Burger King has just released a Low methane whopper, made by changing the diets of the cows, with a super cringe ad campaign. It is intended to be a small solution to a serious problem: methane has a short-term warming effect 84 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.
But it cannot be the only effort to stop methane (it is also totally inappropriate, which we will see in a moment). New research found that global emissions have reached a record high, and agriculture, especially animal agriculture, is largely to blame. The research, conducted by the Stanford University Global Carbon Project and published in Earth system scientific data and Environmental Research Letters On Wednesday, he found that annual global methane emissions increased 9 percent between 2000 and 2017.
In terms of warming potential, those additional methane emissions are similar to doubling the total carbon dioxide emissions of Germany or France. More than half of those emissions come from human activities, including the fossil fuel industry, which is responsible for about a third of anthropogenically produced methane. We need to curb methane emissions from the oil and gas sector through prohibition fracking and phasing out fossil fuels. On Wednesday, the United States saw a victory on that front after a court slapped the reversal proposed by the Trump administration of a methane regulation. However, an even greater source of methane emissions is agriculture.
the larger Agricultural sources of methane emissions are raising ruminants, a type of mammal that includes cows and sheep. In the United States, meat production is responsible for more than one third from agriculture-related emissions, and most of it comes from methane released by cows when they burp.
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The cow belching emissions are what Burger King says it aims to tackle with its new low methane Whopper. The company said You can reduce a cow’s daily methane impact by approximately 33% by adding lemongrass to the animals’ diet. But Jan Dutkiewicz, a postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University and a visiting fellow of Harvard University’s Animal Law and Policy Program, said that figure is hugely misleading and based on research carried out by Restaurant Brand International, the parent company of Burger King instead of being peer reviewed. Furthermore, research says the 33% figure actually only applies to the fattening period of about a year when a cow is taken to a feedlot to prepare for slaughter, not her entire life.
“That is really only a small part of the cow’s life,” Dutkiewicz told Earther. “So if you’re reducing methane emissions alone during that period by 33% … that’s not that significant, that’s snake oil.”
Studies to have found that Changing cow subsistence allowance It can reduce methane emissions to a certain extent. There are evidence that adding a chemical called 3-nitrooxypropanol to livestock feed reduces methane emissions in sheep and cattle by up to 30%. One study found that feeding cows algae It can make an even bigger difference, reducing the methane they emit by up to 60%. Neither of these options has been shown to work at scale, but there is the potential to apply them more broadly.
Beyond beef, there are also other important sources of methane that the world’s farms need to control. Kari Hamerschlag, deputy director of the Friends of the Earth food program, told Earther that about a quarter of the sector’s methane emissions come from rice. Microscopic organisms that live in paddy fields produce greenhouse gases, especially when the soil they are in is flooded and flooded. Studies show exist ways to handle that, even if. In the middle of the planting season, farmers can drain the water in the rice fields so that the water only reaches the roots, and also sow the rice in the dry fields before they are flooded.
There is also some evidence that regenerative agriculture Although it strategically places the life of the plant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it can reduce methane, although some scientists He believes that it cannot be scaled because it requires too much land. Hamerschlag said the best way to quickly halt methane emissions is to link farm subsidies with “implementing healthy soil practices that sequester carbon.”
However, the number one way to reduce methane contamination is to reduce how many cows we produce for meat and dairy. The world is almost three times its carrying capacity when it comes to producing livestock anyway. If a cow is not raised for food, methane is not emitted in the first place.
“It really is that simple,” Dutkiewicz said.
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