Are your Pets Farts destroying our environment?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(nerfer @ Feb 27 2007, 03:50 PM) [snapback]397415[/snapback]</div>

It's not carbonated water as such, but baking soda (bicarbonate of soda), in a grade not pure enough for human consumption. A grain diet makes cows' stomachs too acid. Grain fed cattle are fed bicarbonate of soda to keep the acid level down. From what I can see, the bicarb typically amounts to about 1% of the weight of the grain. At that rate, it appears that cattle consume a large portion (say half) of all the bicarbonate of soda used in the US.

So, there is wide agreement that grain-fed cattle consume a lot of bicarbonate of soda.

For soft drinks and for almost all commercial beers, the carbonation comes from injecting C02 gas directly into the liquid under pressure, so that's your carbonated water. (Only a few beers are actually "naturally carbonated", meaning carbonated by the C02 given off by yeast as part of the fermentation process. The rest are carbonated just like soda pop.)

I don't know where the C02 for carbonated water comes from -- if it's industrial gas condensed out of the air, then then net C02 release is zero. The carbonate for cattle, by contrast, is definitely fossil carbonate, so that is a net C02 release. I could not find the data to let me hazard a guess on total C02 in bicarbonate fed to cattle versus soft drinks. The statement sounds plausible but it would take a lot of digging to pin it down.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(nerfer @ Feb 27 2007, 04:50 PM) [snapback]397415[/snapback]</div>

I didn't encounter anything concerning carbonated water in my research. I saw mention of other methods, but not carbonated water.

Regarding land use, I read that there are 42 million adult cattle in this country. I haven't run the numbers but can speculate that this amount of population would present significant problems should all of these cattle be converted from traditional handling to free range environments.

I just found this link while looking for cattle population in this country. This link does a wonderful job of summarizing water use, land degredation, summarizes energy input to protein output and so on. It also speaks to the economic consequences of maintaing a meat laden culture, meaning if we could export the grains we grow instead of feeding livestock, it would boost the U.S. trade balance by $80 billion a year.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Aug97...estock.hrs.html

So says this report, if you require animal comsumption/protien eat chicken for the least imposing means of animal management. This, I'm sure, will be impossible for some. My parents, for one, would have a cow if they were forced to comply with this.

It seems that no matter how you manage cows, any practice is unsustainable for the long run so long as our consumption is stable (and I read it's on a rise on a global scale).

For a thread w/ such a quirky title, I ended up learning a whole bunch.