Today we burn tons of oil. Say tomorrow we have switched to all electric. Do you think we'll keep extracting oil and that will create an environmental burden because of that oil sitting around?
That's the same reasoning.
Today we grow megatons of corn,... for different things, including feeding livestocks.
Tomorrow, if we have less livestock, we'll adapt the crops mix, just like rest of the world has been or is still doing fine without having mega-herds of cows.
We don't have too many cows because we had too much crops. We increased the crops to match the herds!
no. I just want to see how much water they say cows consumed from cotton and the total amount of water they say was used to grow the cotton. and then I want you to ask yourself if it's reasonable to attribute ANY of that water to cows (it isn't)
i'm having problems right now even pulling up the full article, but, to my recollection, they didn't actually gather any of this data themselves, so you should be able to find some oblique reference to water used somewhere in the body of the paper, and then follow the citation to the actual study that did gather the data.