I don't agree with the statement cows are bad. I think that factory / industrial farming at this scale presents an unnatural concentration of conditions that allow methane levels to be checked and highlighted. Its like if you judged the emmisions of all cars based off of the redneck that just rolled coal through an intersection.

I think the methane issue, if it was framed correctly, would be used to boost the endorsement and possibly subsidization of small farms that raise beef in a more generally traditional way (pasture grazing) or in ways that are more in the vein of permacultue.

Yes, doing so will likely raise the cost of the meat you buy at the store. But beef on pasture, especially when teamed up with chickens and other livestock create a much more balanced system that doesn't impact the ecology in such an acute manner.

I'm concerned that the argument being made about beef overlooks more significant sources of greenhouse gases that aren't tied to our food supply. There is an underlying assumption that we can't go back to farming on a small scale and spin down the general economy so that we could all live simpler and more ballanced lives.

The powers that be will never push for that. They need our behemoth economic output to help keep their thumb on the world through miltary, political and economic force. But, one can't help but recognize that we've become a significantly unwell society. I don't think this all boils down to old people simply being out of touch with themselves or that it wasn't OK to acknologe mental illness. I think our collective illness is one born of the pressures we all face from the GDP graph always needing to go higher and higher.

I just look at it like this. Families used to get by on 50 acres with a few livestock and would run minimal power equipment to manage it all. Their localized impact to the atmosphere was significantly smaller than all of our modernized, centralized methods. I'm not saying we all need to be farmers. But I do think the past has some valuable points to reference from the standpoint of reducing our individual carbon footprints and thereby reducing the incentive for companies to make more stuff that we don't really need if it wasn't in support of our fast paced highly commercialized way of life.

Sorry for the long wandering rant. I'll go back to yelling at the clouds.