are “more potent” than that of cars display another climate cult sleight of hand, which turns a blind eye to toxic industrial pollution that is far more harmful than carbon dioxide or methane.
Carbon vs Methane
The serpentine path to demonizing cows as more environmentally harmful than muscle cars is charted using the special GHG calculus of weighted impacts of carbon dioxide and methane. According to the EPA, transportation generates some 35% of US carbon dioxide emissions, constituting 80% of total US GHG emissions. But methane, which comprises 11.1% of these emissions, is alleged to be more potent, and the EPA identifies livestock as the nation’s largest producer thereof: Ergo, cows are “worse” than cars.
In vilifying bovines, the EPA blames the animals’ biology for what is unnaturally created by the industrial management practices used to house and feed them. Cows rotationally grazed on well-managed pastures prevent erosion by building soils, feeding the microbiome, and increasing water retention – through manure, urine, and grazing activity that nurture plant growth and carbon sequestration. All these activities stimulate microbial life, sequestering carbon, nitrogen, and methane (more than cows emit via burping). Cows are much more than their methane footprint!
This methane metric is demonstrated at the EPA’s website:
“Domestic livestock such as cattle, swine, sheep, and goats produce CH4 as part of their normal digestive process. Also, when animal manure is stored or managed in lagoons or holding tanks, CH4 is produced. Because humans raise these animals for food and other products, the emissions are considered human-related. The Agriculture sector is the largest source of CH4 emissions in the United States.”
The operative phrase “when animal manure is stored or managed in lagoons or holding tanks” reveals that the EPA counts all bovines as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) cows. Humans who regeneratively “raise these animals for food and other products” sequester carbon year-round anthropogenically. It is industrial agriculture that has created artificial lagoons and polluting tanks, not cows grazing as they have for eons without blowing up the universe with a flatulence-fired heatwave.
Manure Deniers
The EPA’s methane metric as applied to livestock exposes another gross flaw in its climate calculus: If cows – whether CAFO or naturally pastured – are eliminated from the US food chain, increased synthetic fertilizer production will be required to replace the manure lost in the bovine-phobic frenzy to eradicate cow burps and flatulence. Synthetic fertilizers damage rather than nurture soil microbes, increase erosion and water loss, and generate GHG nitrous oxide in manufacture. EPA reports:
“Nitrous oxide molecules stay in the atmosphere for an average of 121 years before being removed by a sink or destroyed through chemical reactions. The impact of 1 pound of N2O on warming the atmosphere is 265 times that of 1 pound of carbon dioxide.”
Using their sad-sack logic, the EPA and the manure deniers claim cows are “worse than cars” because methane is worse than carbon dioxide, so cows must be replaced with synthetic fertilizers that destroy soils and emit nitrous oxide, which is far more harmful than methane or carbon. This dismisses the animals’ lost milk and meat, converted from God’s solar panels (renewable energy called “grass”) into healthy food and rural economic growth.
Cows vs Cars
Though all cows are basically the same biological creatures, their management determines whether they are a net benefit or a detriment to the ecosystem. Similarly, cars share many of the same basic attributes: EVs and gas-powered vehicles all require coal-fired steel plants, mining, paints, plastics, chemicals, rubbers, and smelting of various metals that are exempted from the carbon-centric rubric of the climate cult, while the forever chemicals they generate escape into the water and air Americans drink and breathe. EVs and gas-powered cars all end up together in junkyards and landfills.
Yet like CAFO versus rotationally grazed bovines, electric or hybrid cars and their combustion-powered cousins are very different environmental animals: Tires on EVs wear 30% faster than gas-powered cars, their massive batteries pose far greater environmental problems in mining and disposal than their 12-volt forebears, and they burn fossil fuels through the electric grid rather than directly from a service station. The environmental movement and EPA do not categorize EVs and gas-powered cars as equals in their carbon-focused diktats but as opposites in the battle against climate change. Traditionally, husbanded beef and dairy cows are far superior at carbon sequestration than a $70,000 government-subsidized EV or solar panel will ever be. They sequester carbon and feed the soil throughout their lives and again at death – unlike the “renewable” industrial fabrications that will have to be landfilled and replaced with yet more toxic manufacturing.
Cows are not worse for the planet than cars. What is dangerous for the planet is an ideology that would replace natural processes like grass-blade photosynthesis with solar panels, animal meat with synthetic lab goo, and human choice with carbon-obsessed totalitarianism. And in the end, people can’t eat cars.
(Originally published at Liberty Nation.)
They also totally ignore all of the wild ruminates that exist as if they do no produce methane as well.
Great thesis! I wholeheartedly agree. A little more ammo for your argument:
1.
Check out Dale Strickler’s “Managing Pasture” - a great encyclopedia of nutrition management and rotational grazing strategies. He points out that cows on pasture produce 16 times less CH4 (methane) per acre than rice cultivation. I don’t have the information to compare calorie to calorie or unit of protein produced per methane unit, but if we are worried about methane and nutrition, rice and not pasture raised cows are the first crop that should go. (Besides water usage and water quality concerns from intensive rice cultivation).
2.
Their concern about bovine CH4 production is only tied to CAFOs, which you point out, but it isn’t just the manure management that is the problem, but also the fact that cows fed grain produce much much more methane than grass fed cows. The principal pathway for methane production from cattle is not the rear end but the front end. Burping and not farting. Cattle fed corn and soy have indigestion because their rumen microbiome was built by the creator to process grass and not grain. This methane burping is actually indicative of inefficiencies in our subsidized grain model- the cattle are losing out on nutrients from their feed that is lost through burping. Properly managed pasture raised ruminants will not have this indigestion, and there are certain probiotics that can reduce methane burping further, even on pasture, allowing greater feed conversion.
3.
Embedded carbon in EVs. The amount of diesel needed to produce a battery is mind boggling. Moving all of the earth through a mining process is incredibly energy inefficient, and none of that equipment runs on anything except for diesel. Ditto for renewables.
4.
Carbon is not the enemy we think it is. My hypothesis is that urban heat island effect and disruption of small water cycle through tillage ag production and urbanization explain virtually all of the “symptoms” attributed to CO2. We know that there is an albido effect from CO2, but we do not have definitive evidence tying that to warming recorded temps or weather variance. When you go from your farm into a city you notice temp changes by 5-10 degrees warmer. Rainfall patterns in the middle part of the country are heavily influenced by there not being year round green cover on millions of tilled acres.
When you look at the totality, it is a singular gov policy driving all of these inefficiencies in the market: grain subsidies. If these were removed the CAFO system loses its business model, Cargill is neutered at their demonic base, and cows or sheep on pasture become the most cost effective meat production model (even cheaper than chicken). Iowa soils should be used for perennial pasture to produce high quality meat instead of mined of fertility to produce poor quality animal feed. Ending this policy would change our entire country.