Combat Cows Countering Climatic Carbon Catastrophe

... and yes, I am proud of the alliteration. Thanks for asking. Anyway, remember that idea that using huge herds of livestock could actually be beneficial for fighting climate change ? If not, the basic idea is that grasslands didn't develop in isolation, but in tandem with the evolution of grazing animals. Since we eliminated most of the grazing megafauna, the land is out of balance. It's no longer being fertilised or trampled, and the natural decay processes when the grass dies aren't happening. This, in short, isn't good - but the effect can be recreated with great efficacy using livestock herds. As well as preventing soil erosion and increasing crop yields, this also allows the soil to re-absorb enormous amounts of carbon. And you get a bunch of tasty cows wandering about to boot.

This first article takes a similar angle, with the slightly different spin that this means there's no need to give up eating meat. Actually, not really - despite the title, it barely mentions that. What it does do is note two important things : 1) that we're used to thinking of crop and meat production as two separate things, but this is a recent development; 2) we only think of cattle as causing problems because we're so used to (1), but if we abandon this and switch to high intensity grazing, it turns out that the carbon absorbed by the soil more than compensates for that produced by the cattle. Win-win all round.

A second article deals with a totally different climate issue, but in a similarly counter-intuitive way of using animals. What do we need to save the permafrost ? Horsies ! Lots of horsies ! How do they help ? By getting rid of the snow.

Wait, what ?

It turns out that snow is bad in this context because it's such an effective insulator. What you want to do is expose the ground to the cold winter air so it can freeze. The trampling hooves of horses (and other large animals) compresses and disperses the snow, halving the average depth and reducing the insulation. That, overall, should keep the ground significantly colder and allow the permafrost to last a lot longer. So more animals => less climate change = super happy environmentalists.

At least you might think so. But I've learned that whenever anyone posts anything - anything at all - that says, "we can fight climate change using method X", where method X is anything other than reducing fossil fuels, the reaction tends to be negative. For a substantial minority, nothing less than living in the trees and sacrificing babies to a rare species of carnivorous goat seems to be enough. "This will distract from the fight against fossil fuels !" they say. Geoengineering gets a particularly bad rap. And make no mistake : the schemes outline above are indeed geoengineering, just using animals instead of robots.

Here's the thing. We've already put too much carbon into the atmosphere, so we have a responsibility to clean up our mess. More fundamentally, why on Earth limit yourself to fighting fossil fuels ? If you really believe that climate change, not fossil fuel per se, is the problem, you should be using every possible method to mitigate it. By all means, reduce fossil fuels as well as the other options, but good lord don't forbid those other options. That only makes the battle harder to win. Yes, fossil fuels are nasty things, and ought to be phased out anyway. But if it's really climate change that you're trying to stop, use every weapon available rather than trying to fight with one hand tied behind your back.