Green House Gases & Beef Production

The easiest and most cost effective way of reducing Global Warming Gases -- going vegetarian or at least reducing red meat and dairy consumption -- is seldom mentioned by environmental groups. If you must eat red meat -- hunt it.

But out in the West behind the Bovine Curtain, we never hear about this connection from so called environmental groups, much less all the other impacts associated with livestock production from killing of predators to trashing of riparian areas to water pollution. It is like it doesn't exist -- instead we have praise for the "working landscape" and "traditional uses."

Even Mr. Global Warming End of Nature Bill McKibben supports dairy farming in Vermont, apparently not willing to take on the unpopular notion of suggesting that we should all use less milk and meat, never mind all the other impacts from livestock production.

American Geophysical Union
2008 Fall Meeting

The GHG and Land Demand Consequences of the US Animal-Based Food Consumption
Martin, P A Dept. of Geophysics, 5734 S. Ellis Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, United States
Eshel, G Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale, NY 12504-5000, United States

Abstract:

While the environmental burdens exerted by food production are addressed by several recent publications, the contributions of animal-based food production, and in particular red meat---by far the most environmentally exacting of all large-scale animal-based foods---are less well quantified.

We present several simple calculations that quantify some environmental costs of animal - and cattle - based food production.

First, we show that American red meat is, on average, 350% more GHG (greenhouse gas) -intensive per edible calorie than the national food system's mean.

Second, we show that the per calorie land-use efficiencies of fruit and beans are 5 and 3 times that of animal-based foods. That is, an animal-based edible calorie requires the same amounts of land as 5 fruit calories or 3 bean calories.

We conclude with highlighting the importance of these results to policy makers by calculating the mass flux into the environment of fertilizer and herbicide that will be averted by reducing or eliminating animal-based foods from the mean US diet. This also enables us to make preliminary quantitative statements about expected changes to the size and probability of Gulf of Mexico anoxic events [the Dead Zone] of a certain O2 depletion levels that are likely to accompany specific dietary shifts.