The headline in weekend’s WSJ is painfully misleading. Worse still, it’s in an ad paid for with federally supervised dollars (contributed by the cattle industry and overseen by the USDA so as to not be used to affect public policy or stifle competition).
There is no mention of methane in the source PNAS article in the footnotes, or on the QR-coded Beef Checkoff site. It’s like they want to ignore the most potent GHG, methane, altogether. 🐄💨
25% of U.S. methane comes from cattle. As a GHG, it is ~25x more harmful in the near term than CO2.
They also ignore land use and deforestation. Cattle has been the cause of 90% of the deforestation in the Amazon for the past 40 years.
Saying it’s only 0.36% globally is pretty misleading, as headlines go. The UN estimates cattle to be 9.4% of GHG globally (14.5% livestock * 65% cattle = 9.4%).
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