|
I've been calling the S.A.D. (Standard American Diet) the "Hummer" diet for a while now. Turns out burgers and Hummers have more in common than you might think. According to Common Dreams:
Simply switching from steak to salad could cut as much carbon as leaving the car at home a couple days a week.
Does this mean you have go to veg? Not necessarily, according to the article. Livestock overall accounts for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And over 3/4 of those emissions come from beef - even though beef only makes up 30% of meat consumption in the developed world. Beef emits 4 times more greenhouse gasses than pork and 10 times more than chicken.
In America beef consumption fell between 1970 and 2006 as a percentage of total meat consumed - but it's still fairly high. Over half of all meat eaten in America is red meat. |
Switching to chicken or even pork helps your dietary carbon footprint, but so does eating less meat overall:
"Meat once was a luxury in our diet," Pelletier said. "We used to eat it once a week. Now we eat it every day."
If meat consumption in the developed world was cut from the current level of about 90 kilograms a year to the recommended level of 53 kilograms a year, livestock related emissions would fall by 44 percent.
"Given the projected doubling of (global) meat production by 2050, we're going to have to cut our emissions by half just to maintain current levels," Pelletier said.
It's not just the lefty hippie crowd on Common Dreams saying this. Scientific American recently ran an article called The Greenhouse Hamburger: How Meat Contributes to Global Warming. That article says that an average American's annual beef consumption is equivalent to driving a car 1800 miles.
In truth, every food we consume, vegetables and fruits included, incurs hidden environmental costs: transportation, refrigeration and fuel for farming, as well as methane emissions from plants and animals, all lead to a buildup of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Take asparagus: in a report prepared for the city of Seattle, Daniel J. Morgan of the University of Washington and his co-workers found that growing just half a pound of the vegetable in Peru emits greenhouse gases equivalent to 1.2 ounces of CO2 as a result of applying insecticide and fertilizer, pumping water and running heavy, gas-guzzling farm equipment. To refrigerate and transport the vegetable to an American dinner table generates another two ounces of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases, for a total CO2 equivalent of 3.2 ounces.
But that is nothing compared to beef. In 1999 Susan Subak, an ecological economist then at the University of East Anglia in England, found that, depending on the production method, cows emit between 2.5 and 4.7 ounces of methane for each pound of beef they produce. Because methane has roughly 23 times the global-warming potential of CO2, those emissions are the equivalent of releasing between 3.6 and 6.8 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere for each pound of beef produced.
Taking such factors into account, Subak calculated that producing a pound of beef in a feedlot, or concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) system, generates the equivalent of 14.8 pounds of CO2 pound for pound, more than 36 times the CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emitted by producing asparagus. Even other common meats cannot match the impact of beef; I estimate that producing a pound of pork generates the equivalent of 3.8 pounds of CO2; a pound of chicken generates 1.1 pounds of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gases. |
