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On the ecological point, the difference is whether the grassland would naturally support that number of bison. Or if bison (or cows) are continually being grown, killed, grown killed at industrial scale beyond the normal bison lifecycle. With many carbon inputs (fossil-fuel based fertilizer, etc) and production costs (slaughtering, transport, etc).

Wild bison live 15-20 years.

Cattle raised for beef ~18 months.

That's beyond the natural carbon cycle an existing ruminant population.

Also horses, in my reading of the data, actually have less of a methane impact. They have a different digestive system entirely.

On the methane point, methane, yes, is a greenhouse gas that breaks down over years (~12 years). But has far worse impact on climate while its in the atmosphere.

by quantumwannabe2 hours ago|

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It’s completely made up. All meat is carbon neutral because animals don’t produce carbon atoms from nothing. They get them from the plants they eat which in turn get their carbon from the atmosphere.

The carbon cycle is basic scientific fact yet confidently ignored by people who hate things like logging and meat.

by hunter-gatherer1 hours ago|

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I'm not an expert here, but I see what you're saying. Is the carbon calculation from the meat _processing_??? Every year I hunt a buck and carry it off the mountain. So the carbon footprint for getting that meat for my family is really the drive up to and from wherever I'm hunting from, plus a few other small things that probably amount to almost nothing.

I live close to a large meat processing facility, and it appears to be quite an energy intensive operation from the outside. Never been inside though, so I can't say for sure. But transporting live cattle, feed, water, slaughter, freeze, freeze+transport all might be pretty carbon heavy.

by quantumwannabe46 minutes ago|

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All of that would go away with renewable energy and therefore reducing meat consumption would not be "the next frontier" in the battle against climate change as the original poster said.

by anticorporate2 hours ago|

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By that same logic, fossil fuels are carbon neutral because they come from living things.

The problem is we have too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not too much of various assorted carbon-based compounds on the planet.

by quantumwannabe1 hours ago|

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But the supply of herd animals is essentially fixed. There isn’t infinite growth. Eating meat therefore does not increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, no matter what vegans who want to ban meat for personal moral reasons assert.

If humans stopped eating meat, the only way to reduce the amount of carbon that animals “emit” would be to kill all of them and bury their carcasses underground where they can’t decompose (as that would turn them into CO2).

Burning oil introduces new carbon into the cycle, animals existing does not.

by Klayy1 hours ago|

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That's a fairly simplistic argument though. Deforestation converts forest into a cattle feed monoculture. That plant material locks in less co2 than a forest. There's the extra CO2 emitted from growing cattle feed as opposed to growing food for humans directly (via fossil fuels used in production). And then there's methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas.

It's a topic that's way more complex than you seem to think. Climate scientists did not miss the simple fact that all carbon in a cow originates from the atmosphere. That's understood. But there's all the other stuff.

For the record I'm not vegan or even vegetarian. Attacking vegans for their beliefs is poor formimo

by quantumwannabe50 minutes ago|

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Cows eat wild grass for most of their lives. There is zero deforestation to feed cattle in the US. The amount of methane is also fixed as it gets broken down into CO2 which is later absorbed by plants.

Scientists didn't miss this; there's just a lot of grifters trying to use people's desire to fight climate change to get them to support unrelated issues.

Doing an appeal to authority is poor form.