Are you talking about cow farts? When cows eat grass, the carbon they emit was already in the system. It's just like any other organism staying alive. This is different than burning fossil fuels, the carbon of which until they are extracted hasn't been in the system for millions of years.

To the extent that the beef industry burns fossil fuels, that's something you could criticize, but it's hardly unique to the beef industry. Cattle would eat less intensively-cultivated corn and more grass if the corn farmers weren't subsidized so much. If no corn was cultivated at all, cattle would still be a pretty efficient way of sustainably extracting food from marginal grassland.

Hum, I'm not familiar with ruminant (i.e. cow) digestion but I think you're right in suggesting there's greater complexity here when associating cattle with the use of modern agriculture practices (haber-bosch process).

Regarding the parent's comment, the 1800 pounds-of-water-for-pound-of-beef figure seems to be sourced from https://waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Report-48-WaterFo... (which won't say 1799 because it's metric) https://www.watercalculator.org/footprints/beef-king-big-wat... seems to aggregate various estimates.

To direct the conversation towards solutions, Project drawdown (https://www.drawdown.org) mentions Silvopasture practices (closely related to Joel Salatin style farming). That said, reducing the amount of intensively-cultivated corn grown ultimately still means reducing the number of cattle (we're ~80-90% more than 100yrs ago) and seemingly less meat consumption per capita.

From what I understand the main concern with cow farts is the methane produced in cows' (and other ruminants') digestive systems, not carbon dioxide. Methane is a 25x more potent greenhouse gas according to the EPA: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases#m...

The carbon they emit was already in the system- but it is also true that they have converted carbon dioxide to methane.

I’m guessing you didn’t look at the links I included?

Did you? The one is talking about water, which I don't care about since I'm not raising cattle in a desert. The other says that people are eating more meat, which seems more of an economic measure than anything else. Yet you've posted them on this thread about carbon emissions. I tried to interpret your links in a reasonable way, but if I missed the point you could explain further.

I was replying to a comment saying:

> it takes around 2,000 gallons of water to make a typical pair of jeans.

This sounds like a lot until you consider how much water goes into literally everything else people do without thinking.

Let me know if you need more clarity.