A report by an entity called The Institute for Agriculture and Trade called ‘Milking the Planet: How big dairy is heating up the planet and hollowing rural communities’ is based on the same false premise so many of these anti farming reports are, which is that all biogenic methane emissions cause the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gas to increase.
The science does not support this assertion. It is a simple and unalienable truth that most of these biogenic methane emissions cycle harmlessly to and from the atmosphere in a relatively short time and do not cause an increase in atmospheric methane. To compare emissions which do not cause such an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas with emissions that do, as this report does, is to fail fairly basic science.
The report authors claim that 13 dairy companies produce the same quantity of emissions as the United Kingdom, but the emissions they are referring to are of ‘carbon dioxide equivalents’ or ‘carbon’ which is not a greenhouse gas at all, it is no more than a political system to equate different greenhouse gases in order to quantify them but it has no credibility in science.
The reports intention seems to be to warn of the environmental impact of dairy farm livestock emissions, but by using a system to quantify biogenic methane emissions that does not recognize the cyclical nature of these emissions means the report is not worth the paper it is written on.