the potency of cattle emissions – and suggest only fossil fuels are worth worrying about. But other climate scientists warn that we shouldn’t take methane reduction off the table.: “Emitting methane will always be worse than emitting the same quantity of carbon dioxide, no matter the time scale.
And yet millions of cattle are grazed in places that are not native grasslands. All over the world, forests, wetlands, woody savannas and other ecosystems have been cleared to make room for cattle or growing cattle feed. In those cases, grazing livestock tends to have a much more destructive impact because of what experts call “the opportunity cost of land”, in other words, factor in the carbon we’re not capturing by letting these ecosystems be.
“The overwhelming greenhouse gas costs from agriculture comes from our land use,” says Searchinger, who is also the technical director of the food program at the non-profit thinktank World Resources Institute. “There’s a huge amount of carbon in the atmosphere because it’s no longer in the land that was entered into agriculture.”