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Promoting livestock methane emissions as sustainable and not responsible for global warming and advocating fairness for agricultural producers under any carbon emission laws or regulations.

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Animal Respiration & Global Warming

December 17, 2009 By Robin Grieve

Two World Bank environmental advisors Robert Goddard and Jeff Anhang put out a report claiming eating meat was having far more of an impact on global warming than was officially recognised. They argue that instead of producing 18% of world emissions it is actually 51%.

They are idiots so I won’t analyse it all but amongst other things they want to add animal respiration to our livestock emissions. This is the CO2 animals breathe out. This is not currently treated as an emission because it is regarded as neutral because it is just returning carbon that was removed from the atmosphere by the growing grass. There is no net increase and at least in this part of things the global warming industry has recognised this fairly sound and basic science.

But now it seems this may change because Robert and Jeff from the World Bank are arguing that without the animal there this carbon would not be respired and so the emission should count. According to them this equates to a massive 8.7 billion tonnes and is 3.7 per cent of total emissions.

They don’t realise though that if the animal was not there the grass would die and rot away and the carbon would return to the atmosphere. Presumably you need a brain to work for the World Bank but they somehow got around this requirement.

My first reaction was to dismiss them outright because of the stupidity of their argument and it saddened me that any study or report that paints agriculture in a bad light is eagerly rounded up by our news media and regurgitated without any checks on the intelligence of the authors.

But then I realised that I may have been too harsh on them because their fundamental argument over this carbon dioxide is the same as our Governments argument over enteric methane. These two advisors argue the emission of carbon dioxide is causing global warming despite the fact that the carbon emitted is offset by the carbon sequestered by the grass. Our Government argue that enteric methane causes global warming despite the fact that the methane emitted is offset by the methane that oxidises back to carbon dioxide.

So I have to concede that relative to our Government and its advisors these two from the World Bank are no more stupid.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Add new tag, carbon emissions, climate change, global warming, methane, Respiration

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