the carbon cost of eating meat

So, on to the next of those three precepts: vegetarianism, or the huge carbon cost of eating meat. From what I have seen, this is too often ignored in discussions about solutions to the global warming crisis, for whatever reasons — too personal, too threatening? Or, more cynically, because of the influence of Big Agriculture — or that there is little profit to be made from a wholesale transition to giving up meat (as opposed to, for instance, pushing "green" products like electric cars or solar panels).

When I first began looking up "personal carbon footprint" calculators a few years back, they almost completely ignored the issue of diet, focusing exclusively on how much you drive, what kind of energy you use in your home, how efficient your appliances are, etc. The Sierra Club (as recently as 2008), in its listing of things you can do to lessen your carbon footprint, included small actions such as hanging your clothes out to dry, but did not include eating less (or no) meat.  Until pretty recently, Al Gore had never so much as mentioned the environmental impact of meat (according to Ben Adler). I heard only last month that Gore has now adopted a vegan diet (about time, I'd say); and when I looked again at carbon calculators, I found some that were much improved, taking vegan diets and local food into account — but still diet is given very little attention considering the outsized impact it could have on the crisis.

Whatever the reason for neglect in most discourse, switching to a vegetarian/vegan diet is surely the single most effective thing any individual can do to lower demand for fossil fuels and decrease GHG emissions — and some experts believe that a massive reversion to vegetarianism, coupled with re-forestation of lands now devoted to livestock, is our only hope of being able to drastically reduce emissions as rapidly as necessary in our constantly-worsening emergency.

More on that later; first — meat is essentially grain, water, and land, greatly concentrated. Here are a few specifics:

1. Grain: I have often read arguments that it is cereal monocrops — with their profligate use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers — that are most intensively contributing to environmental degradation. Those who point this out often argue that people should stop eating bread and pasta, not meat. This completely ignores the huge proportions of cereal crops that are fed directly to livestock — according to the World Bank, 65% of world corn production is used for animal feed, with only 15% used for feeding humans. In the US the numbers are even more striking: about 80% of the corn crop goes to feed livestock, and 98% of soybean meal is destined to feed animals, not human tofu-eaters! Meat is essentially grain, greatly concentrated. Estimates vary, but even for chicken (the least carbon-intensive meat) it takes about 2 pounds of grain to produce one pound of live weight gain (which presumably includes the bones, beak, feathers, and all the other "waste" parts that get thrown out). Beef is much worse — I've seen estimates ranging from 3 - 16 pounds, but most sources put the ratio at 7 or 8 pounds of grain to produce one pound of live weight gain. Most certainly, we could get much more food much more efficiently from those vast amounts of corn and soybeans if we just fed them directly to humans!

2. Water: Water use may not have a direct effect on climate change — but it is certainly a consideration, given the increased potential for drought (as we Californians are realizing right now). It takes 29 gallons of water to produce a pound of tomatoes, 219 gallons to produce a pound of tofu, and 2,464 gallons to produce a pound of hamburger (Water Education Foundation). Enough said.

3. Land use: Of course, it takes lots of land to grow not only all those cereal crops, but also to graze vast herds of cattle. The total land area of the US is about 2.3 billion acres; the lower 48 states (excluding a lot of ice and tundra in Alaska) totals about 1.9 billion acres. Of that, the USDA lists 614 million acres of pasture and rangeland, or nearly one-third of the total. Even that is a low estimate, as it does not include so-called "cropland used for pasture" — other estimates have put the total as high as 788 million acres, or 41% of total land area in the lower 48! Add to that the 200-plus million acres used to plant feed corn, soy, and alfalfa hay used for feeding livestock, and we can see that approximately half of the total land area in the contiguous United States goes to growing and feeding animals destined to be eaten (dwarfing the 3% that is urban land). On a global scale, "livestock systems" are estimated to occupy 45% of all land on earth — a pretty astounding figure, I'd say.

The carbon cost of meat is truly enormous — even the UN FAO's extremely conservative estimate is that 18% of global GHG emissions can be traced to meat, more than the entire transportation sector; and WorldWatch's Goodland and Anhang, taking into account all of the factors the FAO missed, calculated that an astonishing 51% of worldwide emissions are attributable to meat production. But it is because of that land use that, according to Goodland, switching to vegetarian/vegan diets may be the only hope for pulling back from the brink of our climate catastrophe. James Hansen recently recommended immediate decreases in carbon consumption of 6% a year, coupled with massive reforestation, as the only way to stay below a 2°C rise in global temperatures (subsequent developments have shown that that challenging figure is not enough — we need to cut back something more like 10% per year, starting now — but the principle still stands). But where is it possible for that massive reforestation to happen? Some of us may fantasize about turning shopping malls, parking lots, and golf courses back into forested land — but even if that were possible, the acreage wouldn't be nearly sufficient (remember, we're talking about massive reforestation here). But remember that approximately half of the total land area in the contiguous US, and 45% in the world, is devoted to grazing and feeding livestock, and the solution becomes obvious. According to Goodland, only by taking meat out of our diets and taking these vast rangelands and feedlots out of production could we find enough land for the reforestation that might — just might — give us a chance of averting catastrophe.

I want to be really clear, here — I am not proposing vegetarianism as a solution by itself. There is only so much that reforestation can do, and it could only work if accompanied by those massive cuts to consumption (10% per year until we reach zero), which entail serious changes in the way we do everything we do (another subject for a long post yet to come…). But in terms of what an individual can do, going vegan is undoubtedly the single most effective way to decrease emissions… And aside from the numbers, there is the consideration that going vegetarian is one of the simplest ways to affect climate change as an individual — as Adler says, "consumers may not have a say in whether or not another coal power plant will be built, but they do have control over how much meat they personally eat." Or, in other words, it is probably a lot more feasible to give up eating meat than it is to stop driving to work or to completely turn off the heater in the winter (plus there is the added benefit of better health... not to mention the massive cruelty of factory farming — but that could be an entire subject in itself...).