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Published Letters: 1
I might be able to accept that meat production is implicated in global warming if we are just talking about fossil fuels burned in its production, but claiming that the livestock themselves contribute to the problem seems to me to miss the point.
Any carbon dioxide or methane emitted into the atmosphere by livestock necessarily has to come from feed. When more feed is grown to replace that consumed by the livestock, the carbon (and nitrogen) in that feed comes from ... you guessed it, the atmosphere! This is, in simple form, the carbon cycle, and it is a zero-sum process.
The true problem of global warming is the release into the atmosphere of carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years in fossil fuel deposits. All this noise about cows polluting is an ill-informed distraction by people trying to piggyback their pet obsession onto a real global crisis.
