Vegetarian/Vegan and Climate Change 2

by Shannon Turner
November 19, 2010

Our addiction to meat, dairy, and eggs is the single largest contributor to global climate change.  Not our addiction to oil, though that's another problem to overcome.  Reversing the damage we've done to the air we breathe, the water we drink, and our planet's climate will take a comprehensive shift in our behaviors.

Recycling, though important, is not enough.  Conserving energy, taking public transportation, using more efficient appliances and lighting, getting a hybrid car - all of these are important, but not enough.

How do our diets affect the planet in such a powerful way? Simply put, raising animals for food is grossly inefficient.  Think about this: how many pounds of food do you eat in a year? According to the USDA, the average American consumes about 2000 pounds of food in a year. Yet none of us weigh 2000 pounds, and it's obvious why: we use the energy we get from food and excrete a lot of waste.  Even if we gain weight, it's in modest amounts relative to the amount of food.

Farm animals are no different - except two of our main food animals, cows and pigs, have much greater appetites than we do.  Cows eat about 90 pounds of feed and drink up to 50 gallons of water in a single day.  It's estimated that it takes 16 pounds of feed to create ONE pound of animal meat.  In other words, we're wasting 15 pounds of otherwise edible food to create one single pound of food that we've already shown to be harmful to our health.

That inefficiency in feed has ripple effects that we'll discuss in a further article, but for now let's focus on water.  A meat-based diet uses 13 times more water than a vegan diet due to inefficiencies in meat production.  Think about it: with a vegan diet, you only produce crops, and that takes about 290 gallons of water per day to produce all the food you'd need (it sounds like a lot, but remember that most of the water is returned to the soil, replenishing it and the water table).  But with a meat-based diet, you need to produce 16 times the crops you would normally, and then feed that to the animals, which also consume water.  After all is said and done, a meat-based diet needs 3962 gallons of water per day to produce the food you'd need.

Not only does meat production waste a lot of water, it creates a lot of waste-water.  Animals create waste products - and especially on large factory farms where the majority of meat is produced, it is concentrated in small areas, creating literal mountains and lagoons of manure.  While a giant pile of crap might sound funny, that waste seeps into the soil and groundwater, causing nightmarish health hazards for people.

In response to the steep increase in demand for meat, many countries have responded by increasing the supply.  In many countries in Latin America, for instance, rainforests are clear-cut to make room for livestock and the huge amount of food they need to grow to feed the animals.  However, the soil isn't replenished from animal manure as well as it was from the lush rainforest - so farmers abandon the depleted soil within a few years and clear-cut the next swath of rainforest.  It's estimated that 2,900,000 acres of rainforest are cleared in a single year to grow crops for animals to eat.

You can't blame the farmers, either - they're simply responding to economic pressures.   If the demand for meat weren't so high, it wouldn't be so profitable to slash and burn millions of acres of rainforest, which itself puts pollutants into the air we breathe, increases greenhouse gases, and removes one of our planet's best ways for dealing with increased greenhouse gases in our atmosphere - our rainforests.

It's not just the destruction of rainforests that contributes to greenhouse gases. Livestock themselves, and the manure they produce, are significant sources of these gases as well.  Not only do they produce CO2, but more importantly, they produce methane and nitrous oxides - which are far more potent (24-300 times more potent) than carbon dioxide in contributing to the greenhouse effect.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has estimated that 18% of greenhouse gases produced are linked to production of meat, dairy and eggs. If this figure is correct, then eating meat contributes more air pollution and greenhouse gases than all forms of transportation combined. However, new research shows that 18% might be a gross underestimate; the actual figure is closer to 51%, which would make meat production 3 times more harmful to the environment than we previously thought.

Much has been made of the American public's dwindling support for measures that would help to curb global climate change. Skeptics and deniers abound, but among the scientific community - specifically climate scientists the world over, there is a clear consensus that global climate change is a real threat, caused by us.  We know that burning rainforests and fossil fuels is harmful to the air we breathe and creates harmful greenhouse gas pollution.  We know that farming animals wastes our precious water supply and poisons groundwater supplies.  Many important steps have been taken to protect and conserve this planet's natural resources.  But as a society we have largely overlooked switching our diets; we have been penny-wise and pound-foolish.  If we are truly serious about and committed to preventing global climate change, we must adopt a vegan diet.