Dr. Wallace Broecker, the Newberry Professor of Geology at Columbia University, first coined the phrase “global warming” in his 1975 paper, “Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore’s campaign to raise awareness of global warming was made into the documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth”. As a result, even more people were made aware of this environmental issue.
The causes of global warming are both natural and man-made: the temperature increase of the Earth’s surface is due to both solar irradiance and greenhouse gases, which trap heat in Earth’s lower atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect. As stated in an article published in National Geographic, scientists predict that the Earth’s temperature could eventually increase by an increment of between 2.5 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit; the difference depending on future human behavior. Proposed solutions include driving hybrid vehicles, using energy-efficient home appliances, switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs, and improving home insulations. The United States government has also stepped in and launched various programs, including “Cash for Clunkers” and tax credits for certain home appliances, to incentivize consumers to become more energy efficient in their daily lives.
All of the aforementioned strategies can help minimize this difference and even assist you in shedding big bucks off your utility bills. There is one suggested remedy for global warming, however, that baffles me: vegetarianism.
In his post on the Planetsave blog, Brian Liloia boldly claims that if every American went vegetarian for one day, global warming could be prevented. Supporters of this theory have started campaigns such as “Meatless Mondays” and “Less Meat = Less Heat”.
As much as I would like to believe that the answer to global warming is as simple as giving up meat, I simply have to disagree with Liloia due to the fact that his “vegetarianism is the panacea of global warming” theory contains both statistical and argumentative fallacies.
Firstly, the data that Liloia uses to show livestock’s impact on the environment is inflated.
Liloia’s rationale is that if more people were to start following vegetarian diets, less livestock would be raised, less greenhouse gases would be emitted, global warming would be prevented, and the polar bears could live happily ever after. Not only is this argument a slippery slope, but it is also based on inaccurate data from the article, “Livestock’s Long Shadow”, which was released by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2006. This article claims that “the livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 percent of (global) greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents). This is a higher share than transport.”
Air quality expert, Frank Mitloehner, Ph.D., criticizes the methodology used by the FAO to calculate the greenhouse gas emission of livestock and the resulting comparison with the greenhouse gas emission of transportation. In the report, the livestock emissions included gases produced by growing animal feed, livestock’s digestive emissions, and processing meat and milk into food. On the other hand, analysis of transportation only included those gases produced by burning fossil fuels while driving, but not any other transport lifecycle related factors. This means that the article overestimates the influence of livestock emission and understates transportation emission. “This lopsided analysis is a classical apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issue,” Mitloehner says.
An adjusted study, published by the World Resources Institute, cleared up this confusion and found that only 5.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions can be directly attributed to livestock.
On the other hand, a new study written by Klaus Butterbach-Bahl, a professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, shows that cows actually reduce the level of the greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, indirectly through grazing. The key point of the article is that grazing keeps the grass short. During winters, tall grass traps snow on the ground, creating an insulating blanket that keeps the ground temperature at about 16 degrees Fahrenheit. However, on grazed lands where grass is shorter, snow is blown away. The ground freezes, which results in the nitrous-oxide emitting soil microbes being killed.
Thus, Liloia overly exaggerates the enormity of the amount of greenhouse gases produced by livestock and overlooks the benefits of livestock grazing in his posts.
Secondly, Liloia ignores the fact that vegetables also contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, just as livestock do.
Liloia fails to acknowledge that vegetables require large amounts of fertilizer to grow and thus assumes that vegetable farming does not harm the environment. Now guess what is the most widely used fertilizer? Drum roll please…animal manure! It’s rich in nutrients and the rise in commercial fertilizer costs makes manure the ideal fertilizer for vegetable farming, including organic vegetables.
Manure emits the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. The Agriculture Section of the 2010 US Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report indicates that agriculture soil management activities, such as fertilizer application, account for 68% of total nitrous oxide emission. Therefore, by following Liloia’s logic, that humans can prevent global warming by avoiding greenhouse gas producing foods, we would have to stop eating vegetables too.
Lastly, Liloia overlooks all livestock utilizations apart from those in the process chain of human consumption.
Liloia’s source, Kathy Preston, claims that 100 billion gallons of water could be saved and the emission of 1.2 million tons of carbon dioxide would be prevented if everyone in the US were to avoid eating meat for one day. But the magnitude of these statistics would only be plausible if the population of livestock were to be reduced in exact proportion to the reduction of meat consumption by humans. This argument assumes that the sole purpose and reason for existence of all livestock is to be eaten.
However, there are other common reasons for raising livestock. Livestock by-products, including fur, hair, wool, leather, hooves, and horns, can be used as components of textile and industrial products, as well as household cleaning supplies. Furthermore, the glands and organs of some livestock are used to produce drugs such as epinephrine, insulin, and pepsin. So, chances are, vegetarians still utilize non-meat components and by-products of livestock. Therefore, it would be necessary to continue to raise livestock even if everyone on Earth were to become vegetarian.
For all its health, moral, and religious glories, roughly 1% of the world’s population leads a vegetarian lifestyle (excluding India). However, vegetarianism does not and could not prevent global warming to the large extent that Liloia suggests. This deduction is a result of following a logical chain of thought; that livestock do not emit as many greenhouse gases as critics propose, that vegetables contribute greenhouse gases indirectly through their uses of manure fertilizers, and that livestock would still exist for other reasons, even if there was no demand for meat.
Try a Prius instead.
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