COW vs. GTI

Image source, left: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

I am sure we’ve all read an assortment of articles about how cows are our greatest enemy and that through their methane production they are trying to get rid of us all so that they will inherit the earth. Perhaps we’ll hear of Planet of the Bovines coming to a Cineplex near you. No? I have run into a couple of articles recently about cows and global warming and it got me thinking.

Matt Blitz’s article, “Do cow farts actually contribute to global warming” references a recent Danish study which determined that the average cow produces the equivalent of 4 metric tons of CO2 in methane a year, so I guess you could call it their carbon hoof print (sorry I couldn’t resist). This is in terms of their effect on global warming so that one can compare it to other things that produce carbon. And that is just looking at the off gassing of the cow, not dealing with the byproduct of all the grass/corn it eats. I must admit, I did wonder how they figured this out.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

Continuing down the food chain, an average 1000 pound cow produces an average of 430 pounds of meat that can be sold at a super market in various cuts. (These statistics vary with various resources.) When you do the back of the envelope math that works out to about the equivalent of 20 pounds of CO2 to produce 1 pound of edible meat before you add the processing and distribution energy.

You know what else produces 20 pounds of CO2? A gallon of gasoline. This is the footprint when you burn it, not any of the energy to produce it or transport it. So how does my daily driver, a 2010 VW GTI stack up against a cow? In almost five years of ownership and 56,000 miles on the clock I have contributed approximately 22 metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere or approximately 4.7 tons a year. According to our rough math, that’s equivalent to a little more than one cow. I, for one, did not expect that one cow would contribute almost as much to global warming as my car. Clearly I am not considering trading in my GTI for a cow to get me around town even though it has a heated seat of sorts.

So, with not quite 88 million cows in America and 250 million cars that is about a 1:3 ratio. Cows are responsible for much less pollution production than automobiles in the US. But what about a country like Brazil? Somewhere on the order of 186 million cows and only 80 million cars, who or what is contributing most to the pollution problems south of the border? Again, this is just looking at a cow standing in a field eating grass, not any of the embedded energy to turn that cow into something one might eat. Likewise, the car is just running down the road, we haven’t calculated any of the embedded energy to produce it or ultimately get rid of it. Calculating the carbon footprint of those activities in either case is currently almost impossible, which continues to frustrate me.

Regardless of where you live, cars are getting more efficient and one imagines that the carbon footprint will continue to decrease as it will for most of our technology. But where does this leave the cow? Stuck at producing approximately 4 metric tons per year. Bioengineering anyone? What is the point, you ask? Given how difficult it is to determine the carbon footprint of your daily life I just thought it was interesting that the equivalent amount of CO2 it takes to pre-produce a pound of meat is approximately the same amount of CO2 my car produces to get me to work each day. That’s just a small slice of my daily activities drawn in comparison. That said, what is the long term future of a pound of meat?

In our future lives will we be forced to make choices on where to spend our personal allocation of daily carbon? Bits of carbon coin? I guess that outcome is only possible once it can be measured in a reasonably accurate manner, but until that day arrives I guess one has to keep looking at the small slices that make up our daily lives and make up one’s own mind as to want is important as we all try to reduce our footprint on the planet.