In honour of Earth Day, Kathy Freston offers 13 Breathtaking Effects of Cutting Back on Meat. Elsewhere, she’s produced A Beginner’s Guide to Conscious Eating and The Startling Effects of Going Vegetarian for Just One Day.
A few of my favourites:
- It takes more than 11 times as much fossil fuel to make one calorie of animal protein as it does to make one calorie of plant protein.
- Water used for farmed animals and irrigating feed crops: 240 trillion gallons per year — 7.5 million gallons per second (that’s enough for every human to take 8 showers a day, or as much as is used by Europe, Africa, and South America combined). According to the UN: “[t]he water used by the sector exceeds 8 percent of the global human water use.” As just one example, “[O]n average 990 litres of water are required to produce one litre of milk.” So drinking milk instead of tap water requires almost 1,000 times as much water.
- Emissions of greenhouse gases from raising animals for food: The equivalent of 7.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, according to the UN report. Concludes the UN: “The livestock sector is… responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions.” That’s about 40 percent more than all the cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships in the world combined (transport is 13%). And “The sector emits 37% of anthropogenic methane (with 23 times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2)… It emits 65% of anthropogenic nitrous oxide (with 296 times the GWP of CO2).
- United Nations scientists, in their 408-page indictment of the meat industry, sum up these statistics, pointing out that the meat industry is “one of the … most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global,” including “problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.”
Now, don’t feel compelled to completely cut out meat. The concern is that Westerners eat far too much meat, not that they aren’t vegetarians. Start treating it as a side-dish rather than a main and begin enjoying meat-free days.
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