the question is whether turning out agricultural waste into ethanol has less of a negative impact on the environment than feeding it to animals. a claim either way must be substantiated.

one bathtub can’t turn all of the worlds agricultural waste into ethanol. surely you have some kind of data to back up your claims though.

Why on earth did you branch out my comment into three different subsection replies in which you say essentially the same thing?

I considered each response independent, and I’m not a huge fan of editing comments

if we are only talking about animals raised on agricultural waste, i doubt it. do you have any numbers to substantiate that?

I don’t see how this is ever going to happen

same way you dictate what food is made, I suppose

this isn’t proof that animal use of our crop waste is more polluting.

ethanol production definitely requires land

as soon as you figure out how to dictate what crops are planted, I’m sure the answer will be clear.

This means, instead of using silage to make fertilizer or allow tractors to run on ethanol, we send it far away, where it can be used make a lot more contributions to greenhouse gases than we would have if we’d just stop trying to rear animals.

can you provide any numbers to support this? it seems to me if the carbon has been taken out of the atmosphere by crops, then burning it as ethanol has a higher carbon release than letting a cow turn at least some of it into food.

So now we need to transport our silage further to distribute it to our livestock, who again release a lot of methane in their processing of it.

no, you can just raise the livestock near the crops.

Then because they die unevenly (older and naturally sicklier animals first), they’re still pretty well distributed throughout farms very far from each other.

what, why? if you can control who is planting what, where, why can’t you control who is breeding livestock?

Okay, so we have large numbers of livestock dying of starvation because there are not enough calories in silage to support the livestock we have.

why? beef cattle are usually harvested at 18 months or so. surely it’s just a matter of decreasing production across the board.

we don’t need to feed them more than waste. that’s a choice

just don’t feed them anything other than our waste products (silage, crop seconds, waste from processing, etc). then you don’t need to feed them anything else, but i’ve already described the vast majority of crops that are given to animals.

we already do that. but food production is also a good use for it. i would argue it’s the best use.

not necessarily

I didn’t say that. you are arguing with a strawman

They’re just not an efficient addition to the system on a large scale at all

so? they can still help us reclaim some of the effort put into growing crops that otherwise would go to waste.

If we reduced the amount of livestock, you’d have to increase transportation costs to get the silage to the animals.

no, you wouldn’t