Our Livable World by Marc Schaus

Author:Marc Schaus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2020-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

Meating Our Climate Goals

Clearly, we need to re-think how we grow our food. But beyond fruits and vegetables, other aspects of our food production system carry oversized energy and carbon emissions costs. Producing meat—essentially any kind of meat—carries a particularly huge footprint in terms of energy cost and carbon emissions. Fortunately, advanced new sciences and technologies can again lower both to sustainable levels.

By now, you’ve probably heard that meat production is an incredibly wasteful use of our land and poses numerous environmental problems. A growing number of meat-eaters worldwide will make these problems worse. We hear these points on the news and on our social media feeds; from our friends and our favorite celebrities and artists. In fact, as I was writing this section, pop stars Beyoncé and Jay-Z were offering their fans free tickets for life (or 30 years, anyway) in a campaign to get more people onto a plant-based diet. Events like “Veganuary” were just picking up steam and more and more people were trying out “Beyond Meat” burgers at local fast food chains.

Many of us consume far more meat than we need to. Which, in terms of the resources going into producing our calories, is spectacularly wasteful. Every piece of meat we consume necessitates that land has been used somewhere to grow and care for the animal it came from. It involves the footprint of their housing and well-being, the processing and shipping of those animals and keeping everything cooled the entire way.

Every aspect of meat production carries its own associated energy and emissions cost. As Bill Gates noted on his blog back in 2018: if “cattle” were its own country, it would currently rank third overall in carbon emissions.52 Resource-wise, depending on the animal, producing one pound of meat protein with Western industrialized methods requires 4 to 25 times more water, 6 to 17 times more land, and 6 to 20 times more fossil fuels than producing a pound of plant protein.53

We also sacrifice the land being used to raise animals for meat consumption. This is land often cleared for livestock owners through a razing of forested areas crucial for our planet’s health. In fact, Project Drawdown Executive Director Jonathan Foley cited tropical deforestation—often undertaken so land prospectors can raise livestock or grow crops to feed other livestock—as potentially the number-one source of greenhouse gases from land use and agriculture.54 Which makes sense, if all the carbon stored in trees is simply being released back into the atmosphere.

Only about 18 percent of our calories come from meat and dairy—even as those two calorie sources take up 83 percent of our farmland.55 Incredibly, almost 30 percent of the world’s ice-free land is now used to raise livestock.56

It should be no surprise, then, that given our energy costs associated with meat—and given our carbon costs especially—academics worldwide are calling for us to reduce meat consumption as much as we can. One letter signed by more than 50 leading scientists published in Lancet recently argued that the world must

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