Ignoring the meat of the global warming issue

NEIL REYNOLDS

We all emit greenhouse gases simply by breathing - one kilogram of carbon dioxide a day, on average, per person. Since there are six billion of us, we collectively emit more than two trillion kilograms of carbon dioxide a year. Scientists don't hold these emissions against us. What public policy options, after all, exist? Breath control?

All animals emit greenhouse gases and by comparison, humans are relatively restrained respirators. The planet's livestock animals alone, for example, breathe out three billion tonnes of CO{-2} a year. Livestock, indeed, emit more GHG into the atmosphere than all of the cars, freight trucks, railways, airplanes and container ships in the entire world.

In a comprehensive 400-page analysis, published last year, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) described the spiralling increase in greenhouse gases from livestock as "massive" and asserted that the world governments must urgently address the problem. It explicitly chided environmentalists for their apparent indifference. In essence, the FAO says, livestock have inherited the Earth - with disastrous consequences.

Together, livestock animals account for 20 per cent "of terrestrial animal biomass" - in other words, of all living land creatures, humans included.

Feed crops take 30 per cent of the world's arable land. Livestock command 70 per cent of the planet's agricultural land and 30 per cent of its entire land surface.

Directly and indirectly, livestock account for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, the FAO says - more than "all transport" combined. These animals emit 9 per cent of human-induced carbon dioxide, 37 per cent of human-induced methane, 64 per cent of human-induced nitrous oxide and 65 per cent of human-induced ammonia. Methane has a longer lifespan than carbon dioxide - between 9 and 15 years. Second-ranked of the greenhouse gases, it has a bad-guy GWP - "global warming potential" - of 21, meaning that it is 21 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over a hundred-year period. Nitrous oxide's lifespan is 114 years; its GWP is 296.

And ammonia is a well-known cause of acid rain.

Animal husbandry, the FAO finds, "is responsible for the production of gases with far higher potential to warm the atmosphere than carbon dioxide." These gases cause other problems as well. Though measured in the atmosphere in parts per billion, nitrous oxide can overwhelm forests, producing what the FAO calls "forest dieback." The excessive nitrogen load essentially reverses the growth effect of CO{-2} and reduces the capacity of the forests to act as "carbon sinks."

Economic growth in developing countries has driven the world's recent increase in meat production, and the higher the income, the bigger the steaks tend to be. Canadians and Americans consume almost 100 kilograms of meat, per capita, per year (which requires the killing of 10 billion animals). The Chinese account for 60 per cent of the world's increase in meat production in the past 25 years. Meat consumption increased by 30 per cent in China's cities between 1980 and 2000 and by 85 per cent in China's rural areas. The Chinese are now the world's biggest producer of pork and, necessarily, the world's biggest producer of methane gas from pig manure.

The FAO report ("Livestock's Long Shadow") says that livestock "biomass" increased from 428 million tonnes in 1960 to 700 million tonnes in 2000. Aside from the three billion tonnes of CO{-2} that result from simple breathing, this vast herd of creatures emits 85 million tonnes a year of intestinal methane and 18 million tonnes of manure methane.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has found that the consumption of fatty meat is one of the principal causes (along with sugar and processed foods) for the obesity epidemic in the developing world, which now suffers more from too many calories than from too few. The WHO says that the number of obese people in the developing world exceeds one billion; the number of malnourished people 800 million.

Greenhouse gas emissions from beef, pork and chicken are every bit as human in origin as the emissions from cars and trucks - and every bit as serious. As an exporter of meat to 130 countries (with export sales of $4-billion a year), Canada produces more than its per-capita share.

As Pogo astutely observed so many years ago: "We have met the enemy and he is us." Perhaps Finance Minister Jim Flaherty should amend his GHG automobile incentive programs and introduce a combination subsidy based on Canadians' consumption of mileage and meat.