Meat is Destroying the Earth – Official
Viva!’s once solo voice warning of the environmental threat from meat production is now attracting a loud backing group
For 11 years Viva! has been saying that livestock production is the single greatest threat to the global environment on a whole range of issues – use of fresh water, the destruction of forests, soil erosion and loss of fertility, the spread of deserts, acid rain and so on. At last, researchers from several universities now support our claims on global warming and are calling for dramatic changes in diet.
“However close you can be to a vegan diet and further from the mean American diet, the better you are for the planet”, say researchers at the University of Chicago.
They compared the amount of energy used and the greenhouse gasses produced by five different diets – average American, red meat, fish, poultry and vegetarian (which included eggs and dairy). Each one provided 3,774 calories but the vegetarian diet was the most energy efficient, followed by poultry and the average American diet. Fish and red meat almost tied in first place as the least efficient.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the energy used to produce the diets were added to those created by the animals themselves – nitrous oxide from slurry lagoons and the methane from digestion – more than 20 times more damaging than CO2. The conclusions were that changing your diet was more important than changing to a smaller car.
The researchers reached another conclusion – that animal protein (meat) was just as bad for health as saturated animal fat and that plant-based diets are healthier for both people and planet. The science to support this, of course, has been around for decades but has been studiously ignored by government and industry alike for short-term commercial reasons.
The prestigious Washington-based Worldwatch Institute is also in no doubt about the terrifying environmental impact of meat eating:
“As environmental science has advanced, it has become apparent that the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future.” To Viva!’s list it adds loss of biodiversity and the destablisation of communities.
Earthsave International has done its own research and is equally vocal about the damaging effect farmed animals are having on climate change. It maintains that methane causes almost as much global warming as CO2 and the number one source is animal agriculture. It is responsible for over 100 million tons of methane a year – 85 per cent from digestion and 15 per cent from slurry lagoons.
Its conclusions are pretty bald: “The best way to reduce global warming is to reduce or eliminate our consumption of animal products. Simply by going vegetarian (or, strictly speaking, vegan), we can eliminate one of the major sources of methane.”
As developing countries such as China start to gobble up animals as if there’s no tomorrow the problem is accelerating away from us and the annual global slaughter now stands at around 55 billion animals.
“This trend must be reversed on a global scale”, say the 19 academics involved in the Profetas study, set up by the three Dutch universities of Twente, Waganingen and VUA. They say we should all be looking to make the transition from meat protein to vegetable protein alternatives (novel protein foods) based on such plants as soya or peas. Doing so will positively affect everything from sustainable energy and water use to biodiversity, human health and animal welfare, they say.
The reason why more and more academics are being galvanised into action is because the scientific models which predict what’s likely to happen with global warming are screamingly wrong and it’s all happening far, far quicker than anyone believed. Dear old, time-serving Foreign Secretary and former Defra minister, Margaret Becket, is talking of ‘dire consequences’ in about 1,000 years time. She’s the only one who is.
Professor David King, scientific adviser to the government, says that levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are “higher than we’ve seen for over a million years, possibly 30 million years”. Two studies in the science journal Nature claim that glaciers and arctic ice sheets are melting so fast that we could be heading for catastrophic rises in sea levels – several metres by the end of the century.
And, of course, the warmer oceans become, the more CO2 and methane is released from tundras and the sea bed. More violent storms and hurricanes can be expected and even the hugely prestigious publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Science is wagging a frightening finger of concern.
It’s major worry is that once average temperatures rise by 3degC, the atmospheric CO2 that is currently absorbed by plants will be outweighed by the CO2 produced from the soil in which they stand as a result of organic decomposition. This is the tipping point, the trigger for positive feedback or the point of no return – phrases that are being increasingly used but all amount to the same thing – global warming will become unstoppable, with unknown consequences.
A far-sighted, 16-year-old report spells out what one consequence might be: “Nature might be totally unpredictable if knocked out of balance. We are not able to destroy the Earth but we might change the climate in an unpredictable direction – at worst endangering our survival as a species”.
It wasn’t said by environmentalists or us ‘bunny huggers’ but concerned Scandinavian vets writing about the meat industry for the meat industry in 1990.
Professor Peter Cox of Exeter University recently told the Royal Geographical Society that this tipping point could be reached by 2050 – when my children will be just middle aged.
This is very serious stuff – so why, in all the acres of newsprint that have appeared, has no one identified meat and dairy as one of the primary causes? The Welsh assembly has produced a guide to the environment in conjunction with WWF – not a word about changing your diet. The Guardian has just published an 80-page guide to greener living and vegetarianism merits just a single paragraph.
You will, of course, read plenty about not leaving your TV on standby, insulating your house, riding your bike to work, recycling your bottles and sticking solar panels on your roof but why the total silence on cutting meat consumption – a simple act that dwarfs all these other activities combined? It’s easy - none of these other things threaten anyone’s profit margins!
It’s bad enough that Daily Mail writers such as Melanie Philips and the intellectually challenged Tom Utley give credence to those who deny that climate change is happening but when old fart ‘environmentalist’ and industry apologist David Bellamy joins with them, you start to think that we get what we deserve.
But these, of course, are just the footsoldiers – the generals and field marshal are ensconced in corporate board rooms and the White House (and No10). Why else would president Bush have appointed Philip Cooney - oil industry lobbyist without a science degree to his name - as head of his environment office? His contribution to the problem was to rewrite the warning papers of government scientists, altering words such as ‘will’ to ‘may’.
When he was eventually caught and resigned, he walked into a job at oil giant Exxon Mobil the very next day. Pure coincidence, of course, that Exxon generously funds almost the entire denial brigade. If ex-vice president Al Gore hadn’t exposed this in his new film, An Inconvenient Truth, we would probably have remained ignorant.
There is logic to the world’s most profitable oil company denying climate change but tobacco giant Philip Morris is also involved, as George Monbiot points out in his book Heat (Allen Lane, £17.99). Why? Because if you can undermine sound science on one front, you weaken it on all fronts!
As well as having powerful political patronage, a diverse range of corporations have joined together to rubbish scientific research through puppet organisations such as the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. In Philip Morris’s case it is to throw doubt on the claim that passive smoking kills but alongside them are biotech companies who promote GM foods and the nuclear industry. Together, their aim is to reduce ‘over regulation’, promote ‘sound science’ and discredit ‘junk science’. By junk science they mean anything which threatens their profits and by sound science they mean their own pseudo-scientific denials.
And boy, have they been successful! The climate change denial industry has prospered despite there not being one peer-reviewed research paper published in the last decade that supports their claims.
I can’t prove that the meat and dairy industries are involved in similar scams but as one of the biggest contributors to global warming it would be extraordinary if they weren’t. But there are a few clues.
Why else would the meat industry’s anti-vegetarian agenda be taken up so eagerly by so many journalists in defiance of the science? Why would academics make anti-vegetarian statements in public that are contradicted by their own research? Why is the internet littered with sites attempting to rubbish vegetarianism and extol meat? Why does the government refuse to acknowledge the mountain of research linking animal products to disease?
Corrupt political contacts, tame journalists, dodgy academics and massive resources are the tools of denial and they cost lives – millions in the case of tobacco and potentially even more with climate change denial. Complex issues are reduced to sound bites - just how complex is shown by recent research presented to the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research.
Significantly more ultra violet B light (UVB) is reaching the Southern Ocean than previously thought (and livestock production plays a part in that, too). Does it matter? Well, my water supply comes from a bore hole and is purified by means of a UV light which kills all bacteria, that’s how powerful it is.
What it appears to be doing in Antarctica is reducing phytoplankton blooms – the growths of tiny plant life that produce perhaps 70 per cent of the world’s oxygen and form the basis of the oceans’ food chain. They are the same organisms that absorb carbon dioxide and help to stop the unbridled acceleration of global warming. Fewer of them and less CO2 is absorbed, less oxygen is produced and the worse global warming becomes. If widespread, the implications are devastating.
It is impossible to deny truth indefinitely and what we are finally beginning to see is the scientific validation of claims we have been making for years. We were right, we knew we were right and now others are confirming it. I’m tempted to lay odds on how long it will take the government to begrudgingly follow suit. I think I would sooner wait for Godot.