I have listened to the podcast and agree with much of what you said about industrial farming and re-greening the planet. But I have a question. You mentioned that water vapour is the most potent greenhouse gas in the troposphere. As water vapour blocks/absorbs the same parts of the infrared radiated heat spectrum as methane and outnumbers it by about 10,000 to one, the maths and science suggests that methane is only a tiny player in driving climate change?
The way I've heard this explained before is that water vapour is a natural phenomenon so normally wouldn't be an issue, but a warming atmosphere can hold more water vapour, so it has become a positive feedback loop.
Hello Rachel, love your podcast. I'm an organic, independently audited net zero, 100% pasture fed, 5th generation dairy farmer based in SW Scotland. We have been on this agroecological journey for over 25 years, developing a food model on our upland family farm that delivers positive climate, biodiversity, diffuse pollution, animal and social welfare outcomes. We are currently fine tuning our European-leading (we are part of an EU-wide network) cow-with-calf dairying system to prove to a sceptical industry that we can deliver on all these ecosystem services, and be profitable! My late wife and I wrote a book about our journey a couple of years ago (A Dairy Story - available on line) and I'd love to come on you platform to talk about the outcomes we have experienced from working with nature. Best, David
I didn't quite understand how you allocated deforestation to crop agriculture and animal agriculture. To my knowledge there is no data set that would allow such allocation. Further I wonder how you consider "deforestation" that results in forestry.
In most of the Northern hemisphere it seems to me that the most radical land use transformation since 1750 has not been forests to farm land but "primary forests" to plantation kind of forests. Ironically, earlier a lot of forests were grazed, so what has counted as "primary forests" for example in Sweden where I live was actually grazed forest (and used for charcoal etc) until commercial forestry took off end of 19the century. A bit later, grazing forests was banned and plantation style forestry was established. I think it would be very difficult to allocate emissions to any particular sector in those circumstances.
As far as I can understand, in many parts of the world, the draining of wetlands for agriculture use has been very wide spread since 1750 and would be even more relevant as an emission source of CO2 and N2O. Methane emissions would be drastically reduced by draining wetlands though, and a wetland that would be grazed by ruminants would in many cases emit less methane with the ruminants included than before (In Sweden estimates are that fertile wetlands can emit 300 kg of CH4 per hectare and year, which is the same as 1.5-3 cows per year (the lower number could be intensive dairy, the higher number grazing beef mother cows) .
These paper have stirred up a lot of discussion - good to see, because the conventions on how emissions are measured need more scrutiny. Your query about relating land use emissions to sectors is a good one, that has a simple answer - land emissions are related to sectors based on current land carbon deficit and land use. For example, all grazing land is for agriculture (animal ag) therefore carbon deficit and land use emissions are 100% due to that land use, and crops are apportioned according to biomass flows - all described in the papers and supplementary material, that contains more detail on types of fire etc. Accuracy of results depends totally on accuracy of data, so the best data time series were used, and all three new accounting measures are well established - in the literature as referenced, so none of these measures is controversial. This work is the first to apply all three together, which delivers the rather surprising results.
My prior comment https://tinyurl.com/4tfe3dwa was based on mainly on your paper. Though in regards to the contents of this podcast, I'm equally underwhelmed.
Like I noted previously you seem to thinks carbon from biogenic sources is being constantly emitted rather than cycled. This perspective is just conceptually wrong. But this mindset is the same one of many modern Westerners who seem unable to understand that pretty much everything in nature is cyclical as well as that natural cycles are interdependent and interconnected.
Specifically, in regards to methane, if you look at annual budgets of methane based on more accurate top down analysis, these show emissions only slightly exceeding sinks. Without fossil fuels, sinks would far exceed emissions.
With methane data generated from satellites, this data looks mainly at high concentrated sources. So, most of what's detected is emissions from natural gas sites and then waste dumps. Extensive enteric emissions are too diffuse to be detected.
Plus if you look at recent trends of when atmospheric levels of CH4 have increased, those were when natural gas use increased in the 1960's through 80's with massive fugitive emissions, and then more recently with fracking starting around 2008. From around 1996 to 2007, atmospheric CH4 levels were flat even though this was during a period where global cattle herd sizes increased.
Note too: Thermogenic emissions (fossil fuels) are emitted without the precursors needed for hydroxyl radical [OH] formation. In natural and anthropogenic systems that mimic nature biogenic emissions are emitted with the precursors needed for OH formation. So, such biogenic emissions will break down a lot faster than the 10 year average...often within hours and days rather than years.
Like you noted, CH4 can lead to the formation of tropospheric ozone [O3], but so can all the non-methane hydrocarbons emitted by trees and plants. To do so, these various hydrocarbons react with NOx emitted largely from soil as part of the nitrogen cycle. This occurs constantly, and O3 is require for the main pathway for OH formation in the troposphere. So, O3 isn't always "bad." It's needed to breakdown CH4 and other atmospheric trace gases.
So, it doesn't seem like you actually know that much about atmospheric chemistry.
I'd also have to make a similar conclusion about your understanding of soil science, since you seem to be adhering to an old paradigm about the rate of soil organic matter formation. Maybe too much Pete Smith, who also doesn't understand the newer microbial soil science. Grazing, when done well, actually increases carbon distribution fixed via photosynthesis into root exudates, and its this root carbon consumed by microbes, that die and become the necromass associated with minerals to form recalcitrant forms of mineral associated organic matter [MAOM] that retain carbon for hundreds of years.
And as for his ERF argument, that's just a slightly recycled GWP20 argument to claim gross methane has a larger climate impact than when GWP100 is used as the standard. It too is wrong. GWP* is flawed, but it's better than these alternatives. Obviously given your food religion, you're obviously going to filter the data to fit this quasi-religion.
Not sure where I can find the data on the area of grazing land for domestic herbivores and an analysis of how big share of that land that is actually from deforestation (a lot of grasslands are "natural grasslands"). Note that only around half of the land classified as grasslands are grazed by domestic animals, approximately 1.6 billion.
Absolutely we need to be looking at gross figures to get the full picture, but I think there is a reason to consider fossil carbon as more significant in terms of system change. When forests are cleared that is releasing carbon from a relatively fast part of the carbon cycle, which has a large and constant turnover, and into which (as long as we don't push the ecological system too far) it can fairly reliably be drawn down again. Whereas fossil fuel use is releasing carbon from the much slower geological part of the cycle. It effectively cannot return there any time soon (CCS being bullshit), and can only add to the atmosphere & biosphere carbon, increasing the total carbon that needs to be drawn down by the biosphere, potentially far beyond its capacity to do so. All that said, land clearance and animal agriculture are still significantly understated causes, especially at policy level. Few politicians seem willing to talk about plant based diets. The cultural aspect of neoliberalism emphasises the right of individuals to consume whatever they want without thought of wider consequences. That's going to be hard to change.
You're right Mathew. That difference between the relatively rapidly-cycling biological part of the carbon cycle and the vastly slower geological part of the cycle is also why the idea of planting trees to 'offset' fossil fuel extraction/burning is like drinking more water to keep sea levels down (for all that wise tree-planting is a wonderful and appropriate course of action!).
AND there's something exciting about recognising the significant holes in the narrative that climate impacts are merely the result of globalised average warming from atmospheric greenhouses gases.
After many, many years as a climate activist, researcher and author, this piece nonetheless significantly shifted my perspective, which is the highest recommendation I can offer it:
Those holes in the dominant climate narrative that it explains are exciting because they offer empowerment. Offer the understanding that our communities and regions need to improve the climate that affects our lives.
Meaningful, life-changing local and regional action, rather than lobbying global governance or drop in the ocean emissions reductions. I might also add that I’ve seen this exact understanding directed into action at Tamera, Portugal, and walked in paradise where a desert used to be 💧 🌱 🌳
Tamera's delicious film 'Water Is Love' looks at multiple other examples of putting this understanding into practical action: https://www.waterislovefilm.org/
And to me this makes all the sense, even in a world where the culture behind still-accelerating emissions is "going to be hard to change", as you understatedly put it.
You’re missing the point about most land clearing. In the first instance cleared forest is in the majority of cases not just “left to grow back”. In the second instance, regrowth forest has a fraction of the drawdown potential and biodiversity of an old growth forest or woodland ecosystem. It takes 100-200 years for temperate rainforest in Australia to become “old growth” with nesting habitat for many bird species like owls and cockatoos, and it also takes that long to reach peak drawdown rates. Young regrowth forest uses a lot more water, and recycles much less water than a mature rainforest. The Carbon drawn down in the first twenty years of regrowth is pretty insignificant when compared with the drawdown that the old growth forest that was removed wouldHave continued doing over that period. In Australia, forest commissions would be clear felling that forest again in 30-50 years to harvest the timber for the export wood chips market in Japan (who preserve and revere their forests) and China (who don’t but have.converted large arid areas into giant silviculture/forested estates).
>. When forests are cleared that is releasing carbon from a relatively fast part of the carbon cycle, which has a large and constant turnover, and into which (as long as we don't push the ecological system too far) it can fairly reliably be drawn down again.
Well this is the same ill-informed work-salad we hear ad:nauseam from IPCC scientists and a few pseudo-environmentqal groups defending animal ag, the fast-cycle or slow-cycle is largely irrelevant, what counts is the absence of draw-down where once there was draw-down, on a massive scale as Gerard said. and the addition of methane production where once much of the methane produced in the forest was recaptured in the forest not added to the atmospheric stock of rapidly growing methane.
Alastair, I wasn't able to find in Mathew's comment any claim that cleared forest is in the majority of cases "left to grow back", so hopefully we can agree that that's not the case and that old growth forest, regrowth forest, and forestry commission "timber mines" (to quote Vandana Shiva) are VERY different beasts. I also agree with you about the toxic insanity of industrialised animal agriculture.
Yet I'm curious as to why you think pulling carbon from slow-cycle geology (i.e. locked up for the long-term in fossil fuels underground) into the active carbon cycling between trees/oceans/atmosphere etc is "largely irrelevant". You call it "ill-informed word salad", but what is your actual critique of the point?
I 100% agree that the absence of draw-down where once there was draw-down is critical. And if you see the addition of extra methane to the atmospheric stock (that then needs drawing down) as important — as I fully agree that it is — why do you see the addition of extra carbon that needs drawing down as irrelevant? Or am I misunderstanding you?
Hoping to understand your perspective.
Perhaps it was more the "it can fairly reliably be drawn down again" that you reacted against? I shared that reaction. The "as long as we don't push the ecological system too far" is valid, but as a parenthetical note seemed to be doing a lot of work in that sentence, in a world where that is clearly what's happening! Still, one can analyse the structure of quickly-typed blog comments too far.
What is really hard to figure out here, as Rachel hinted at, is why (mainstream) scientists are not behind this type of argument. On the one hand, many mainstream scientists have said that the accounting issue Gerard mentions is a real issue and should be changed, but those same people generally do not reach the same conclusions as to how a change in accounting suddenly results in big differences with which GHG is causing the most trouble, so why is that? As Rachel said, it seems unlikely that the powerful are more interested in dismantling FF than animal consumption, as energy drives everything, while eating meat is a simple choice or preference for most people, as most people have alternative food sources. And the non-food products made from animals are not essential or non-replaceable. So the idea of protecting this slice of the agriculture industry rather than our basic energy production industry doesn’t make sense.
Gerard’s suggestion that it boils down to scientists and NGOs “toeing the line” doesn’t add up. Outside of the scientists who are specifically hired by agricultural interests, public and private, who of course would be more likely to have to protect an official story, it’s hard to imagine those who work on solving climate issues and who have no such ties to agriculture keeping silent about bad science that might prop up agra stories, especially if keeping silent forces them to reduce the effectiveness of their own research, which is their bottom line.
After Sailesh Rao spoke on PC, I did a pretty exhaustive review and analysis of his arguments, and found them lacking. The result was that while animal agriculture, specifically, is indeed a big source of GHGs, his accounting on that sector’s total global GHG slice is not as big as he claims. But that isn’t as important as the fact that animal products are far less sticky than fossils. We can stop animal consumption much faster than fossil burning, and we get a double whammy effect from that because by stopping animal consumption we not only drastically reduce methane emissions, but we also allow for more land now used for keeping animals to revert to original states, increasing biodiversity and carbon drawdown through vegetation that will grow there, in addition to reducing the “need” to clear forests for livestock production (keeping in mind, however, more of that land seems to be used for soybean and other crops than for livestock, while how much of those crops are being fed to the livestock is a very good question I don’t know the answer to!). On the other hand, we cannot forget that rewilding typically results in reduced albedo, creating a warming effect that can even outweigh the cooling effect from reduced GHG emissions, so the simple fix isn’t as straightforward as many think.
As for Gerard’s argument, which is narrower than Rao’s, some of the same issues persist, on both pro and con sides. One thing I note is that claiming animal agriculture to be the largest human source of methane is questionable, although ultimately of very little importance as the scale is still large. One reason is that data on this typically groups agriculture in a block, including rice cultivation, which is estimated to represent 5-20% of the agricultural total. Estimates on rice’s contribution, as well as the sources for methane in general (!) are tricky to arrive at because many of the variables are not so well known and some are also moving targets depending on seasonal variations and other factors.
Why a focus on short-lived GHGs like methane may not be as strong in the scientific community as that given to CO2 is that it is likely that CO2 is seen as more problematic due to the built-in negative feedback against further anthropogenic methane emissions as climate change progresses and human collapse approaches. A reduction in human activity and consumption as a result of continued climate change reduces emissions of all types. Less money means less travel, expensive foods, even heating. The more that global heating is due to short-term GHGs like methane, the better, as reduced consumption would decrease global heating. If more of the heating were due to CO2, then a collapse of consumption is more likely to trigger a higher loss of polluting aerosols from FF which have had a cooling effect on the planet, which then results in a sharp increase in global heating rather than a cooling. We are likely going to see continued growth in both vegi-consumption and meat consumption as a result of attitude changes and population growth combined with enhanced incomes, for bit. Five more years? But I think the growing incomes of the poor may soon splutter and then erode as warming will take everyone by surprise, so that the trend of rising wealth among the world’s poor driving increased meat consumption will stop, and population growth probably will too. Hopefully that will drive a global cooling and also force those in power to wake up, or better yet, be thrown aside!
A major part of the resistance to the accounting advances is the first one applied - consistent gross accounting of carbon. See the papers but this mindset is based on the rationale that clearing/regrowth is part of a cycle. It is a cycle, but is caused by us, not by nature. I have simply used accepted published data on gross and net land use emissions (adopting gross land use and gross fossil fuel carbon emissions).
The carbon that is emitted when we clear a forest is no longer biogenic - we have been burning fossil fuels for 6,000 years, so forest growth and carbon stored since then are a mix of original biosphere carbon and a growing proportion of fossil carbon. Forests take up carbon from all sources, so the original biosphere carbon pool and carbon cycle no longer exists.
A growing number of authors now advocate full gross carbon accounting - in fact I am not the first for any of these 3 novel accounting changes - just the first to apply all three. All three are accepted science, in the peer-reviewed literature for several years (as referenced in the papers).
Thank you, Gerard. I have read your papers and many of those you reference. As I wrote, I recognize that there are scientists who agree that GHG accounting should be consistent, rather than being a combination of gross and net, and that GWP could be replaced by ERF. But outside of two or three other sources that have been mentioned, like Calverd, Goodland-Anhang and Rao, whose positions are problematic, I’m not aware of others coming out with statements claiming that CO2 is not the primary source of global warming, or that livestock farming, or, land use change, is the main source of GHGs, but do let us know if I’ve missed any relevant research on that question, I would love to read it. And on the subject of simply going further back in time to begin measuring anthropogenic GHG emissions, no matter how that changes the tally, what I think climate scientists are saying toward the animal livestock argument, and the carbon cycle, for example, is that the really explosive increase in both GHG concentrations and global temperature change has only occurred after pre-industrial times, so very recently. This is part of the argument that fossil burning is not part of the so-called “natural” carbon cycle because of both the effort required to obtain it and the higher release of GHGs from burning it as compared to wood, for example.
Although I think it is easy to get into trouble when you start saying one thing is “natural” and another isn’t, as if humans aren’t natural creatures, there is a valid argument when it comes to the fact that only people, and only with highly concentrated effort (other than say the minor effects of burning coal one could find without having to mine it), are able to unlock the GHGs from fossils. So that may be seen as “unnatural” and therefore not part of the carbon cycle. But destroying a forest, cutting it down or burning it, happens to some extent as well naturally, particularly through fires. It seems to me that this is why scientists tend to count anthropogenic deforestation as being part of the carbon cycle. What makes anthropogenic deforestation different is the massive scale that we now do it on. And looking at GHG concentration data, human population growth, global warming (temperature rise) data, you see all three exploding only in the last couple of hundred years, although with global temperatures coming in a bit later. So it seems clear that a combination of a fuel switch plus an energy-hungry technology boom plus a population change have resulted in climate change. Some things that we did before, like agriculture, were massively ramped up as population grew, and agriculture methods and fuels to operate them changed as well. At what point should human behavior be considered natural or unnatural? Is rapid population growth unnatural? Or just unwise?
Honestly, I’m not so sure it matters all that much which GHG has created more impact, when it really just boils down to a fight over carbon dioxide and methane, with nitrous oxide coming in a distant third. CO2 is weaker, but more numerous, and very long-lasting, while methane is stronger but very short-lived (before turning into CO2!)… It isn’t as if these differences aren’t important, but maybe we should consider how (or if) discovering which gas is the king of warming will actually allow us to improve our strategy. At this point, I don’t see any real strategy being put into practice, it’s just been a lot of words and promises and targets. And the strategies of global veganism, or massive rewilding, are filled with wild assumptions.
By the way, in your discussion of the amount of GHGs remaining in the atmosphere, with methane and CO2, you said “Two-thirds of it [CO2] is drawn down. In the first year, it’s drawn down by growing vegetation.” This seems to imply that in one year 2/3 is drawn down, but that’s way off. The work of Joos et al (2013) is often cited in the literature, showing that on a methane timescale of (after) 10 years, some 70% of CO2 remains in the atmosphere, 60% at 20 years, 50% at 40 years…30% (2/3) comes up around 400 years, down to 20% remaining after 1,000 years. These are approximations of course, but still. I don’t want to say the standard accounting practice is okay, but from this point of view the fact that CO2 is typically accounted for on a gross scale seems not quite so bad.
I think the US 'deep state' ie fossil fuels, arms, animal ag, pharma, agrochemicals, tech and media who control the 'narrative' don't care about fossil fuels being under the bus- it's done nothing to harm their profits nor to stop emissions.
However, people have much more power over what goes into their mouths than who supplies their heating (or cooling). We could do some damage to animal ag (and therefore pharma and therefore agrochem and therefore fossil fuel's profits and power.
The vegan and environmental movements were growing in influence in 2019. They were, I believe, deliberately scuppered by the 'pandemic' response and the growth of right wing climate crisis denial which gained momentum from the OTT big government style measures- leading to getting a climate crisis denier (in public) into the White House. Madness.
I've heard what I consider to be pretty reasonable points coming from other researchers/scientists.
They're not denying that a large proportion of methane is produced through industrial animal agriculture but they argue that the amount of methane produced by ruminant animals hasn't changed for millennia.
The idea put forward is that the global mass of ruminant animals hasn't actually changed, it's just shifted from the diminishing wild (bison, deer..) to the increasing livestock (cattle, sheep...)
They also put forward the idea that the amount of ruminant produced methane is in a long term balance with the planet's natural bio-spherical processes.
Now if this is indeed the case, would it not be reasonable to wonder where the true increase in methane (and atmospheric CO2) is coming from?
Have we clever humans have been extracting coal, oil and gas for the last 100 or so years?
Up until then, methane and potential CO2 in these 'new' fuels has been locked away for millions of years, underground and not a part of the atmosphere, not contributing to any warming or climate shenanigans.
Nah, that's just an unlikely coincidence, isn't it. Nothing to see here, move along...
BTW, if people are unaware, the act of extraction has emitted vast amounts of methane (under reported, if reported at all) and of course the burning of these fuels releases unimaginable amounts of CO2 - and other pollutants that we don't bother talking about any more, it seems.
>> “The idea put forward is that the global mass of ruminant animals hasn't actually changed, it's just shifted from the diminishing wild (bison, deer..) to the increasing livestock (cattle, sheep...)
They also put forward the idea that the amount of ruminant produced methane is in a long term balance with the planet's natural bio-spherical processes.” <<
you then go on to say “Well if this is the case…”. Well it is not the case. It’s not even close to the case.
It doesn’t matter how often this garbage gets uttered by scientists with no expertise in this field or anybody else with no expertise, the numbers of large mammals being produced today vastly outweighs the natural ecosystems once on these lands, even when you include all the land used for crop feed to bring animals to market weight much faster than in natural herds. Paul Maloney has written lots of blog pieces about this on old blog Terrasendo and his new blog Planetary Vegan, Here’s one such post read i recall reading years ago: https://terrastendo.net/2013/07/26/do-the-math-there-are-too-many-cows/
Don’t forget urbanisation and broad-scale Ag has resulted in many wetland systems being removed from Earth’s ecosphere as the Ag revolution took off. These wetlands produce methane (though they also can drawdown carbon at a high rate as well, especially mangrove systems), and that would account for an offsetting of some of the measured methane due to animal production.
The way scientists distinguish bio-logical methane and fossil methane (released from fracking well sites and open cut coal mines) in the atmosphere is with carbon dating≥ ie using the ratio of C12 to C14 to see how old molecules are. There are natural sources of methane but the vast majority today, and the human caused part, is livestock and dairy production. Biological sourced methane is just over half the atmospheric stock these days according to the literature I’ve read.
Can you point to a group who's doing the quantifying?
I am being lazy, but I've been down this path before and given up on finding reliable numbers because of the back and forth between competing 'experts', all carrying their own biases and quiet vested interests.
"Current mammal livestock biomass has been estimated to be 0.1 PgC and only 0.003 PgC in current wild mammal populations (Bar-On et al., 2018; Greenspoon et al., 2023). Thus, the estimated current-day mammal biomass, including livestock, is somewhat smaller than what we estimate to be the present-natural biomass of wild mammals. The estimates are of similar magnitude, but with a near-complete shift from wild to domestic mammals. We note that these numbers only concern standing biomass and not biomass flux. While we estimate higher standing biomass, the faster turnover rate of domestic animals may mean a higher biomass consumption rate per kg of farmed biomass relative to wild biomass."
In terms of biomass, livestock (animals raised for human consumption) vastly outweigh wild mammals on Earth. Humans and their livestock account for 96% of the total mammal biomass, with wild mammals representing only 4%, https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass. Specifically, cattle and pigs alone make up 60% of the total mammal biomass.
Well, that is what the reference I gave said as well. But it didn't respond to my question about how you can compare US bison with global cattle numbers. Also, what my links show is that the biomass of wild animals were in the same order of magnitude as the biomass of today's ruminants.
it says the biomass of current-day mammals including livestock is smaller than present total of wild mammals. This makes no sense- current day total of all mammals is less than current wild mammals? It's says nothing about what they 'were' at some unspecified time in the past.
As regards how i can compare bison to global cattle, it's just an estimate but in places like New Zealand there were no large mammals. Bison were also native to Europe but no records of hunting to extinction.
You should read the paper that is referenced. I can understand that you misunderstand what they say as they use a funny terminology. Both papers , how is that the biomass of wild animals, before human exterminated them, were in the same order of magnitude as the biomass of today's ruminants.
Thanks, Rachel, for this interview. It mirrors an episode of Just Have A Think a few months back which featured the paper by Charles Behrens and others. It also produced a lot of heat in the comments. My own feeling is that it is very easy to get lost in the weeds in these complex issues. Truth, as usual, is only ever partial and most commentators with integrity will have part of the truth in their findings. The great task is to find the level on which all these truths can be reconciled. We will need consensus when the time comes to rebuild.
Those operating at organisational level, like Gerard, are doing what they can to exert some influence and it is important push back. We should not be too optimistic thought about the effect. I may be a little cynical but while we all shouted about the naivety of the Nordhaus paper on how climate change would (or more accurately wouldn't) affect the economy, its widespread acceptance owed less to blind belief in its integrity than to its helpful message to carry on regardless.
Meanwhile, the political and economic juggernaut is not going to be stopped in its tracks while it still feeds power and wealth, however the cake is sliced in terms of emitters, so it is down to us to do what we can where we live and where we have influence.
As always, another engaging conversation. As a plant-based eater for many years, I have never pushed others in that direction because people don’t like being told how they eat matters to the planet not just their palate. And I get it. I have food preferences, too. I included a chapter in my book, Being Restorative, called the Vegan Chronicles, with a note preceding it to assure readers I am not trying to cudgel them. This conversation helps me get beyond my reluctance to discomfort because the planet is at stake. And as a person who identifies as a daughter of the trees, I have been more vocal about deforestation because people tend not to be quite so defensive. This conversation, however, is so compelling that I posted it on Facebook (I know, its own abomination) because I hope friends will take the time to consider the evidence Gerard presents.
Also, I appreciate his explanation of inaccurate data comparison. And Rachel, re: your curiosity about why the fossil fuel industry doesn’t try to reduce animal agriculture, is it because so many petrochemicals and so much fossil fuel get used in large scale animal agriculture so the fossil fuel companies don’t want to lose some of their profits? That would be interesting to explore.
it’s difficult. as a adult-life long vegetarian and decade long vegan I know well the difficulties and the resistence people put up, at the individual and societal levels. I try and live an example and cook people the best vegan food i can. but it doesn’t change very many minds, not yet. I do think there’s a sea-change amongst young people. Let’s hope so.
thanks for having Gerard Wedderburn Bishop on your pod, Rachel. i cant wait to listen, and i know his papers well, having read some of his prepublication material for several years.
Gerry educated me on anomalies in methane emissions accounting, measurement and aggregation in 2012-15 as i assisted with preparation of two major Beyond Zero Emissions reports, including data overload on maps and other infographics and graphs for the BZE Land Use Report, 2015 of which GWB was a lead author.
the LUR highlighted the fact that Ag and Forestry sectors have been implicitly claiming the entirety of biosphere’s CO₂ drawdown as their own private emissions accounting offsets so far as national accounting under the current UNFCCC rules for national emissions accounting
Gerard’s recently published papers are a fascinating synergy of his work over decades and new understandings the physical sciences community have around Radiative Forcing indexes for various heating and cooling GHGs. the implications are truely revelatory, especially for anybody who’s never really gone down the GHG emissions accounting rabbit hole. i thoroughly recommend they read his most recent two or three papers or if that’s too big an ask, watch his media release videos and YouTube a series on the Farmed Animal Controversy.
Is there a danger when including the cooling effect of aerosols that we lose sight of the potential warming when those particles ultimately fall out of the atmosphere?
James Hansen calls it our “Faustian Pact” for good reason. if you subscribe to his newsletter or read his most recent paper (co-authored with dozens if not 100 other climate scientists if i recall correctly) he explains the real and present dangers of this situation.
Is the reason that Animal Agriculture isn’t used as the fall guy for the Fossil Fuel Industry the mutual independence between the two i.e. the fertiliser necessary to grow the feed for the animals?
it’s complicated. as someone whose spent over a decade in climate activism and renewable energy transition advocacy i can tell you that both sectors, and forestry as well have very powerful lobbying capability, not the same in nature or orgs behind them but it’s all
connected at the political level in many ways. the “resources sector” in general, at least in Australia but also in USA and UK from what i know see conservationists, climate activists, environmentalists, vegans, peace activists and you name it as the Common Enemy. they literally use that kind of language when the address voters in regional electorates in Australia. see any video capturing Barnaby Joyce having a conversation with some local supporters for example.
i would make the point that if and when fossil emissions ever do peak and decline to a minuscule proportion of what they are today in any country or globally, it is at this point the livestock and forestry industries will have nowhere to hide and the spotlight will very much be swung onto their side of the emissions court and they know it, so are trying to co-opt the Regenerative Ag movement to be mostly about rotational grazing or Savory Swindle method rotations as being of climate benefit. they do it the same way the media falls for the Atkin’s diet just because one paper documenting a clinical trial showed that people on massively reduced calories using a Atkin’s diet allocation of macros nutrients and food sources showed moderate loss of weight, the media figuring that means eat more animal fats and proteins to lose weight and get certain markers down. in spite of the fact that there’s entire journals full of evidence to show these diets are intact incredibly unhelpful in reducing obesity, and getting certain disease correlated markers down.
in economics there’s a school of though called Institutional Econ dating back to Veblen writing “How the Leisure Class Lives” in the 19th century and it shows how people are influenced towards Conspicuous Consumption of certain goods, brands and quantities/volumes of these goods. it explains how private decision making can be harnessed to be collectively directed towards meeting economic and political, environmental, climate outcomes. As anybody on this podcast knows, marketing and Advertising industries get paid a fortune because this kind of influence (mind control) really does work at the macro and micro levels.
LOL. ..."entire journals full of evidence..." You obviously don't understand how the GRADE system of evidence works because if you did then you'd understand how weak 98% of that evidence is. Though thanks for the laugh.
FWIW here's my response to this person's paper, that was incredibly flawed:
the Oxford China Study was the largest epidemiological body of scientific research ever done. they discovered previously unknown links between some 8000 compounds relating to dietary intact and the kinds of disease that have reached epidemic proportions in rich nations. they showed extremely high confidence level correlations between meat and dairy consumption in humans and the “lifestyle” diseases clogging up our hospitals. they published hundreds of papers from this study alone.
Like I previously noted, you don't understand the GRADE system in weighing the significance of scientific data. Epidemiology, which is observational science, is low GRADE data (GRADE 2 out of 5 grades). Epidemiology's primary use is to generate hypothesis for more rigorous research.
Why? With oobsevrational data, there are a lot of confounding variables (confounders).
For example, increased ice cream sales correlate with shark attacks. Does this "prove" eating more ice cream increasing the frequency of shark attacks? No, of course not. But in summer, there are both more shark attacks and ice cream sales because more people are swimming in the ocean and more people are eating ice cream.
So, a basic rule of science is that correlation (aka association) doesn't equal causation. Therefore, you have to look at the strength of the association. That's why you have to look at BOTH relative AND absolute risk. Weak associations, like all of those in the China Study, have a ton of confounders.
I went over the difference between absolute and relative risk in these two blogs:
Absolute Versus Relative Risk- What’s the Difference?
And yes, the China study is mainly an observational study (i.e. low GRADE evidence). Plus, T. Colin Campbell's interpretations of the China study have been thoroughly and repeatedly been debunked, for example, in these two blogs:
how food and diet industry lobbyists and influencers trashed the science of Epidemiology is the subject of an Oxford School report and the subject of this video:
Epidemiology Faces Its Limits: The search for subtle links between diet, lifestyle, or environmental factors and disease is an unending source of fear—but often yields little certainty, by Gary Taubes
Comparative ecologic relationships of saturated fat, sucrose, food groups, and a Mediterranean food pattern score to 50-year coronary heart disease mortality rates among 16 cohorts of the Seven Countries Study
the China study correlations were not weak, quite the opposite , they were as good as you see in medical science while controlled for confounding influences. how about you actually read the book or better yet the papers they published. the scale of the data and the depth of testing for attributes was both broad and deep.
This Harvard study shows that red meat is WORSE for your health than ultra-processed food. Chris interviews one of the authors, Dr. Fenglei Wang, to find out more.
do you actually think epidemiologists (or I) don’t know know the statistical methods used to develop real science as opposed to the “cat puts dint in garage roof” type of correlation? how dumb are you? epidemiologists have made a huge contribution to medical science. much more the that livestock lobby. you’ve probably sore because T Colin Campbell has exposed the efforts the livestock industry go to infiltrate WHO, USDA, US health dept and public health more generally.
everything the China Study Revealed has been shown in clinical trials to be real. Dr Cardwell Essylstein showed heart disease to be a paper tiger. he took patients in the queue for heart bypass surgery and coached them in wholefood plant based diet (medicine) and guess what, the heart disease just melts away when the meat and dairy heavy diets cease, so long as they’re replaced with plant based wholefood diets. same for type 2 diabetes, macular degeneration and many other “western” disease epidemics.
and in the US vegans live 10 years longer. i guess that’s down to some confounding influence too right?
I think animal ag ( pharma's biggest client), agrochemicals and fossil fuels are so closely interdependent you can't see daylight between them.
I think the push back against accepting that animal ag is most culpable is because 'they' know that we can't do much about fossil fuel emissions- we're reliant on governments energy contracts and pricing etc. Even knowing that fossil fuels contribute to climate change- emissions are still going up. But we can all control what goes into our mouths. We can all significantly impact both the profits and power of industry and the climate crisis. https://jowaller.substack.com/p/no-small-local-independent-animal?utm_source=publication-search
i partly agree and partly disagree. i am accurately aware that global emissions are still rising, but China had its first year where wind water and solar produced more electricity than the fossil fuel generators in 2024. they are decarbonising rapidly and where china leads the industrialised world follows. in South Australia they’re already at 78% renewables and target is for 100% plus by 2028 iirc. even industrialised economies can do it with the political will, and South Australia had some of the highest power prices in australia before they invested in renewables (it’s partly why a lot of wind developers choose SA for so many projects rather than states with larger economies, bc they could get more favourable ROIs on their power in SA than other states, plus they had a safer political environment eventually with bipartisan support as RE was such a winner of Federal support for the state reducing energy costs to consumers and industry).
The RE revolution in power sector is all over bar the shouting, even Trump’s ecocide policies can’t stop the growth of RE in the USA, acting for the Fossil Fuel companies who donate to him and buy his cypriots-coin (bribes in plain sight) can’t stop it. even Elon the fake sustainability crusader acting for the fossil fuel lobby by gutting the EPA can’t stop it. (Trump just ordered EPA to destroy its two recently launched satellites which measure point source methane and other GHGs would you believe, i hope EPA sells them to Australia, Canada or EU for a dollar!). the real challenge now is with electrification of all the fuelled transport and industrial processes. i’m very optimistic that heat energy storage at high temperatures will revolutionise many parts of the industrial sector in the 2030 decade. mark my words, there’s so much promising R&D in this space about to bare fruits of many colours and flavours, it will be amazing, even if it is too late to prevent 2.0 to 2.5 °C of warming and the collapse of some major climate systems that impact humankind and ecosystems in catastrophic ways. but we need to do the best we can in dark times and remember that things have been even more bleak in human history, even recently in the 20th century of world wars due to colonial rivalry and the global economic system not being able to get off the gold standard fast enough to prevent wars.
and for sure farmed animal producers will have nowhere to hide other than behind Alan Savoy type fake data/regenerative farm farming memes. but the kids are waking up. veganism is growing like a wave for all kinds of reasons from personal health, animal welfare, climate, ecosphere, and other reasons.
we have to keep the pressure up bc as the comments on this thread show, the bludgeoning rhetoric of the farmed animal producers will always have paid lobbyists spreading myths and attacking valid scientific enquiry into the demonstrable harms to the climate and ecosphere and human civilisations that the industry are responsible for.
Here below are some comments from reading the results of this person's paper. This author pretty much filters data to fit his bias. So, I'm not the slightest bit impressed by what he wrote.
Before noting listing these items, let me first note that deforestation is a process with many drivers from road building for infrastructure needing for electricity to refine aluminum provide access for timber extraction, and land clear for cattle than crop uses, particularly soy used for feeds, biofuels, cooking oil, and other uses. So, livestock may be the most ostensible driver, but there are plenty of other drivers including and especially greed and corruption.
I go over this Deforestation Process in this old blog:
-Regarding figure 1, for forestry the numbers don't account for biological nmvoc's [NM-BVOC] or forest floor NOx emissions. These are large numbers. Monocrops of palm trees and bamboo are especially large emitters of NM-BVOC's like isoprene. These NM-BVOC play multiple roles including using up hydroxyl radicals [OH] and creating secondary oxidation aerosols [SOA's]. So NM-BVOC's impact both the rate of methane oxidation and water vapor consolidation in clouds.
RE: 4.1 & 4.2
-This paper doesn't appear to account for the emissions from wildlife and plants prior to change of use to anthropogenic sources. So net differences of over all carbon emissions from 1750 to 2020 for natural ecosystems to anthropogenic systems are not noted. Only gross increases noted.
-Plus this paper is looking at cumulative emissions without recognizing there's a finite of amount of carbon that is constantly being cycled from the atmosphere to biomass/soil and then to animals and back to the atmosphere. So, the gross numbers are re-counting the same carbon multiple times.
-Fossil fuel emissions and old growth forests have very different time frames (millions compared to hundreds of years). Furthermore fossil fuel emissions are trapped whereas old growth forests and other forests are continuously emitting methane and NM-BVOC's in very large quantities. So, these sorts of thermogenic and biogenic carbon pools and emissions are very different. All fossil fuel emissions since 1750 haven't been in the atmosphere for approx. the past 200 to 300 hundred million years. So, the thermogenic carbon, unlike biogenic carbon, hasn't been part of the finite carbon cycle for a very very VERY long time. Biogenic carbon, cycles from a gas to liquid or solid and back to gas at varying rates from a less than second to hundreds of years. I go over the differences more in this blog: https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2023/05/28/the-methane-chronicles-plus-why-you-cant-discuss-methane-without-discussing-hydroxyl-radicals/
-Note too perennial grasslands in mollisols draw down huge amounts of soil carbon, particularly with necromass that associates exudates with minerals to form mineral associated organic matter [MAOM] to depths as far as roots and mycorrhizal associations reach (a lot deeper than 30 cm). This MAOM is retained in the earth for a very long time (200+ years). Other pools of carbon include these extensive mycorrhizal fungi networks.
-Below ground biomass in the various carbon pools with varying rates of cycling are protected from fire unlike above ground biomass.
-Additionally tropical rain forests do not allocate much carbon into the soil since their soils are very acidic (oxalic). Oxalic soils are very rich in iron and bauxite (which is used to make aluminum). So this is why mining along with the electricity (damns) needed to convert bauxite into aluminum are also large drivers of deforestation.
RE: 4.3.
-Land that is "grazing land" is not fully occupied by grazing animals all the time. Grazing animals only occupy a fraction of such land at any one time. Such land often is an intact grassland ecosystem with numerous plants, insects and wild animals that have evolved in these intact grassland ecosystems. So, this is multi-use land. And again converting grasslands to forests will likely lower the albedo and thus increase surface temps. See: MYTH 1 and 1B in this recent blog: https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2025/07/01/vegan-myths-half-truths-versus-reality/
-Again massive over counting of methane since "cumulative methane emissions" is the same methane being double, triple, quadruple counted over and over and over again. Methane can last in the atmosphere anywhere from a second to 140 years depending upon when it collides with a hydroxyl radical [OH]. Currently, the half life of methane is approx 7 years and it's average lifespan is approx 10 years. Before industrialization, the half life of methane was approx 4 years. So that means prior to industrialization half of all methane emit broke down back to cyclical CO2 and water vapor in 4 years or less time.
I discussed these methane dynamics in this blog where I provided the curve for CH4 oxidation:
I've only scratched the surface on this topic, but when it comes to how atmospheric chemistry in the atmosphere interacts with the the biosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere, the key thing in my mind is to make sure the various carbon cycles still function, and by cycles I mean a balance of phase changes from gases into liquids & solids for as long as possible before phase changing back to gases.
So, this requires maximizing photosynthesis both in regards to amount and efficiency. Thus desertification and deforestation reduces this photosynthetic capacity/efficiency as does plant diversity reduction and bare fallows. So, diverse forests and grasslands/meadow replacement by monocrops or trees, especially w/o cover crops, reduce photosynthetic capacity/efficiency.
Obviously, esp the tilled, chem tilled, and other forms of degenerative Ag also destroy the soil carbon holding capacity of the lithosphere. Further extraction of the trapped carbon pools also adds to the atmospheric carbon load creating greater in balances to carbon cycling due to reduced photosynthesis capacity/efficiency, reduced biomass, and reduced soil carbon pools.
All the Ag, including tree Ag, also adversely impacts surface by decreasing the albedo (increasing surface temps) ...plus messes up the water cycle...since compaction reduces infiltration and retention of water, and thus reduces plants and the plant emissions needed for water vapor consolidation as well as for hydroxyl radical formation. I wrote about this some in this old blog: https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2022/05/30/interdependent-cycles-and-rainfall/
Anyway, sorry for the long dissertation...like I noted this is infinitely complex and impossible to model...though climate scientists love their models
'And again converting grasslands to forests will likely lower the albedo and thus increase surface temps.'
Sorry Regen, but this is a much quoted (by the climate establishment) but fundamentally false statement!
Yes, converting grassland to forest (more usually the converse) reduces both albedo (reflected heat) and radiated heat, but greatly increases the global cooling effect of evaporation/evapotranspiration, which is proportional to leaf surface area (leaf area index - LAI). Particularly tropical and sub-tropical forestation, which has a relatively large LAI, has a net cooling effect on the planet, and it is here much of the deforestation is occurring.
So, once again context is important. The context that you're citing for tropical forests is a lot different than the context referred to in the paper for temporal grassland ecosystems like those in the Midwestern US where this research was conducted.
Not to mention, evapotranspiration occurs from grasses and forbes as well as from trees. So does the emission of NM-BVOC's and NM-OBVOC's needed for the secondary oxidation aerosols [SOA's]. These SOA's are used for water vapor consolidation into rain cloud formation. Without these SOA's, water vapor won't consolidate.
I wrote about this in this blog, citing multiple references:
(As a side note: Phytoplankton also emit NM-BVOC's that help form rain clouds over oceans).
And guess what? In arid and semi-arid environments, well managed domesticated ruminants and predator managed wild ruminants (and herbivores) by grazing directly impact photosynthetic fixed carbon allocation down to soils as root exudates. These exudates feed microbes that die and become necromass. This necromass is what forms up to 50% of soil organic matter [SOM]. Thus this increases SOM, which increases rain water infiltration and retention.
And guess what that does? It improves grass & forbe growth and thus more evapotranspiration in arid and semi arid ecosystems as these ecosystems are transformed back into grassland ecosystems as shown in this video: https://youtu.be/_KtaG_laADA?si=KkuDRZRuMiT5YU4k
But that's not all. Grazing in these restored grassland ecosystems releases the NM-OBVOC's (esp methanol CH3OH) from grasses and forbes to form SOA's ...as well as be part of the process that forms OH.
Thus, contrary to WB's incorrect assertion, well-managed grazing ruminants are part of the process that leads to cooling from aerosols and rain cloud formation.
your blog cited tweets by an Alan Savory believer. that’s not citing science that’s citing wishful thinking.
Savory himself is on the record as saying to a university audience ., “i don’t have evidence or solutions, all i’m offering is a different way to think about things”. he’s a charlatan because he’s always claiming the “the only way to save the climate is with animal agriculture systems”
LOL. You're obviously not aware of range scientists like Dr. Jason Rowntree at Michigan State University and Dr. Richard Teague, professor emeritus at Texas A & M. So, there's a ton of range (and soil) science supporting what I wrote. Here's a spread sheet I compiled with links to this growing body of science:
Okay Regen. we can agree on one thing, I think - that properly managed ruminants in a nature-based system can be part of the climate/biodiversity crisis solution.
However, the first paper you reference states that, for example, in the tropical/sub tropical Sahel on the southern edge of the Sahara re-forestation would cause climate warming. The logic here being that as the cooling effect of albedo ( reflected short wavelength heat) would be reduced, this net warming effect would more than offset the cooling effect of carbon sequestration into forest. Which, I am sorry, is just patent nonsense.
It totally ignores the impact of re-forestation on reducing heat radiated from the planet surface and the substantial cooling effect of rebuilding/strengthening of the water cycle through the increase in leaf area.
Certainly, forestation above and below the 60th parallel, where snow and ice can prevail and evapotranspiration and radiation are weak, forestation will substantially reduce albedo and can have a climate warming influence. But that is small relative to climate impact of de/re-forestation in the tropics/subtropics.
LOL. Again, you're making overly broad generalizations about ecosystems you obviously know nothing about. When people try to apply universal truths to places with a lot of variability, I just have to assume such people are activists or advocates cosplaying as scientists.
Regardless, grassland ecosystems like those in the Midwestern US haven't been forests for over 50 million years. This was first due to large megafauna, including mastodon and mammoths, up until 10 to 12 thousand years ago. These large herbivores, as well as large herds of ruminants and other herbivores, controlled soil and plant succession.
After most of these large megafauna went extinct (the reasons why are debated, but the general consensus was a combination of over hunting and climate changes), mankind became the keystone species and used fire as a tool for many reasons, including to control plant succession and movement of large herds of bison. These tools were used up until the end of the 1800's when bison, elk, and pronghorn herds (plus their predators) were largely extirpated from these grassland ecosystems.
The Greats Plains of the US was known as the American Serengeti https://tinyurl.com/y79yfy9w because of all this life that co-evolved with the plants in these tall perennial grassland ecosystems. This life wasn't in forests where the remaining animals retreated.
Perennial grasses in mollisols also have very deep root fibrous systems that form associations with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi [AMF]. So, they actually retain a lot more fixed carbon in the soil than many forms of forests do in their above ground biomass and less fibrous root systems. So, the so-called "carbon opportunity" with many forests isn't greater.
The one big exception to this rule are boreal forests with evergreens. But in climates with harsh winters, these types of trees reduce the albedo compared to grasslands during the summer and even more so during the winter when grasslands are covered with snow.
Now that has exactly been the case with the ecosystems these researchers were looking at in their paper where tall grass prairie ecosystems are being overgrown with invasive evergreen junipers and shrubbery.
The thing too is that plant succession follows soil microbe succession from bacteria dominated to fungi dominated soils. So, many attempts to plant trees fail because these trees are planted in bacteria dominated soils. Most trees in temperate forests require fungi dominated soils. Grasslands are pretty balanced (bacteria to fungi) ..and succeed to shrubs.
Though shrubs and early forest succession from grasslands are also very susceptible to fire, and fire can start soil and plant succession all over again. Here desertification is just as or more likely to occur than any sort of plant succession.
Tillage, chem tills, and bare fallows also destroy soils.
So, we need to be just as concerned about desertification as we are about deforestation.
Anyway, this is my last response to you. I see no point in arguing with absolutists. Feel free to have the last word.
so what? the numbers of natural herbivores on these systems is nothing like the intensive grassing and lot feed “finishing” on cropped soy beans etc for the vast majority of cattle in Australia and USA. in USA almost all cattle are lot fed for at least half their weight gain, if not all of it.
In the US, approx. 85% of beef cattle inventory is on grass at any one time in cow/calf and stocker operations. Though 94% is feedlot finished (not grass finished). How is that possible? Bulls, cows, replacement heifers, and calves (up until 10 to 14 months) are all on grass. Steers, culled heifers and culled cows get sent to feedlots where they're transitioned to feeds from forages for approx the last 1/3 of their lives.
Now in an ideal world, more cattle would be grass finished in the US. Personally, I only eat grass finished cattle that I purchase directly from the ranches that I know have good practices. But even with cattle sent to feed lots, the grazing management on cow-calf and stocker operations can be improved. Additionally stockers can also be backgrounded longer on cover crops and regeneratively grown crop residues before being transferred to feedlots.
So, there are a lot of ways to improve grazing and finishing.
if the world suddenly saw livestock production halted then more than have the land under production would no longer be not be required for food. more than half the globes crops are used to feed animals. more than half the worlds cleared land has livestock pasturing around on it. and the vast majority of deforestation is to clear land for animal production especially in deforestation hot spots like Brazil. the UN puts out a lot of data on deforestation based on rigorous science, and the disaggregated data clearly shows animal ag as driving the majority of deforestation.
i analysed some of that data which UN publishes last year. i’ll come back with some:e links.
sadly, deforestation is driven by greed and corruption more than anything else. So, if everyone stopped eat meat tomorrow, deforestation would continue unabated. Roads would still be built for infrastructure access for mining, forests would still be cleared for timber, soy would still be grown for its oils and meals. The meals would just be used for other reasons.
So, stop deluding yourself that veganism or plant based is any sort of panacea. It isn't, and all it does is lead to a lot of serious nutritional deficiencies that cause people to have all sorts of cognitive distortions like the ones you're displaying with your oversimplified polarized thinking and filtering.
in my somewhat informed opinion it’s got both amazing for a revolution in nutrition, fuel switching out of FF and democratising the Ag sector but also the co-opting of this revolution by the livestock and dairy industries to basically play a deflection and greenwashing role on emissions in these sectors. ditto forestry industry to a lesser extent.
Pros:
pesticide and herbicide free foods, FF use reduce, small farm operators (families) become more economically viable, de risked to climate/economic shocks or collapse and just financially independent and successful.
I should make it clear that when talk about the benefits of regenerative ag. I’m talking farming systems free of broad scale or boutique animal production. Regenerative cropping is a thing. Regenerative market gardening and agroforestry are viable and better for the climate and better for feeding a hungry planet.As I wrote, the big threat as i am seeing it is the Livestock and Dairy industries, lobbies, farmers and their cynical political allies and representatives co-opting the name and concept of Regenerative as code for livestock production and dairy with greenwashing spin about carbon drawdown (which is complete and utter rubbish, especially for cattle and sheep producers, the biggest sectors in the Australian animal farming industry in Australia and many other countries).
The Drawdown from regen cattle/sheep production when compared with the GHG, water, land, energy, feed input and other footprints of animal ag is 100s of times that of vegetable and fruit production, when you multiply all these factors together into a product footprint. A bit of praire grass drawdown does almost nothing to offset that footprint, and in most cases re-wilding the land would be a much improved drawdown situation than running Livestock on it, they impede nature from restoring biodiversity and reforestation in most cases as Gerry said. The Alan Savoury cool-aide is being drunk everywhere cattle are produced, and it’s hard to seperate a man/woman from their intoxicant of choice.
Thanks for reading. I think it may be helpful to reserve regenerative/integrative to refer farming animals for food and conservation agriculture (ie min/no tillage, polycrops etc) to refer to plant agriculture?
i read most of your linked piece. generally you are correct in the broad polemic you’re making and we’re in broad agreement but theres a few mistakes and exaggerations in that text. I’ll come back and post on the blog itself it in detail when i get a chance. In the meantime you might like to look at the long running trials of animal free and combined animal-cropping systems at Rhodale Institute, you might be surprised by the data. Your reductive calculations that animals eating vegetation and pooping it out has no net gain for the soil or farm is incorrect, you are missing the big picture in a serious way with that kind of reductionism. claiming only feed brought in from off-farm is a net-gain to the system is thinking like an accountant or dull-minded agronomist, not a biologist or systems thinker. I’m vegan, so please don’t shoot me for saying these things.
So I did look at the Rhodale and the 'decades' long research which compares grain production of conventional using synthetic nitrogen with legume cover crops with legume cover plus 'manure'. The manure, which shows better yields, gets fertilisation from periodic applications of composted manure from 'livestock' obviously outside the eat and poo system. Producing this manure would takes up loads of land, water and energy and produce lots of methane avoided by the legume only crops, that also improved profits over conventional.
The removal of nutrients from the soil by eating them and the addition of some of them back to the soil in the form of poo, not representing net improvement in the nutrients in the soil, and thus the farm, is basic biology and is correct. You seem to be too keen to make a point that can't be made.
You linked to your own post about claims around grazing systems! LOL didn’t even bother to look up RHodale Institue farm and said their data doesn’t surprise you. That is dishonesty and bad faith rhetoric, plain and simple.
Maybe you need to start listening and stop repeating yourself because the Rhodale Institute data I referred to was a comparison of regenerative cropping systems and has ZERO to do with Alan Savory (who I consider a prolific liar and charlatan in some ways, though i acknowledge some people in Permaculture are defenders of what he’s helped explain to orthodox livestock producers).
Rhodale have decades long trails of cropping only and cropping with some animals on stubble/fallow land and the data clearly shows that the combination of small numbers of animals on the land is more productive. They dont make claims about the GHG implications and I havent seen the data. Privately, Elain Ingham made me some big claims for regen drawdown when I interviewed her for BZE Radio show ~8 years ago, but I’ve never seen Rhodale or her make any specific, quantified claims publicly around drawdown potential for regenerativecropping systems.
The productivity benefits are undeniable, as are the improved yields croppers are seeing and massive decline in use of inputs.
This is something I wish to emphasis because even if you aren’t saying it here, your White Privilege blog is saying it right throughout.
It is also something George Monbiot is constantly asserting and much as i love George and his platform, he has a tin ear on this point.
George Monbiot is constantly making a claim which says regenerative farming is by definition boutique farming and less productive than industrial scale farming. he’s straight up wrong and. he’s using a Logical fallacy to hide his ignorance about regenerative farming behind.
just because SOME regenerative farms are boutique and have lower productivity doesn’t mean they have to be this kind of farm by definition.
theres an interview with a Minnesota cropper on the “How To Save a Planet Podcast” recorded some years back.
He and his wife both had to have off-farm jobs. him driving trucks at night and her as aLocal school teacher to survie the high bill for sprays and diesel doing conventional ag. after a few years of transitioning to regenerative farming out of desperation as much as anything, they dont have to have two jobs each and they are using 90% less sprays on their crops. That fact alone in itself brings a huge increase in financial security and farm gate income. Far as i know he doesn’t farm animals as part of that system. you can dismiss it as White Privilege as is your right, but I think its a step in the right direction for global Ag and for the people who grow our food.
And can somebody close to the man please ask George Monbiot to go see this for himself, their YIELDS WENT UP.
If George is like me and does fly for climate reasons he can read One Straw Revolution, written by a Japanese agronomist turned regenerative farmer 50 years before the phrase had been invented. As a former public scientist/agronomist he knew what national rice and barley Maximum Yields were, and he was outproducing them on a farm where he hand sowed the crop (in clay balls to prevent birds eating the winter barley seeds which dorment for half of the year) and used no animal or mechanical harvesting equipment no less! No other human labour than his own in the early days either.
I agree the drawdown claims about animal ag in ANY pasture grazing system known to man are small compared to the land re-wilded.
I notice that the Rodale 40yr report doesn’t mention methane emissions. Not once. This suggests a bias. In effect the farmers in Minnesota have just externalised a cost of their fertilising regime.
Also I can’t help but wonder, where do the cattle go when the crops are growing ?
My point stands that increasing production of crops (by how much and was it really worth it?- does the husbandry of those animals not represent an input; having been bought from breeders and attended by vets? -so the animals graze and humans don't have to do it or sow green manure, big deal- and if the animals aren't being farmed for food they represent a cost to the business) with a small number of animals on land is irrelevant to the bigger picture and all part of the propaganda from industry.
A whole food , conservation grown vegan diet is a no brainer, as you know, not just for non-human animals and human health but because as Wedderburn-Bisshop shows animal ag (which is unnessecary and represents a major part of over consumption of calories, fat and protein mostly by the West (which pleases pharma as they like us fat, sick and on drugs)), is responsible for 50% of climate forcing and without it about 40% of habitable land could be returned to sequestration and rewilding.
Any alleged local benefits of integrative farming in costs, soil quality and decreased labour (over industrial animal farming or monocrops) can not only be reproduced by ‘animal free’ conservation agriculture they are vastly outweighed by the global loss of sequestration and emissions that farming animals for food at all represents.
I didn’t argue that plant based agriculture is not better for the environment than animal based agriculture. In my opinion that is obvious on many levels — on both sides of the farm gate especially once public health is put on the scales of cost/benefit analysis. I’ve said many times in many places that vast amounts of cleared land in Australia, Brazil, USA, Scotland etc etc could and would be returned to high-drawdown ecosystems through re-wilding if all of a sudden there was no markets for animal products (Gerard told me in 2012 that 90% of Australian cattle herds are produced in QLD & NT and 90% of those are ground into burger mince and frozen for export markets).
What I said, and therefore what you are deflecting away from with these comments is that farm productivity can benefit from the use* of animals in sequenced arrangements with a farm that has all of its land under a cycle of cropping. It’s also true that degraded land can benefit in some instances from the short use of grazing animals, especially on marginal non-arable land with poor biodiversity levels because of past abuses under human use for agriculture. Biodiversity returns to these farms where animals are used to improve soils in all cases, because nature will do it for itself given an opportunity as Gerard says.
There’s lots of farms demonstrating this fact and Rhodale Institute is one of them. Their cropping systems including farmed animals are more productive for crops and vegetables, even not considering the animals’ value as products. But given we live in a world where the taking of animal lives is considered acceptable and therefore legal and given the premium prices paid for these animal carcasses,milk and eggs over a bag of grain that is calorifically equivalent, many farmers are going to chose the inclusion of farmed animals in their systems.
First nations in Australia talk about their land turning to rubbish when they are overgrown with ground covers or grasses etc and they burn them off periodically in dry country where theres no herbivores to eat it, or the kangaroos are eating green growth not dry old grasses. the way they do these cool temperature burns it helps the land regenerate (be more productive from a human perspective, biodiverse from an ecological perspective). The use of short intense grazing by animals can bring similar benefits to degraded land, and conversely the introduction of English sheep and cattle onto Australian ‘natural’ grasslands (stewarded by indigenous people for tens of thousands of years) destroyed what was initially incredibly high productivity of these grasslands (there are historical records of some early pasture stations hosting one million sheep at a time), the hard hooves compacted the land and the ntroduced (low protein) grasses started to dominate the higher nutrient level native grasses.
Another natural input is rainfall, good soils full of air pockets and the organisms that mine these air conduits in soil turn poor soils where water runs straight off the agoraphobic surface into massive sponges. Keyline channel systems on hilly country can massively increase the water holding capacity of the land, to the benefit of farmers and their productive systems if the soil is capable of holding the water. There is no doubting the fact that farmed animal manure can improve the richness of soil biota. I didn’t say there is no other way. It’s a method farmers like because it’s low labour for them and they get to sell the animal carcasses at the end of the financial year for a large amount of money, once the herd has had babies which they replace the mothers with. I wouldn’t do it, but the fact is it happens and makes them a livelihood.
I note you didn’t defend the claim that the only benefit to crops that animals can bring is only in proportion to the inputs brought In from off-farm fertiliser or animal feed. That’s an absurd claim that implicitly assumes that a farm is a closed system in energetic terms. It isn’t, there’s a constant input of energy on all farms, it’s called the sun. Most of that energy is reflected back or absorbed as heat which warms the top soil, but some of it is converted by plants using photosynthesis (which itself is fairly “inefficient” but incredibly effective) into a huge range of plants in a natural ecology and just one crop in monoculture cropping.
Cover crops and green manures,even mixed weed pastures can do wonders for the “efficiency” of a farm system in converting solar radiation into plants which in turn feed a myriad of bacteria in the ground. This biota, in turn have a symbotic relationship with the plants, whose roots, leaves, branches etc are their ‘habitat’. It is these biota that can absolutely turn the dial on cropping and vegetable plant health, disease résistance and yields. Biodynamic and regenerative cropping systems are designed to look after the soil biota, because thats the key to plant health, as many farming pioneers have rediscovered in this modern era. Animal manure can also introduce the bacteria and bioavailable nutrient which promotes soil health, and counter to your claim, the benefits are greater than the input of plant feed going in the ground feed that goes into making that dung/manure. It’s reductive to assume it’s just an exercise in counting the calories and doing the math.
* some consider it abuse given that animals are killed at the equivalent of ~8 yo in human life expectancy terms, but i’m not talking about animal welfare in this thread.
scientists are discovering that as the Earth’s atmosphere warms, the heating potential of methane is Increasing not decreasing, so even if your chemistry lesson is correct, its not the whole picture.
Having said that. yes complex systems evolve to have all kinds of amazing stabilising mechanisms, it’s just that mankind has become so powerful and destructive of the ecosphere that all these natural stabilising systems are being overwhelmed, its a measure of the damage we are doing to Gaia, our host, and it’s not going to end well in the sense of ecosystems everywhere being degraded to the point where ecological collapse or transformation to use a less scary term has become the path we are committed to at this time..
Note he's not wrong about hydroxyl oxidation, though there are a myriad of sources of methane including many aquatic sources which by some accounts are over 50% of all methane emissions. So, per, the just cut CH4 emissions school of climate science, the best thing to do would be to kill off beavers, drain wetlands, and essentially turn Earth into Mars. The other better option is to increase the methanotrophic oxidation capacity of the small soil sink and the hydroxyl oxidation capacity of the very large tropospheric methane sink.
you love quoting fringe science and saying it accounts for over 50% of methane. seriously, cite real science with references or just stop.
we are talking about anthropogenic methane, and a little more than half that is associated with livestock production and rice paddies according to carbon dating, the vats portion of that is livestock. a little under 50% is fossil fuel extraction and supply chains and combustion which all leaks methane along the way. as do open cut coal mines and fracking fields seeping methane into underground water and percolating up through creeks and the ground.
most of the Earths wetlands have been removed under human development. some natural wetland ecosystems like mangroves have drawdown much greater than the highest sequestering forests. if they are emitting methane it is possibly getting consumed by methane digesting microbes that can rely on a ready source. that’s the same with methane digesting microbes in the soil, it’s the subterranean methane percolating up their are digesting not passing cattle sourced methane because it tends to rise not sink into the ground being lighter than nitrogen, CO₂, O2 etc. .
New data from the New South Wales government reveals land-clearing has increased by 40% prompting calls for the Minns government to overhaul the state’s native vegetation laws.
The statewide data, published Monday afternoon, shows 66,498ha of native vegetation was cleared for agriculture, infrastructure and forestry in 2023, “equivalent to bull-dozing Sydney’s Royal national park four times over”, the Nature Conservation Council of NSW said.
The total cleared was up 40% on the previous year, when 47,388ha was bulldozed.
The rate of increase was even higher for woody vegetation, with 21,137ha cleared in 2022 and 32,847 ha in 2023 - up by 55%.
Jacqui Mumford, the chief executive of the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, said:
The jump in land clearing across NSW by 40% during Labor’s first year of governing is a major red flag. The government needs to get moving on its election commitment to ‘end runaway land clearing’.
The former Coalition government relaxed the state’s native vegetation laws in 2017.
Agriculture was again the biggest driver of clearing in 2023, contributing 51,201 hectares - 77% of all the clearing. More than half of the overall clearing was “unallocated”, meaning the clearing did not require an approval under the state’s laws, or the environment department could not find a record of approval, or the clearing was unlawful.
Nathanielle Pelle from the Australian Conservation Foundation said:
What that means in real terms is more homes for native wildlife were knocked down in this 12-month period than the previous year, pushing species like koalas, quolls, greater gliders and gang gang cockatoos closer to extinction.
The second paper that finds animal agriculture to be the leading cause of present day climate change is published here - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/adb7f2
I have listened to the podcast and agree with much of what you said about industrial farming and re-greening the planet. But I have a question. You mentioned that water vapour is the most potent greenhouse gas in the troposphere. As water vapour blocks/absorbs the same parts of the infrared radiated heat spectrum as methane and outnumbers it by about 10,000 to one, the maths and science suggests that methane is only a tiny player in driving climate change?
The way I've heard this explained before is that water vapour is a natural phenomenon so normally wouldn't be an issue, but a warming atmosphere can hold more water vapour, so it has become a positive feedback loop.
water changes from gas to liquid (rain, etc) quickly and so doesn't remain in the atmosphere long enough to pose a serious problem like other GHGs
Yes, but water vapour is in constant flux, as one molecule drops out another molecule enters. Water vapour is always present, it doesn’t disappear!
Yes but the amount of it in the atmosphere is always changing. Disappearing and reappearing.
It is always there. Water vapour never‘disappears’!
Exactly, so it’s the increasing GHGs that turn up the dial.
Thank you Gerard!
Hello Rachel, love your podcast. I'm an organic, independently audited net zero, 100% pasture fed, 5th generation dairy farmer based in SW Scotland. We have been on this agroecological journey for over 25 years, developing a food model on our upland family farm that delivers positive climate, biodiversity, diffuse pollution, animal and social welfare outcomes. We are currently fine tuning our European-leading (we are part of an EU-wide network) cow-with-calf dairying system to prove to a sceptical industry that we can deliver on all these ecosystem services, and be profitable! My late wife and I wrote a book about our journey a couple of years ago (A Dairy Story - available on line) and I'd love to come on you platform to talk about the outcomes we have experienced from working with nature. Best, David
Very underwhelming
https://open.substack.com/pub/planetcritical/p/gerard-wedderburn-bisshop?r=urwf6&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=134726924
....
I didn't quite understand how you allocated deforestation to crop agriculture and animal agriculture. To my knowledge there is no data set that would allow such allocation. Further I wonder how you consider "deforestation" that results in forestry.
In most of the Northern hemisphere it seems to me that the most radical land use transformation since 1750 has not been forests to farm land but "primary forests" to plantation kind of forests. Ironically, earlier a lot of forests were grazed, so what has counted as "primary forests" for example in Sweden where I live was actually grazed forest (and used for charcoal etc) until commercial forestry took off end of 19the century. A bit later, grazing forests was banned and plantation style forestry was established. I think it would be very difficult to allocate emissions to any particular sector in those circumstances.
As far as I can understand, in many parts of the world, the draining of wetlands for agriculture use has been very wide spread since 1750 and would be even more relevant as an emission source of CO2 and N2O. Methane emissions would be drastically reduced by draining wetlands though, and a wetland that would be grazed by ruminants would in many cases emit less methane with the ruminants included than before (In Sweden estimates are that fertile wetlands can emit 300 kg of CH4 per hectare and year, which is the same as 1.5-3 cows per year (the lower number could be intensive dairy, the higher number grazing beef mother cows) .
Hi Gunnar,
These paper have stirred up a lot of discussion - good to see, because the conventions on how emissions are measured need more scrutiny. Your query about relating land use emissions to sectors is a good one, that has a simple answer - land emissions are related to sectors based on current land carbon deficit and land use. For example, all grazing land is for agriculture (animal ag) therefore carbon deficit and land use emissions are 100% due to that land use, and crops are apportioned according to biomass flows - all described in the papers and supplementary material, that contains more detail on types of fire etc. Accuracy of results depends totally on accuracy of data, so the best data time series were used, and all three new accounting measures are well established - in the literature as referenced, so none of these measures is controversial. This work is the first to apply all three together, which delivers the rather surprising results.
My prior comment https://tinyurl.com/4tfe3dwa was based on mainly on your paper. Though in regards to the contents of this podcast, I'm equally underwhelmed.
Like I noted previously you seem to thinks carbon from biogenic sources is being constantly emitted rather than cycled. This perspective is just conceptually wrong. But this mindset is the same one of many modern Westerners who seem unable to understand that pretty much everything in nature is cyclical as well as that natural cycles are interdependent and interconnected.
Specifically, in regards to methane, if you look at annual budgets of methane based on more accurate top down analysis, these show emissions only slightly exceeding sinks. Without fossil fuels, sinks would far exceed emissions.
With methane data generated from satellites, this data looks mainly at high concentrated sources. So, most of what's detected is emissions from natural gas sites and then waste dumps. Extensive enteric emissions are too diffuse to be detected.
Plus if you look at recent trends of when atmospheric levels of CH4 have increased, those were when natural gas use increased in the 1960's through 80's with massive fugitive emissions, and then more recently with fracking starting around 2008. From around 1996 to 2007, atmospheric CH4 levels were flat even though this was during a period where global cattle herd sizes increased.
Note too: Thermogenic emissions (fossil fuels) are emitted without the precursors needed for hydroxyl radical [OH] formation. In natural and anthropogenic systems that mimic nature biogenic emissions are emitted with the precursors needed for OH formation. So, such biogenic emissions will break down a lot faster than the 10 year average...often within hours and days rather than years.
Like you noted, CH4 can lead to the formation of tropospheric ozone [O3], but so can all the non-methane hydrocarbons emitted by trees and plants. To do so, these various hydrocarbons react with NOx emitted largely from soil as part of the nitrogen cycle. This occurs constantly, and O3 is require for the main pathway for OH formation in the troposphere. So, O3 isn't always "bad." It's needed to breakdown CH4 and other atmospheric trace gases.
I went over this in this blog: https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2024/06/15/just-some-nerdy-atmospheric-chemistry/
So, it doesn't seem like you actually know that much about atmospheric chemistry.
I'd also have to make a similar conclusion about your understanding of soil science, since you seem to be adhering to an old paradigm about the rate of soil organic matter formation. Maybe too much Pete Smith, who also doesn't understand the newer microbial soil science. Grazing, when done well, actually increases carbon distribution fixed via photosynthesis into root exudates, and its this root carbon consumed by microbes, that die and become the necromass associated with minerals to form recalcitrant forms of mineral associated organic matter [MAOM] that retain carbon for hundreds of years.
And as for his ERF argument, that's just a slightly recycled GWP20 argument to claim gross methane has a larger climate impact than when GWP100 is used as the standard. It too is wrong. GWP* is flawed, but it's better than these alternatives. Obviously given your food religion, you're obviously going to filter the data to fit this quasi-religion.
Not sure where I can find the data on the area of grazing land for domestic herbivores and an analysis of how big share of that land that is actually from deforestation (a lot of grasslands are "natural grasslands"). Note that only around half of the land classified as grasslands are grazed by domestic animals, approximately 1.6 billion.
https://tinyurl.com/5by86scw
Gunnar, here are some of my thoughts on this person's paper FYI
https://open.substack.com/pub/planetcritical/p/gerard-wedderburn-bisshop?r=urwf6&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=134726924
Have to note, I wasn't the slightest bit impressed.
Absolutely we need to be looking at gross figures to get the full picture, but I think there is a reason to consider fossil carbon as more significant in terms of system change. When forests are cleared that is releasing carbon from a relatively fast part of the carbon cycle, which has a large and constant turnover, and into which (as long as we don't push the ecological system too far) it can fairly reliably be drawn down again. Whereas fossil fuel use is releasing carbon from the much slower geological part of the cycle. It effectively cannot return there any time soon (CCS being bullshit), and can only add to the atmosphere & biosphere carbon, increasing the total carbon that needs to be drawn down by the biosphere, potentially far beyond its capacity to do so. All that said, land clearance and animal agriculture are still significantly understated causes, especially at policy level. Few politicians seem willing to talk about plant based diets. The cultural aspect of neoliberalism emphasises the right of individuals to consume whatever they want without thought of wider consequences. That's going to be hard to change.
You're right Mathew. That difference between the relatively rapidly-cycling biological part of the carbon cycle and the vastly slower geological part of the cycle is also why the idea of planting trees to 'offset' fossil fuel extraction/burning is like drinking more water to keep sea levels down (for all that wise tree-planting is a wonderful and appropriate course of action!).
AND there's something exciting about recognising the significant holes in the narrative that climate impacts are merely the result of globalised average warming from atmospheric greenhouses gases.
After many, many years as a climate activist, researcher and author, this piece nonetheless significantly shifted my perspective, which is the highest recommendation I can offer it:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-07-17/millan-millan-and-the-mystery-of-the-missing-mediterranean-storms/
Those holes in the dominant climate narrative that it explains are exciting because they offer empowerment. Offer the understanding that our communities and regions need to improve the climate that affects our lives.
Meaningful, life-changing local and regional action, rather than lobbying global governance or drop in the ocean emissions reductions. I might also add that I’ve seen this exact understanding directed into action at Tamera, Portugal, and walked in paradise where a desert used to be 💧 🌱 🌳
Tamera's delicious film 'Water Is Love' looks at multiple other examples of putting this understanding into practical action: https://www.waterislovefilm.org/
And to me this makes all the sense, even in a world where the culture behind still-accelerating emissions is "going to be hard to change", as you understatedly put it.
Great paper, thanks for sharing it.
Tamera is an incredible community! I saw "Village of Lovers" and am eager to watch "Water is Love"
Currently freely watchable at that link I shared :)
You’re missing the point about most land clearing. In the first instance cleared forest is in the majority of cases not just “left to grow back”. In the second instance, regrowth forest has a fraction of the drawdown potential and biodiversity of an old growth forest or woodland ecosystem. It takes 100-200 years for temperate rainforest in Australia to become “old growth” with nesting habitat for many bird species like owls and cockatoos, and it also takes that long to reach peak drawdown rates. Young regrowth forest uses a lot more water, and recycles much less water than a mature rainforest. The Carbon drawn down in the first twenty years of regrowth is pretty insignificant when compared with the drawdown that the old growth forest that was removed wouldHave continued doing over that period. In Australia, forest commissions would be clear felling that forest again in 30-50 years to harvest the timber for the export wood chips market in Japan (who preserve and revere their forests) and China (who don’t but have.converted large arid areas into giant silviculture/forested estates).
>. When forests are cleared that is releasing carbon from a relatively fast part of the carbon cycle, which has a large and constant turnover, and into which (as long as we don't push the ecological system too far) it can fairly reliably be drawn down again.
Well this is the same ill-informed work-salad we hear ad:nauseam from IPCC scientists and a few pseudo-environmentqal groups defending animal ag, the fast-cycle or slow-cycle is largely irrelevant, what counts is the absence of draw-down where once there was draw-down, on a massive scale as Gerard said. and the addition of methane production where once much of the methane produced in the forest was recaptured in the forest not added to the atmospheric stock of rapidly growing methane.
Alastair, I wasn't able to find in Mathew's comment any claim that cleared forest is in the majority of cases "left to grow back", so hopefully we can agree that that's not the case and that old growth forest, regrowth forest, and forestry commission "timber mines" (to quote Vandana Shiva) are VERY different beasts. I also agree with you about the toxic insanity of industrialised animal agriculture.
Yet I'm curious as to why you think pulling carbon from slow-cycle geology (i.e. locked up for the long-term in fossil fuels underground) into the active carbon cycling between trees/oceans/atmosphere etc is "largely irrelevant". You call it "ill-informed word salad", but what is your actual critique of the point?
I 100% agree that the absence of draw-down where once there was draw-down is critical. And if you see the addition of extra methane to the atmospheric stock (that then needs drawing down) as important — as I fully agree that it is — why do you see the addition of extra carbon that needs drawing down as irrelevant? Or am I misunderstanding you?
Hoping to understand your perspective.
Perhaps it was more the "it can fairly reliably be drawn down again" that you reacted against? I shared that reaction. The "as long as we don't push the ecological system too far" is valid, but as a parenthetical note seemed to be doing a lot of work in that sentence, in a world where that is clearly what's happening! Still, one can analyse the structure of quickly-typed blog comments too far.
Warmly,
Shaun
Hi Mark, I did an explanatory video on some of the detail behind critics' objections and responses - it's a bit technical but may be helpful - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW5vpWXvd5A&t=2s
What is really hard to figure out here, as Rachel hinted at, is why (mainstream) scientists are not behind this type of argument. On the one hand, many mainstream scientists have said that the accounting issue Gerard mentions is a real issue and should be changed, but those same people generally do not reach the same conclusions as to how a change in accounting suddenly results in big differences with which GHG is causing the most trouble, so why is that? As Rachel said, it seems unlikely that the powerful are more interested in dismantling FF than animal consumption, as energy drives everything, while eating meat is a simple choice or preference for most people, as most people have alternative food sources. And the non-food products made from animals are not essential or non-replaceable. So the idea of protecting this slice of the agriculture industry rather than our basic energy production industry doesn’t make sense.
Gerard’s suggestion that it boils down to scientists and NGOs “toeing the line” doesn’t add up. Outside of the scientists who are specifically hired by agricultural interests, public and private, who of course would be more likely to have to protect an official story, it’s hard to imagine those who work on solving climate issues and who have no such ties to agriculture keeping silent about bad science that might prop up agra stories, especially if keeping silent forces them to reduce the effectiveness of their own research, which is their bottom line.
After Sailesh Rao spoke on PC, I did a pretty exhaustive review and analysis of his arguments, and found them lacking. The result was that while animal agriculture, specifically, is indeed a big source of GHGs, his accounting on that sector’s total global GHG slice is not as big as he claims. But that isn’t as important as the fact that animal products are far less sticky than fossils. We can stop animal consumption much faster than fossil burning, and we get a double whammy effect from that because by stopping animal consumption we not only drastically reduce methane emissions, but we also allow for more land now used for keeping animals to revert to original states, increasing biodiversity and carbon drawdown through vegetation that will grow there, in addition to reducing the “need” to clear forests for livestock production (keeping in mind, however, more of that land seems to be used for soybean and other crops than for livestock, while how much of those crops are being fed to the livestock is a very good question I don’t know the answer to!). On the other hand, we cannot forget that rewilding typically results in reduced albedo, creating a warming effect that can even outweigh the cooling effect from reduced GHG emissions, so the simple fix isn’t as straightforward as many think.
As for Gerard’s argument, which is narrower than Rao’s, some of the same issues persist, on both pro and con sides. One thing I note is that claiming animal agriculture to be the largest human source of methane is questionable, although ultimately of very little importance as the scale is still large. One reason is that data on this typically groups agriculture in a block, including rice cultivation, which is estimated to represent 5-20% of the agricultural total. Estimates on rice’s contribution, as well as the sources for methane in general (!) are tricky to arrive at because many of the variables are not so well known and some are also moving targets depending on seasonal variations and other factors.
Why a focus on short-lived GHGs like methane may not be as strong in the scientific community as that given to CO2 is that it is likely that CO2 is seen as more problematic due to the built-in negative feedback against further anthropogenic methane emissions as climate change progresses and human collapse approaches. A reduction in human activity and consumption as a result of continued climate change reduces emissions of all types. Less money means less travel, expensive foods, even heating. The more that global heating is due to short-term GHGs like methane, the better, as reduced consumption would decrease global heating. If more of the heating were due to CO2, then a collapse of consumption is more likely to trigger a higher loss of polluting aerosols from FF which have had a cooling effect on the planet, which then results in a sharp increase in global heating rather than a cooling. We are likely going to see continued growth in both vegi-consumption and meat consumption as a result of attitude changes and population growth combined with enhanced incomes, for bit. Five more years? But I think the growing incomes of the poor may soon splutter and then erode as warming will take everyone by surprise, so that the trend of rising wealth among the world’s poor driving increased meat consumption will stop, and population growth probably will too. Hopefully that will drive a global cooling and also force those in power to wake up, or better yet, be thrown aside!
A major part of the resistance to the accounting advances is the first one applied - consistent gross accounting of carbon. See the papers but this mindset is based on the rationale that clearing/regrowth is part of a cycle. It is a cycle, but is caused by us, not by nature. I have simply used accepted published data on gross and net land use emissions (adopting gross land use and gross fossil fuel carbon emissions).
The carbon that is emitted when we clear a forest is no longer biogenic - we have been burning fossil fuels for 6,000 years, so forest growth and carbon stored since then are a mix of original biosphere carbon and a growing proportion of fossil carbon. Forests take up carbon from all sources, so the original biosphere carbon pool and carbon cycle no longer exists.
A growing number of authors now advocate full gross carbon accounting - in fact I am not the first for any of these 3 novel accounting changes - just the first to apply all three. All three are accepted science, in the peer-reviewed literature for several years (as referenced in the papers).
Hope this helps!
Thank you, Gerard. I have read your papers and many of those you reference. As I wrote, I recognize that there are scientists who agree that GHG accounting should be consistent, rather than being a combination of gross and net, and that GWP could be replaced by ERF. But outside of two or three other sources that have been mentioned, like Calverd, Goodland-Anhang and Rao, whose positions are problematic, I’m not aware of others coming out with statements claiming that CO2 is not the primary source of global warming, or that livestock farming, or, land use change, is the main source of GHGs, but do let us know if I’ve missed any relevant research on that question, I would love to read it. And on the subject of simply going further back in time to begin measuring anthropogenic GHG emissions, no matter how that changes the tally, what I think climate scientists are saying toward the animal livestock argument, and the carbon cycle, for example, is that the really explosive increase in both GHG concentrations and global temperature change has only occurred after pre-industrial times, so very recently. This is part of the argument that fossil burning is not part of the so-called “natural” carbon cycle because of both the effort required to obtain it and the higher release of GHGs from burning it as compared to wood, for example.
Although I think it is easy to get into trouble when you start saying one thing is “natural” and another isn’t, as if humans aren’t natural creatures, there is a valid argument when it comes to the fact that only people, and only with highly concentrated effort (other than say the minor effects of burning coal one could find without having to mine it), are able to unlock the GHGs from fossils. So that may be seen as “unnatural” and therefore not part of the carbon cycle. But destroying a forest, cutting it down or burning it, happens to some extent as well naturally, particularly through fires. It seems to me that this is why scientists tend to count anthropogenic deforestation as being part of the carbon cycle. What makes anthropogenic deforestation different is the massive scale that we now do it on. And looking at GHG concentration data, human population growth, global warming (temperature rise) data, you see all three exploding only in the last couple of hundred years, although with global temperatures coming in a bit later. So it seems clear that a combination of a fuel switch plus an energy-hungry technology boom plus a population change have resulted in climate change. Some things that we did before, like agriculture, were massively ramped up as population grew, and agriculture methods and fuels to operate them changed as well. At what point should human behavior be considered natural or unnatural? Is rapid population growth unnatural? Or just unwise?
Honestly, I’m not so sure it matters all that much which GHG has created more impact, when it really just boils down to a fight over carbon dioxide and methane, with nitrous oxide coming in a distant third. CO2 is weaker, but more numerous, and very long-lasting, while methane is stronger but very short-lived (before turning into CO2!)… It isn’t as if these differences aren’t important, but maybe we should consider how (or if) discovering which gas is the king of warming will actually allow us to improve our strategy. At this point, I don’t see any real strategy being put into practice, it’s just been a lot of words and promises and targets. And the strategies of global veganism, or massive rewilding, are filled with wild assumptions.
By the way, in your discussion of the amount of GHGs remaining in the atmosphere, with methane and CO2, you said “Two-thirds of it [CO2] is drawn down. In the first year, it’s drawn down by growing vegetation.” This seems to imply that in one year 2/3 is drawn down, but that’s way off. The work of Joos et al (2013) is often cited in the literature, showing that on a methane timescale of (after) 10 years, some 70% of CO2 remains in the atmosphere, 60% at 20 years, 50% at 40 years…30% (2/3) comes up around 400 years, down to 20% remaining after 1,000 years. These are approximations of course, but still. I don’t want to say the standard accounting practice is okay, but from this point of view the fact that CO2 is typically accounted for on a gross scale seems not quite so bad.
I think the US 'deep state' ie fossil fuels, arms, animal ag, pharma, agrochemicals, tech and media who control the 'narrative' don't care about fossil fuels being under the bus- it's done nothing to harm their profits nor to stop emissions.
However, people have much more power over what goes into their mouths than who supplies their heating (or cooling). We could do some damage to animal ag (and therefore pharma and therefore agrochem and therefore fossil fuel's profits and power.
The vegan and environmental movements were growing in influence in 2019. They were, I believe, deliberately scuppered by the 'pandemic' response and the growth of right wing climate crisis denial which gained momentum from the OTT big government style measures- leading to getting a climate crisis denier (in public) into the White House. Madness.
Great discussion, as always Rachel.
I've heard what I consider to be pretty reasonable points coming from other researchers/scientists.
They're not denying that a large proportion of methane is produced through industrial animal agriculture but they argue that the amount of methane produced by ruminant animals hasn't changed for millennia.
The idea put forward is that the global mass of ruminant animals hasn't actually changed, it's just shifted from the diminishing wild (bison, deer..) to the increasing livestock (cattle, sheep...)
They also put forward the idea that the amount of ruminant produced methane is in a long term balance with the planet's natural bio-spherical processes.
Now if this is indeed the case, would it not be reasonable to wonder where the true increase in methane (and atmospheric CO2) is coming from?
Have we clever humans have been extracting coal, oil and gas for the last 100 or so years?
Up until then, methane and potential CO2 in these 'new' fuels has been locked away for millions of years, underground and not a part of the atmosphere, not contributing to any warming or climate shenanigans.
Nah, that's just an unlikely coincidence, isn't it. Nothing to see here, move along...
BTW, if people are unaware, the act of extraction has emitted vast amounts of methane (under reported, if reported at all) and of course the burning of these fuels releases unimaginable amounts of CO2 - and other pollutants that we don't bother talking about any more, it seems.
>> “The idea put forward is that the global mass of ruminant animals hasn't actually changed, it's just shifted from the diminishing wild (bison, deer..) to the increasing livestock (cattle, sheep...)
They also put forward the idea that the amount of ruminant produced methane is in a long term balance with the planet's natural bio-spherical processes.” <<
you then go on to say “Well if this is the case…”. Well it is not the case. It’s not even close to the case.
It doesn’t matter how often this garbage gets uttered by scientists with no expertise in this field or anybody else with no expertise, the numbers of large mammals being produced today vastly outweighs the natural ecosystems once on these lands, even when you include all the land used for crop feed to bring animals to market weight much faster than in natural herds. Paul Maloney has written lots of blog pieces about this on old blog Terrasendo and his new blog Planetary Vegan, Here’s one such post read i recall reading years ago: https://terrastendo.net/2013/07/26/do-the-math-there-are-too-many-cows/
Don’t forget urbanisation and broad-scale Ag has resulted in many wetland systems being removed from Earth’s ecosphere as the Ag revolution took off. These wetlands produce methane (though they also can drawdown carbon at a high rate as well, especially mangrove systems), and that would account for an offsetting of some of the measured methane due to animal production.
The way scientists distinguish bio-logical methane and fossil methane (released from fracking well sites and open cut coal mines) in the atmosphere is with carbon dating≥ ie using the ratio of C12 to C14 to see how old molecules are. There are natural sources of methane but the vast majority today, and the human caused part, is livestock and dairy production. Biological sourced methane is just over half the atmospheric stock these days according to the literature I’ve read.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44185-022-00005-z
The mass of ruminants seems to have changed- from a decrease of 29.5 million bison and an increase of 1.5 billion cows, an increase of 1.47 billion
Thanks for those figures Jo - helpful!
Can you point to a group who's doing the quantifying?
I am being lazy, but I've been down this path before and given up on finding reliable numbers because of the back and forth between competing 'experts', all carrying their own biases and quiet vested interests.
They are estimates of the number of bison- between 30 and 60 million- no one counted with 500,000 now living.
The number of cows in the world https://www.statista.com/statistics/263979/global-cattle-population-since-1990/
I think it gives a reasonable ball park for methane.
How can you compare the American previous bison population with global cattle numbers?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44185-022-00005-z
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/geb.13723
"Current mammal livestock biomass has been estimated to be 0.1 PgC and only 0.003 PgC in current wild mammal populations (Bar-On et al., 2018; Greenspoon et al., 2023). Thus, the estimated current-day mammal biomass, including livestock, is somewhat smaller than what we estimate to be the present-natural biomass of wild mammals. The estimates are of similar magnitude, but with a near-complete shift from wild to domestic mammals. We note that these numbers only concern standing biomass and not biomass flux. While we estimate higher standing biomass, the faster turnover rate of domestic animals may mean a higher biomass consumption rate per kg of farmed biomass relative to wild biomass."
In terms of biomass, livestock (animals raised for human consumption) vastly outweigh wild mammals on Earth. Humans and their livestock account for 96% of the total mammal biomass, with wild mammals representing only 4%, https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass. Specifically, cattle and pigs alone make up 60% of the total mammal biomass.
Well, that is what the reference I gave said as well. But it didn't respond to my question about how you can compare US bison with global cattle numbers. Also, what my links show is that the biomass of wild animals were in the same order of magnitude as the biomass of today's ruminants.
it says the biomass of current-day mammals including livestock is smaller than present total of wild mammals. This makes no sense- current day total of all mammals is less than current wild mammals? It's says nothing about what they 'were' at some unspecified time in the past.
As regards how i can compare bison to global cattle, it's just an estimate but in places like New Zealand there were no large mammals. Bison were also native to Europe but no records of hunting to extinction.
You should read the paper that is referenced. I can understand that you misunderstand what they say as they use a funny terminology. Both papers , how is that the biomass of wild animals, before human exterminated them, were in the same order of magnitude as the biomass of today's ruminants.
Thanks, Rachel, for this interview. It mirrors an episode of Just Have A Think a few months back which featured the paper by Charles Behrens and others. It also produced a lot of heat in the comments. My own feeling is that it is very easy to get lost in the weeds in these complex issues. Truth, as usual, is only ever partial and most commentators with integrity will have part of the truth in their findings. The great task is to find the level on which all these truths can be reconciled. We will need consensus when the time comes to rebuild.
Those operating at organisational level, like Gerard, are doing what they can to exert some influence and it is important push back. We should not be too optimistic thought about the effect. I may be a little cynical but while we all shouted about the naivety of the Nordhaus paper on how climate change would (or more accurately wouldn't) affect the economy, its widespread acceptance owed less to blind belief in its integrity than to its helpful message to carry on regardless.
Meanwhile, the political and economic juggernaut is not going to be stopped in its tracks while it still feeds power and wealth, however the cake is sliced in terms of emitters, so it is down to us to do what we can where we live and where we have influence.
As always, another engaging conversation. As a plant-based eater for many years, I have never pushed others in that direction because people don’t like being told how they eat matters to the planet not just their palate. And I get it. I have food preferences, too. I included a chapter in my book, Being Restorative, called the Vegan Chronicles, with a note preceding it to assure readers I am not trying to cudgel them. This conversation helps me get beyond my reluctance to discomfort because the planet is at stake. And as a person who identifies as a daughter of the trees, I have been more vocal about deforestation because people tend not to be quite so defensive. This conversation, however, is so compelling that I posted it on Facebook (I know, its own abomination) because I hope friends will take the time to consider the evidence Gerard presents.
Also, I appreciate his explanation of inaccurate data comparison. And Rachel, re: your curiosity about why the fossil fuel industry doesn’t try to reduce animal agriculture, is it because so many petrochemicals and so much fossil fuel get used in large scale animal agriculture so the fossil fuel companies don’t want to lose some of their profits? That would be interesting to explore.
it’s difficult. as a adult-life long vegetarian and decade long vegan I know well the difficulties and the resistence people put up, at the individual and societal levels. I try and live an example and cook people the best vegan food i can. but it doesn’t change very many minds, not yet. I do think there’s a sea-change amongst young people. Let’s hope so.
thanks for having Gerard Wedderburn Bishop on your pod, Rachel. i cant wait to listen, and i know his papers well, having read some of his prepublication material for several years.
Gerry educated me on anomalies in methane emissions accounting, measurement and aggregation in 2012-15 as i assisted with preparation of two major Beyond Zero Emissions reports, including data overload on maps and other infographics and graphs for the BZE Land Use Report, 2015 of which GWB was a lead author.
the LUR highlighted the fact that Ag and Forestry sectors have been implicitly claiming the entirety of biosphere’s CO₂ drawdown as their own private emissions accounting offsets so far as national accounting under the current UNFCCC rules for national emissions accounting
Gerard’s recently published papers are a fascinating synergy of his work over decades and new understandings the physical sciences community have around Radiative Forcing indexes for various heating and cooling GHGs. the implications are truely revelatory, especially for anybody who’s never really gone down the GHG emissions accounting rabbit hole. i thoroughly recommend they read his most recent two or three papers or if that’s too big an ask, watch his media release videos and YouTube a series on the Farmed Animal Controversy.
Is there a danger when including the cooling effect of aerosols that we lose sight of the potential warming when those particles ultimately fall out of the atmosphere?
James Hansen calls it our “Faustian Pact” for good reason. if you subscribe to his newsletter or read his most recent paper (co-authored with dozens if not 100 other climate scientists if i recall correctly) he explains the real and present dangers of this situation.
Indeed, and the risks of 'termination shock' also apply to the key geoengineering solutions considered, i.e. solar radiation management...
Thank you!!!
Is the reason that Animal Agriculture isn’t used as the fall guy for the Fossil Fuel Industry the mutual independence between the two i.e. the fertiliser necessary to grow the feed for the animals?
it’s complicated. as someone whose spent over a decade in climate activism and renewable energy transition advocacy i can tell you that both sectors, and forestry as well have very powerful lobbying capability, not the same in nature or orgs behind them but it’s all
connected at the political level in many ways. the “resources sector” in general, at least in Australia but also in USA and UK from what i know see conservationists, climate activists, environmentalists, vegans, peace activists and you name it as the Common Enemy. they literally use that kind of language when the address voters in regional electorates in Australia. see any video capturing Barnaby Joyce having a conversation with some local supporters for example.
i would make the point that if and when fossil emissions ever do peak and decline to a minuscule proportion of what they are today in any country or globally, it is at this point the livestock and forestry industries will have nowhere to hide and the spotlight will very much be swung onto their side of the emissions court and they know it, so are trying to co-opt the Regenerative Ag movement to be mostly about rotational grazing or Savory Swindle method rotations as being of climate benefit. they do it the same way the media falls for the Atkin’s diet just because one paper documenting a clinical trial showed that people on massively reduced calories using a Atkin’s diet allocation of macros nutrients and food sources showed moderate loss of weight, the media figuring that means eat more animal fats and proteins to lose weight and get certain markers down. in spite of the fact that there’s entire journals full of evidence to show these diets are intact incredibly unhelpful in reducing obesity, and getting certain disease correlated markers down.
in economics there’s a school of though called Institutional Econ dating back to Veblen writing “How the Leisure Class Lives” in the 19th century and it shows how people are influenced towards Conspicuous Consumption of certain goods, brands and quantities/volumes of these goods. it explains how private decision making can be harnessed to be collectively directed towards meeting economic and political, environmental, climate outcomes. As anybody on this podcast knows, marketing and Advertising industries get paid a fortune because this kind of influence (mind control) really does work at the macro and micro levels.
Thanks Alastair. Your second paragraph about 'the Common Enemy' rings true, it's a tribal in-group / out-group dynamic.
works every time.
LOL. ..."entire journals full of evidence..." You obviously don't understand how the GRADE system of evidence works because if you did then you'd understand how weak 98% of that evidence is. Though thanks for the laugh.
FWIW here's my response to this person's paper, that was incredibly flawed:
https://open.substack.com/pub/planetcritical/p/gerard-wedderburn-bisshop?r=urwf6&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=134726924
In this response, I included this link that also discusses some nutritional myths that you probably don't realize are myths:
https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2025/07/01/vegan-myths-half-truths-versus-reality/
Have a nice day.
the Oxford China Study was the largest epidemiological body of scientific research ever done. they discovered previously unknown links between some 8000 compounds relating to dietary intact and the kinds of disease that have reached epidemic proportions in rich nations. they showed extremely high confidence level correlations between meat and dairy consumption in humans and the “lifestyle” diseases clogging up our hospitals. they published hundreds of papers from this study alone.
Like I previously noted, you don't understand the GRADE system in weighing the significance of scientific data. Epidemiology, which is observational science, is low GRADE data (GRADE 2 out of 5 grades). Epidemiology's primary use is to generate hypothesis for more rigorous research.
Why? With oobsevrational data, there are a lot of confounding variables (confounders).
For example, increased ice cream sales correlate with shark attacks. Does this "prove" eating more ice cream increasing the frequency of shark attacks? No, of course not. But in summer, there are both more shark attacks and ice cream sales because more people are swimming in the ocean and more people are eating ice cream.
So, a basic rule of science is that correlation (aka association) doesn't equal causation. Therefore, you have to look at the strength of the association. That's why you have to look at BOTH relative AND absolute risk. Weak associations, like all of those in the China Study, have a ton of confounders.
I went over the difference between absolute and relative risk in these two blogs:
Absolute Versus Relative Risk- What’s the Difference?
https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2018/10/02/absolute-versus-relative-risk-whats-the-difference/
The relative risk con game
https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2019/10/05/the-relative-risk-con-game/
Plus here's a good paper on this topic:
Relative risk versus absolute risk: one cannot be interpreted without the other
https://academic.oup.com/ndt/article/32/suppl_2/ii13/3056571
And yes, the China study is mainly an observational study (i.e. low GRADE evidence). Plus, T. Colin Campbell's interpretations of the China study have been thoroughly and repeatedly been debunked, for example, in these two blogs:
Rest in Peace, China Study
https://chriskresser.com/china-study-debunked-by-new-research/
The China Study: Fact or Fallacy?
https://deniseminger.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/
Anyway, thanks for the laughs. You're zealotry is very amusing. You're obviously not a scientist.
how food and diet industry lobbyists and influencers trashed the science of Epidemiology is the subject of an Oxford School report and the subject of this video:
https://youtu.be/JJeoYQ6FaAw
⤴️ listen and learn meat man. same to anybody who thinks you a making some valid points, because you are not.
links from the video description for those looking to dig deeper on big data epidemiology and such.
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 • Documenting Andrew Huberman's Lies
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 • Follow the Money: Peter Attia’s ...
Nina Teicholz - 'Why Nutrition Advice is So Wrong'
 • Nina Teicholz - 'Why Nutrition A...
Causal Inference Seminar: Peter Tennant
 • Causal Inference Seminar: Peter ...
Peter Attia's Longevity Book Outlive: The BEST or WORST longevity book?
 • Peter Attia's Longevity Book Out...
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Modern Epidemiology Fourth Edition by Tim Lash
https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Ep...
The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl
https://www.amazon.com/The-Book-...
Nutritional Epidemiology 3rd Edition by Walter Willett
https://www.amazon.com/Nutrition...
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https://www.amazon.com/Epidemiol...
Mendelian Randomization: Methods for Causal Inference Using Genetic Variants
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Dietary protein intake in midlife in relation to healthy aging – results from the prospective Nurses’ Health Study cohort
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Comparative ecologic relationships of saturated fat, sucrose, food groups, and a Mediterranean food pattern score to 50-year coronary heart disease mortality rates among 16 cohorts of the Seven Countries Study
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The challenges of control groups, placebos and blinding in clinical trials of dietary interventions
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Review: Evolution of evidence on PFOA and health following the assessments of the C8 Science Panel
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the China study correlations were not weak, quite the opposite , they were as good as you see in medical science while controlled for confounding influences. how about you actually read the book or better yet the papers they published. the scale of the data and the depth of testing for attributes was both broad and deep.
This Harvard study shows that red meat is WORSE for your health than ultra-processed food. Chris interviews one of the authors, Dr. Fenglei Wang, to find out more.
https://youtu.be/LPXWCIFDkgM
Viva Longevity's mission is to find the most credible scientists and help them tell their stories.
PAPERS
Optimal dietary patterns for healthy aging
https://www.nature.com/articles/...
Life expectancy gains from dietary modifications: a comparative modeling study in 7 countries
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...
LOL . Okay rocket scientist, list the aRR's and rRR's of the associations you claimed aren't "weak."
do you actually think epidemiologists (or I) don’t know know the statistical methods used to develop real science as opposed to the “cat puts dint in garage roof” type of correlation? how dumb are you? epidemiologists have made a huge contribution to medical science. much more the that livestock lobby. you’ve probably sore because T Colin Campbell has exposed the efforts the livestock industry go to infiltrate WHO, USDA, US health dept and public health more generally.
everything the China Study Revealed has been shown in clinical trials to be real. Dr Cardwell Essylstein showed heart disease to be a paper tiger. he took patients in the queue for heart bypass surgery and coached them in wholefood plant based diet (medicine) and guess what, the heart disease just melts away when the meat and dairy heavy diets cease, so long as they’re replaced with plant based wholefood diets. same for type 2 diabetes, macular degeneration and many other “western” disease epidemics.
and in the US vegans live 10 years longer. i guess that’s down to some confounding influence too right?
LOL.
New study from China comparing diets
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41514-025-00213-4
"...this finding highlights modest inclusion of animal-based foods may improve the overall health status of healthy older adults...."
blogger refutes hundreds of papers. yep. seen it all before.
LOL. You're just a food religion zealot who doesn't even understand the limits of nutritional science. https://youtu.be/FA2sncncWaM
Nothing in the China Study has been replicated in control studies.
Thanks for all the laughs. But I don't see any point in arguing with zealots.
I think animal ag ( pharma's biggest client), agrochemicals and fossil fuels are so closely interdependent you can't see daylight between them.
I think the push back against accepting that animal ag is most culpable is because 'they' know that we can't do much about fossil fuel emissions- we're reliant on governments energy contracts and pricing etc. Even knowing that fossil fuels contribute to climate change- emissions are still going up. But we can all control what goes into our mouths. We can all significantly impact both the profits and power of industry and the climate crisis. https://jowaller.substack.com/p/no-small-local-independent-animal?utm_source=publication-search
i partly agree and partly disagree. i am accurately aware that global emissions are still rising, but China had its first year where wind water and solar produced more electricity than the fossil fuel generators in 2024. they are decarbonising rapidly and where china leads the industrialised world follows. in South Australia they’re already at 78% renewables and target is for 100% plus by 2028 iirc. even industrialised economies can do it with the political will, and South Australia had some of the highest power prices in australia before they invested in renewables (it’s partly why a lot of wind developers choose SA for so many projects rather than states with larger economies, bc they could get more favourable ROIs on their power in SA than other states, plus they had a safer political environment eventually with bipartisan support as RE was such a winner of Federal support for the state reducing energy costs to consumers and industry).
The RE revolution in power sector is all over bar the shouting, even Trump’s ecocide policies can’t stop the growth of RE in the USA, acting for the Fossil Fuel companies who donate to him and buy his cypriots-coin (bribes in plain sight) can’t stop it. even Elon the fake sustainability crusader acting for the fossil fuel lobby by gutting the EPA can’t stop it. (Trump just ordered EPA to destroy its two recently launched satellites which measure point source methane and other GHGs would you believe, i hope EPA sells them to Australia, Canada or EU for a dollar!). the real challenge now is with electrification of all the fuelled transport and industrial processes. i’m very optimistic that heat energy storage at high temperatures will revolutionise many parts of the industrial sector in the 2030 decade. mark my words, there’s so much promising R&D in this space about to bare fruits of many colours and flavours, it will be amazing, even if it is too late to prevent 2.0 to 2.5 °C of warming and the collapse of some major climate systems that impact humankind and ecosystems in catastrophic ways. but we need to do the best we can in dark times and remember that things have been even more bleak in human history, even recently in the 20th century of world wars due to colonial rivalry and the global economic system not being able to get off the gold standard fast enough to prevent wars.
and for sure farmed animal producers will have nowhere to hide other than behind Alan Savoy type fake data/regenerative farm farming memes. but the kids are waking up. veganism is growing like a wave for all kinds of reasons from personal health, animal welfare, climate, ecosphere, and other reasons.
we have to keep the pressure up bc as the comments on this thread show, the bludgeoning rhetoric of the farmed animal producers will always have paid lobbyists spreading myths and attacking valid scientific enquiry into the demonstrable harms to the climate and ecosphere and human civilisations that the industry are responsible for.
Here below are some comments from reading the results of this person's paper. This author pretty much filters data to fit his bias. So, I'm not the slightest bit impressed by what he wrote.
Before noting listing these items, let me first note that deforestation is a process with many drivers from road building for infrastructure needing for electricity to refine aluminum provide access for timber extraction, and land clear for cattle than crop uses, particularly soy used for feeds, biofuels, cooking oil, and other uses. So, livestock may be the most ostensible driver, but there are plenty of other drivers including and especially greed and corruption.
I go over this Deforestation Process in this old blog:
https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2021/05/17/the-deforestation-process/
RE: 4
-Regarding figure 1, for forestry the numbers don't account for biological nmvoc's [NM-BVOC] or forest floor NOx emissions. These are large numbers. Monocrops of palm trees and bamboo are especially large emitters of NM-BVOC's like isoprene. These NM-BVOC play multiple roles including using up hydroxyl radicals [OH] and creating secondary oxidation aerosols [SOA's]. So NM-BVOC's impact both the rate of methane oxidation and water vapor consolidation in clouds.
RE: 4.1 & 4.2
-This paper doesn't appear to account for the emissions from wildlife and plants prior to change of use to anthropogenic sources. So net differences of over all carbon emissions from 1750 to 2020 for natural ecosystems to anthropogenic systems are not noted. Only gross increases noted.
-Plus this paper is looking at cumulative emissions without recognizing there's a finite of amount of carbon that is constantly being cycled from the atmosphere to biomass/soil and then to animals and back to the atmosphere. So, the gross numbers are re-counting the same carbon multiple times.
-Fossil fuel emissions and old growth forests have very different time frames (millions compared to hundreds of years). Furthermore fossil fuel emissions are trapped whereas old growth forests and other forests are continuously emitting methane and NM-BVOC's in very large quantities. So, these sorts of thermogenic and biogenic carbon pools and emissions are very different. All fossil fuel emissions since 1750 haven't been in the atmosphere for approx. the past 200 to 300 hundred million years. So, the thermogenic carbon, unlike biogenic carbon, hasn't been part of the finite carbon cycle for a very very VERY long time. Biogenic carbon, cycles from a gas to liquid or solid and back to gas at varying rates from a less than second to hundreds of years. I go over the differences more in this blog: https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2023/05/28/the-methane-chronicles-plus-why-you-cant-discuss-methane-without-discussing-hydroxyl-radicals/
-Replacing grasslands in some contexts with certain types of forests, esp borreal forests, may significantly lower the albedo leading to increased surface temps. See this old blog: https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2025/01/18/decreased-albedo-more-impactful-that-sequestered-co2/
-Note too perennial grasslands in mollisols draw down huge amounts of soil carbon, particularly with necromass that associates exudates with minerals to form mineral associated organic matter [MAOM] to depths as far as roots and mycorrhizal associations reach (a lot deeper than 30 cm). This MAOM is retained in the earth for a very long time (200+ years). Other pools of carbon include these extensive mycorrhizal fungi networks.
-Below ground biomass in the various carbon pools with varying rates of cycling are protected from fire unlike above ground biomass.
-Additionally tropical rain forests do not allocate much carbon into the soil since their soils are very acidic (oxalic). Oxalic soils are very rich in iron and bauxite (which is used to make aluminum). So this is why mining along with the electricity (damns) needed to convert bauxite into aluminum are also large drivers of deforestation.
RE: 4.3.
-Land that is "grazing land" is not fully occupied by grazing animals all the time. Grazing animals only occupy a fraction of such land at any one time. Such land often is an intact grassland ecosystem with numerous plants, insects and wild animals that have evolved in these intact grassland ecosystems. So, this is multi-use land. And again converting grasslands to forests will likely lower the albedo and thus increase surface temps. See: MYTH 1 and 1B in this recent blog: https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2025/07/01/vegan-myths-half-truths-versus-reality/
-Again massive over counting of methane since "cumulative methane emissions" is the same methane being double, triple, quadruple counted over and over and over again. Methane can last in the atmosphere anywhere from a second to 140 years depending upon when it collides with a hydroxyl radical [OH]. Currently, the half life of methane is approx 7 years and it's average lifespan is approx 10 years. Before industrialization, the half life of methane was approx 4 years. So that means prior to industrialization half of all methane emit broke down back to cyclical CO2 and water vapor in 4 years or less time.
I discussed these methane dynamics in this blog where I provided the curve for CH4 oxidation:
https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2025/02/22/carbon-in-a-larger-ecosystem-context-and-the-need-to-differentiate-between-biogenic-and-thermogenic-sources/
=========================================
I've only scratched the surface on this topic, but when it comes to how atmospheric chemistry in the atmosphere interacts with the the biosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere, the key thing in my mind is to make sure the various carbon cycles still function, and by cycles I mean a balance of phase changes from gases into liquids & solids for as long as possible before phase changing back to gases.
So, this requires maximizing photosynthesis both in regards to amount and efficiency. Thus desertification and deforestation reduces this photosynthetic capacity/efficiency as does plant diversity reduction and bare fallows. So, diverse forests and grasslands/meadow replacement by monocrops or trees, especially w/o cover crops, reduce photosynthetic capacity/efficiency.
Obviously, esp the tilled, chem tilled, and other forms of degenerative Ag also destroy the soil carbon holding capacity of the lithosphere. Further extraction of the trapped carbon pools also adds to the atmospheric carbon load creating greater in balances to carbon cycling due to reduced photosynthesis capacity/efficiency, reduced biomass, and reduced soil carbon pools.
All the Ag, including tree Ag, also adversely impacts surface by decreasing the albedo (increasing surface temps) ...plus messes up the water cycle...since compaction reduces infiltration and retention of water, and thus reduces plants and the plant emissions needed for water vapor consolidation as well as for hydroxyl radical formation. I wrote about this some in this old blog: https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2022/05/30/interdependent-cycles-and-rainfall/
Anyway, sorry for the long dissertation...like I noted this is infinitely complex and impossible to model...though climate scientists love their models
===================================
'And again converting grasslands to forests will likely lower the albedo and thus increase surface temps.'
Sorry Regen, but this is a much quoted (by the climate establishment) but fundamentally false statement!
Yes, converting grassland to forest (more usually the converse) reduces both albedo (reflected heat) and radiated heat, but greatly increases the global cooling effect of evaporation/evapotranspiration, which is proportional to leaf surface area (leaf area index - LAI). Particularly tropical and sub-tropical forestation, which has a relatively large LAI, has a net cooling effect on the planet, and it is here much of the deforestation is occurring.
No, it's not a "fundamentally false statement."
Here is the research paper that supports this statement:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46577-1 .
So, once again context is important. The context that you're citing for tropical forests is a lot different than the context referred to in the paper for temporal grassland ecosystems like those in the Midwestern US where this research was conducted.
Not to mention, evapotranspiration occurs from grasses and forbes as well as from trees. So does the emission of NM-BVOC's and NM-OBVOC's needed for the secondary oxidation aerosols [SOA's]. These SOA's are used for water vapor consolidation into rain cloud formation. Without these SOA's, water vapor won't consolidate.
I wrote about this in this blog, citing multiple references:
https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2022/05/30/interdependent-cycles-and-rainfall/
(As a side note: Phytoplankton also emit NM-BVOC's that help form rain clouds over oceans).
And guess what? In arid and semi-arid environments, well managed domesticated ruminants and predator managed wild ruminants (and herbivores) by grazing directly impact photosynthetic fixed carbon allocation down to soils as root exudates. These exudates feed microbes that die and become necromass. This necromass is what forms up to 50% of soil organic matter [SOM]. Thus this increases SOM, which increases rain water infiltration and retention.
And guess what that does? It improves grass & forbe growth and thus more evapotranspiration in arid and semi arid ecosystems as these ecosystems are transformed back into grassland ecosystems as shown in this video: https://youtu.be/_KtaG_laADA?si=KkuDRZRuMiT5YU4k
But that's not all. Grazing in these restored grassland ecosystems releases the NM-OBVOC's (esp methanol CH3OH) from grasses and forbes to form SOA's ...as well as be part of the process that forms OH.
Thus, contrary to WB's incorrect assertion, well-managed grazing ruminants are part of the process that leads to cooling from aerosols and rain cloud formation.
your blog cited tweets by an Alan Savory believer. that’s not citing science that’s citing wishful thinking.
Savory himself is on the record as saying to a university audience ., “i don’t have evidence or solutions, all i’m offering is a different way to think about things”. he’s a charlatan because he’s always claiming the “the only way to save the climate is with animal agriculture systems”
LOL. You're obviously not aware of range scientists like Dr. Jason Rowntree at Michigan State University and Dr. Richard Teague, professor emeritus at Texas A & M. So, there's a ton of range (and soil) science supporting what I wrote. Here's a spread sheet I compiled with links to this growing body of science:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1G-QQINHgq5Y9rm-BP2f1hedoX7QUBh1C3zU49fMc26Y/edit?gid=1957274644#gid=1957274644
Anyway, thanks for the laugh. Your ignorance is very amusing.
Okay Regen. we can agree on one thing, I think - that properly managed ruminants in a nature-based system can be part of the climate/biodiversity crisis solution.
However, the first paper you reference states that, for example, in the tropical/sub tropical Sahel on the southern edge of the Sahara re-forestation would cause climate warming. The logic here being that as the cooling effect of albedo ( reflected short wavelength heat) would be reduced, this net warming effect would more than offset the cooling effect of carbon sequestration into forest. Which, I am sorry, is just patent nonsense.
It totally ignores the impact of re-forestation on reducing heat radiated from the planet surface and the substantial cooling effect of rebuilding/strengthening of the water cycle through the increase in leaf area.
Certainly, forestation above and below the 60th parallel, where snow and ice can prevail and evapotranspiration and radiation are weak, forestation will substantially reduce albedo and can have a climate warming influence. But that is small relative to climate impact of de/re-forestation in the tropics/subtropics.
LOL. Again, you're making overly broad generalizations about ecosystems you obviously know nothing about. When people try to apply universal truths to places with a lot of variability, I just have to assume such people are activists or advocates cosplaying as scientists.
Regardless, grassland ecosystems like those in the Midwestern US haven't been forests for over 50 million years. This was first due to large megafauna, including mastodon and mammoths, up until 10 to 12 thousand years ago. These large herbivores, as well as large herds of ruminants and other herbivores, controlled soil and plant succession.
After most of these large megafauna went extinct (the reasons why are debated, but the general consensus was a combination of over hunting and climate changes), mankind became the keystone species and used fire as a tool for many reasons, including to control plant succession and movement of large herds of bison. These tools were used up until the end of the 1800's when bison, elk, and pronghorn herds (plus their predators) were largely extirpated from these grassland ecosystems.
The Greats Plains of the US was known as the American Serengeti https://tinyurl.com/y79yfy9w because of all this life that co-evolved with the plants in these tall perennial grassland ecosystems. This life wasn't in forests where the remaining animals retreated.
Perennial grasses in mollisols also have very deep root fibrous systems that form associations with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi [AMF]. So, they actually retain a lot more fixed carbon in the soil than many forms of forests do in their above ground biomass and less fibrous root systems. So, the so-called "carbon opportunity" with many forests isn't greater.
The one big exception to this rule are boreal forests with evergreens. But in climates with harsh winters, these types of trees reduce the albedo compared to grasslands during the summer and even more so during the winter when grasslands are covered with snow.
Now that has exactly been the case with the ecosystems these researchers were looking at in their paper where tall grass prairie ecosystems are being overgrown with invasive evergreen junipers and shrubbery.
The thing too is that plant succession follows soil microbe succession from bacteria dominated to fungi dominated soils. So, many attempts to plant trees fail because these trees are planted in bacteria dominated soils. Most trees in temperate forests require fungi dominated soils. Grasslands are pretty balanced (bacteria to fungi) ..and succeed to shrubs.
Though shrubs and early forest succession from grasslands are also very susceptible to fire, and fire can start soil and plant succession all over again. Here desertification is just as or more likely to occur than any sort of plant succession.
Tillage, chem tills, and bare fallows also destroy soils.
So, we need to be just as concerned about desertification as we are about deforestation.
Anyway, this is my last response to you. I see no point in arguing with absolutists. Feel free to have the last word.
so what? the numbers of natural herbivores on these systems is nothing like the intensive grassing and lot feed “finishing” on cropped soy beans etc for the vast majority of cattle in Australia and USA. in USA almost all cattle are lot fed for at least half their weight gain, if not all of it.
In the US, approx. 85% of beef cattle inventory is on grass at any one time in cow/calf and stocker operations. Though 94% is feedlot finished (not grass finished). How is that possible? Bulls, cows, replacement heifers, and calves (up until 10 to 14 months) are all on grass. Steers, culled heifers and culled cows get sent to feedlots where they're transitioned to feeds from forages for approx the last 1/3 of their lives.
Now in an ideal world, more cattle would be grass finished in the US. Personally, I only eat grass finished cattle that I purchase directly from the ranches that I know have good practices. But even with cattle sent to feed lots, the grazing management on cow-calf and stocker operations can be improved. Additionally stockers can also be backgrounded longer on cover crops and regeneratively grown crop residues before being transferred to feedlots.
So, there are a lot of ways to improve grazing and finishing.
if the world suddenly saw livestock production halted then more than have the land under production would no longer be not be required for food. more than half the globes crops are used to feed animals. more than half the worlds cleared land has livestock pasturing around on it. and the vast majority of deforestation is to clear land for animal production especially in deforestation hot spots like Brazil. the UN puts out a lot of data on deforestation based on rigorous science, and the disaggregated data clearly shows animal ag as driving the majority of deforestation.
i analysed some of that data which UN publishes last year. i’ll come back with some:e links.
You're just repeating common plant based myths and half-truths that I discussed in this blos:
Plant based myths & half truths versus reality
https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2025/07/01/vegan-myths-half-truths-versus-reality/
And as I discussed in these blogs
The Deforestation Process
https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2021/05/17/the-deforestation-process/
Amazon Besieged: Q & A with author and reporter Sue Branford
https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2019/06/02/amazon-besieged-an-interview-with-author-and-reporter-sue-branford/
Soy 101 https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2019/12/28/soy-101/
sadly, deforestation is driven by greed and corruption more than anything else. So, if everyone stopped eat meat tomorrow, deforestation would continue unabated. Roads would still be built for infrastructure access for mining, forests would still be cleared for timber, soy would still be grown for its oils and meals. The meals would just be used for other reasons.
So, stop deluding yourself that veganism or plant based is any sort of panacea. It isn't, and all it does is lead to a lot of serious nutritional deficiencies that cause people to have all sorts of cognitive distortions like the ones you're displaying with your oversimplified polarized thinking and filtering.
Wait for the Regen Ag crowd …
in my somewhat informed opinion it’s got both amazing for a revolution in nutrition, fuel switching out of FF and democratising the Ag sector but also the co-opting of this revolution by the livestock and dairy industries to basically play a deflection and greenwashing role on emissions in these sectors. ditto forestry industry to a lesser extent.
Pros:
pesticide and herbicide free foods, FF use reduce, small farm operators (families) become more economically viable, de risked to climate/economic shocks or collapse and just financially independent and successful.
Cons:
too many to mention!
i list a few of the cons here https://jowaller.substack.com/p/the-green-washing-of-white-priviledge
I should make it clear that when talk about the benefits of regenerative ag. I’m talking farming systems free of broad scale or boutique animal production. Regenerative cropping is a thing. Regenerative market gardening and agroforestry are viable and better for the climate and better for feeding a hungry planet.As I wrote, the big threat as i am seeing it is the Livestock and Dairy industries, lobbies, farmers and their cynical political allies and representatives co-opting the name and concept of Regenerative as code for livestock production and dairy with greenwashing spin about carbon drawdown (which is complete and utter rubbish, especially for cattle and sheep producers, the biggest sectors in the Australian animal farming industry in Australia and many other countries).
The Drawdown from regen cattle/sheep production when compared with the GHG, water, land, energy, feed input and other footprints of animal ag is 100s of times that of vegetable and fruit production, when you multiply all these factors together into a product footprint. A bit of praire grass drawdown does almost nothing to offset that footprint, and in most cases re-wilding the land would be a much improved drawdown situation than running Livestock on it, they impede nature from restoring biodiversity and reforestation in most cases as Gerry said. The Alan Savoury cool-aide is being drunk everywhere cattle are produced, and it’s hard to seperate a man/woman from their intoxicant of choice.
Thanks for reading. I think it may be helpful to reserve regenerative/integrative to refer farming animals for food and conservation agriculture (ie min/no tillage, polycrops etc) to refer to plant agriculture?
i read most of your linked piece. generally you are correct in the broad polemic you’re making and we’re in broad agreement but theres a few mistakes and exaggerations in that text. I’ll come back and post on the blog itself it in detail when i get a chance. In the meantime you might like to look at the long running trials of animal free and combined animal-cropping systems at Rhodale Institute, you might be surprised by the data. Your reductive calculations that animals eating vegetation and pooping it out has no net gain for the soil or farm is incorrect, you are missing the big picture in a serious way with that kind of reductionism. claiming only feed brought in from off-farm is a net-gain to the system is thinking like an accountant or dull-minded agronomist, not a biologist or systems thinker. I’m vegan, so please don’t shoot me for saying these things.
So I did look at the Rhodale and the 'decades' long research which compares grain production of conventional using synthetic nitrogen with legume cover crops with legume cover plus 'manure'. The manure, which shows better yields, gets fertilisation from periodic applications of composted manure from 'livestock' obviously outside the eat and poo system. Producing this manure would takes up loads of land, water and energy and produce lots of methane avoided by the legume only crops, that also improved profits over conventional.
And they do claim carbon sequestration to boot.
The removal of nutrients from the soil by eating them and the addition of some of them back to the soil in the form of poo, not representing net improvement in the nutrients in the soil, and thus the farm, is basic biology and is correct. You seem to be too keen to make a point that can't be made.
I was not surprised at the data. https://jowaller.substack.com/p/yet-another-unsuccessful-attempt?utm_source=publication-search
You linked to your own post about claims around grazing systems! LOL didn’t even bother to look up RHodale Institue farm and said their data doesn’t surprise you. That is dishonesty and bad faith rhetoric, plain and simple.
Maybe you need to start listening and stop repeating yourself because the Rhodale Institute data I referred to was a comparison of regenerative cropping systems and has ZERO to do with Alan Savory (who I consider a prolific liar and charlatan in some ways, though i acknowledge some people in Permaculture are defenders of what he’s helped explain to orthodox livestock producers).
Rhodale have decades long trails of cropping only and cropping with some animals on stubble/fallow land and the data clearly shows that the combination of small numbers of animals on the land is more productive. They dont make claims about the GHG implications and I havent seen the data. Privately, Elain Ingham made me some big claims for regen drawdown when I interviewed her for BZE Radio show ~8 years ago, but I’ve never seen Rhodale or her make any specific, quantified claims publicly around drawdown potential for regenerativecropping systems.
The productivity benefits are undeniable, as are the improved yields croppers are seeing and massive decline in use of inputs.
This is something I wish to emphasis because even if you aren’t saying it here, your White Privilege blog is saying it right throughout.
It is also something George Monbiot is constantly asserting and much as i love George and his platform, he has a tin ear on this point.
George Monbiot is constantly making a claim which says regenerative farming is by definition boutique farming and less productive than industrial scale farming. he’s straight up wrong and. he’s using a Logical fallacy to hide his ignorance about regenerative farming behind.
just because SOME regenerative farms are boutique and have lower productivity doesn’t mean they have to be this kind of farm by definition.
theres an interview with a Minnesota cropper on the “How To Save a Planet Podcast” recorded some years back.
He and his wife both had to have off-farm jobs. him driving trucks at night and her as aLocal school teacher to survie the high bill for sprays and diesel doing conventional ag. after a few years of transitioning to regenerative farming out of desperation as much as anything, they dont have to have two jobs each and they are using 90% less sprays on their crops. That fact alone in itself brings a huge increase in financial security and farm gate income. Far as i know he doesn’t farm animals as part of that system. you can dismiss it as White Privilege as is your right, but I think its a step in the right direction for global Ag and for the people who grow our food.
And can somebody close to the man please ask George Monbiot to go see this for himself, their YIELDS WENT UP.
If George is like me and does fly for climate reasons he can read One Straw Revolution, written by a Japanese agronomist turned regenerative farmer 50 years before the phrase had been invented. As a former public scientist/agronomist he knew what national rice and barley Maximum Yields were, and he was outproducing them on a farm where he hand sowed the crop (in clay balls to prevent birds eating the winter barley seeds which dorment for half of the year) and used no animal or mechanical harvesting equipment no less! No other human labour than his own in the early days either.
I agree the drawdown claims about animal ag in ANY pasture grazing system known to man are small compared to the land re-wilded.
I notice that the Rodale 40yr report doesn’t mention methane emissions. Not once. This suggests a bias. In effect the farmers in Minnesota have just externalised a cost of their fertilising regime.
Also I can’t help but wonder, where do the cattle go when the crops are growing ?
My point stands that increasing production of crops (by how much and was it really worth it?- does the husbandry of those animals not represent an input; having been bought from breeders and attended by vets? -so the animals graze and humans don't have to do it or sow green manure, big deal- and if the animals aren't being farmed for food they represent a cost to the business) with a small number of animals on land is irrelevant to the bigger picture and all part of the propaganda from industry.
A whole food , conservation grown vegan diet is a no brainer, as you know, not just for non-human animals and human health but because as Wedderburn-Bisshop shows animal ag (which is unnessecary and represents a major part of over consumption of calories, fat and protein mostly by the West (which pleases pharma as they like us fat, sick and on drugs)), is responsible for 50% of climate forcing and without it about 40% of habitable land could be returned to sequestration and rewilding.
Any alleged local benefits of integrative farming in costs, soil quality and decreased labour (over industrial animal farming or monocrops) can not only be reproduced by ‘animal free’ conservation agriculture they are vastly outweighed by the global loss of sequestration and emissions that farming animals for food at all represents.
I didn’t argue that plant based agriculture is not better for the environment than animal based agriculture. In my opinion that is obvious on many levels — on both sides of the farm gate especially once public health is put on the scales of cost/benefit analysis. I’ve said many times in many places that vast amounts of cleared land in Australia, Brazil, USA, Scotland etc etc could and would be returned to high-drawdown ecosystems through re-wilding if all of a sudden there was no markets for animal products (Gerard told me in 2012 that 90% of Australian cattle herds are produced in QLD & NT and 90% of those are ground into burger mince and frozen for export markets).
What I said, and therefore what you are deflecting away from with these comments is that farm productivity can benefit from the use* of animals in sequenced arrangements with a farm that has all of its land under a cycle of cropping. It’s also true that degraded land can benefit in some instances from the short use of grazing animals, especially on marginal non-arable land with poor biodiversity levels because of past abuses under human use for agriculture. Biodiversity returns to these farms where animals are used to improve soils in all cases, because nature will do it for itself given an opportunity as Gerard says.
There’s lots of farms demonstrating this fact and Rhodale Institute is one of them. Their cropping systems including farmed animals are more productive for crops and vegetables, even not considering the animals’ value as products. But given we live in a world where the taking of animal lives is considered acceptable and therefore legal and given the premium prices paid for these animal carcasses,milk and eggs over a bag of grain that is calorifically equivalent, many farmers are going to chose the inclusion of farmed animals in their systems.
First nations in Australia talk about their land turning to rubbish when they are overgrown with ground covers or grasses etc and they burn them off periodically in dry country where theres no herbivores to eat it, or the kangaroos are eating green growth not dry old grasses. the way they do these cool temperature burns it helps the land regenerate (be more productive from a human perspective, biodiverse from an ecological perspective). The use of short intense grazing by animals can bring similar benefits to degraded land, and conversely the introduction of English sheep and cattle onto Australian ‘natural’ grasslands (stewarded by indigenous people for tens of thousands of years) destroyed what was initially incredibly high productivity of these grasslands (there are historical records of some early pasture stations hosting one million sheep at a time), the hard hooves compacted the land and the ntroduced (low protein) grasses started to dominate the higher nutrient level native grasses.
Another natural input is rainfall, good soils full of air pockets and the organisms that mine these air conduits in soil turn poor soils where water runs straight off the agoraphobic surface into massive sponges. Keyline channel systems on hilly country can massively increase the water holding capacity of the land, to the benefit of farmers and their productive systems if the soil is capable of holding the water. There is no doubting the fact that farmed animal manure can improve the richness of soil biota. I didn’t say there is no other way. It’s a method farmers like because it’s low labour for them and they get to sell the animal carcasses at the end of the financial year for a large amount of money, once the herd has had babies which they replace the mothers with. I wouldn’t do it, but the fact is it happens and makes them a livelihood.
I note you didn’t defend the claim that the only benefit to crops that animals can bring is only in proportion to the inputs brought In from off-farm fertiliser or animal feed. That’s an absurd claim that implicitly assumes that a farm is a closed system in energetic terms. It isn’t, there’s a constant input of energy on all farms, it’s called the sun. Most of that energy is reflected back or absorbed as heat which warms the top soil, but some of it is converted by plants using photosynthesis (which itself is fairly “inefficient” but incredibly effective) into a huge range of plants in a natural ecology and just one crop in monoculture cropping.
Cover crops and green manures,even mixed weed pastures can do wonders for the “efficiency” of a farm system in converting solar radiation into plants which in turn feed a myriad of bacteria in the ground. This biota, in turn have a symbotic relationship with the plants, whose roots, leaves, branches etc are their ‘habitat’. It is these biota that can absolutely turn the dial on cropping and vegetable plant health, disease résistance and yields. Biodynamic and regenerative cropping systems are designed to look after the soil biota, because thats the key to plant health, as many farming pioneers have rediscovered in this modern era. Animal manure can also introduce the bacteria and bioavailable nutrient which promotes soil health, and counter to your claim, the benefits are greater than the input of plant feed going in the ground feed that goes into making that dung/manure. It’s reductive to assume it’s just an exercise in counting the calories and doing the math.
* some consider it abuse given that animals are killed at the equivalent of ~8 yo in human life expectancy terms, but i’m not talking about animal welfare in this thread.
Here's a bit of, whatever.
Methane persists in the atmosphere until it is degraded by hydroxil.
The by-product of this process is water... and CO2.
Yay, from one fun greenhouse gas to another!
Oh, and the hydroxil is formed in a reaction between atmospheric oxygen and that other evil 'greenhouse gas', water vapor.
Interesting to think that the warmer the planet gets, the more water in the atmosphere, the more rapid the degradation of methane.
It's like nature has worked out some magical self regulating system, gee, who'd of thought that could happen.
:eyeroll:
scientists are discovering that as the Earth’s atmosphere warms, the heating potential of methane is Increasing not decreasing, so even if your chemistry lesson is correct, its not the whole picture.
Having said that. yes complex systems evolve to have all kinds of amazing stabilising mechanisms, it’s just that mankind has become so powerful and destructive of the ecosphere that all these natural stabilising systems are being overwhelmed, its a measure of the damage we are doing to Gaia, our host, and it’s not going to end well in the sense of ecosystems everywhere being degraded to the point where ecological collapse or transformation to use a less scary term has become the path we are committed to at this time..
Note he's not wrong about hydroxyl oxidation, though there are a myriad of sources of methane including many aquatic sources which by some accounts are over 50% of all methane emissions. So, per, the just cut CH4 emissions school of climate science, the best thing to do would be to kill off beavers, drain wetlands, and essentially turn Earth into Mars. The other better option is to increase the methanotrophic oxidation capacity of the small soil sink and the hydroxyl oxidation capacity of the very large tropospheric methane sink.
I went into a lot more details here:
https://lachefnet.wordpress.com/2023/05/28/the-methane-chronicles-plus-why-you-cant-discuss-methane-without-discussing-hydroxyl-radicals/
So, you can't really discuss methane without also discussing hydroxyl radicals.
you love quoting fringe science and saying it accounts for over 50% of methane. seriously, cite real science with references or just stop.
we are talking about anthropogenic methane, and a little more than half that is associated with livestock production and rice paddies according to carbon dating, the vats portion of that is livestock. a little under 50% is fossil fuel extraction and supply chains and combustion which all leaks methane along the way. as do open cut coal mines and fracking fields seeping methane into underground water and percolating up through creeks and the ground.
most of the Earths wetlands have been removed under human development. some natural wetland ecosystems like mangroves have drawdown much greater than the highest sequestering forests. if they are emitting methane it is possibly getting consumed by methane digesting microbes that can rely on a ready source. that’s the same with methane digesting microbes in the soil, it’s the subterranean methane percolating up their are digesting not passing cattle sourced methane because it tends to rise not sink into the ground being lighter than nitrogen, CO₂, O2 etc. .
LOL. You're very funny. My blog referenced this paper in the "fringe" scientific journal Nature:
Half of global methane emissions come from highly variable aquatic ecosystem sources
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00715-2
Maybe you should learn how to read before making your ignorance so manifest again.
Anyway, thanks for another laugh.
Thank you. I'll read the second one too
New data from the New South Wales government reveals land-clearing has increased by 40% prompting calls for the Minns government to overhaul the state’s native vegetation laws.
The statewide data, published Monday afternoon, shows 66,498ha of native vegetation was cleared for agriculture, infrastructure and forestry in 2023, “equivalent to bull-dozing Sydney’s Royal national park four times over”, the Nature Conservation Council of NSW said.
The total cleared was up 40% on the previous year, when 47,388ha was bulldozed.
The rate of increase was even higher for woody vegetation, with 21,137ha cleared in 2022 and 32,847 ha in 2023 - up by 55%.
Jacqui Mumford, the chief executive of the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, said:
The jump in land clearing across NSW by 40% during Labor’s first year of governing is a major red flag. The government needs to get moving on its election commitment to ‘end runaway land clearing’.
The former Coalition government relaxed the state’s native vegetation laws in 2017.
Agriculture was again the biggest driver of clearing in 2023, contributing 51,201 hectares - 77% of all the clearing. More than half of the overall clearing was “unallocated”, meaning the clearing did not require an approval under the state’s laws, or the environment department could not find a record of approval, or the clearing was unlawful.
Nathanielle Pelle from the Australian Conservation Foundation said:
What that means in real terms is more homes for native wildlife were knocked down in this 12-month period than the previous year, pushing species like koalas, quolls, greater gliders and gang gang cockatoos closer to extinction.