That Thing Cows Do

Posted on Thu 09/11/2008 by TonyfromOz

This is not satire.

A friend in California who I share emails with on a regular basis sent me a link to an article from the UK the other day.
The point of the article was that to save the Planet from Global Warming Climate Change, we need to be eating less meat.
Sounds obscure, doesn’t it?
Beef cattle, and to a lesser extent, pigs and sheep, make up a huge part of the eating habits of Western society, and you’d think that our eating habits contributing to Climate change might seem to be drawing a long bow, but bear with me for a minute.
These three animals are grass eaters and you have to understand THEIR eating habits to see where this story comes from.
I’ll only mention the cattle element of it, because they provide the largest section of our dietary habits.

Cows have 2 stomachs. They eat grass, and whatever else it is that they are fed. That green matter they eat goes into that first stomach where it is broken down by the digestion process. After it has been broken down, it then enters the second stomach, where it is consumed. It provides sustenance to the cow and the waste is then ejected as, well, cow pats.

So, let’s look at that process. As the green matter is broken down in the first stomach, methane gas is produced and that comes out of the cow in two ways, one via burping, and the second through, and there’s just no other word for it, farting.

I first became aware of this when that earlier buzz story from the 80’s, ‘the hole in the ozone layer’ was in all the news, the forerunner to today’s Climate Change debate.
That hole was growing because of the gases emitted here on the surface rising and burning a hole through that layer, allowing in more of the Sun’s harmful rays.
We changed the air conditioning process because of that by changing the gas in them from a Chlorofluorocarbon, Freon the most common of them to another more benign gas. However, in that same original debate, there were two other major culprits among the long list of these gases. These two culprits were volcanos, and the ubiquitous ‘farting’ cows. Now, we had absolutely no control over land based volcanos or sub sea ruptures in the Earth’s crust where those gases escaped, bubbled up to the surface, and then off into the atmosphere. We also had no control over, and I’ve used the word twice now so I’ll just refer to it now as the process from the cows.
We can’t control the eating habits of cows or their internal processes of digestion, so we just stuck with the things we could change, those being refrigeration, air conditioning and the propellants for spray products.

So, the cow process thing. This now correlates directly back to this current Climate Change debate.
The cow pats themselves generate Nitrous Oxide, This gas is nearly 300 times more volatile a greenhouse gas that Carbon Dioxide CO2. That, er, other process produces Methane gas, which is 23 times more volatile that CO2. Each cow, every single one of them, produces close to 45 Gallons of this methane gas alone each and every day. In the US alone, there are 100 million head of cattle, so the production of this methane gas, and the Nitrous Oxide is now put in some perspective.

Now here’s the crunch.

World livestock production produces 18% of all the World’s greenhouse gases.
If you were to add up the emissions from every car, every truck and bus, every boat, every train, and every plane in use on the planet, the total greenhouse gas emissions from all of that amounts to 13% of all greenhouse gas emissions, 5% less than for the livestock gas emissions.

That production from the livestock source takes into account the clearing of land by deforestation, but it’s all contributing to the whole, so it is a relevant addition to that total.

Now you can see where the ‘eat less meat’ argument is coming from.

However, in reality, it’s a futile argument. People will never stop eating meat.
There was a huge argument back in the late 70’s and into the early 80’s directly relating to deforestation, and how the trees were the lungs of the Earth, and how we were cutting them all down at a huge rate.
Where this was happening the most was in Brazil, and mainly in the vast Amazon jungle.
That jungle was being cleared at an immense rate, and even back then, it was being done to provide grazing land for the production of cattle, mainly to provide meat for the US market, in the form of ground beef, and we all know the biggest user of that ground beef.
The clearing of the Amazon was perceived as a worrying thing, and in all probability, something would need to be done to stop this land clearing on such a monumental scale.

At the time, Brazil itself was pretty much an economic basket case. The Country’s foreign debt was so huge that Brazil could not even pay the interest on those borrowings. The UN, and by extrapolation the US who was the biggest source provider for that money owed made a conscious and deliberate decision to completely forgive that whole debt in total.
The one condition was that Brazil would ease back on clearing the Amazon jungle with a view to ceasing that clearing rate of jungle, so ‘the lungs of the Earth’ would stay fairly pristine.

Pretend you were in charge of Brazil, and just what your answer would be. They jumped at the offer. The whole debt was totally forgiven, and now Brazil could start all over again.

However, the people who wanted to raise cattle to feed that ground beef demand were not all that impressed. After a few years, the Government who agreed to the deal were thrown out of office, and Brazil now had two sources of income. They resumed clearing the Amazon jungle. This time the timber from that became a cash earning export, and the cleared land was stocked with cattle to feed that ground beef demand. It was a win win for Brazil, and a lose lose for the rest of the Planet.
So, the argument didn’t work well then, just as much as it won’t work all that well now.

The problem is not solely in the court of the Western World, because something that has been noted is that as those Developing Nations of the World industrialise, the eating habits of the people in those Country’s are also changing. They now have more money at their disposal, and they are increasingly moving towards a more meat diet.
So, the rate of need for the meat will not only not decrease, but will increase at a more rapid rate.

The UN has asked that we cut back on the number of meat based meals we have so that Climate Change can be slowed.

This article from TIME also details some of the problems.

It’s not specifically aimed at meat eaters as you might think it is.
Vegetarians also come into the equation as part of their diets include cheese and milk and butter products are included as well, because after all, dairy cows are still just cows, and they produce just as much methane as for beef cattle.

So, the next time you look at that wonderful steak dinner, keep in mind you’re contributing towards Climate change. (Now, that was satire.)

Edit.

It was pointed out to me that there is an inaccuracy in this Post.

At the top I mentioned that Cows have 2 stomachs. It was something told to me by my Mother when I was a boy. You know that you should always believe your Mother, so in my mind there was no need to check something like this.

It was pointed out to me that Cows only have one stomach, but that it has four compartments in it. The cow chews the green matter and it enters that first compartment, the Rumen. The eaten matter goes through a process of softening in that compartment. The softened matter is regurgitated and the cow then chews its cud. This process is called Rumination, hence Cows are termed as ruminants. After this second chewing, the matter then enters other chambers of the stomach.

That first compartment can contain between 25 and 75 gallons of matter. As it breaks down, well, that’s where the gas comes from.

The important point I was trying to make was the fact that grazing animals we use for food products contribute 18% of the total mix of greenhouse gases, while the whole combined transport sector on the Planet produces only 15%.

Hat tip to Tina for correcting me on this matter.

For those of you who are interested, here’s a site to go and look at.

Tony