There is a certain amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and a certain amount of carbon in the ground.
When you burn oil, you take carbon from the ground and introduce it into the atmosphere. This increases the total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere.
When you grow plants, you take carbon out of the atmosphere. When you eat it, you release it back into the atmosphere. The total amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere does not change.
Grass grows more vigorously when regularly pruned, for example by a grazing animal. Farms also make a point of planting thing which grow quickly and efficiently. Thus it's reasonable to expect that farming could increase the rate of carbon turnover in the atmosphere, which would create the appearance of increased carbon emissions without a corresponding increase in the amount of carbon resident in the atmosphere.
In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged. But the cow itself only causes a short lived, fixed increase in atmospheric methane and an increased rate of carbon turnover.
Grass grows more vigorously but also consumes more nutrients when regularly pruned, other plants also "grow more vigorously" e.g get replanted when harvested by humans. This does not seem unique to grass or animal feeding.
Even if it was, grass-fed beef is about 1% of the supply in the US. It has also been shown that grass-fed beef on average causes more environmental degradation than conventionally fed beef, due to the deforestation required to create grazing areas
Buffalo is a very obvious harm reduction option that would create less harmful externalities but it’s not at all suggested, only lab grown meats and removing all meats from diet.
I never claimed the phenomena was unique to this situation - it's a general phenomena.
Deforestation is a real problem. How do you address this from a policy perspective? If you ban beef, that is only a temporary band-aid on the real problem of deforestation, which both fails to address deforestation properly, and which prevents beneficial uses of livestock such as for reuse of food waste products, grazing of natural grasslands, production of natural fertilizer, etc.
It's a concern, but fortunately if cattle population stays constant, their portion of the atmospheric resident methane will also remain constant, because methane degradation will keep pace with emissions.
Compare this to cars. Even if the number of cars remains constant, their contribution to the C02 pool grows every day.
So we should avoid increasing cattle population 100x, but we wouldn't want to do that anyway because we'd have nowhere to put them, and I certainly wouldn't support deforestation.
World population is largely a strayman, it's mostly about rising standards of living. Animal consumption per capita increases drastically as poverty dissipates, and sharply declines as people get educated about health and the environment. It's a race between those two pressures that determines the cattle population.
Projections are that it will increase very, very drastically as middle eastern and african countries soon escape the poverty line
> In practice, farms regularly use synthetic fertilizers. They might cut down trees to clear fields for animals. They use heavy, oil burning equipment. These, and many other practices, actually increase atmospheric carbon, and for that reason should be discouraged.
I cannot say anything wherever cows really are inconsequential wrt the warming effect, but it definitely goes against what's generally said by climate scientists.
I suppose you could grasp at that straw, but the reality is that grain farms always use diesel and electricity, not just "heavy, oil burning equipment", no matter how much you might think they don't, and that's multiplied by a factor of 10 when you feed that grain to a cow.
You're clearly misunderstanding what I wrote, which is likely because of my poor phrasing.
To phrase it differently:
Climate scientists generally think that cows are an issue, but I do not have the qualification to judge wherever Dojis claim (that they don't matter) has any truth to it, as I'm not informed enough to form an opinion on the matter.
Doji did not claim that modern agriculture isn't harmful, they just addressed cows specifically.
This implies that the land used to grow cow feed couldn't be used to instead grow human-consumable crops or left fallow as a carbon sink. I'm not aware of any studies showing that.
You make a strong argument. I think this is a case where we'll find the global optimum somewhere in the middle.
Deforesting the amazon to grow corn for cows is something I'm sure we can all agree is bad.
Should we use livestock to eat cover crops and waste products like corn husks and cobs? This way we reuse waste and produce high quality protein to supplement our diets.
Should we graze cattle on natural grasslands like the great plains? Especially in rotation with human foods, like the cover crops mentioned before?
I'm pretty sure that feedlot studies say that the usual situation in the US is that 1/2 of beef calories come from a 10:1 ratio of human edible calories.
So sure, go for 100%-grass-and-not-human-edible-food-fed beef, but that's not the current system.
A common misconception which I frequently see when this topic arises is the failure to distinguish carbon cycles and one-way carbon emission.
You exhale carbon dioxide. However, this carbon dioxide comes from the carbon in the food you eat, and the food you eat obtained it from the atmosphere. Thus, it's a cycle. As a system (ignoring food transportation, deforestation, etc.) it's effectively carbon neutral.
By contrast, when we dig up oil and burn it, there is no cycle. It's a one way street.
Methane production from cattle is slightly more complicated instance of a carbon cycle. The cows produce methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. However, it degrades in the atmosphere into C02. Since this C02 was obtained from the food the cattle ate, this is another cycle.
Since the methane released from cattle is continually degrading, it does not accumulate. The total amount of bovine methane resident in the atmosphere is ultimately a function of herd size, or perhaps more accurately quantity of feed consumed.
You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time. Additionally our planet was once host to wild ruminants like Buffalo which no longer exist in large numbers. As a result I would be very surprised to learn that bovine methane production is completely out of historical context.
As a result I see this as a topic which generally serves to distract from the root cause and real problem associated with climate change - fossil fuel usage.
The start of the carbon cycle is one which I have found to be very unpopular to discuss, and it has a direct connection to methane in the atmosphere. Artificial fertilizers is produce through a process which takes in natural gas as its primary ingredient. The process is also a major source for methane leaks, with a large variance in claimed contribution for the global methane pollution.
For a large portion of the global Methane pollution from cattle, the carbon cycle started out with natural gas being used to produce artificial fertilizer. If we wanted to address methane pollution it would make sense to start there in order to address both leaks and the introduction of carbon into the system, but this is where politics comes in. Artificial fertilizer is not just the building block for most cattle farmers, it is also the building block for most meat alternatives and the so called "renewable and carbon free" biomass industry.
On my free time I often spend time diving in the Baltic sea, and every time I go below the surface I see the effect that artificial fertilizer has. The excess nutrient is killing the whole area, which in turn release more methane from the ocean bottom. Currently the area is around of 60,000 km2, but the effect can easily be seen in nearby "healthy" areas.
It will be fairly straightforward to decarbonize fertilizer production, using electrolyzed hydrogen rather than natural gas. As the industry matures, it's likely to be even cheaper than naturals gas derived ammonia. Here's a pilot project in Spain, for example:
However, misapplication of fertilizer, and the resulting destruction of aquatic ecosystems, will take other fixes, and strong penalties on farmers that do this sort of damage.
You are right, in the longer term, but hydrogen from electrolysis comes at a levelised cost approximately four times grey hydrogen. Of course that is comparing apples and oranges a bit (the grey hydrogen externalises some of its costs) but I think it is still over double as expensive as blue hydrogen. I would be delighted if electrolysis becomes two to four times cheaper than it is today but for a relatively mature chemical process I'm just not sure I see it happening in the next couple of decades.
This is why the Carbon and other externalities taxes always have to come as soon as possible. They are not just good ideas in themselves, but the resulting price corrections will make further investigation and planning easier.
No only is trying to do all subsidy non tax embarrassingly weak politics, it's a stupid game of whac-a-mole a market can just route around.
That fertilizer accounts for about 2% of global carbon output, but it does seem on track to be replaced with ammonia made from green hydrogen rather than steam reformed from fossil gas.
Probably won't help with runoff issues though, as it'll be chemically identical, just with a lower carbon footprint.
> Since the methane released from cattle is continually degrading, it does not accumulate.
That's like saying lakes are impossible because of rivers.
If you look at historical methane concentrations in our atmosphere, they are already almost 3x of pre-industrial levels, and over 3x of mean historical levels over the past ~1 million years [1]
Interestingly only about 1/4 of today's emissions are directly caused by all agriculture according to NASA[0]. A decent chuck of modern emissions are caused by other human activities.
> Across the study years, wetlands contributed 30 percent of global methane emissions, with oil, gas, and coal activities accounting for 20 percent. Agriculture, including enteric fermentation and manure management, made up 24 percent of emissions, and landfills comprised 11 percent. Sixty-four percent of emissions came from tropical regions of South America, Asia, and Africa, with temperate regions accounting for 32 percent and the Arctic contributing 4 percent.
I suspect that methane emission levels from energy industry are likely downplaying and underestimating total methane emissions from fracking and similar activities because they have a strong financial/political interest in doing so.
The wikipedia page you link to clearly shows that enteric fermentation accounts for 16% vs Coal and Oil at 19%. There is also another 36% anthropogenically produced methane in that chart so I think that easily accounts for the 3x increase without pinning it on cows. Interestingly rice cultivation contributes a whopping 12%.
Not really, we're trying to do some important math to figure out how to balance a carbon budget. We need to know what options are on the table and how much each of them contribute. It's the same as balancing a household budget, you don't just flail wildly about slashing costs and enduring privation. You reduce expenditures in areas where they are unnecessary and try to cause the least disruption to your life.
I get what you are trying to say, but we don't have a carbon budget, nor a methane budget. Maybe attitudes need to shift gradually to make other people feel more comfortable, but the fact is that we need to make radical changes to all areas of human existence in order to deal properly with the magnitude of the crisis. It seems like...smart...to be rational, and weigh costs and impact and supposedly choose the smartest strategy and all, but it's mostly just a vehicle for one sector to shift the blame on another and try to make it someone else's problem. I know you specifically aren't doing that, but the end result is that nothing will ever get done, as we will be in analysis paralysis even as it all comes unraveled.
Natural CO2 sinks that absorb carbon from volcanos exist. As such we can have some net human CO2 production without making things worse than they are today.
An 80% reduction in CO2 isn’t quite enough, but it would avert most issues for a long time. More importantly doing something is much more productive than saying we need to change everything on day one which just promotes paralysis.
The obvious step one is to get cars and electricity to ~zero. That’s achievable in 20 years especially when you consider gas stations closing are going to make ICE engines unappealing.
Gas stations are closing because ICE engines are getting more efficient and now have a lot more range. I think this is going to make them more appealing in the short term.
FWIW, IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) reports gather statistics and best practice across science and engineering and produce reports at multiple levels to detail pertinent statistics on this area.
Is that from cow herd size increases or other causes? OP’s point was that with q fixed herd size the amount of methane accumulating in an atmosphere is stable.
> Lakes don’t grow and grow and consume the world.
No, they don't usually grow forever, that's true. But floods happen, and that's bad. Last time methane was this high it was millions of years ago, and Earth had no ice caps. We have already flooded the atmosphere with methane, and the consequences of this will take decades, if not centuries, to play out. Contrary to our current instant-gratification dopamine loops of today, the lag between cause and effect isn't two damn seconds or even one frickin year. So stay tuned.
Was it all from agriculture? We don't know. There's plenty of methane coming from fossil fuel production. Just go read the Wikipedia article I linked. We do know that we are getting close to setting off some very bad feedback loops, as arctic permafrost is starting to thaw, and it's going to produce gobs of methane.
The problem is the millions to billions of people who are living in areas that will become virtually uninhabitable due to temperature changes and sea level rise. The first way climate change will seriously negatively impact humanity is through geopolitical conflict and a massive refugee crisis.
Change causes extinctions. If the temperature suddenly swings down, things die. If it subsequently swings back up, do they come back? No! More things die.
If methane is only 3x larger than before, that suggests animal husbandry is only a small part of the increase.
The first two categories are almost entirely new. Especially given human population is way bigger than it was in past ages, so past landfills likely weren’t so large.
This is surprising to me as I has figured ruminants caused more of an increase. If we could cut their emissions by 80% with seaweed this analysis suggests their overall contribution would be lower than it historically was.
Let's not forget that all the grain those cattle are eating were grown in nitrogen fixed soil produced via fossil fuels. Nor that roughly 40% of the world's crops are used to feed cattle. Or the other detrimental environmental effects to the land such as feedlot runoff that pollute streams and rivers. The environmental impact of raising cattle is by no means something we should ignore.
I agree we should not ignore detrimental environmental effects. However we should strive for a nuanced view which attempts to determine root causes.
The root cause of artificial fertilizers is fossil fuels.
The root cause of feedlot runoff is... feedlots? I'm not sure if there's something more fundamental at play here. I'd like to see a fundamental analysis of this.
Cattle feed is generally not human edible, that's the beauty of ruminant animals. Even conventionally raised cattle usually grow up on grass, only to be finished on grain. Granted as cattle are slaughtered at younger and younger ages, the grain finishing portion is consuming a larger percentage of their overall lifetime feed stuff. But even so the grain they're eating wasn't going to just end up on your dinner plate. They eat the husk and all. And besides this is only bad insofar as growing food in general is bad, so that's the root cause.
You missed deforestation, which we discussed elsewhere in the comments. I recommend to check it out.
It's all hands on deck dude. Do you think we have the luxury to focus on just the worst offender? People (society) can work on more than one problem at-a-time, it's not a "distraction" it's doing anything and everything we can to prevent extinction of our species. Meat consumption and the environmental damage caused by it's infrastructure AND fossil fuel usage need to be addressed, not one or the other.
One alternative would be accepting that the climate has always changed, regularly dramatically so, and focus on adapting to survive the inevitable.
It sucks, but it is what it is, and it's not going anywhere.
The environmental movement was fully compromised a long time ago, it has absolutely nothing to do with the environment anymore, it's all about profit and shame.
The geological record is quite clear that the climate has never changed like this without extinction events that kill 75% of all life on earth. Personally, I don't like those odds, especially since we have an alternative (keep the climate from changing). Furthermore, the climate has never changed anywhere near this quickly before. Natural warming and cooling happens over 100s of thousands of years, not a lifetime. This is unprecedented and preventable.
My point exactly, so we're better of figuring out how to survive it asap.
Remains to be proven, it's never a linear process, once certain critical masses are reached it will happen more or less instantly. We're about due for an ice age, and from what I understand this is possibly how they start.
> Additionally our planet was once host to wild ruminants like Buffalo
Not at anywhere near the density you find in modern agriculture. Domesticated cattle and pigs alone are 15x the biomass of all wild mammals combined. Wild ruminants are somewhat insignificant compared to that.
This article measures current biomass distribution. Given that Bison herds in North America has reduced from 60 million to 30 thousand, and I suspect other species have seen similar changes, I'm not surprised by the result.
Also as a point of nuance, I'd like to say that I'm sure we have actually increased biomass density. If we had not, our farms wouldn't be doing their jobs very well. I'm not trying to say no increase has occurred, simply that it is less than one might expect. Unfortunately I don't have exact numbers to back this up though. I wasn't planning on writing all this when I woke up today, and it's admittedly not my field. Here's to hoping more informed people take over!
Bison have never roamed outside of North America, so let’s look at local cattle numbers instead of worldwide populations if we want to compare.
There are 94.4 million cattle in the United States and around 4.5 million in Canada according to a quick web search.
A full grown Bison weighs 1600kg, and the average weight of a steer at slaughter is 600kg or so.
There was likely a dip between the virtual wiping out of Bison in the 19th century and the re-establishment of large herds of ruminants across the Great Plains via ranching, but in terms of biomass I think we can at least say that they are in the same ballpark.
(this puts aside the extirpation of antelope and deer species from large areas of their previous ranges. There were for instance 10 million elk in North America prior to European contact compared to 1 million today at 400-500kg fully grown).
(edit: according to statista your headline number of 1.5 billion is also off: “ The global cattle population amounted to about 989.03 million head in 2019, down from over one billion cattle in 2014.” — https://www.statista.com/statistics/263979/global-cattle-pop... )
> I'd like to say that I'm sure we have actually increased biomass density. If we had not, our farms wouldn't be doing their jobs very well.
As you stated, this doesn’t need to be the case since a lot productivity gains come down to more frequent harvesting. The natural lifespan (not average due to low survival rates in the first year) of a Bison can be up to 18-20 years, while a typical beef cow is slaughtered at 18 months. Ruffed grouse have an average lifespan of 1.5 years or so, but can make it up to 7 years or more. Chickens are typically slaughtered at 8 weeks.
As for crops, large swathes of them replaced forest which were larger pools of biomass that still cycled into the atmosphere through decay and fire.
> You exhale carbon dioxide. However, this carbon dioxide comes from the carbon in the food you eat, and the food you eat obtained it from the atmosphere. Thus, it's a cycle. As a system (ignoring food transportation, deforestation, etc.) it's effectively carbon neutral.
All of modern agriculture and food science has been about turning inedible calories into edible ones (think: cooking meat with wood, baking bread). There is almost no food you eat that isn't touched by fossil fuels at some point in the process.
The cows are eating grain raised using anhydrous ammonia (made with natural gas) and processed using diesel/gas/electricity to be edible before the cow ever sees it. That cow is 'eating' all of those fossil fuels. Only silvopasture cows wouldn't be, but have methane emissions from those cows been studied?
The Haber process which you mentioned is really key here. It uses a lot of natural gas - more interesting than cow methane might be using nitrogen fixing bacteria or crop rotation (legumes) to reduce it's usage.
From what I've read, you can't grow enough legumes to fix the needed amount of nitrogen for high intensity agriculture. The Haber process sustains a sizable fraction of the world's animal population.
Human urine would be a sufficient source of nitrogen but it ends up in sewage nitrification-denitrification reactors that eventually turn most of the urea back into nitrogen gas so that the effluent can be safely discharged into water bodies.
It’s kind of irrelevant whether or not a cow is carbon neutral by some definition. The point is that greenhouse gas emissions are effectively reduced using this feed. Sure, it isn’t as great as getting rid of all fossil fuels, but it’s something relatively easy we could do.
Atmospheric forcing doesn't distinguish between "natural" and "unnatural" causes. Let's grant that methanogenesis from ruminant bellies has been a constant throughout history (unlikely, but as we'll see, irrelevant): that methane contributes a certain amount to the greenhouse effect.
That amount is non-trivial, because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and there are a lot of cattle out there. It does break down, but more is constantly being emitted: all of this is factored in to calculations giving cattle's contribution to warming.
A cheap mitigation which eliminates this source of methane is great news, because it reduces the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere: which is the only thing we care about, certainly not whether that gas is au naturale.
Being steady state is what matters about the boivne methane production, rather than if it's natural.
Our problem isn't the steady state processes, it's the growth ones, and we won't be able to solve our growth problems by reducing the steady state ones.
It's a simple "shut up and calculate" situation, any reduction of greenhouse gasses is equally to be esteemed in proportion to the amount of forcing effect it eliminates from the atmosphere.
It's true that removing all "natural" emissions is both impractical and insufficient (I don't intend to stop exhaling!), but reduction is reduction, full stop.
Besides which, what you said is wrong on the face of it: turning the year-over-year growth in carbon emissions into a plateau is woefully insufficient to mitigate warming. Besides, we're well on track to achieve it, though some of that is due to the pandemic. We have to reduce emissions substantially below current levels, and find a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere faster than natural processes will do it for us.
In no conceivable way is drastically reducing bovine methane anything but assistance in that goal.
> You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time. Additionally our planet was once host to wild ruminants like Buffalo which no longer exist in large numbers. As a result I would be very surprised to learn that bovine methane production is completely out of historical context.
I think historical context is useful information, but just because it was fine at some point in the past does not mean it is fine in the current context. There are new sources of greenhouse gases and, as the dominant species, we have to make decisions about which ones are most important to us and make trade offs. Reducing the emissions from farmed biomass means we have to make less of a tradeoff.
> You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time.
Do you have a source for this? Wikipedia says there are an estimated 75 million ruminants worldwide, while there was a peak of 1 billion cows on Earth in 2014.
That’s a great start to understanding flows of carbon and other substances through the ecosystem!
I’d like to add that much of the feed is grown using fertilizer, which is often/typically produced via fossil-fuel consuming processes (see Fischer Tropsch).
Where carbon is stored in the system is another major consideration.
I don't think it's fair to treat deforestation as a local issue. Cattle production drives deforestation - whether it's in Brazil or the USA or China, doesn't matter, because we share the atmosphere.
Three-quarters [of global deforestation] is driven by agriculture. Beef production is responsible for 41% of deforestation [...]
I'm likewise unsure if it's fair to treat cattle production which did not engage in deforestation (perhaps located on the great plains or similar) the same as cattle production which did. However I find your argument interesting. I will spend more time brooding on it.
It's true, not all cattle production can be held accountable for deforestation. For example, here in the UK, it's supposed to be a less carbon-intensive industry than in South America, because the grasslands on which cattle graze are good for little else - they are not really suited for crops. I agree on that point.
However (and from this point, it's speculation from my part), I am very skeptical about that grassland being grassland before agriculture arrived. Eg. was it part of the ancient forest that largely covered Britain? If so, it was indeed deforestation, only it was around 500-1000 years ago.
And this gives a whole other dimension to the discussion - we are OK with our deforestation here in Europe, because it happened a long time ago, but we are not OK with deforestation in Indonesia to produce palm oil (which WE consume) because it's happening now. Strangely, we are not that keen on re-forestation and we just want to push the burden to developing nations (a form of de-humanizing the poor, in my opinion).
I don't have any argument here, I just thought I would share my thoughts.
I think that in the systemic terminology, a mature forest is a carbon "stock". Deforestation means getting rid of that stock and putting all of its CO2 into the atmostphere by burning it. Unless you use all that wood for something else (buildings or whatever) which is possible but I think it's unlikely. I might be wrong though!
The carbon cycle is rather irrelevant. The trophic pyramid is what's to argue about. All the energy food provides comes from the sun hitting the land. We need to start there. Meat still only conserves 10% of the energy the plants provided to the animal. Therefore meat consumption is insanely wasteful use of land and resources. We could grow soy for human consumption on a fraction of the land for meat production and reforest the remaining space for carbon capture.
Natural ecosystems tend to not exploit resources to the point of collapse. Large herds of bisons may have roamed the lands, but their existence wasn't borrowed from erroded soils, drained sources, globalized deforestation and synthetic fertilization from mined minerals. They were bound to what their local ecosystem could provide.
This data goes back to 1962 and shows a trend. I suspect that if we had data from before the advent of industrial agriculture, that curve would tend to approximate lower and lower numbers as we go back in time.
You are half right about that. It also matters how these gases are released. Intensive cattle farming involves a lot of CO2 and methane that has more to do with supply chain of the food for the animals than it has to do with the animals themselves. Think soil erosion due to tilling (which emits massive amounts of C02 & methane), fertilizers, pesticides, etc. needed to compensate for that. Transporting of the animal food and the rest of the supply chain. And getting rid of the excrement and methane.
Compare that with regenerative farming where if done right, the cattle actually captures more carbon in the soil than is released as co2 or methane. Even just having animals not taking a leak where they dump their manure makes a difference. Amonia is nasty and gets created when you mix the two. That's why cattle farms smell so nasty: it's the urine and manure mixing when they shouldn't.
Same steak but completely different from a sustainability point of view. Expensive but tasty. Might actually scale if farmers were incentivized to try this. There's no shortage of land to restore.
Feeding cattle seaweed might help a little. But maybe let's not intensively farm oceans to feed land animals. That sounds like a net loss.
Even if atmospheric methane has not increased in recent times, it may be a good idea to try and reduce it.
We have too much of one greenhouse gas, and so far we've been unable to change that. Reducing another greenhouse gas could partially compensate for that.
Sorry I didn't mean to say that atmospheric methane has not increased. It definitely has, as other commenters have pointed out. However, I contend that most of this increase is likely from other factors. Melting of the polar ice caps, factory emissions, etc.
I never knew/considered this. I wanted to clarify something. What you mean when you say that there is no cycle in the burning of fossil fuels, do you just mean that it is a net positive gain of carbon in the atmosphere because the carbon did not originate from the atmosphere? Plants can still process the carbon put there by the burning of fossil fuels but there is an excess because that carbon does not originate from living things? I guess I’m just trying to clarify that there isn’t something about the carbon from fossil fuels that makes it impossible for plants to consume it.
Yes that's right, plants can't tell the difference between a carbon atom which came from fossil fuels, and a carbon atom which came from an animal. It's all mixed together / fungible. Nevertheless, there's an important distinction here, because emissions from food are fundamentally limited by how much food we can produce, so it's carbon balanced on an extremely short time horizon. Meanwhile fossil fuel emissions are uncoupled from any sort of sequestration, and if it balances on any time horizon at all it will be a very very very long one.
Yes but also no... while it's true that it doesn't accumulate in the long term, in the short one it does induce a dynamic equilibrium with a higher concentration of greenhouse gasses that do contribute to atmospheric heating and the approach to potentially catastrophic tipping points... so no.
Even more precise: gasses in the atmosphere convert and stabilize at an equilibrium concentration, depending on their marginal rate of production versus conversion. Therefore, an increased production van lead to an increased equilibrium level.
Also biomass is a better proxy, and here the presence of cattle has increased significantly.
What you are saying is true, of course, but you are overlooking the fact that cattle that graze on large enough areas (like the buffalo of historical time) are a part of an ecosystem that sequesters carbon dioxide.
Game meat is often carbon neutral because of that, whereas very little meat produced today is.
Per capita red meat consumption has been declining in the U.S. for decades from ~130lbs/yr in 1960 to 112lbs in 2020. At the same time, chicken went from 34lbs/yr to 113lbs so overall meat consumption has actually increased.
I suppose some people may consider stable to be overstating this situation. Nevertheless, when put into context of natural wild herd sizes as done by krrrh https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26543346 , I believe my overall point stands.
> You may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time.
It hasn't, though. You need to be comparing pre-industrial herd sizes (Which fed less than a billion people) to modern herd sizes (Which feed nearly 8 billion people.)
The per-capita beef consumption was not 8 times larger back then.
It's true that there were large herds of wild ruminants wandering around, hundreds of years ago. However, the increase in the biomass of domesticated cattle vastly overshadows the decrease in biomass of all wild land animals.
I apologize in advance for my bad math. Please adujust and correct if any have the inclination. Thank you.
My Google results say 94.4M cows in the US. Assume a quarter of those are milk cows, leaving 70.8M beef cattle. Assume a ratio of 1:1 cows to calves, leaving 35.4M adult cows for slaughter. 1000lbs. of cow will will average around 430 pounds of retail cuts. So, with 1/4 lb. servings, one cow will feed 1720 people. Contrary to beef sellers' belief that eating red meat every day is good, one should not consume more than 3 portions of beef a week if one hopes to live to old age. Population of US is 328.2M people, assuming they all eat precisely maximum amount of beef a week to remain healthy, that is about 51.2B servings (let's say 1.4 lb. each serving) of beef a year consumed, which is about 7.4M cows per year. There appears to be a needless surplus of 28M head of cattle.
So many things bother me about the cattle industry. The horror of it, the cruelty, the waste, the destruction of wild habitat, the environmental impact, the greed, and the bullshit idea that we as a society need to do anything to preserve the way of life for rich ranchers (such as the Bundy's, et al).
I had to use Terraform at work to configure some SDN controllers . I never felt the need for an external language.
You can list a directory, read all the json that dir (in a single list/map comprehension/building expression) and use that to feed your modules that manage the actual terraform resources.
When you realize that terraform modules are functions, terraform become a usable functional language.
Why would I want to generate some terraform when I can simply use it to generate the desired state using my higher level data ?
Nickel does not generate Terraform. It is simply a language. The idea is that projects like Terraform could use it rather than create their own language out of a mess of JSON files.
In that sentence, I believe their meaning is that Terraform's language is already capable of generating configuration, and in fact this is a feature which is quite essential to Terraform's use. They acknowledge that all these projects (Nix, Terraform, Bazel, etc) already utilize relatively sophisticated programming languages for configuration. Nickel merely aims to be a better designed language for the purpose.
Don't buy smart speakers. Just buy regular speakers. Then you can plug them into whatever you like, run whatever software you like (e.g. pi musicbox) etc. So you actually own them, and they should serve you well for many years, for whatever you may need.
Also don't buy soundbars. Speakers don't want to be long and skinny. You'll end up paying a lot more for a lot less sound.
Also consumer grade speakers are often more expensive for crappier sound. Look into professional models, like studio monitors. For example, JBL 305PMKII. You may be able to find a local store where you can listen to studio monitors before purchasing.
> Also don't buy soundbars. Speakers don't want to be long and skinny. You'll end up paying a lot more for a lot less sound.
From a practical perspective, my home simply doesn't have room for anything but a soundbar for my TV. My options are built-in TV speakers, or a soundbar.
I don't know if it still applies, but studio speakers used to be notorious for bad sound. I would also hope that you wouldn't be considering guitar amp-type speakers as well.
Depends on what you spend. Good studio monitors should have fairly flat response across the audio spectrum and most tend to be Near-field monitors which sound absolutely great when you are positioned in front of them as you would for mixing, but don’t sound quite as good when used as a general room speaker. Mind you they are often still better than many peoples setups just the same. The ones that are not Near field can work even better for a general audio situation but tend to cost even more.
Some studio monitors like the popular KRK series are not flat response and are a bit bass heavy.
Speakers (of any kind) can vary tremendously, which is why it's nice to be able to compare them. Guitar Center carries more than just guitar-specific items, which is why I thought it would be helpful to mention them; it's not something many people are aware of. I would never consider guitar speakers for general purpose use.
I never saw a section there for audio equipment, but I probably wasn't really paying enough attenton to that. I still think that for home sound that you're going to live with for a very long time, unless the manufacturer bricks them, it might be best to find a place that specializes in home sound systems.
There are fewer and fewer places that specialize in home sound systems, particularly the ones that let you compare numerous choices before you buy. The place that sold me most of my audio gear has been closed for 20 years.
