the link between climate change and meat consumption, on the heels of a series of damning reports that say if humans don’t act now to halt climate change, the results will be catastrophic. A new study by the World Meteorological Organization shows the past four years have been the hottest on record. On Tuesday, the United Nations reported that carbon emissions reached record highs in 2017 and are on the rise for the first time in four years. Radical reductions are necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, the level that would prevent the worst effects of catastrophic climate change.
The UN reports that economic growth is responsible for last year’s rise in emissions, and that all G20 countries are not on track to meet their 2030 climate pledges. The UN report comes just days after the United States government released an alarming study saying that the warming climate will increase wildfires, destroy infrastructure, worsen air quality, ruin crops, lead to more frequent disease outbreaks and could shrink the U.S. economy by as much as 10 percent by the end of the century.
As the world prepares for UN climate talks next month in Katowice, Poland, we turn to the rarely covered devastating impact of meat production on the climate. Livestock for meat and dairy products worldwide is responsible for almost 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, making it the second largest source of emissions after the fossil fuels industry. Meat and dairy production also uses about 70 percent of all agricultural land across the world. It is one of the principal causes of biodiversity loss, water pollution and deforestation.
According to the World Resources Institute, global meat and dairy consumption is likely to increase by nearly 70 percent by 2050. The resulting agricultural emissions will make it impossible to limit global temperature rise to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius, a target of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord.
George Monbiot talking:
it is not just that meat and dairy production make a huge contribution to climate breakdown. And I call it climate breakdown because calling it climate change is like calling an invading army unexpected visitors. This is an existential crisis we face. Not just that it also contributes to much wider environmental breakdown, the collapse of biodiversity, the destruction of habitats, the destruction of soil and water resources. But it’s also that if we stop eating meat and dairy, we have an enormous potential then for sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. Because so much of the land which is currently occupied by livestock would revegetate if those livestock were removed. Trees could grow back, deep vegetation could grow back and in doing so, they suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and give us the best possible chance we have of preventing climate chaos and breakdown.
Livestock account for 83 percent of our agricultural land use, according to one study, and produce 18 percent of our diet. It is a huge disproportion. Now when you look specifically at grazing livestock, which people tend to assume is more environmentally friendly than feeding them on grain, it’s completely the opposite. It’s the worst possible option. Grazing livestock occupy twice as much land as all the arable and horticultural land put together, yet they provide just over one percent of our diet. It is a fantastically wasteful way of using land.
And in order to keep your livestock on that land, you have to exclude most other wildlife. You have to kill the predators. You have to exclude the competitors, the other herbivores, the wild ones. The livestock wipe out most of the trees because they eat the tree seedlings. The old trees die on their feet and they are not replaced. They wipe out the deep vegetation. They cause a radical simplification of the ecosystem. And as a result of all of that, where livestock are grazed, you end up with more or less a wildlife desert, very low carbon-holding capacity. Lots of damage downstream as well, as soil is eroded, as animal wastes go into the water supply. So doing it with the grazing route is very damaging.
Feeding them on grain is also very damaging. The great majority of the soya plantations which are now devastating South America, wiping out the Gran Chaco dry forests, the Cerrado systems in Brazil, many of the forests around the edges of the Amazon basin—all being destroyed en masse for soya forming. The great majority of that soya goes into animal feed, such that if you want to eat less soya, you should eat soya. The reason being that there’s far more soya embedded in a lump of meat that has been produced in indoor agriculture than there is embedded in a lump of tofu.
I looked into Allan Savory’s claims very carefully because his TED talk went viral, its very popular claims. I looked into the science behind them and found there was none. Instead, there were a large number of scientific papers showing that those claims are rubbish. They don’t stand up at all. I then interviewed Mr. Savory and asked him to justify his claims. He simply couldn’t give me a straight answer to any of my questions.
Then there was a major study conducted, reviewing 300 papers on this subject, to see whether his claims such as his holistic ranching could suck all of the industrial carbon out of the atmosphere. Whether that stood up. They found there is simply no evidence for such claims at all, that they are wildly wrong. And unfortunately those claims, because they’re highly attractive to people because they create the impression that you can eat meat and save the world, are simply not based on facts.
intensively produced meat, indoor meat, is tremendously cruel to animals. The huge battery hog farms that you have in the United States, the chicken farms packed into broiler sheds, this is an unbelievable exercise in mass cruelty, in the torture of intelligent, sentient beings. It is an absolute outrage. And so people say, “Well, let’s not do that then. Let’s go for free range meat instead.” And that’s certainly kinder to the animals, but it is much crueler to the living planet. Because it is such an inefficient use of land, free-range meat has a far greater environmental impact, even than the very high impact of indoor meat production.
Indoor meat production has huge environmental impacts because of the feed used to give to the animals, because of the huge amount of waste that they produce, which then goes into lagoons and floods out of those lagoons and poisons rivers and causes dead zones at sea. But the impact of free-range production is even greater because it requires using such a vast area of the planet to produce so little meat. And across that area, we see the radical simplification of ecosystems, we see the killing of predators, we see fences put up keeping out herbivores, we see trees removed, a complete transformation from rich ecosystems to very poor ones. So we’re faced with a choice here. If you want to eat meat, you can have extreme cruelty or extreme environmental destruction. My answer to that? Stop eating meat.
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George Monbiot
British journalist and author. He is a columnist with the Guardian.
— source democracynow.org | Nov 29, 2018