We keep hearing about how cows are releasing carbon into the atmosphere. So lets talk about something called the “Law of Conservation of Mass.” It’s a thing. Now cows, like nearly all living things on the planet, are made of organic compounds. An organic compound is a chemical compound that contains the elements oxygen, CARBON, and hydrogen, which means that they contain carbon-hydrogen bonds.
Again, nearly all living things on the planet get their energy either directly from the sun, or from consuming other living things. The cow gets those carbon atoms by ingesting other living things- namely plants. Plants are largely made of carbohydrates, which are organic compounds.
Where do plants get their carbohydrates from? They make them, using water and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and energy from the sun.
This process is called the “carbon cycle.” The carbon is absorbed from the air, ingested by the cow, and then either becomes part of the cow or is discharged in the form of cow farts, exhaled CO2, or manure.
The point here is that the cow can’t release more carbon from the atmosphere than it has absorbed from plants. Where does the plant get the carbon? From the atmosphere. It’s a cycle.
2 Comments
Therefore · March 20, 2021 at 5:27 pm
And think about the language. They call it “carbon” when they mean carbon-dioxide. This allows them to confuse the issue. Nobody wants yucky black carbon in the air. Not CO2, that stuff plants need to make O2.
SiG · March 21, 2021 at 10:13 am
Another crazy example was a few years ago when suddenly the annual fires in the Amazon basin were The Big Terrifying Thing. “The Lungs of the Earth are Burning!!”
The fires weren’t particularly bad. The pictures being spread were from fires years before – and not even from the same year. In the big picture, the carbon in the plants got converted into CO2 which was then converted back into carbon in the next generation of plants, probably within a year, but everyone was supposed to be terrified of some sort of apocalypse.
I have no idea why.
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