debunking that Worldwatch piece on beef impacts
If only that were true. The fact is, we have lots and lots of climate activists and enviros whose lives are awash in internal contradictions -- giving up their steaks, their two-ton SUVs (for that one ski trip a year), and gratuitous airplane travel are all non-starters. American (and Euro) exceptionalism; wants vs needs. The real problem is them dark people in India wanting an hour a day of electric. From coal. Can you imagine!
Nothing quite tops the denial of beef production impacts by people who know better. I am reminded of the third monkey -- the one with its hands over its ears. Can't hear, won't hear:
beef is worse than all the world's vehicles combined.Dead zone again in the Gulf from all that fertilizer? Too bad, but I gotta have red meat but hey here is a $20 donation for the Sierra Club, mitigate my lifestyle.
Scientific reticence: hundreds of ongoing AGU2015 climate science talks but you are compelled to fly to San Francisco because the member-controlled professional association refuses to show the posters, slides or video sessions. Who among the speakers has objected to that (no one), even in the concurrent Paris conf year.
My observation is that even the outspoken ones eat steaks whenever they please. They get a pass because of good deeds elsewhere. The problem is too many people issuing themselves passes.
Giving up beef will reduce carbon footprint more than cars, says expert
PNAS … free full text, no registration http://www.pnas.org/content/111/33/11996
Beef’s environmental impact dwarfs that of other meat including chicken and pork, new research reveals, with one expert saying that eating less red meat would be a better way for people to cut carbon emissions than giving up their cars.
The heavy impact on the environment of meat production was known but the research shows a new scale and scope of damage, particularly for beef. The popular red meat requires 28 times more land to produce than pork or chicken, 11 times more water and results in five times more climate-warming emissions. When compared to staples like potatoes, wheat, and rice, the impact of beef per calorie is even more extreme, requiring 160 times more land and producing 11 times more greenhouse gases.
Agriculture is a significant driver of global warming and causes 15% of all emissions, half of which are from livestock. Furthermore, the huge amounts of grain and water needed to raise cattle is a concern to experts worried about feeding an extra 2 billion people by 2050. But previous calls for people to eat less meat in order to help the environment, or preserve grain stocks, have been highly controversial.
“The big story is just how dramatically impactful beef is compared to all the others,” said Prof Gidon Eshel, at Bard College in New York state and who led the research on beef’s impact. He said cutting subsidies for meat production would be the least controversial way to reduce its consumption. “Remove the artificial support given to the livestock industry and rising prices will do the rest.”
Eshel’s team analysed how much land, water and nitrogen fertiliser was needed to raise beef and compared this with poultry, pork, eggs and dairy produce. Beef had a far greater impact than all the others because as ruminants, cattle make far less efficient use of their feed. “Only a minute fraction of the food consumed by cattle goes into the bloodstream, so the bulk of the energy is lost,” said Eshel. Feeding cattle on grain rather than grass exacerbates this inefficiency, although Eshel noted that even grass-fed cattle still have greater environmental footprints than other animal produce. The footprint of lamb, relatively rarely eaten in the US, was not considered in the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Prof Tim Benton, at the University of Leeds, said “The biggest intervention people could make towards reducing their carbon footprints would not be to abandon cars, but to eat significantly less red meat,” Benton said. “Another recent study implies the single biggest intervention to free up calories that could be used to feed people would be not to use grains for beef production in the US.”
Prof Mark Sutton, at the UK’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, said: “The US and Europe alike are using so much of their land in highly inefficient livestock farming systems, while so much good quality cropland is being used to grow animal feeds rather than human food.”
Separately, a second study of tens of thousands of British people’s daily eating habits shows that meat lovers’ diets cause double the climate-warming emissions of vegetarian diets.
The study of British people’s diets was conducted by University of Oxford scientists and found that meat-rich diets - defined as more than 100g per day - resulted in 7.2kg of carbon dioxide emissions. In contrast, both vegetarian and fish-eating diets caused about 3.8kg of CO2 per day, while vegan diets produced only 2.9kg. The research analysed the food eaten by 30,000 meat eaters, 16,000 vegetarians, 8,000 fish eaters and 2,000 vegans.
More on the climate cost of cattle just on US public land (100 million acres with mammoth lease subsidy at $1.15 per acre per month per cow/calf pair) focusing on the belched methane (not considered above):
Cattle contribute to global climate change through the emission of methane they produce by enteric fermentation as part of their digestion. I quantified the mass of this methane produced by cattle that graze on U.S. federal public lands managed by the BLM and U.S. Forest Service. I've now updated that 2008 essay in important ways by recalculating the methane production using the most recent government data about the extent of grazing on these lands. And Ive incorporated the most recent findings about the heat-trapping properties of methane, which are now regarded as being much greater than they were in 2008. Not included: soil's lessor sequestering of atmospheric carbon under grazing and under grazing exclusion. http://www.mikehudak.com/Articles/PLR_Methane.html
Amusing footnote:
During the presidential campaign of 1928, a circular published by the Republican Party claimed that if Herbert Hoover won there would be “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” The promise of prosperity was derailed seven months after Hoover took the oath of office. The stock market crash of 1929 plunged the country into the Great Depression and people eventually lost confidence in Hoover.
In other words, in 1928, chicken not to mention beef, was not even on the horizon for most Americans during the height of the boom. They couldn't afford a worn-out stewing chicken but somehow they got along without. Today that would be "a beef on every grill and a motorhome on every curb." Big climate footprint aspirational.