City Goes Vegetarian to Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Finding Dulcinea - Monday, May 18, 2009

By Hayley A. Lovett

The Belgian city of Ghent will encourage residents to not eat meat every Thursday, highlighting the environmental and health benefits of a reduced-meat diet.

Cutting one day of meat consumption may cut greenhouse gas emissions for the city of Ghent by as much as 18 percent, one of the promoters of Ghent’s "VeggieDag" (Veggie Day) told Reuters.

A 2006 report from the United Nations found that cattle farming emits more harmful greenhouse gasses than cars and other modes of transportation. The report also explains that a great deal of land on Earth is dedicated to livestock, "which now use 30 per cent of the earth’s entire land surface," adding that most of it is for grazing, "but also including 33 per cent of the global arable land used to producing feed for livestock," said a UN News Center piece on the study.

Ghent officials want to help reduce the environmental impact of animal farming. The town is not forcing its citizens to become vegetarian, but rather encouraging citizens to choose not to eat meat on Thursday. Government employees and politicians will be eliminating meat one day a week, and restaurants are encouraged to provide one vegetarian option during the "Veggie Day." In September, schools will start offering a meat-free lunch, but Veggie Day started last week, the BBC reported.

According to the BBC, Ghent is the first city in the world to go vegetarian one day a week. But the "veggie day" is not the first campaign encouraging people to follow a reduced meat diet. Meatless Monday is a nonprofit based in the United States that encourages people to avoid animal products on Monday. The organization, started in 2003, has a goal to reduce U.S. consumption of saturated fat by 15 percent by the year 2010. The main focus of the Meatless Monday campaign is to prevent heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer caused by diets high in saturated fat.

Australia recently started a campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from livestock by 30 percent by the year 2030. Currently, animal flatulence (methane gas) creates more than one tenth of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. One method of reducing methane emissions is to encourage residents to farm and eat more kangaroo, an animal which naturally produces less methane due to special bacteria in its stomach.

In the United States, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandate that required some livestock farmers to report estimates of animal emissions angered both pork farmers and environmentalists alike. The farmers felt that the EPA did not provide enough guidance for how to comply with the new mandate, while environmentalists felt that the rule, requiring only very large livestock operations to report numbers, was not comprehensive enough.
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Blogger's Note:

While I think it's great that people around the world are considering reducing their meat intake for health and environmental reasons, it's too bad they aren't also doing it out of compassion for animals. A lot of people love animals and would never think of eating their cat or dog, yet they don't extend their love to other animals such as pigs, chickens and cows. This needs to change.

We need to solve the 'meat problem'

The St. Catharines Standard - Thursday February 26, 2009

By Daniel K. Wilson, NIAGARA VOICES

“Other than not driving a car, not eating meat is the second most important positive environmental decision that a consumer can make.” – Union of Concerned Scientists

I’ve been meeting a lot of people who are truly concerned about the environmental crisis we’re facing. They’re also frustrated because they feel powerless to make changes.

Greening your home, installing a backyard windmill or buying a hybrid vehicle is unfeasible for most. It seems like only the wealthy can afford to be energy efficient.

Well, I have some good news. If you want to be eco-friendly without going into debt, then go vegetarian.

It’s true! Switching to a vegetarian diet is the single best thing you can do to slow down climate change and make the world a cleaner, better place in which to live.

In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization released a report that found animal agriculture to be one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gas emissions and responsible for almost 20% of human-caused climate change. That’s more than the entire world’s transportation combined!

Henning Steinfield, a senior official with the UN says, “Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” adding, “Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.”

Every aspect of livestock production: growing and transporting the crops to feed the animals; operating the factory farms, slaughterhouses and meat processing plants; and finally transporting the animals to those slaughterhouses, meat-processing plants and grocery stores as packages of meat requires staggering amounts of fossil fuels.

It’s estimated that for every pound of hamburger produced, 500 pounds of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere.

The raising of animals for their flesh, milk and eggs is also responsible for other greenhouse gases including methane, which comes from belching and flatulent livestock.

Methane has 23 times the global warming potential of CO2 and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lists livestock as the largest source of methane emissions in the world, generating more than 500 million tons of it annually.

Nitrous oxide, another byproduct of animal agriculture, is 300 times stronger than carbon dioxide at trapping heat inside our atmosphere, and the meat, egg and dairy industries account for nearly 65% of the planet’s nitrous oxide emissions.

As if that weren’t enough, roughly 80% of the world’s forests have been destroyed for animal agriculture, which release even more CO2 into the atmosphere. In Central and South America, much of the rainforest has been cleared to provide grazing land for beef cattle and we’re losing another 50 million acres every year.

According to Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research group in Washington, D.C., “the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future,” including deforestation, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution and climate change.

By changing our eating habits from the Standard American Diet (SAD) to a vegetarian one, we do more for the environment than if we all drove hybrid vehicles. For example, it takes eight times more fossil fuel energy to produce animal protein than it does to produce plant protein.

Researchers at the University of Chicago agree. When geophysicists Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin compared energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions with what people ate, the vegetarian diet turned out to be the most energy efficient.

“However close you can be to a vegan diet and further from the mean American diet, the better you are for the planet,” concluded Eshel.

Fifty years ago, when the world’s population was around 3 billion, the world’s total meat supply was 70 million tons. Now there are over 6 billion of us and the global meat supply is approximately 290 million tons.

With our numbers expected to reach 9 billion by the middle of this century, and with nations like China and India adopting the Standard American Diet as a result of their growing economies, we need to address the 'meat problem' sooner rather than later. Moving away from an animal-based diet does.

And because eating lower on the food chain is cheaper, going vegetarian is good for the planet and your pocketbook. So if you’re serious about helping the environment but don’t know where to start, try going vegetarian. If you’re already vegetarian, then go vegan.

The U.N.'s meatless drive

Our appetite for steaks and burgers is a huge contributor to global warming.

Los Angeles Times - Tuesday, September 9, 2008

EDITORIAL - So it turns out that meatless Fridays, which for generations inflicted fish sticks and tuna casseroles on millions of school-age children, Catholic and otherwise, were actually saving the planet. The United Nations is now urging wealthy nations to make a dramatic shift in eating habits, saying the best way to curb climate change is for people to go at least one day a week without meat.

And Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - which shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year - isn't just asking diners to bypass a burger now and then. After achieving a weekly day without meat, he said, they should embark on a progressive reduction of their meat intake.

The problem isn't so much with hamburger patties as it is with cow patties. Meat production accounts for nearly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations. Cows and other ruminants, such as sheep and goats, release methane and nitrous oxide in amounts that put to shame the carbon dioxide belched out by cars. In fact, a red-meat-eater in a Prius is probably hurting the environment more than a vegan in a Hummer.

The U.N. also is calling for governments to launch campaigns to reduce meat eating. If they do, such efforts will probably start in Europe, then sweep through every city, town, village and hamlet in Asia, Africa, Australia and Antarctica before the U.S. Department of Agriculture stops propagandizing on behalf of meat without any regard for human or environmental health.

Which brings us back to individual abstinence. We're not calling for a vegan revolution, but this page has noted that a sincere personal effort to fight global warming must include a reduction in eating red meat. Were fish sticks on Fridays really that bad?

The Environment

Livestock production is one of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution. According to a 2006 United Nations report,

“Climate change is the most serious challenge facing the human race. The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent. This is a higher share than transport.”

The rainforests pay a heavy price too. We need oxygen to survive, and rainforests provide us with much of that oxygen. Still, about one-third of all rainforest destruction is to provide grazing land for beef cattle.

Animals that are raised for food produce 13 billion tons of waste every year, which is 100 times more toxic than human waste. Along with pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals in feed crop runoff, waste from industrial farms is washed into our streams, rivers and lakes.

Adopting a vegetarian or vegan diet is far less demanding on the Earth's resources.

• amount of water needed to produce one pound of steak: 2,500 gallons
• amount of water needed to produce one pound of lettuce, wheat, tomatoes or potatoes: 25 gallons or less
• amount of excrement produced by farmed animals: 130 times more than humans
• amount of water pollution caused by livestock production: 10 times that of the human population

"Yet, as environmental science has advanced, it has become apparent that the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future: deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities, and the spread of disease." - Worldwatch Institute, "Is Meat Sustainable?"