Meat is murder - on the atmosphere

I just signed a petition that will be submitted to the United Nations on Earth Day (22 April) 2009.

http://www.evana.org/UN/index.php?lang=en

Having been vegetarian for 33 years (other than a brief lapse at university) it seems obvious to me that our ability to feed the world's population is hampered by our determination to feed our crops to animals that are raised in horrendous conditions before being transported hundreds or thousands miles to meet their deaths in poorly regulated slaughterhouses.  I thought everyone would understand that this unnecessary cruelty is also hugely inefficient, reducing the calories that reach people's mouths from our farmlands by 90 or 95%.  Eric Schlosser ("Fast Food Nation") and Colin Tudge ("So Shall We Reap") made all this crystal clear to millions of people - Schlosser's book topped the bestseller lists for months.

What this petition could do is bring this truth out into the open in 2009, something that powerful lobbies for the food industry and farming would rather we kept quiet about.

Of course, some kinds of animal husbandry are more ethical than others.  No-one could begrudge subsistence farmers their chickens and goats - these are essential to survival and quality of life for millions of impoverished families.  They are hardly likely to see much grain, anyway, as their starving owners have none to spare.  Similarly, grazing animals on hillfarms may be seen as a natural part of a sustainable lifestyle and what they consume (in summer at least) is free feed, additional to the calories our farms can provide. Against all my instincts as an animal lover, I have to concede that hunting genuinely wild animals, not those that gamekeepers have reared for so-called sport, can form part of a sustainable diet for indigenous families in remote areas. I am not excusing the probable extinction of great apes or other primates by the bushmeat trade, just noting that the use of wild populations can be sustainable in a way that intensive animal husbandry can never be.

However, the burgeoning appetite for meat in the emerging markets will not be met from these more ethical sources any more than it is in Europe and North America.  The world's demand for meat and meat products is being supplied by intensive farming. 

• This industry, built on the suffering of animals, competes with human mouths for the crops that our farms can produce.  
• Meat production, together with the current generation of biofuels, is driving the clearance of tropical rainforest at a greater rate today than ever before.  
• Lastly, if more reasons were needed to stop eating meat, animal husbandry results in around 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.  
  

In a letter published in the current edition of New Scientist (27 September 2008), Peter Martin of CarbonSense points out that methane has an 'instantaneous' greenhouse gas potency that is more than 60 times as great as carbon dioxide.  The biggest manmade source of methane is animal husbandry - from both ruminant guts and fermentation of slurry.  We may be unable to prevent the outgassing of methane from the Arctic Ocean and tundra, as the northern sea ice and permafrost disappear, but at least we must begin to tackle the methane contributed by our own actions in raising animals for meat and dairy products! 

This blog is about reducing the environmental impact of everyday life.  That means changing our behaviour.  Adopting a vegetarian diet is one of the most significant changes we can make in our impact on the environment.  We need some basic knowledge and information to maintain good nutrition without meat but it's a really big contribution to a healthy lifestyle.  

If everyone were to halve their meat intake, this would go a long way towards feeding all the world's people, reducing deforestation (for cattle ranching and soya production) and cutting the greenhouse gases that animal husbandry emits.   

Please sign the "FOOD vs FEED" petition and think about cutting your own consumption of meat and dairy products.

http://www.evana.org/UN/index.php?lang=en

Giving up the car

I started this blog a year ago with little idea what it would achieve and that's why it didn't achieve much.  This time around, I will try to post regularly and keep it practical so that you may be able to make use of what I have to say.

I have been busily working to cut my family's home energy usage and have now reduced our annual consumption by 30% since 2006.  Some of this required capital outlay - money which came from selling my two year old Civic Type-R.  This pocket rocket was much loved but owning it contradicted everything I believe about sustainability.  Consequently, selling it became a powerful statement of my personal commitment to reduce my own impact on the environment.  In a rare case of economic and environmental coherence, ditching this 200 horsepower runabout saved me at least £2000 a year (insurance, maintenance, tax, fuel and depreciation), cut my carbon footprint by around 4 Tonnes a year and put more than enough cash into the bank to fund my energy efficiency measures at home.  In the interests of transparency, I must add that my family still has the use of my wife's company car at weekends and for holidays.  

I know that my former online buddies at the CTR Owner's Club were unable to take the environment seriously but it's really hard to get your head round the idea that your own lifestyle is the problem!  Nothing is wrong with the CTR in particular, it's a fantastic car.  Like all petrol and diesel engines, however, it emits greenhouse gases whenever you use it.  The emissions per passenger-kilometre depend on driving style and number of people on board.  The incredible performance of the CTR is begging to be used and encourages the driver to adopt a fiery rather than frugal attitude.  It is also rare to see more than one passenger in a CTR and, during the rush-hour, most have no passengers - just a lone driver commuting between work and home.  

The alternatives to driving to and from work are difficult for many people and adopting them takes real courage.  Perhaps we should start by persuading everybody to avoid one day's commute a week - or even a month!  For the record, here are the obvious alternatives:

1) Work from home - using broadband, phone or just catching up on all that reading you're supposed to get through.

2) Share a lift - find out who lives near you and what days it will be convenient for you to pool.

3) Try the public transport options.  No really, they do exist for many of us.

4) If it's within an hour's cycling distance - pedal.  

5) If it's within an hour's walking distance - walk!  (or pedal, it's so easy if it's that close)

Less obvious - and really hard to do - is to face up to the environmental impact of living so far away from your place of work.  Few of us are in a position to trade in our current job for something closer to home - or to 'up sticks' and move closer to the office/ factory / shop, etc.  

The change that will drive us towards more sustainable personal transportation is likely to be painful and unpopular.  It will involve paying the true cost of the energy used and the environmental impact of this usage.   Fuel prices may bring this about, some years after peak oil has been recognised, but that will be too late to start managing down the carbon emissions  of our personal transport choices. 

Reducing oil consumption

Here are my thoughts on reducing our use of oil while we still have some left to play with!

New Scientist (4 July 2007, "Biorefineries: curing our addiction to oil") reports that over 70% of the oil we extract is used for transport fuel. Most of the remainder is burned for energy (and this without including natural gas, another fossil carbon) or used for roads, lubricants and waxes. Just 3.4% is used in the petrochemical industry, to synthesise all the materials we depend on in our everyday lives - e.g., plastics, cosmetics, paints and medicines. Wouldn't it make sense to cut down the 90-odd percent that is used for energy and save the oil for petrochemical manufacture? If we were to do this ahead of "peak oil" then the feedstocks that we need for the synthetic chemical industries could last for centuries.

It is comparatively easy to switch electricity generation over to renewables, including woodchip and pellet technologies used for industrial "cogeneration" or combined heat and power (CHP). Slough Trading Estate has been doing this for several years so your UK Mars Bars are made using sustainable energy. This type of biofuel makes sense and does not compete for agricultural resources with food supply. The biggest problem will be scaling up the supply of woody fuel - perhaps an argument for restoring some of Britain's native woodland cover that was displaced by farming?

It is much harder to make the switch to renewables for the transport fuel we all depend on because few other materials have the energy density of petrol or diesel. Plug-in hybrids could help, if recharged from renewable electricity, but hybrid cars today are really no more than green window-dressing to enhance the reputations of the world's largest car manufacturers, while they continue to flog Chelsea tractors, SUVs, pickups and luxury limos.

Whether it's ethanol from sugar cane ('gasohol' in Brazil) or biodiesel from oilseed crops, production of biofuels for transport displaces food production (witness the soaring price of bread). More importantly, to meet the current transport fuel demands of the developed world, biofuel would have to supplant food production entirely - and then some more!

There is an overwhelming need is to change the way we use transport - both personal and freight. That's a very tall order but nothing else comes close to providing a sustainable solution.

Energy efficiency, both domestic and industrial, offers huge prizes but is barely beginning to be tapped here in England because energy is still far too cheap. There is loads of advice available on improving our domestic energy and I will post the best links I can find to help with this. Retailers and manufacturers have much scope to cut their energy consumption but the economics will need to change before they pay more than lipservice to these opportunities. Massive hikes in the price of oil and gas would drive energy efficiency but this is not going to win elections anywhere in the world and so seems unlikely to happen before we reach peak oil.

Solar thermal power is already highly efficient - vacuum collector tubes can capture over 90% of the solar energy reaching them. Rooftops around the world should be covered in them already but - outside of Germany - they are not.

Solar electricity generation, in contrast, uses only up to 15% of the incident energy. There is plenty of room yet for technological innovation, both the physics of solar energy capture and the manufacturing processes used to produce photovoltaic panels in large quantities and at low cost.

Even nuclear fission is ultimately unsustainable because the uranium reserves are limited and the environmental and human costs of uranium mining are very high. If we could tame nuclear fusion as an energy source we would really be getting somewhere!

Light bulbs

The first thing that seems to spring to mind when you mention carbon is changing your lightbulbs. That's good because it's easy and, once you've done it, it takes no further effort.

A lot of people though, including Tesco's Sir Terry Leahy, have pointed out that we can't just BAN high-energy lights because they are not suited to all situations, a lot of current light fittings won't use them, etc. How far is that true?

Energy-efficient bulbs for the standard bayonet (BC) or screw (ES) fitting are now sold for under a pound in supermarkets, department stores and the like. They are longer than their equivalent high-energy bulbs, however, so they might not fit your existing lampshade or luminaire. In that case, you need to get hold of the tiny little energy-saving bulbs that are now available from online retailers - I've listed some below - for even the small bayonet (SBC) and screw (SES) fittings. They work really well. Yesterday, I replaced a 40 watt tungsten "golfball" bulb, 95mm-long, with an energy-saving equivalent that is 5mm shorter and 35 watts lighter.

Unfortunately, these non-standard energy-saving bulbs cost £4 - £8 each which is a big barrier to replacing all the tungsten bulbs in your home.

Halogen downlighters and spots are the very epitome of modern lighting. Bright and affordable, they claim higher efficiency than regular tungsten filament bulbs. In practice, they are highly directional so that many more bulbs are needed to light a room than with traditional bulbs.

Just before I started to think about energy efficiency, I fitted 12 mains-powered halogen bulbs in a long, narrow utility room at home. I think this stupid deployment of 600 watts was the first thing that made me feel guilty about my household energy consumption. Fortunately, I discovered Megamann 7 watt compact fluorescent spots and spent a hundred quid reducing this figure to 84 watts.

Sad to say, these are only available for 240v lights so I don't think we can do anything practical yet to replace all those 12 volt halogens our homes are filled with.

I have just tried out some 1 watt LED replacements for the little 10 watt halogen bulbs with two metal legs coming out of them (called G4 capsules). They were £5 a piece, very fragile (I broke two), difficult to fit and produced negligible illumination with a ghastly mains flicker.

Furthermore, the power consumption of the transformer supplying 12 volt DC to the 1 watt LED was still 15 watts, so the real saving was 50% rather than the 90% I had hoped for.

My next stop was the lounge and dining room, with a grand total of 17 matching wall and floor lights, each using 40 watts. The Omicron replacements, at 5 watts each, have cost me £140 but they are saving 600 watts between them.

My latest discovery is energy-saving striplights, to replace those long filament bulbs built into bathroom mirrors, furniture and under kitchen cabinets. The 221mm bulb uses 5 watts rather than the 30 watt incandescent bulb: the 284mm one uses 7 watts in place of 60 watts.

How about Tesco start piling them high and selling them cheap so that we can all switch more of our lights over to energy-efficient bulbs?

In the meantime, please check out these online retailers and buy all the energy-saving bulbs you need, and can afford, to replace your high-energy incandescent lamps. I have been happiest with BLT Direct because their prices are fair, they deliver quickly and they handle returns very efficiently.

http://www.bltdirect.com/

http://www.ebulbshop.com/

http://www.toplightco.com/acatalog/Energy_saving_lightbulbs.html#a25_20watt_20Daylight

First things first

Welcome to the "Cut Your Carbon" blog. I haven't written one of these before and apologise if the style or content fail to live up to your expectations.

I am a life scientist who down-shifted from an industrial science career a couple of years ago and now work part-time on a project to generate commercial funding for really great causes in the developing world. My work on renewable energy has drawn me into the sustainable living arena and I have begun to form my views on what we can do as individuals to mitigate the impending tragedies of climate change and peak oil.


I will attempt to set out these views here and invite your responses. I will be more grateful for constructive comments than suggestions that I am mad, dangerous or likely to die soon.