Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [56]
On the issue of climate change, animal agriculture is a nightmare in comparison to producing grains and beans and other plant-based foods. In a 400-page report from the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” UN agricultural scientists conclude that the business of raising animals for food is responsible for about 18 percent of all warming, and that meat eating is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” World Bank agricultural scientists rebutted the UN in 2010, arguing that, actually, the number is not 18 percent, but rather at least 50 percent. The most highly esteemed agricultural scientists are saying that animal agriculture is at least one half of the problem of climate change.
It’s a little hard to fathom when you think about a small chick hatching from her fragile egg. How can an animal, so seemingly insignificant against the vastness of the earth, give off enough greenhouse gas to change the global climate? The answer is in their sheer numbers. We slaughter around 10 billion land animals a year in this country alone, and 60 billion are slaughtered worldwide. Remember that all these animals have to eat—feed mills have to operate, trucks have to tote the feed (and the animals and their carcasses) from here to there. And on and on—producing massive amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2). But that’s not the only warming gas that worries scientists.
Carbon dioxide counts for about half of global warming gases, and a third is from methane and nitrous oxide. These superstrong gases come primarily from farmed animals’ digestive processes and from their manure. In fact, while animal agriculture accounts for 9 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions, it emits 37 percent of our methane, and a whopping 65 percent of our nitrous oxide. Methane is twenty times as powerful as CO2 as a planet warmer, and N2O is almost 300 times as powerful. By simply raising fewer (or no) animals, we could turn off these climate change spigots.
What we’re seeing is just the beginning, too. Meat consumption has increased fivefold in the past fifty years, and is expected to double again in the next fifty, encouraged by growing global affluence and enormous advertising campaigns by the animal agriculture companies that tell us to drink more milk and eat more meat. We are not only eating ourselves to death, but we are also eating our planet to death.
I often hear people say, “I don’t eat red meat because I know cows give off methane.” But the factory farming of chickens releases tremendous amounts of greenhouse gas emissions as well. Industrial farming of any animals is a problem because, whether for cows, pigs, or chickens, food still has to be grown and turned into animal feed, and extra trucks and factories are operated that would not be needed for plant foods. So if you do indeed decide to cut back on meat, cut back on all meat, because just switching from beef to chicken doesn’t make much of a difference.
And it’s not just a matter of global warming gases: with chickens, as with pigs and cattle, vast quantities of dangerous chemicals are produced, acidic and tainted urine seeps into the groundwater, and bacteria-laden manure infects the soil, thanks to concentrated animal-feeding operations.
In a story about chicken-waste pollution, the New York Times reported that “[a]lthough the dairy and hog industry in states near the bay produce more pounds of manure, poultry waste has more than twice the concentration of pollutants per pound.” That’s probably in part because calorie for calorie, chickens are given a lot more drugs than pigs and cattle—because they’re kept in even worse conditions.
When you have the attorney general of a state like Oklahoma battling poultry producers over the