cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/climate/p/1398372/climate-warming-methane-emissions-from-the-worlds-biggest-livestock-companies-are-bigge
Ahead of the United Nations climate talks in Brazil, advocacy groups are pushing for companies and governments to set meaningful emissions targets to lower emissions from livestock.
The world’s biggest meat and dairy companies are responsible for emitting more climate-warming methane than all of the countries in the European Union and United Kingdom combined, according to a new assessment published Monday.
They looked at 45 major livestock and dairy companies, finding that they generated about 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023—roughly the same amount as reported for Saudi Arabia, the world’s second largest oil producer.
Yes, but meat demands are also deforesting huge swathes of land all over the world. Then, instead of forest that are carbon-negative you get pastoral lands and cattle that are carbon-positive.
Brazil’s deforestation is the world’s most extreme. It is at a point now (due to deforestation and livestock) where the Amazon rainforest is no longer a carbon sink and now emits more greenhouse gasea than it absorbs.
You can use that argument for everything that isn’t run in a sustainable manner. The same can go for growing vegetables that are not for animal feeding but human consumption. But it can be done in a sustainable manner, and obviously that was what I meant.
Last I heard the land recovered from deforestation in Brazil is not very good, and generally cannot sustain their crops for long, the land becomes infertile, and they continue the deforestation.
This is unsustainable no matter what the crop is or is for. And is not a good argument against farming that is sustainable.
It especially sucks when it’s rain forest that is lost, because it is extremely hard to get to recover again. I live in Denmark, and we produce 3 times more meat than we consume, and that is done with sustainable farming. Most of the farmland we have today used to be infertile heathland, and took decades to improve into fertile farmland.
Many countries have similar types of land that can be improved, so the problem is that they don’t do that instead of destroying valuable land.
But to make it work requires government incentives to do that instead of ruining fertile lands and then just move on when the soil is depleted.