How Much Does Meat Contribute to Global Warming?

by: Jill Richardson

Tue Sep 01, 2009 at 08:54:52 AM PDT

Meanwhile, the EPA (under Bush) put out a statement that the U.S. agriculture industry only accounts for 6% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (and, presumably, livestock is a part of that number but not all of it). That's much less than the FAO's estimate that the global livestock industry accounts for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Given this discrepancy, I am very grateful to Ralph Loglisci of Johns Hopkins' Center for a Livable Future, who looked into this very question.

Last year Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future's research and policy director Roni Neff published a paper in the journal of Public Health Nutrition that found U.S. newspaper coverage did not reflect the increasingly solid evidence of climate change effects due to current food systems.

It's not just burps from livestock that are to blame for the greenhouse gases (GHG) attributed to food animal production. Don't forget that the vast majority of the grains we grow in the U.S. go to feed livestock. A 12-year-old Cornell study found that livestock, "consume more than five times as much grain as is consumed directly by the entire American population." (The amount of fresh water used in animal production is even more shocking.) When you consider the GHG emissions from all that grain production including transportation and the fossil fuels used to make artificial fertilizers you start to get the picture of just how resource intensive industrial food animal production can be.

So what does he say about the EPA's 6% figure?

I'd like to "debunk" their misleading claim. First off, the percentage used by Livestock's Long Shadow is not comparable because UN researchers were looking at global numbers and they included data that the EPA accounts for in other categories. Regardless, industry groups are trying to confuse the American public by focusing on percentages rather than hard numbers. Even if the percentage is actually lower, that doesn't mean that the total GHG emissions are any less. The fact that the U.S. spits out so much more GHG through its power plants, fossil fuel powered vehicles and factories than most other countries, it's not surprising that the percentage number is lower. The U.S. is arguably the number one GHG emitter in the world. Although recent data suggest China just earned the top distinction, climate experts say all the GHG created by Chinese factories spitting out products for American consumers should count towards our total. But I digress. Another contributor to a lower percentage number may include that we've already deforested the majority of our land, unlike less developed countries.

In other words, the reason why our livestock accounts for a smaller percent of our emissions than the global figure isn't necessarily that we raise livestock MORE efficiently, but we pollute more overall so livestock is a smaller percentage of it. And while the FAO counts deforestation in their 18% global figure, we here in the U.S. already cut down many of our trees a long time ago. Bad news all around.

So... Ralph's best estimate? U.S. animal product production (red meat + dairy + poultry/fish/eggs) accounts for 9% of the United States' total greenhouse gas emissions.