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.
replyIf 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.
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.
replyIt'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