Home » Posts tagged 'meat consumption'

Tag Archives: meat consumption

Photo Source Audrey | CC BY 2.0

Thanksgiving is quite a holiday. In one day, we manage to eat and enjoy 44 million turkeys, twice the number consumed at Christmas. Yes, vegetarians may live longer and vegans even more so, but the smell of a roasting turkey in the kitchen lingering in the nostrils, titillating appetites as friends and relations gather, is synonymous with Thanksgiving — a meal where it is politic to keep politics away from the table.

Yet the news about our world cannot cease. The annual greenhouse gas bulletin issued by the World Meteorological Organization reports a new high in CO2 levels of 405.5 parts per million reached in 2017; it is 46 percent higher than preindustrial levels. The rising trend continues for on May 14, 2018, another high of 412.60 ppm was recorded.

The enthusiastic consumption of meat in industrialized countries is one cause. The worst culprits are lamb, mutton and beef because sheep, goats and cattle are ruminants and their digestive systems release methane mostly through belching rather than the other end. Cattle emit so much greenhouse gas that if they were a country they “would be the planet’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter.” They produce an astounding 270,000 tonnes of emissions over their agricultural life cycle per tonne of protein, multiple times more than pork or poultry or eggs. Transferring our carnivorous instincts from beef to poultry reduces so much emissions as to be near as good as being vegetarian although not quite.

Another way of imagining the effect is to translate a kilo of food sources into the number of car miles driven to produce the same emissions. A kilo of beef equates to 63 miles. Eating chicken reduces this by 47 miles, rice by another 10, lentils by 4 more.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Biggest analysis to date: Cutting out animal products is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth

June 5, 2018

Biggest analysis to date: Cutting out animal products is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth

The Guardian reports on a new study out of the University of Oxford:

Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet.

The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world.

Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.

…even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.

“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions.

“Agriculture is a sector that spans all the multitude of environmental problems,” he said. “Really it is animal products that are responsible for so much of this. Avoiding consumption of animal products delivers far better environmental benefits than trying to purchase sustainable meat and dairy.”

The comparison of beef with plant protein such as peas is stark, with even the lowest impact beef responsible for six times more greenhouse gases and 36 times more land.

Subsidies for sustainable and healthy foods and taxes on meat and dairy will probably also be necessary.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Eat Less Meat to Save Ourselves.

September 6, 2015

Eat Less Meat to Save Ourselves.

A report has been released by the U.N., in which it is urged that we reduce consumption of meat and dairy products as a means to mitigate climate change, hunger and fuel poverty It is stressed that food, transportation and housing must be made more sustainable if we seriously intend to ameliorate biodiversity loss and climate change, and as a matter of urgency. Some 30% of global CO2 emissions is a result of internationally traded goods, while the mining sector uses 7% of the world’s energy: a fraction that is expected to increase in line with “growth”, which has serious connotations regarding international policy. A doubling of income is predicted to cause an 81% increase in CO2 emissions, which is an alarming prospect in the context of the rising population, predicted to be over 9 billion by 2050. 70% of all the world’s freshwater consumption is taken by agriculture, which also accounts for 38% of the total use of land, and 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions. It has been estimated that it will be necessary to increase food production by 70% in 2050 if the population of the world is to be fed, but its expected increase from 7.3 billion now to perhaps 9.6 billion in 2050 will overwhelm any efficiency gains in agriculture. The production of animal products is particularly demanding in terms of land for grazing animals, and water, and a rising global middle class which is increasingly meat-hungry.

The above 70% increase in food production assumes that the western diet will spread to the Global South, with no reduction in consumption by the northern nations. 30-40% of cereals are presently fed to animals, which could rise to 50% if levels of meat and dairy consumption increase as predicted. It has been reckonedthat 3.5 billion additional people could be fed if all cereals were given over for human consumption.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Moving Towards Sustainability – by Eating Less Meat

August 11, 2015

Moving Towards Sustainability – by Eating Less Meat

The amount of meat humans eat is immense. In 1965, 10 billion livestock animals were slaughtered each year. In 2012, that number was 55 billion. More chickens are killed in the US every year than there are people in the world, and there are one billion cattle alive, weighing twice as much as the human population.

All that livestock needs land, which places pressure on wildlife habitat and forest. Livestock is the world’s largest land user. Grazing occupies 26 per cent of the earth’s ice-free terrestrial surface, and feed crop production uses about one third of all arable land.

Factor in that meat production requires staggering amounts of land, water, and energy compared to plant foods, and it’s not surprising that a 2010 UN report explained that western-type dietary preferences for meat would be unsustainable in future, given that the expected rise in world population. Demand for meat is expected to double by 2050. Meat consumption is already steadily rising in countries such as China, which once followed more sustainable, vegetable-based diets.

A person existing mainly on animal protein requires ten times more land to provide adequate food than someone living on vegetable sources of protein. Far more energy is put into animals per unit of food than for any plant crop because cattle consume 16 times as much grain as they produce as meat: it takes 16 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef.

Animal farms use nearly 40 per cent of the world’s total grain production. In the US, nearly 70 per cent of grain production is fed to livestock. If humans continue to eat more and more meat, it means we are going to place far more strain on land and water use and are also going to manufacture much more chemical fertilisers and pesticides. We will thus be creating far more pollution and greenhouse gases.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: meat consumption

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Latest Posts