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Cows Produce Planet-Warming Gases. What Does That Mean for a Beef-Lover’s Diet?

By Elizabeth Rembert

From her home in eastern Nebraska, Angie O’Brien does what she can to help the environment.

She reduces, reuses and recycles – taking the time to clean out even the messy things like peanut butter jars to make sure it can go in the recycling.

“My husband’s always like ‘You’re using way more water, just throw it away!’” she said. “And I say ‘I know, but I feel like it’s doing good.’”

O’Brien also tries to know where her food is coming from. Like beef, which she often buys from nearby ranchers.

“I’ve always wanted to be more conscious of where my beef is coming from,” O’Brien said. “I’ve figured that if it’s a local cow that’s been in pastures eating grass, that’s probably a little bit better than being brought to a feedlot and fattened up.”

Beef in particular can drive up a person’s contributions to climate change. In the U.S., beef production is responsible for about 4% of the nation’s planet-warming pollution, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Some researchers and environmental advocates have suggested that eating less beef could lower emissions. One study published by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that swapping out beef can slash your diet’s footprint in half for that day.

But O’Brien, a native Nebraskan, isn’t looking to cut out the red meat entirely.

“No,” she said, laughing. “We’re in the beef state!”

Beef’s emissions footprint

Most people don’t think about how their diet might be impacting the environment, according to Diego Rose, who leads the nutrition program at Tulane University in New Orleans.

“They typically think about their energy use,” he said. “Do they fly a lot? What kind of car do they drive? How often do they drive? All those questions come ahead of food and diet.”

But his research tallied the emissions footprints of a one-day snapshot of nearly 17,000 people’s diets. Running down the list, most foods clocked in around the same.

“And then all of a sudden, we’d hit one that was like, 10 times more or 100 times more than anything else,” he said. “And invariably, that was beef.”

The burgers, steaks and roasts added up.

“If we could get the top meat eaters down to even just average consumption, we’d save a lot in terms of greenhouse gas emissions,” Rose said. “So much so that it could actually make a small dent in our original commitment to the Paris Accord.”

Beef’s cultural role in the United States can make that hard to pitch, Joshua Specht said. His book “Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America” argues beef is tied into the American frontier, affluence, masculinity and more.

“Beef consumption is at the core of what it means to be American. As they were creating America, ranching was a central part of that,” said Specht, a professor at the University of Notre Dame. “Any time we talk about meat consumption today, that’s all kind of in the hamburger as we take a bite.”

Burps drive emissions

Cow burps are a lot of what’s packing the environmental punch, according to Aaron Smith, an agricultural economist at the University of California Berkeley.

“Sometimes people like to say it’s cow farts because it’s more fun or funny to talk about,” he said. “But it really is almost all burps.”

As cows break down grasses and hay, their digestion produces methane. It’s a process that’s unique to animals like cows, sheep and goats – chickens and pigs have a different digestive system.

“It’s one reason they can process foods that we can’t,” Smith said. “If we would eat coarse grasses, they would just go straight through us. But cattle are able to break them down.”

The cow then burps the methane, releasing a powerful gas that contributes to climate change. Methane initially traps far more heat than carbon dioxide, but it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long.

“It’s sort of like how much heat is generated from a campfire,” Smith said. “Methane is like a dry twig that burns super hot, so you get a lot of heat coming off it for a short period. Whereas carbon is like a big log that burns steady for a long time.”

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