I try (but don't always succeed) to judge content on its own merit and not on the labels attached to it or domain name choice. Sometimes there's just poor choice of words which carry heavy preconceptions and prejudices, which don't fairly represent the content behind them. The Cowspiracy website and documentary quotes from the more recent study below that found that the production of animal byproduts actually accounts for 51% of worldwide emissions. More facts at: http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/ In the documentary the movie maker asks the question "If animal production in the biggest contributor of emissions how come no one is talking about it?" He tries to get big environmental agencies involved in climate change activism, such as Greenpeace, to answer this question but they avoided it and never gave him a satisfactory answer. Hence the name, Cowspiracy. He reached the conclusion that environmental organizations shy away from the animal production issue because it's contentious. People don't like being told what to eat and that would cause subscriptions and donations (their main source of income) to the awareness raising eco-organisations to drop.I fucking love it when every article I ever read that says stuff like this comes from sites like:
"A widely cited 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Livestock's Long Shadow, estimates that 18 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions are attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs, and poultry. But recent analysis by Goodland and Anhang finds that livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions."
~ http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6294
See the rest of my post: The point I am making is that, when the sites that say this are very clearly biased, you have no reason to trust anything they cite as fact, and have no reason to think they are giving you all relevant information. As to the study you cite at 51%, it is very clear that the authors of the paper were very much trying to get every last little bit of emissions out of animals, going so far as to even count their every last breath as an emission source. The reality is more neutral than that, and probably lies between the 20 and the 50 percent statistics, and is probably closer to 30 from what I have seen online. Of course, even if cattle did take up fifty percent of worldwide emissions, I wouldn't care very much. Cattle aren't something that is like fossil fuels, something that creates massive amounts of carbon purely in releasing/burning carbon stored eons ago. Any emissions from cows, assuming we do not continue to expand land for more cows, is going to be offset by growing the crops to feed them in the first place. Seriously, their "scientific" article starts off with "What if climate change was caused by cows pigs and chickens". That isn't reasonable. These so called facts are nothing but insulting and misleading.I try (but don't always succeed) to judge content on its own merit and not on the labels attached to it or domain names
I'm pleased to see that you're driven by science and facts. I assume you mean the whole of animal production and not just cows. In any case I very much doubt that. Have you got a study supporting this claim?Any emissions from cows, assuming we do not continue to expand land for more cows, is going to be offset by growing the crops to feed them in the first place.
I do mean animal production, and I am assuming a closed system where people find dirt, plant crops, feed those crops to cows. Whatever cows produce has to come from somewhere, so any building materials or carbon emissions are going to come from their feed. In order to produce this carbon in the food, the plants have to absorb and take out of the atmosphere an equal amount of carbon. There are cases where emissions can come from how food is grown with tractors, the production of fertilizer, etc. Those I do not consider directly under "emissions from cows" because they are third party things that often involve the use of fossil fuels, and can change with time to become more efficient or not release greenhouse gases. As for methane being 20 to fifty times the potential of carbon dioxide: methane degrades into carbon dioxide with a half-life of twenty years, not enough time for it to have a significant impact on the atmosphere without us already releasing massive amounts of it at once, which we do not.