What You Should Know
In December 2006, the United Nations published a report on livestock
and the environment with a stunning conclusion: "The livestock sector
emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to
the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to
global." It turns out that raising animals for food is a primary cause
of land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution,
loss of biodiversity, and not least of all, global warming.Last year researchers at the University of Chicago took the Prius down a peg when they turned their attention to another gas guzzling consumer purchase. They noted that feeding animals for meat, dairy, and egg production requires growing some ten times as much crops as we'd need if we just ate pasta primavera, faux chicken nuggets, and other plant foods. On top of that, we have to transport the animals to slaughterhouses, slaughter them, refrigerate their carcasses, and distribute their flesh all across the country. Producing a calorie of meat protein means burning more than ten times as much fossil fuels--and spewing more than ten times as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide--as does a calorie of plant protein. The researchers found that, when it's all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius. According to the UN report, it gets even worse when we include the vast quantities of land needed to give us our steak and pork chops. Animal agriculture takes up an incredible 70% of all agricultural land, and 30% of the total land surface of the planet.
As if that isn't bad enough, the real kicker comes when looking at gases besides carbon dioxide--gases like methane and nitrous oxide, enormously effective greenhouse gases with 23 and 296 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, respectively. If carbon dioxide is responsible for about one-half of human-related greenhouse gas warming since the industrial revolution, methane and nitrous oxide are responsible for another one-third. These super-strong gases come primarily from farmed animals' digestive processes, and from their manure. In fact, while animal agriculture accounts for 9% of our carbon dioxide emissions, it emits 37% of our methane, and a whopping 65% of our nitrous oxide. It's a little hard to take in when thinking of a small chick hatching from her fragile egg. How can an animal, so seemingly insignificant against the vastness of the earth, give off so much greenhouse gas as to change the global climate? The answer is in their sheer numbers. The United States alone slaughters more than 10 billion land animals every year, all to sustain a meat-ravenous culture that can barely conceive of a time not long ago when "a chicken in every pot" was considered a luxury.
Source: Excerpted from Kathy Freston's "Vegetariansm is the new Prius" (Jan 2007)
Easy Things You Can Do
Eat less meat. Cutting back on the amount of meat you eat doesn't mean you have to become a vegetarian. Start off slowly--try to cut out one or two meat meals a week every six months until you're down to three or less meat meals a week. How to make the switch?:- Preferably eat fish or chicken instead of livestock.
- Try other sources of protein that aren't beef, such as beans, nuts, and tofu. Besides helping prevent global warming, you'll be helping your body: Eating less meat has been proven to reduce the risk of heart disease, breast cancer, prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, and colon cancer.
Follow a vegetarian diet. Cutting out meat completely will have the biggest impact on your carbon emissions.
Source: You Can Prevent Global Warming (and save money!) 51 Easy Ways by Jeffrey Langholz, Ph.D., and Kelly Turner