The Biggest Greenhouse Gas Contributor

Photo by Bruna Branco

From Food Revolution Network Summit

George Monbiot:

Overwhelmingly, the major contributor to those problems is animal agriculture because it just takes a lot more to produce a given amount of calories from animals than it does from plants, a lot more land, a lot more crops if feeding them with crops or even more land if you're feeding them with grass because that's quite a land inefficient way of producing food. And so you have to occupy vast tracks of the planet which would otherwise support wild ecosystems.

John Robbins:

Last year, researchers from the University of Oxford completed an extraordinary study that gives us the largest and most comprehensive look yet at the environmental costs of meat production.

Ocean Robbins:

They found that vegan diets are responsible for 75% fewer greenhouse gases than diets containing meat. And that vegan diets also result in 75% less land use, 54% less water use and 66% less biodiversity loss.

John Robbins:

The benefits from a vegan diet are so enormous. The researchers added that even small changes in cutting down the amount of meat a person eats can make a huge difference for the earth and for all the life it holds.

Dr. Neal Barnard:

Let's face it, the earth is changing. You just look at the thermometer any day, we are inching up more and more and more, and so we know that the greenhouse gases are having an effect. If anything, it's probably more rapid than scientists had predicted. There are a lot of drivers of this, but one of them is the fact that if you could take all the cows in North America, put 'em on one side of the scale, take all the people in North America, put them on the other side of the scale, the cows outweigh us dramatically. The mass of cows is just huge and every single one of them is a belching methane. Methane coming out of every animal in the feedlot, in the dairy industry and so forth. Methane is a dramatically powerful greenhouse gas, much more powerful than CO2. And so researchers have concluded a long time ago that while we're waiting to cap the smokestacks and we're waiting for people to drive electric and all the things that should all happen, you can change what you have for lunch. And as soon as you do, you become a methane fighting machine yourself.

Dr. James Loomis:

When you look at climate change, for example, most people don't realize that animal husbandry, especially cows contributes more to global warming than all the transportation combined. And there's a combination of things. So cows, cows eat grass. Grass has cellulose in it, so they can't, which is hard to digest. So they've evolved a separate stomach called a ruen, which is full of bacteria that predigests break apart the cell walls, the cellulose so that they can get access to the protein and the nutrients in the grass. While the byproduct of that is methane. So methane and it gets emitted from both ends of the cow. We also have to grow the feed to feed the cattle. And so there's pesticides, there's herbicides. Those are typically petroleum-based. We have to till up the ground, we have to take the cows to slaughter.

The other thing people don't realize is most like you look at Amazon forest loss, most of that is driven by cattle. And so when we tear down the Amazon forest, we lose the ability of that forest to capture carbon. And I think the numbers, it's like every hectare of forest captures about 30 tons of carbon, and when you cut that down, you lose that and it takes at least a generation to two generations to regrow that, to recapture that carbon after you replant the trees. So why are we cutting down the Amazon rainforest? Well, it's either to create grassland to graze the cattle or to grow cover crops to feed the cattle. And I mean you look at the other huge greenhouse gas, it's nitric oxide, right? So where does that come from? It's about 300 times greater. Greenhouse gas mainly comes from manure. And so you see these pictures of these huge, like the chicken houses and there's these big retaining ponds where they dump all the manure. I mean, the amount of two that escapes into the atmosphere is profound, and so people have no idea about the impact, the disassociation and that we haven't even started talking about like water use and land use.

Dr. Marion Nestle:

The single biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions is beef animal food production in general has a higher impact on greenhouse gas emissions then does the production of vegetable foods. But beef far and away is the most serious contributor because rumen and animals have this unfortunate habit of burping methane. And if you have a lot of animals in one place, they're burping a lot of methane in one place.

Dr. David Katz:

So beef is off the charts. Other animal foods are behind beef, but mammals invariably are high, poultry relative to plants. Basically, all animal foods have a higher environmental impact than plant foods. Overall mammals in particular.

Check out Food Revolution Network here: https://foodrevolution.org/blog/eating-the-rainbow-health-benefits/