The
New Scientist February 10,
2009
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16573-eating-less-meat-could-cut-climate-costs.html
Eating
less meat could cut climate
costs
By Jim
Giles
Cutting
back on beefburgers and bacon
could wipe $20 trillion off the
cost of
fighting climate change. That's
the dramatic conclusion of a
study that
totted up the economic costs of
modern meat-heavy
diets.
The
researchers involved say that
reducing our intake of beef and
pork would
lead to the creation of a huge
new carbon sink, as
vegetation
would thrive on unused
farmland.
The model
takes into account farmland that
is used to grow extra food
to make up
for the lost meat, but that
requires less area, so some
will be
abandoned. Millions of tonnes of
methane, a potent greenhouse
gas, would
also be saved every year due to
reduced emissions from
farms.
These
impacts would lessen the need for
expensive carbon-saving
technologies,
such as "clean coal" power
plants, and so save huge
sums, say
Elke Stehfest of the Netherlands
Environmental Assessment
Agency and
colleagues.
Flatulent
feeders
Climate-change
experts have warned of the high
carbon cost of meat
for several
years.
Beef is
particularly damaging. Methane, a
potent greenhouse gas, is
released
from flatulent cows and by manure
as it decays. Furthermore,
to produce
a kilogram of beef (2.2 pounds),
farmers also have to feed
a cow 15 kg
of grain and 30 kg of forage.
Grain requires fertiliser,
which is
energy intensive to
produce.
Stehfest
has now weighed the economic
impact of beef and other meats
against the
cost of stabilising carbon
dioxide levels at 450 parts
per million
- a level that some scientists
say is needed to help
prevent
dangerous droughts and sea level
rises.
If eating
habits do not change, Stehfest
estimates that emissions
would have
to be cut by two-thirds by 2050,
which is likely to cost
around $40
trillion.
If,
however, the global population
shifted to a low-meat diet -
defined as
70 grams of beef and 325 grams of
chicken and eggs per
week -
around 15 million square
kilometres of farmland would be
freed
up.
Vegetation growing on this land
would mop up carbon dioxide. It
could
alternatively be used to grow
bioenergy crops, which would
displace
fossil fuels.
Supermarket
labels
Greenhouse
gas emissions would also fall by
10% due to the drop in
livestock
numbers, she calculates.
Together, these impacts would
halve the
costs of dealing with climate
change by 2050.
To help
consumers, the environmental cost
of meat, in terms of carbon
emissions
per portion, could also be
included in the purchase price,
says
Stehfest.
The costs
sound about right, says Raymond
Desjardins of Agriculture
and
Agri-Food Canada. However, it may
be unfair to compare future
farms to
current ones, he adds.
Journal
reference: Climatic Change (DOI:
10.1007/s10584-008-9534-6)
