Can Vegetarianism Save the World? Nitty-gritty (hint: livestock produce 18% to 51% of Global GHGs)

[Bill USA]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101684301

[kestrel91316]

1. Don't look at me - I've eaten MAYBE 1 lb of animal products

in the past 6 months.

[GliderGuider]

3. Are you all counting the insect legs and rat hairs in non-animal food? nt

[kestrel91316]

9. Nope, lol, but I assume it doesn't add up to much.

I'm big on whole grains and fresh produce.

[GliderGuider]

2. No.

[Bill USA]

16. OF course, vegetarianism won't save the World. THe title is meant to get your attention. HOwever,

.. the article is worth posting and reading ... as it points out how big a source of GHGs livestock are, and that even if you can't go completely vegan (which, let's face it, most of us probably will not do) if you can cut down your beef consumption, by say, 10% you would be helping the GHG emissions problem as you would be contributing to lowering the demand for beef and thus, as a result, lowering the number of pharting cattle on the farms.

http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=29892

"Depending how the figure is calculated, livestock account for anywhere between 18 and 51 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions measured in CO2 equivalent. Even the conservative estimate of 18 percent is a higher share than all transport—cars, trucks, planes, airplanes and mopeds—put together. This number is reported in CO2 equivalent because many of the gases released by agriculture, such as methane, have 23 times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2. Nitrous oxide, of which livestock is responsible for 65 percent of anthropogenic output, has 296 times the GWP of CO2.[font size="+1"] Raising farm animals is a huge part of our climate change problem, and cutting back on animal products is one of the biggest, most immediate things we all can do to help."[/font]
(more)

I posted this for those who have expressed a concern for the uses of food crops. Hopefully, this will give them a more complete picture of that situation.

[FBaggins]

4. Does the same animal put out less gas...

...when it changes from being "livestock" to "wildlife" ?

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. 'wildlife' of those species would be a tiny percentage of those that are farmed

So it doesn't really matter.

[FBaggins]

6. Hold on a sec...

... so I don't get to eat them and they die off anyway? Other large species don't expand to fill the now unused grazing land?

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. No, that's the point - we have to use a lot of the land to grow crops

but what we don't use would be a more diverse ecosystem, natural to the region, and almost inevitably with less farting ruminants, since it hasn't been designed for them - eg Brazilian rainforest.

[FBaggins]

8. Here in the US... aren't most cows currently raised...

... on land that was "designed" for the American Bison (a roughly comparable number of them to the number of cattle now on the same land)?

Do Bison fart less than cows?

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. My understanding is that a lot of US cattle are fed crops

rather than being free-ranging; and I suspect that even free-ranging cattle are more intensive than wild bison, because ranchers put as many as they can on the land, rather than being limited by predators. And, just to be clear, I'm not calling the natural state 'designed', just the present one (such as wolves being restricted).

[Bill USA]

15. your comparison to bison is meaningless. Article compares beef to chicken which is 5x as efficient

at converting inputs (animal feed) to meat protein. http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=29892
Chickes need 1/5th the amount of inputs, compared to cattle, to produce a given amount of meat protein. In addition chickens phart less than cattle (verrrry little chicken pharts).


OF course, even better, to what ever extent you can reduce consumption of beef, you would be reducing our GHG emissions- even if you substituted Chicken for beef you would be improving the situation. IF you can replace ALL types of meat with vegetable proteins even better. As I said in post on GoodReads (http://www.democraticunderground.com/101684301) , the OP has the link in it, most of us realilsically are not going to stop eating ALL meat products. But maybe we could manage a 10% reduction in red meat consumption. That at leas would help the picture.

I posted this for the people who are concerned about our crop usage, especially Corn - the majority of which is raised to feed cattle and pigs. By reducing red meat consumption you would be reducing demand for beef and with less cattle farting up the countryside (methane clouds) we'd have less GHGs being put into the atmosphere - and we would also be more healthy!

[Bill USA]

14. chickens see article

[cprise]

11. There is a downside to chickens

I read somewhere that egg production was horrendously wasteful, in the same class as beef.

[Nihil]

12. If you "factory farm" anything, it will be both horrendously wasteful and completely inhumane.

And if you want to, you can even extend that to the "factory farming" (i.e., intensively
unnatural large-scale raising) of crops as although the "inhumane" bit doesn't apply
to the unnatural produce, it definitely applies to the other denizens of what was once
a balanced ecosystem.

Subtext: If you have to "factory farm" anything, you are breaking systems to support
more consumers than can be sustained naturally. Big clue there as to the problem.

[Red Mountain]

13. Do humans create more or less GHGs when fed a vegetarian diet?

I think we're talking primarily about ruminants when the subject of GHG production comes up.....how about non-ruminants? Is it always less efficient to eat meat in terms of the GHGs produced when you consider how the human gut handles different protein sources?

I think of 7 billion people sharing a colossal vegetarian chili night and wonder.....

[Bill USA]

17. humans have the option to cook their food before eating. cows generally eat their grass raw.

cooking the food makes it more easily digestable, therefor less pharting. Cows haven't figured out how to do this.