The meat industry and its front groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom are perpetuating the myth that Americans should not be worried about the meat & global warming connection. This is the argument:
The US has a more efficient livestock production system. According to the 2006 US EPA report, US agriculture causes less than 6% of US greenhouse gases, while livestock causes only 2.58% of US GHG. The UN says 18% of *global* GHG is due to livestock. We should resume consumption patterns and keep the industry competitive; otherwise we’d be importing more meat from less GHG efficient livestock production systems, and cause MORE global warming.
The argument exploits very misleading and incomplete statistics and rests on some flawed assumptions. In the final analysis, what matters is the total VOLUME of American consumption & GHG production, and factoring in livestock’s land and land-use.
Below are some facts which point to how the US livestock industry is definitely a major contributor to global warming.
1. The US consumes FAR more meat / animal products than most of the world.
So much for American efficiency. The world’s leading consumers of meat and animal products share the biggest responsibility for continuing to make the global livestock industry grow! As long as the meat industry continues to be supported by a growing culture of high volume meat eaters, the industry will be able to expand its reach globally.
Dr. Barry Popkin, author of “The World is Fat”, agrees
What’s more, the developing world seems to be falling in step, Popkin says. In India, meat and dairy intake more than doubled between 2000 and 2005. In 2006, the average diet of 67% of the Chinese population comprised at least 10% meat and dairy products, up from about 39% of the population in 1989. “We truly did this to the globe — changed the way the world eats,” says Popkin.
2. The US produces FAR more GHG than most of the world.
The U.S., with a population of about 300 million (5% of the world), produces about 18% (2009 US EPA) of GLOBAL greenhouse gases.
Consider the image below which portrays the CO2 responsibility PER CAPITA by country between 1950-2000.
Not surprisingly, most of the US and “Western countries” are the highest emitters. See more “List of countries by greenhouse gases in 2000”
Even though China as a whole produces more CO2 as a country (since recently), their per capita emissions figures are STILL 1/3 – 1/4 of the US population (China recently officially surpassed the US in producing GHG, but China has 4 times the population (China has 1.3 billion people, US has 300 million people)).
It’s a huge difference. So what does this tell us about the EPA’s estimates on livestocks GHG impact?
We can predict that X% of US GHG per capita is far greater than X% of China’s GHG per capita.
Basically 2.58% of US GHG is much more than 2.58% of China GHG (or most other countries).
We know this because on average, one American is emitting as much GHG as four Chinese. In addition, one American consumes as much meat as 2-3 Chinese citizens (again, the average meat consumption per Chinese is 52 kg, compared to Americans at 125 kg – 2005 FAO)
3. The US EPA report does not include land-use (deforestation, desertification) and other criteria used in the UN FAO report.
As I explain in a previous post, the EPA report excludes the whole GLOBAL livestock commodity chain including fuel combustion, agricultural CO2 fluxes and land-use changes (such as deforestation), while the UN report includes these factors (as its a global organization, and land-use is probably difficult to quanity on a country level).
According to the UN’s Livestock’s Long Shadow report, land-use is the primary reason why livestock’s share of global GHG is so high:
“(livestock) accounts for nine percent of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, most of it due to expansion of pastures and arable land for feed crops.
The livestock sector is by far the single largest anthropogenic user of land. Grazing occupies 26 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial surface, while feed crop production requires about a third of all arable land. Expansion of grazing land for livestock is a key factor in deforestation, especially in Latin America: some 70 percent of previously forested land in the Amazon is used as pasture, and feed crops cover a large part of the reminder.
Consider the GHG volume of land use compared to livestock’s other GHG sources:
Land use and land use change: 2.5 Giga tonnes CO2 (#1) equivalent; including forest and other natural vegetation replaced by pasture and feed crop in the Neotropics (CO2) and carbon release from soils such as pasture and arable land dedicated to feed production (CO2)
— Feed Production (except carbon released from soil): 0.4 Giga tonnes CO2 equivalent, including fossil fuel used in manufacturing chemical fertilizer for feed crops (CO2) and chemical fertilizer application on feedcrops and leguminous feed crop (N2O, NH3)
— Animal production: 1.9 Giga tonnes CO2 equivalent, including enteric fermentation from ruminants (CH4) and on-farm fossil fuel use (CO2)
— Manure Management: 2.2 Giga tonnes CO2 equivalent, mainly through manure storage, application and deposition (CH4, N2O, NH3)
— Processing and international transport: 0.03 Giga tonnes CO2 equivalent
From these figures we know that the U.S EPA omitted a huge cause of GHG from the livestock industry.
In conclusion
We know that…
1. US meat consumption per capita is higher than most of the world’s.
2. The US produces way too much GHG per capita (5% of world population produces about 18% of GHG)
3. The US EPA report does not factor in the #1 cause of CO2 emissions from livestock: land and land-use (2.5 Giga tonnes).
The US livestock industry’s share of the GLOBAL livestock industry’s greenhouse gases is much higher than the industry (whose prime consumers are Westerners) is willing to admit. It’s hard to calculate an exact figure, but we know the leading consumers and producers of meat also support the growth of a global livestock industry, which contributes most of its GHG through land and land-use.
Production of domestic livestock on the public land in the U. S. (Forest Service and BLM) is reducing and killing water flows in the arid West, promoting desertification that contributes to global warming, and destroys habitat for species like the sage grouse and pygmy rabbit. See http://www.westernwatersheds.org .
Obama made a disastrous choice picking Colorado rancher Ken Salazar to head BLM the Department of Interior. To change the ecological disaster of public lands grazing, Salazar needs to be removed, and a competent person without bias towards the meat industry put in place.
Consider documenting your sources of information. The reader cannot and should not believe your graphic without being able to evaluate where it came from and what it really is showing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhouse_gas_emissions_per_capita
Cumulative per capita responsibility for anthropogenic CO2
Data from the World Resources Institute’s CAIT 4.0 database (registration required). Includes CO2 emitted up to the year 2000 only (not CH4, N20, PFCs, HFCs or SF6). Estimates of the effects of land-use change are included; bunker-fuel emissions are not. The scale is a 0-100 decay-weighted index.
You are simply perpetuating FAO data which has been twisted and spun for the purposes of ‘shock and awe’ type media presentation to further the goals of the FAO.
Livestock contribute 11.5% of all GHG, per the FAO’s own data, and everyone should take the time to actually read their reports, especially ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow.’ Included in that 11.5% is carbon dioxide emissions from the cropping of animal feed crops, which will increase if the FAO succeeds in intensifying the production of livestock.
Also included in the actual 11.5% are Nitrous oxide emissions at 5.5%, and methane emissions at 5.5%, per the FAO, from the livestock sector. Most of the nitrous oxide is from manure in intensified feedlot livestock production.
The mighty FAO doesn’t ever spend much more than a paragraph in that regard — instead, they constantly tell the world that livestock grazing on grass are inefficient animals, yet their footprint is much smaller than livestock on feed in a bunk.
The FAO incorrectly, and with the intent to confuse and defraud their international audience, includes their estimations of CO2 emissions from deforestation and land use changes. They readily admit it is a ball park estimate and that it is not clear whether a lot of that is actually for human food cropping. For certain, it was necessary for the FAO to include the CO2 from deforestation in order to get their ‘shock and awe’ figure of 18% and thus claim livestock contribute more than transport to climate change.
More importantly, your FAO does not bother to reduce this CO2 emission footprint from deforestation, by anything other than a token amount, for the comparable carbon sequestration of this planet’s grasslands that are the result of that deforestation.
As for the epidemic of obesity — it is a ludicrous notion that obesity is due to animal fat and protein, just plain nonsense. Obesity is directly due to excessive carbohydrate intake, processed carbs, not processed meat, and that’s processed carbs and grains with a much bigger C02 footprint than the meat from an animal will ever have.
And as for the USA being the biggest culprit in GHG emissions from livestock, it just is not the case, per the FAO’s own data. The biggest contribution made by US livestock production is via nitrous oxide in feedlots, and even considering that, our contribution is immaterial compared to developing countries.
Further, the nitrous oxide from untreated human waste in countries such as India with HUGE populations, far and away exceeds the emissions of livestock in this country combined with several others, of that I have no doubt.
Human waste containment and use as a fertilizer would solve most of the global problems of food production and global warming. Apparently, it is a distasteful topic for the highbrow UN climate scientists.
WHY THERE IS GLOBAL WARMING
The information below came from either books or downloaded from the Internet
Please pass this information around to friends. Take Care, Harold
People in the USA, are being told by the U.S. government and media that global warming is man-made. If that is true, how can the government and media explain the high temperatures the earth has experienced in past years when there were far fewer people? Let us look back in the world’s history: for example, between roughly 900AD and 1350AD the temperatures were much higher than now. And, back then there were fewer people, no cars, no electric utilities, and no factories, etc. So what caused the earth’s heat? Could it be a natural occurrence? The temperature graph at the bottom of this article shows the temperatures of the earth before Christ to 2040.
In the book THE DISCOVERERS published in February 1985 by Daniel J. Boorstin, beginning in chapter 28, it goes into detail about Eric the Red, the father of Lief Ericsson, and how he discovered an island covered in green grass.
In approximately 983AD, Eric the Red committed murder, and was banished from Iceland for three years. Eric the Red sailed 500 miles west from Iceland and discovered an island covered in GREEN grass, which he named Greenland. Greenland reminded Eric the Red of his native Norway because of the grass, game animals, and a sea full of fish. Even the air provided a harvest of birds. Eric the Red and his crew started laying out sites for farms and homesteads, as there was no sign of earlier human habitation.
When his banishment expired, Eric the Red returned to congested Iceland to gather Viking settlers. In 986, Eric the Red set sail with an emigrant fleet of twenty-five ships carrying men, women, and domestic animals. Unfortunately, only fourteen ships survived the stormy passage, which carried about four-hundred-fifty immigrants plus the farm animals. The immigrants settled on the southern-west tip and up the western coast of Greenland.
After the year 1200AD, the Earth’s and Greenland’s climate grew colder; ice started building up on the southern tip of Greenland. Before the end of 1300AD, the Viking settlements were just a memory. You can find the above by searching Google. One link is:
http://www.greenland.com/en/about-greenland/kultur-sjael/historie/vikingetiden/erik-den-roede.aspx
The following quote you can also read about why there is global warming. This is from the book EINSTEIN’S UNIVERSE, Page 63, written by Nigel Calder in 1972, and updated in 1982.
“The reckoning of planetary motions is a venerable science. Nowadays it tells us, for example, how gravity causes the ice to advance or retreat on the Earth during the ice ages. The gravity of the Moon and (to a lesser extent) of the Sun makes the Earth’s axis swivel around like a tilted spinning top. Other planets of the Solar System, especially Jupiter, Mars and Venus, influence the Earth’s tilt and the shape of its orbit, in a more-or-less cyclic fashion, with significant effects on the intensity of sunshine falling on different regions of the Earth during the various seasons. Every so often a fortunate attitude and orbit of the Earth combine to drench the ice sheets in sunshine as at the end of the most recent ice age, about ten thousand years ago. But now our relatively benign interglacial is coming to an end, as gravity continues to toy with our planet.”
The above points out that the universe is too huge and the earth is too small for the earth’s population to have any effect on the earth’s temperature. The earth’s temperature is a function of the sun’s temperature and the effects from the many massive planets in the universe, i.e., “The gravity of the Moon and (to a lesser extent) of the Sun makes the Earth’s axis swivel around like a tilted spinning top. Other planets of the Solar System, especially Jupiter, Mars and Venus, influence the Earth’s tilt and the shape of its orbit, in a more-or-less cyclic fashion, with significant effects on the intensity of sunshine falling on different regions of the Earth during the various seasons.”
Read below about carbon dioxide, which we need in order to exist. You can find the article below at:
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/ice_ages.html.
FUN FACTS about CARBON DIOXIDE.
Of the 186 billion tons of carbon from CO2 that enter earth’s atmosphere each year from all sources, only 6 billion tons are from human activity. Approximately 90 billion tons come from biologic activity in earth’s oceans and another 90 billion tons from such sources as volcanoes and decaying land plants.
At 380 parts per million CO2 is a minor constituent of earth’s atmosphere–less than 4/100ths of 1% of all gases present. Compared to former geologic times, earth’s current atmosphere is CO2- impoverished.
CO2 is odorless, colorless, and tasteless. Plants absorb CO2 and emit oxygen as a waste product. Humans and animals breathe oxygen and emit CO2 as a waste product. Carbon dioxide is a nutrient, not a pollutant, and all life– plants and animals alike– benefit from more of it. All life on earth is carbon-based and CO2 is an essential ingredient. When plant-growers want to stimulate plant growth, they introduce more carbon dioxide.
CO2 that goes into the atmosphere does not stay there, but continuously recycled by terrestrial plant life and earth’s oceans– the great retirement home for most terrestrial carbon dioxide.
If we are in a global warming crisis today, even the most aggressive and costly proposals for limiting industrial carbon dioxide emissions and all other government proposals and taxes would have a negligible effect on global climate!
The government is lying, trying to use global warming to limit, and tax its citizens through “cap and trade” and other tax schemes for the government’s benefit. We, the people cannot allow this to happen.
A temperature graph normally goes here that shows the Earth’s Temperature from -2400 to guesses in +2400.
If the Earth’s temperature graph is not shown above, you can see this temperature graph at the link:
http://www.longrangeweather.com/global_temperatures.htm