>That premise is completely contradicted by a study found two links down in the relevant links
No, it's not.
>In other words, wild animals living in a natural savanna ecosystems emit an equivalent amount of greenhouse gasses to domestic animals being grazed. Much of the land currently under agricultural use for animal agriculture would revert to savanna and grassland, with wild grazers replacing the domestic grazers.
I think you misunderstand the meaning of pastoralism - you let the animals out on the land, they eat, you bread some, then you eat some. The actual "in other words" here is that the only way to reduce the GHGs of animal agriculture is to reduce animal agriculture itself. These animals are purposefully bred to eat. All it confirms is that if you breed less animals, you produce less GHGs. The wildlife live out their whole lives, the bred animals do not.
>Don't even get me started on the degree to which these arguments ignore key issues in plant agriculture. Things like the fertilizer necessary to achieve its outputs is all fossil fuel based and carbon emitting for conventional or by products of animal agriculture for organic. We have to get to net zero - you can't reach net zero in plant agriculture any more than in animal agriculture.
Animal agriculture requires plant agriculture to exist, but the same isn't true for the reverse. It's not necessary to eat animals to get the benefits of having the animals in the system. For example, you don't have to eat honey for bees to pollinate. How do we know that? Because honeybees aren't native to the US and the native bee population got along just fine pollinating before honeybees were introduced.
Reforming and using fossil-fuel-free fertilizer is already something people are working on.
>I've seen these sort of thing again and again and again in the push to drop animal agriculture in an attempt to decarbonize our agriculture. This failure to take a systems approach leading to the wrong conclusions.
>Abandoning animal agriculture is not a silver bullet for decarbonizing our agriculture. Its advocates really need to get off their horses and start taking a systems view if we want to come up with solutions that could actually decarbonize our agriculture in a realistic way.
I think if anyone needs to start using systems thinking, it's you. The systems approach here is not to overuse one particular resource. So taking animals, a resource, out of the system continuously is not systems thinking. It is unsustainable use of a resource. You erroneously claim that the food system needs animal agriculture to exist, but it doesn't. It just needs animals to exist. There is no way to make the continuous breeding and killing of animals emit less GHGs than just not doing that.