The thing is it depends on how you define your numbers. Personally I'm a fan of the carbon-above-ground accounting, where if you grow a tree it counts as 0 emissions, and if your burn the tree for fuel it also counts as 0 emissions since there wasn't any new carbon being dug up not was any carbon permanently sequestered.
Giving credit for the tree and taking it away when it is burnt is another choice. It shifts the focus to short term effects over long term ones. Which has both pros and cons.
> if your burn the tree for fuel it also counts as 0 emissions since there wasn't any new carbon being dug up not was any carbon permanently sequestered.
Ok but ... that definition makes not a whole lot of sense, right?
The only thing that should be considered is CO2 in the atmosphere / troposphere.
I think the idea is that the CO2 emitted from burning the tree is the same as is removed by the tree growing, so it cancels out. The tree is effectively a capacitor.
Fairly irrelevant when it comes to cattle though, as it's the methane that's the problem there.
You're going to get the methane anyway, even if you let all the plant matter the cows eat sit and rot.
Eh. Except there's a huge industrial ag machine creating cow-food, that wouldn't be doing that without the cows.
No, methane is a human-originated problem, and hand-waving won't change that.
Right, but doesn't that industry capture carbon?
Well, yes you would be doing that, unless everyone stops eating for example soya.
Soya's actually quite a good example because something like 80% of the mass of soya grown is only suitable for cattle feed, and we need to grow insane amounts of it for human food because it has basically no nutritional value for humans.
What are you going to do with all that? Pile it up and let it rot, emitting huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane?