Better livestock practices will not offset emissions from livestock
- Grass fed beef is not better for the environment
- The British public is totally wrong about how to improve the environment
- food and meat accounts for a large proportion of greenhouse gas emissions
- Livestock on leftovers will not save us, we have to reduce meat
Even under generous assumptions and environmentally optimal management practices, we would only reduce emissions from ruminants by 20-60%. These practices can at best reduce total livestock emissions by 4%-11%.
If we fully adopt 100% of ruminant methane reducing initiatives, we will meet our GHG target for 2030 but it still will not be enough for 2050 (Arnt et al., 2022)
Garnett, 2011 key reference here: demonstrates that productivity and tech increases will not solve the climate crisis, we need to reduce meat.
Changing cow feed isn't effective
- Cows are fed a type of red kelp called asparagopsis taxiformis. This red kelp contains a chemical called bromoform, which changes the metabolic pathways in the cow’s gut so that it can emit less methane.
- When tested on real cows on a farm who are only fed a controlled diet for part of their lives, red seaweed is only able to reduce methane emissions by about 28 percent. Plus, the cows on the diet ate less and weighed less at slaughter, which means that more cows need to be slaughtered to keep up with an increasing demand for meat, which in turn ticks those emissions back up again
- the cows don’t like it either
- Burger King announced their newest green innovation — beef from cows fed 100 grams of lemongrass to reduce methane emissions by 33 percent for every day the cows were fed the herb The overall reduction is only about 3.6 percent This research has never been replicated successfully, even though a researcher from UC Davis has tried.
- Recent piece arguing this isn't going to help much