Did you know that cows are responsible for 18% of greenhouse gases? The production of cattle to feed and clothe humans stresses ecosystems around the world, and is assessed to be one of the top three environmental problems in the world on a local to global scale. Cows release a large amount of methane. Most of it (about 95%) of it comes from the cows burping, not farting despite popular belief. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas then carbon dioxide having about a warming effect from 23 to 50 times greater then carbon dioxide.
I heard something about scientist coming up for a solution for this, they call it "Test Tube burgers" it sounds a bit weird if you ask me, but anyway what they are researching is making meat, without the animal, it would be exactly like normal meat except without the slaughter and the methane. Heres a bit of a secondary question for you vegetarians out there also, if this actually worked, would you eat this meat? I mean no one actually killed an animal for it.
PS: sorry if this is posted already, I couldn't find it if it was.
(I looked for it and I couldn't find a topic about it either.) You're right that cows actually make methane which is a greenhouse gas. There are a lot of solutions being made and some of them are kind of weird. Look at this one about burpless grass.
After doing a little bit more looking, I found that there are a lot of smart ways to get rid of the methane and they are kind of funny. I found another one about giving Beano to cows. Apparently, there can be a lot of different solutions to reduce the methane that cows make. (I think the one on test tube burgers is a good idea.) This could help solve a little of the problem of global warming.
The methane that you really want to watch out for is at the bottom of the ocean in methane hydrate (a.k.a. methane clathrate) formations. If they melt it could be the Permian Mass Extinction all over again. I think we should just reduce eating meat in general, red meat is not even that could for you, have it one or twice every two weeks.
It's pretty much granted that going vegetarian would solve a lot of problems. Since it takes ~10x the weight in grain to produce meat, food shortages would be mitigated greatly (although most food shortages come from political and economic reasons rather than agricultural ones). It would also open up a lot of land for uses other than agriculture. And there'd be fewer greenhouse gases.
The problem with that is the steaks tastes SO GOOD.
Test tube meat is an interesting possible solution. I do wonder how the cost, energy, and food requirements for that meat compare to regular meat.I was listening to NPR and then mentioned that while it was possible to grow muscle mass, getting it to the right consistency and texture of a steak hadn't happened yet. Be cool if it did.
I have a transitional solution. "With an ostrich, the ratio is three to five pounds of grain to get a pound of meat," Mr. Brown said. "With a cow, that ratio is about 14 to 1." http://mishaum.com/ostrich_page.htm Thus we can save energy and grain.
Ostrich is really more of a replacement for chicken or turkey, not beef. You'd need bison to compensate for beef, and I have no idea what the ratio for buffalo are.
I somewhat agree, but many farmers probably wouldn't, seeing as they're a cheap enough and good source of "fertilizer" for them. But, I agree in that cows that are slaughtered for fast food restaurants are fed at troughs their whole lives, and they deposit manure all over the place, and there is so much excess of it all, that the farmers move it all to giant acres of land and just leave it there to be decomposed. Sure it does decompose over time, but in unnecessary ways.
