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

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!