Silverdawn
I wake up 🔄 There's another psyop
Just a 34-year old lad from Eastern Europe. Straight, male, white. Interested in videogames, books, chillstep and running. Lean towards libertarianism/consequentialistism/determinisism.
User ID: 2412
Silverdawn
I wake up 🔄 There's another psyop
1d ago
Cows don't "produce" CO2, they're part of the biological carbon cycle, like rotting leaves and compost piles. All the carbon a cow emits comes from vegetation that got it from the air only a few months before. It neither adds nor removes carbon from the cycle.
Intentionally conflating the exogenous release of geologically sequestered carbon through fossil fuels with the natural carbon cycle is unforgivably dishonest vegan propaganda that needs to be stomped out thoroughly.
Whoever told it to you is a malicious liar you should hunt down and punish for trying to fuck with your understanding of the world.
Hey I was asked to look at your comment by the volunteer quokka report thing and I assumed you were bullshitting but decided to look at the actual science just in case. To my shock, you are correct, despite all the things I've read online, the science suggests that cows largely maintain the current CO2 levels as opposed to adding on to them. So kudos for calling attention to a very important fact and I apologize for having been successfully brainwashed up to this point.
Silverdawn
I wake up 🔄 There's another psyop
2d ago
Wow, that is a very high-effort post!
Silverdawn
I wake up 🔄 There's another psyop
3d ago
I didn't realize it was unusual.
It is! I live in Europe and I've never seen anything like the multiple bus stops in the picture.
So, the way methane works is: it lasts about 12 years in the atmosphere, during which it gets completely broken down. But you have a lot of cows (~1.5B) constantly producing methane so you can think of the situation as a submarine that is constantly losing oxygen because of a leak but is also constantly getting air because of an open air tank. The overall result amounts to about a 0.5° increase in the planet's heat because of these cows. In other words, if you had a magic wand and made all the cows disappear, global temperatures would drop by about half a degree over the course of the next decade.
So methane has a significant negative impact on the climate but it can largely be managed and ameliorated through good policies. Proper manure storage can cut emissions by 50%, for example. Which is still worth discussing and thinking about, of course. But my priors were "cows are objectively bad, we need to cull the vast majority of them if we want humans to continue existing on this planet" which is very far from "the ecological impact of cows is a solvable problem".
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