Hoo-boy! New York Times online has a smart article connecting meat consumption and global warming. It’s great to see such a solid source making these connections — though people have been making this argument for decades, it’s generally over shadowed by other issues. To me, this is one more way our world will look different when we create the sustainable, healthy communities we’re striving for.
Here’s my favorite quote:”Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.”
See the article, “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler” by Mark Bittman complete with some great graphics connecting meat consumption with fossil fuels consumption for yourself
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I can see your point but this article, like many before it, uses some flawed data(*) that has been shown repeatedly to be wrong – it’s an issue with a lot of articles and studies related to this issue. One side believes because they want to believe (pick whichever side you want) and the other finds out there are flaws in the methodology and disqualifies it all. It’s simple math but the reporter didn’t bother to do it. He saw this in a study that used the same numbers from a 1992 book and repeated them in a new calculation, compounding their wrongness.
Meat was environmentally cheaper when it was all grass fed but limiting the number of animals for food means creating a society where only the rich eat meat (not the sort of thing most environmentalists, who I hope are somewhat compassionate toward the poor, want) or banning meat, which is pretty totalitarian in a society that endorses freedom.
One obvious solution is to engineer cows that don’t fart. If a cow farts enough methane per year to fill a hot air balloon (and they do) and we also engineer ways to make more grains with the same land, it’s a happy planet.
Yet some of the same environmentalists who want to save the environment are against genetic research. At some point they need to pick a side.
(*) I don’t want to spam you with a link but I wrote about this, not because I am in favor of polluting the planet or killing cows, but because I am very much against bad science that gets propagated as fact. I won’t put the link here but people can copy and paste if they are interested in the history of this calculation. http://www.scientificblogging.com/hank/strange_climate_math_driving_is_better_for_pollution_than_walking
Food = Global Warming. All food production increases C02 and CH4 releases. While on average INDUSTRIAL meat produces more of these emmissions many studies have shown that in some cases the carbon footprint of your hamburger can be less than that soy milk your drinking. Escpecially when your cutting down the rainforest to grow it, and shipping it across the world. Coffee uses almost as much resources as beef.., yet why do we not talk about coffee? Because Vegatarian and Vegan wish to push there doctrine upon us all as they sip there starbucks brew. Life = Global Warming. There is no one solution to changing the pattern of the current climate. I could tell you to stop smoking, stop drinking coffee, and stop eating meat. But that seems to me like something else i have heard before.
I think it is funny how defensive people get when you suggest that we should stop eating as much red meat. I am not a vegetarian, as I eat meat when I travel and occasionally with my family, but I fail to see how people can think that factory farming for beef is at all sustainable.
We eat an excessive amount of meat in this country, just as we consume an excessive amount of every other natural resource. The rainforest grown soy that people keep bitching at vegetarians for eating mostly goes to feed cattle, not make tofu. (Though soy does have dubious environmental impacts) I’m not trying to push vegetarianism on everyone as people need to make their own lifestyle choices but a 16oz factory farmed steak is not sustainable any way that you look at it. Maybe cutting down on meat consumption and ending factory farming is part of the solution to climate change!
I am not too surprised at the reaction. I recall an article saying that the three things folks get most protective of is their religion, language, and food.
Is it possible that they’re all right? Clearly, factory-farmed meat (and meat in general) has an enormous about of embodied emissions, from the production of the chemicals pumped into the system to the energy used in these farms, from the long-distance transportation and refrigeration to the processing of this meat. However, locally-raised grass-based beef can actually be a more sustainable alternative to highly processed, imported vegetarian alternatives which may have used lots of energy-intensive fertilizers for production – even if it wasn’t grown in a former rainforest (though I remain a vegetarian!). Since we can’t eat grass (which grows pretty efficiently on its own), cattle and other livestock can pretty effectively and efficiently convert this to protein we need to survive (I know, I know, a pretty utilitarian way of looking at beautiful creatures, but if we are looking at carbon footprint of all our food, it will come down to this).
All of the arguments made for or against certain types of food are based on so many factors — how the animals or plants are raised (organically? with chemicals? in greenhouses? in factories? in the fields?), how and where they’re processed and transported (as dried fruits? as refrigerated meat? into strange shapes and flavors? by planes? boats?), but a lot of it is really where they are coming from. Eating local foods in season can do so much to minimize processing and transportation costs, not to mention allow you to ask the farmers how they are raising their crops and animals and judge for yourself what kind of greenhouse gas and ecological impact your food choices have.
I love Richard Manning’s article from a few years ago in Harper’s Magazine — The Oil We Eat — which questions a lot of different food choices and the American food system (check it out at http://www.eciad.ca/~elverumd/References/The%20Oil%20We%20Eat%20by%20Richard%20Manning.pdf) and parts of Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”. And Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma” brings up a lot of these issues, as does his new book “In Defense of Food”. His conclusion? “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
I agree with Pollan: while there is no one exact diet to solve this dilemma, maybe the biggest thing we can do to change the current food system and the energy that goes into bringing us EVERYTHING we eat and drink is just to think about what – exactly – we are eating and what went into bringing it to our tables.
Excuse me, rob the climate guy, but life does not mean global warming. Overconsumption means global warming. Anything we can cut down on is good for the environment. It’s really not that hard.
And of course, there are those who say that eating meat makes one eat less, and therefore must be green. But that doesn’t make one CONSUME less. One must think about the indirect causes of one’s actions as well. Things get tricky these days – one must be smart to be green. And in any case, why eat a food that requires more human food than we’d ever eat? Just eat it ourselves!
A recent study showed that grass fed beef actually produces more emissions because it takes more energy to produce, and plus grass fed cattle release even more methane.
I think that this is definitely an issue that needs to go more mainstream. Climate policy addresses energy production and transportation, but hardly touches agriculture. With the global population rising, global meat consumption could double, and so would the effects. I don’t think the world can handle that.
Our attitude towards meat needs to change, and it starts with people being aware of the incredible amount of resources it takes to eat meat.
Rachel, Even if everyone ate less meat to help the environment, you don’t think the same problem will soon arise with population growth?
Rob is right. It is not one thing that is causing global warming, there are many different factors. Almost all of which we contribute to daily, directly or indirectly. Not to mention the growing population having a multiplicative effect on all the harm done.