Carbon Emission and Our Past
Within the past few years, carbon emissions have been a major disruption and setback which humans have faced. Not only Mega-Cash cow Industries, but small drops of emissions have also been causing major changes in the environment. A report by "Our World in Data" shows that greenhouse gases emissions are 51% caused by herd beef and 34% by chocolate (in the food caused emissions sector).
As we see, methane emissions are large for beef and lamb. This is because cattle and lamb are what we call ‘ruminants’, in the process of digesting food they produce a lot of methane. If we removed methane their emissions would fall by around half. It also matters a lot for dairy production, and a reasonable amount for farmed shrimps and fish.
This is not the case for plant-based foods, with the exception of rice. Paddy rice is typic
ally grown in flooded fields: the microbes in these waterlogged soils produce methane.
This means that beef, lamb and dairy products are particularly sensitive to how we treat methane in our metrics of greenhouse gas emissions. Few would argue that we should eliminate methane completely, but, as explained, there is an ongoing debate as to how to weigh the methane emissions – whether the grey bar should shrink or grow in these comparisons.