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Keeperofthe7keysAf-S t1_iu0fqom wrote

Livestock isn't actually that big of a contributer as is often claimed. The reason is they don't add any new carbon. They get it from plants which get it from the atmosphere, where it later returns. While methane is a part of this cycle and produced from a variety of sources undergoing biological decay or gut microbiome digestion, cows do produce a lot of it.

Methane decays over 20 years back into CO2 and water, but during its life as methane it's an 80x more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and that's the issue, not because it dosen't balance in the end, but because we breed a lot of cows. People gotta eat though and it's gonna come from somewhere in order to sustain the population even if it wasn't cows.

The reason this is a climate win is because we're not adding new carbon, we're capturing methane that exists anyways from waste, converting it back to CO2 and water in order to produce energy, and thereby skipping its life having 80x the warming effect, essentially making it not only carbon neutral, but beneficial to reducing warming. The article might be about a fueling station that's new, but we've been doing this for awhile, not just with manure, but with landfills as well.

Continuing to use fossil sourced natural gas though, that's as we say, no good.

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