How Much Greenhouse Gas Does California Swine Produce?
A question we often find ourselves asking is just how much raising swine in the great state of California contributes to global warming. Now, with help from the data released by the Air Resources Board, I can definitively tell you that raising swine in this state generated 0.0116149133041726 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, the equivalent of burning 1.3 million gallons of gasoline. The US is balking at capping its greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels, but here in California, a law known as AB 32 has done just that. Implementing the policy required that the state do a complete inventory of its GHG emissions from 1990 on, so it could actually determine what the cap should be. That meant calculating the emissions from hundreds of sources from dairy cows to jet fuel to passenger cars. Here at Wired Science, we figure that you are nerds like us who love data, so we made the ARB spreadsheet a little friendlier, calculated gallons of gas equivalents out of the metric tons of gre
