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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 anticorporate1 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 quantumwannabe52 minutes 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 Klayy5 minutes 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