Another Inconvenient Truth – Meat is a Global Warming Issue

by Dan Brook, August 17, 2006

Al Gore’s movie (and book), An Inconvenient Truth, is playing to rave reviews. His laudable project is an urgent message on the vital issue of global warming. We all must heed the call.

If we didn’t realize it already, we now know that we are overheating our planet to alarming levels with potentially catastrophic consequences. 2005 was the hottest year on record. Think of an overheated car; now imagine that on a planetary scale.

There are many human activities that contribute to global warming. Among the biggest contributors are electrical generation, the use of passenger and other vehicles, over-consumption, international shipping, deforestation, and militarism. (The U.S. military is the world’s biggest consumer of oil and the world’s biggest polluter.)

What many people do not know, however, is that the production of meat also significantly increases global warming. Cow farms produce millions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane a year, the two major greenhouse gases that together account for more than 90% of U.S. greenhouse emissions.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme’s Unit on Climate Change, “There is a strong link between human diet and methane emissions from livestock.” The 2004 State of the World is more specific regarding the link between animals raised for meat and global warming: “Belching, flatulent livestock emit 16% of the world’s annual production of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.”

The July 2005 issue of Physics World states: “The animals we eat emit 21% of all the CO2 that can be attributed to human activity.” Eating meat directly contributes to this environmentally irresponsible industry and the dire threat of global warming.

Rainforests are cut at an extremely rapid rate to both pasture cows and grow soybeans to feed cows. This not only creates more greenhouse gases through the process of destruction, but also reduces the amazing benefits that those trees provide. Rainforests have been called the “lungs of the Earth,” because they filter our air by absorbing CO2, while emitting life-supporting oxygen.

Of course, the U.S. should join the other 163 countries in ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. Of course, we should sharply reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and shift towards renewable sources of energy. Of course, we need to stop destroying the rainforests. Of course, we need to stop the war in Iraq and drastically reduce the U.S. military budget (presently at half of the entire world’s total military spending), which would increase, not decrease, national and global security. But as we’re struggling and waiting for these and other structural changes, we need to make personal changes.

Geophysicists Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin from the University of Chicago conclude that changing one’s eating habits from the Standard American Diet (SAD) to a vegetarian diet does more to fight global warming than switching from a gas-guzzling SUV to a fuel-efficient hybrid car. Where the environment is concerned, eating meat is like driving a huge SUV…. eating a vegetarian diet is like driving a mid-sized car. And eating a vegan diet (no dairy, no eggs) is like riding a bicycle or walking. Shifting away from SUVs and SUV-style diets, to much more energy-efficient alternatives, is key to fighting the warming trend.

The editors of World Watch concluded in the July/August 2004 edition that “the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future – deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease.” Lee Hall, the legal director for Friends of Animals, is more succinct: “Behind virtually every great environmental complaint there’s milk and meat.”

Global warming, as Al Gore so powerfully shows, is “an inconvenient truth.” The fact that the production of meat significantly contributes to global warming is another inconvenient truth. Now we know.

Excerpted from E-Magazine, a SustainableBusiness.com Content Partner.