Europe

I can explain things to you. But I can't understand them for you.

Take LNG leaks. Just leaks. That's over 20 Tg(teragram) of methane into the wind every year. A teragram is 1 million metric tons. It takes 400 million cattle an entire year to produce that much methane (while feeding billions of people.)

Fossil fuels make up over 35 percent of methane emissions. Livestock are around 12 percent, and it's mostly cattle (ruminants.)

There's around 1.5 billion cattle and they produce about 75 million metric tons of CH4. Fossil fuels emit around 3x that much.

Eliminating fossil fuels would result in methane and CO2 concentrations dropping across the world. Climate change solved (at least as far as greenhouse gases.) While eliminating livestock production just slows down the rate of increase slightly, so it solves nothing except leaving you vulnerable to crop failures(which climate change will exacerbate) leading to famine and likely billions dead. Womp womp.

Ultimately, livestock are an excellent hedge. I do not understand why people want to make our food system less secure than it already is. To me, you are completely batshit fucking insane.

The world can sustain our present agriculture system without fossil fuels. It's as simple as that. We absolutely need to stop burning fossil fuels. It's as simple as that.

There's really no tug of war. Reducing livestock doesn't meaningfully change anything. It's like letting up slightly off the accelerator but you're still going 900 mph instead of a 1000 miles an hour directly into a brick wall. Eliminating fossil fuel combustion? That's like slamming on the brakes and shifting into reverse and then slamming on the accelerator....