Meat and climate change (v1.0)

 Extract of story from Sentient Climate by Seth Millstein.  

It can be tempting to fall prey to dire climate warnings and imagine that our planet is doomed. But it’s important to keep what the research shows in mind: the food we eat is an area where even individuals can make a difference. Meat is a deeply beloved food around the world, and a regular part of billions of people’s diets. But it comes with a steep cost: our appetite for meat is bad for the environment and climate change — responsible for between 11 and 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, and a constant drain on our planet’s water and land reserves.

Climate models suggest that in order to limit global warming, we’re going to have to seriously rethink our relationship to meat. And the first step to doing that is understanding exactly how the meat industry works, and how it’s impacting the environment.

Over the last 50 years, meat has become significantly more popular: between 1961 and 2021, the average person's yearly meat consumption jumped from approximately 50 pounds a year to 94 pounds a year. Although this rise took place all around the world, it was more pronounced in high- and middle-income countries, though even the poorest countries also saw a slight increase in per capita meat consumption.

It’s probably no surprise, then, that the meat industry is massive — literally.

Half of all habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture. Two-thirds of that land is used for livestock grazing, while the other third goes to crop production. But only half of those crops end up in human mouths; the rest is used either for manufacturing purposes or, far more frequently, to feed livestock.

In totality, if we take livestock crops into account, a whopping 80 percent of all agricultural land on Earth — or around 15 million square miles — is used to support livestock grazing, either directly or indirectly.

Our appetite for meat comes at a steep cost, and we’re not talking about the rising price of cheeseburgers. The meat industry takes a serious toll on the environment in a number of ways — cheap and abundant protein has fed many humans but also left our planet in significantly worse shape.

To begin with, meat is one of the biggest drivers of deforestation, or the clearing of forested land. Over the last 10,000 years, around one-third of the planet's forests have been destroyed. Around 75 percent of tropical deforestation is caused by agriculture, which includes clearing land to grow crops like soy and corn to feed animals, and also land to raise farm animals.

Deforestation has a number of disastrous environmental impacts. Trees capture and store massive amounts of CO2 from the air, which is important because CO2 is one of the most harmful greenhouse gases. When those trees are cut or burned down, that CO2 is released back into the atmosphere. This is one of the fundamental ways eating meat contributes to global warming.

In addition, deforestation destroys the habitats that millions of species rely on. This reduces biodiversity, which is necessary for our planet's ecosystem to thrive, with some of the destruction known to wipe out entire species. A 2021 study found that in the Amazon alone, over 10,000 plant and animal species are at risk of extinction from deforestation.

Of course, deforestation is only part of the equation. The overwhelming majority of meat is produced in factory farms - many of which are on previously forested land — and factory farms are terrible for the environment in a whole host of ways as well.

It’s estimated that somewhere between 11 and 19 percent of global greenhouse emissions come from livestock (my note: US greenhouse gas emissions from farming and livestock together is 10%. Just cattle are about 3.3%). This includes emissions that come directly from the animals, such as the methane in cow burps and nitrous oxide in pig and chicken manure, as well as land use, and smaller sources, like the emissions from food transport or other equipment and facilities farms use in their operations.

Factory farms are also one of the primary sources of water pollution, because synthetic fertilizer, manure, pesticides and other farm byproducts often end up flowing into nearby waterways. This pollution can cause harmful algae blooms, which can poison animals and humans alike; in 2014, an algae bloom in Ohio resulted in 400,000 people losing their access to clean drinking water for three days.

The way we farm is also responsible for soil erosion, which makes it more difficult to effectively grow crops. According to United Nations researchers, soil erosion could cause a loss of 75 billion tons of soils by the year 2050. The meat and dairy industries also extract a massive amount of water to raise farm animals — producing just one pound of beef requires 2400 gallons of water for instance.

Comment added by me: Would this article inspire you to perhaps go vegan or have meat/beef one less day a week thereby reducing demand? For US, problem with beef is less greenhouse gases than other adverse effects including health.