Yet livestock are a major emitter of greenhouse gases that cause
climate change.
Altogether, that's more than the
emissions caused by transportation.
Earth’s early atmosphere is thought to have had methane concentrations
more than 500 times as great as today.
Termites and decaying
garbage dumps were also recognized as methane sources, again in
oxygen-free environments.
In fact, it is now estimated that 150 metric tons of methane
per year, up to 20 percent of the amount that enters the atmosphere,
comes from plants, not from anaerobic microbes in the soil.
This new
discovery will cause people to reconsider planting shrubs, grasses, and
trees to take up the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, that is the focus
of those trying to mitigate global warming.
It is little
recognized that about 25 per cent of atmospheric methane results from
anaerobic microbes that live in the oxygen-poor soils in rice paddies.
The real problem, as I see it, is not meat eaters
or cows or even the sun, it's people. There are too many people on the
planet..unsustainable...of course, we all agree there, I think.
I personally think that Nature will take care and rectify the situation,
and I believe in a Power greater than myself.
That doesn't absolve me
from action, just a comfort that there are forces at work that we don't
understand and probably won't understand, and that my efforts to walk
lightly won't be in vane.
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