Jed Rothwell wrote:
Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
Meat production is hideously inefficient (post-processing soy beans by feeding them to cows, instead of turning them into tofu, is economically
insane), and meat production is the largest single contributor to global warming (or so I have read).
I have read that it is about 10%. Surely that is less than electric power or
transportation.
See:
http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm
Full report available here:
http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.htm
The FAO, which attempted an end-to-end analysis of the meat production
process, put the share of human-produced greenhouse gases attributable
to the meat industry at 18%, "a bigger share than that of transport".
A quote from the first page cited above:
The livestock sector is by far the single largest anthropogenic user
of land. Grazing occupies 26 percent of the Earth's terrestrial
surface, while feed crop production requires about a third of all
arable land. Expansion of grazing land for livestock is a key factor
in deforestation, especially in Latin America: some 70 percent of
previously forested land in the Amazon is used as pasture, and feed
crops cover a large part of the reminder. About 70 percent of all
grazing land in dry areas is considered degraded, mostly because of
overgrazing, compaction and erosion attributable to livestock activity.
At the same time, the livestock sector has assumed an often
unrecognized role in global warming. Using a methodology that
considered the entire commodity chain, FAO estimated that livestock
are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger
share than that of transport. It accounts for nine percent of
anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, most of it due to expansion of
pastures and arable land for feed crops. It generates even bigger
shares of emissions of other gases with greater potential to warm the
atmosphere: as much as 37 percent of anthropogenic methane, mostly
from enteric fermentation by ruminants, and 65 percent of
anthropogenic nitrous oxide, mostly from manure.
