Worse for climate than cars: eating meat
Sunday, December 30, 2007
MIA MacDONALD
Should you give up your burger or your car? Or both? When delegates in Bali, Indonesia, recently tried to hash out a new agreement to combat climate change, this question wasn’t on the formal agenda — but it should have been.
Most of the major causes of global warming are no longer in dispute. What’s less widely acknowledged is how much animal agriculture contributes to climate change.
About 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, as measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, can be traced to livestock production, according to a United Nations report released last year. That’s more greenhouse gases than are released from all the world’s vehicles and airplanes combined — 14 percent, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Animal agriculture also is at the root of a host of other environmental problems, including deforestation, desertification and water scarcity. For example, the destruction of rain forests, often driven by demand for grazing land for cattle or soy for animal feed, is a serious threat to tropical forests. (more…)
