Is Beef Production A Major Contributor To Climate Change?
May 20, 2024/ Francis Menton
Undoubtedly, by this time in your life you have read a hundred times, or maybe a thousand, that beef production is a “major contributor” to climate change. It’s one of those narratives that has become a continuous drumbeat in the progressive press. Probably, you have had no reason to question it. Without thinking about it, you likely assume that this narrative is probably true.
But there is good reason to think critically about this one. Among the various scare stories used to take further control of your life, this is one of the more important. With the war against fossil fuels, there is at least the pretense that their use can be reduced or eliminated without major effect on your lifestyle — i.e., just replace the energy from fossil fuels with “cheap” electricity from wind and sun. There is no such pretense with the war on beef. The end game is unabashedly to reduce your standard of living by taking away one of the most important and best parts of your diet.
So is it true that beef production is a major contributor to climate change? If you give the subject a moment’s critical thought, you will quickly realize that the proposition is wrong. And you will come to that conclusion even if you fully accept that methane gas in the atmosphere is a major contributor to climate change, and that cattle raised to produce beef emit large amounts of methane gas. There is an obvious logical flaw in the reasoning that is used to accuse beef production of being a major contributor to climate change.
But before getting to that, let’s look at one of my lists of the usual fools (and power-hungry government functionaries) repeating the narrative:
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-5-20-is-beef-production-a-major-contributor-to-climate-change