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A new study has found that a 2011 estimate of methane emissions generated by the planet’s livestock was incorrect, with the new finding indicating that they were actually 11 percent higher than the numbers used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), leading to the guidelines and targets set out in the Paris climate accord. Methane (CH4) is produced from the decomposition of biological matter, such as livestock manure, and is a potent greenhouse gas, retaining up to 86 times more heat energy than the same mass of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
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One could say that we have a beef with the rising amount of methane (CH4) in the atmosphere: although this powerful greenhouse gas breaks down much faster than carbon dioxide, it traps 86 times more heat than CO2 over a 20-year span. Human activity has been the chief source of the increase in modern CH4 levels, having increased by about 150 percent since 1750, with about half of all human-generated methane coming from our livestock — particularly from the planet’s 1.5 billion cows. However, a new study has found that spicing a cow’s feed with simple seaweed can cut a burping bovine’s methane production by up to 99 percent.
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Change IS possible: Faced with the news that a class of antibiotics previously banned by the US government for poultry production is still in use, farmers and ranchers will now need a prescription from a veterinarian before feeding antibiotics to their farm animals. The FDA finally put this rule in place after trying for over 35 years to stop this practice, which helps the animals grow larger, but leads–over time–to the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the humans that eat this meat.
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Most of the beef we eat here in the US is tainted with antibiotics, because ranchers fatten the cattle up by feeding them corn, which irritates their stomachs (grass-fed cattle don’t need these medications–and ALSO do not raise your cholesterol).
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