Kurzgesagt Response: "Is Meat Really that Bad?" (Patreon)

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Is Meat Really that Bad? [Kurzgesagt video response]

So, Kurzgesagt put out another video titled Is Meat really that bad?

It’s a bit more nuanced than the typical “cow bad” piece, which is appreciated, but it leaves too much on the table for my taste. I won’t address the whole thing just yet, but will focus on one section which I thought was particularly important.

First off, the video relies a lot on this 2018 Paper by Poore and Nemecek. I recognized it right away because I’ve seen it on the pro vegan film The Game Changers and more than one of the videos criticizing my video on this topic: Eating less meat won’t save the planet.

In fact, I talked about the many flaws with this paper on page 29 of the PDF in this rebuttal I wrote to Earthling Ed’s critique of my video.

So Kurzgesagt brings up this Poore and Nemecek study which they describe as “the most detailed meta analysis of lifecycle assessments to date…” and say that beef emissions come out on top as the worst..

These bars in the picture above are expressing the GHG’s necessary to produce a kg of this food. Kurzgesagt says that of course the most important aspect of our food isn’t weight, but “nutrient density.”

So if you compare by calories or protein, you get this spread, and you still see that beef isn’t so great.

Acknowledges there are some differences - some beef can be more sustainably raised than others, but that the best beef is still worse than the best plant food.

They explain that by far, the largest share of beef emissions comes from methane released directly from the animals.

They acknowledge that CO2 stays in the atmosphere far longer than methane, but that methane’s warming impact is higher. To put methane’s warming impact in perspective, they say: “Methane has already caused 23 to 40% of human made warming so far.”

So let’s recap.

Kurzgesagt has said:

1. Beef’s climate footprint is huge

2. What makes up the largest share of Beef’s footprint is it’s methane emissions.

3. Methane has caused 23-40% of human made warming so far.

4. Instead of elaborating, they say methane is complicated and move on.

…OK so what if methane has caused 23-40% of man made warming? Tons of things emit methane: Rice cultivation, wheat and sugarcane crop residues, oil and natural gas wells, landfills, coal mining, sewage ponds, various industrial processes.

Unintentional leaks of methane from gas wells are turning out to be a huge problem.(S)

On a Bloomberg video about dying gas wells: “In many cases, these marginal wells, they’re actually a lot dirtier than coal. Because so much of the methane that comes out of these wells is actually escaping into the air…”

So what we really want to know is how much of that 23-40% is directly from cows?

This was not addressed by Kurzgesagt.

Further, That 23-40% figure comes from OurWorldinData and it is looking at a huge timeline. In their footnote, it’s explained that this is looking at methane’s contributions from 1750 to 2011.

Now it’s going to be really quite difficult to elucidate cattle’s contribution to that 261 years of methane emission.

Just looking at the period from 1900 to 2000, the cattle population dramatically increased in North America, South and Central America, Europe, Africa, North Asia, South Asia and Oceania(Source)

That’s just 100 years. OurWorldinData is looking at 261 years. How did the cattle population change from 1750 to 1900? We need to consider this and many other factors to get an idea of just how much cattle contributed to the planet warming caused by methane over 261 years.

(By the way, 30-60 million Bison roamed the United States until 1830.(S))

In any case, I hope you’ll agree that that is not relevant.

What we really want to know is how much are the current cattle emissions contributing to methane production now and how much warming is methane incurring now?

Methane from cattle

According to unep.org, “Livestock emissions – from manure and gastroenteric releases – account for roughly 32 per cent of human-caused methane emissions.”

IGSD put it at 33% in 2010 (adding Enteric Fermentation and manure)

Methane’s warming

As I mentioned in my video from April of this year, 10% of the United State’s planet warming contribution (CO2 equivalent) comes from methane. I need to dig up the global number, but that number may be obselete.

Methane is known as a flow gas. Meaning, it’s emitted, it warms the earth but it’s broken down in about 10 or 12 years. CO2 on the other hand stays in the atmosphere for 30 to 100 times longer than methane. So it piles up year after year.

I recently made a one minute youtube “short” titled Beef is not as bad as we thought explaining that the most recent IPCC report suggests that methane from cows is 3-4 times less of a contributor to warming than was previously thought. Quote from Chapter 7, page 123 of the report: “…expressing methane emissions as CO2 equivalent emissions using GWP-100 overstates the effect of constant methane emissions on global surface temperature by a factor of 3-4 over a 20-year time horizon...”

So, what you would want to know is whether cattle emissions are constant or not . Here’s the cattle herd for the U.S. for the past 18 years:

Here’s the global cattle herd:

Doesn’t look like it’s been growing.

So in my earlier video I said that 2.7% of the United States planet warming contribution comes from methane production from cows. Yet, the new data from the IPCC report suggests that U.S. cattle’s methane may in fact comprise as little as 0.68% to 0.9%* to U.S.’s total planet warming effect.

*Of course this IPCC data on methane needs to be applied to other constant sources of methane in the U.S. so it’s not as clean as just dividing by 3 or 4, but you get the idea.

To give you an idea of how methane is more of a cycle, take a look at this image. There are sources of methane, but there are also very powerful methane sinks. If you’d like to learn more about this, I highly recommend taking a look at this presentation by Dr. Frank Mitloehner.

He’s spoken about this complicated nature of methane for a couple years now, in fact that’s why I was able to write such a detailed commentary on the complexities of methane in my response to Earthling Ed’s video criticizing my Eating less meat won’t save the planet video. Now the 2021 IPCC report finally reflects precisely what Mitloehner has been explaining.

So again, Kurzgesagt says

(1) “Meat, but especially beef is the worst food in terms of emissions,” and that

(2) What makes up the largest share of Beef’s footprint is it’s methane emissions.

So you would think they should realy nail this methane component. But instead, it’s explained that cows emit a lot of methane, and it’s implied that methane is really bad.

I don’t think there will be that much fuss about Kurzgesagt’s commentary on methane, but imagine the onslaught of “debunks” if I made a video saying:

-Rice is a staple food for over half of the world’s population.(S)
-It emits 3.3 times the methane of beef per gram of protein(S)
-Methane has caused 23-40% of human made warming so far.
-Methane is complicated so let’s move on.

From an older paper (1995), but consider this quote:
“Ruminant livestock can produce 250 to 500 L of methane per day. This level of production results in estimates of the contribution by cattle to global warming that may occur in the next 50 to 100 yr to be a little less than 2%.”

How did we go from such tiny numbers in 1995 to headlines like “Cows are the new coal” (Time Magazine) In 30 years?

By the way, a new 2021 paper says that a meat-free diet will reduce a New Zealander’s greenhouse gas emissions by only 3-4% over their lifetime.