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
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.
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.
>> “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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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?
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..
If animals were removed from the land that they are currently grazing, some other activity will take its place. The people using that land for income (whether a small income or a large one) are likely not going to be okay going without an income. This might be where Mark Shepard's Restoration Agriculture system can come into play. If you have not looked into his work, consider it. He would be great to speak with.
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’!
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
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 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.
>> “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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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?
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..
Thank you. I'll read the second one too
If animals were removed from the land that they are currently grazing, some other activity will take its place. The people using that land for income (whether a small income or a large one) are likely not going to be okay going without an income. This might be where Mark Shepard's Restoration Agriculture system can come into play. If you have not looked into his work, consider it. He would be great to speak with.
Heat waves are weather.
+0.0156 C per year is climate.
Official global warming is +1.0 to 1.5 C in the GMST anomaly over 140 to 170 years depending on the "expert" and database.
The current GMST trend is 0.0156 C PER YEAR!!! (UAH data)
Insignificant, impossible to actually measure & NOT a “heat wave.”
Water vapor, clouds, ice, snow create 30% albedo which makes the Earth cooler not warmer.
W/o GHE there is no water and Earth goes lunarific, a barren rock ball, 400 K lit side, 100 K dark refuting a warming GHE.
“TFK_bams09” GHE heat balance graphic and ubiquitous clones don’t balance plus violate LoT.
Kinetic heat transfer processes of contiguous atmospheric molecules render a surface black body and it’s “extra” upwelling GHE energy impossible.
GHE is bogus and CAGW a scam so alarmists must resort to fear mongering lies, lawsuits, censorship and violence.