Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Fairlie Simon

Author:Fairlie, Simon [Fairlie, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2011-10-09T04:00:00+00:00

13

GLOBAL WARMING: COWS OR CARS?

When I began this book, the global warming impact of livestock, mostly related to methane from cows, was considered a side issue. Since 2007, it has become the main argument against carnivory, and is now deployed as such by people who have long been advancing other reasons for not eating meat.1 If you are a climate sceptic, then the global warming argument is irrelevant, and you can safely skip the next two chapters, unless you are interested in how the discourse has been altered by the rise of climate politics. I am not a climate sceptic, but that is not to say that I am convinced that 90 per cent of scientists must be right (any more than I believe that we live in an expanding universe born out of a big bang just because 90 per cent of physicists think so). I accept the global warming discourse, because of Pascal’s Wager, otherwise known as the precautionary principle; and because I believe it is an appropriate ideology (or religion if you prefer) for humanity at a time when we are clearly placing too much pressure on the environment through excessive population and consumption.2 In this chapter and the next I therefore take the climate change scenario, as modelled by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as a premise.

If you surfed around the Internet investigating meat and global warming in 2006, you were certain to alight upon this:

Cut global warming by being vegetarian. Global warming could be controlled if we all became vegetarians and stopped eating meat. That’s the view of British physicist Alan Calverd, who thinks that giving up pork chops, lamb cutlets and chicken burgers would do more for the environment than burning less oil and gas. Writing in this month’s Physics World, Calvert [sic] calculates that the animals we eat emit 21 per cent of all the carbon dioxide that can be attributed to human activity. We could therefore slash man-made emissions of carbon dioxide simply by abolishing all livestock.

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