Nah, it's still the cows. No citation of a livestock emissions figure is made by the author. They took an excellent study which didn't mention cows at all and repackaged it as clickbait for this company's blog...<p>29 gigagrams of methane per year from fertilizer plants, says the study. (The 28 gigagrams figure in the article is misquoted, Ctrl+F for "29 (±18) Gigagram per year" here <a href="https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.358/" rel="nofollow">https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.358...</a> )<p>6.2 teragrams of methane per year from livestock emissions, says this other study <a href="https://extension.psu.edu/livestock-methane-emissions-in-the-united-states" rel="nofollow">https://extension.psu.edu/livestock-methane-emissions-in-the...</a><p>Last I checked 6.2 teragrams is a lot more than 29 gigagrams.<p>On another note... I highly recommend looking at the original paper. Awesome visual of emissions data captured by Cornell University sensors onboard a Google Street View vehicle!
Image here: <a href="https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.358/elementa-7-358-g2.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.358...</a><p>It's unfortunate that so much methane is released by fertilizer plants through incomplete chemical reactions, improper combustion, and leaks. 100x more than was previously estimated, in fact.<p>Also a bit curious - how did Cornell researchers get their sensors onboard a Google Street View car? Did Cornell approach Google for this study or vice versa?
Roger Gordon (<a href="http://www.greennh3.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.greennh3.com/</a>) has a design for a small-scale ammonia production system that individual farmers could drive from their own wind turbines. It produces no methane. He has not found investors yet.<p>Driving these big polluters out of business would be a great service to the world, and could be profitable besides. They don't just leak methane, they also release huge amounts of CO2. They have no reason to leak methane; it even costs them money. They are just sloppy.
> Once cattle—raised on grass without synthetic fertilizer—are accurately assessed<p>Except this does not cover the vast majority of cattle consumed. And it doesn't cover the effect of forested land being cleared for cattle production.