There's no real alternative but to drive to and from the shops, most food miles don't occur is the boot of your car and nobody is talking about buying everything from a farmers market. Buying fresh berries which were flown here from South America rather that buying frozen ones that were grown closer to home is a choice. Buying red meat is a choice. Agriculture is, by far, the biggest contributor to Climate Change. If we all stopped eating red meat it would have a far bigger impact on climate change than if we all stopped flying and moved to EV's. By the way I'm very fond of red meat. I'm just pointing out the facts.
Should I buy a diesel if living in the city?
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There is no such thing as a completely emission free car. Either they are directly polluting like diesel or petrol or hybrid or they are indirectly polluting the atmostphere via power stations or mining for key minerals for batteries. Hybrids are far more fuel efficient for city driving then diesel or petrol but they are not perfect
EV's over their lifetime are about 18% more environmentally friendly than a ICE counterpart. Therefore a small ICE car will have a smaller environmental footprint that a large EV. As electricity generation becomes more efficient that 18% figure should improve. Unfortunately Europe in general, and Germany in particular, seem to me moving away from the best source of Green Energy.
NoRegretsCoyote
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I was literally quoting someone who advocated buying only local produce.
Local as in from Ireland or from Europe.
Listened to Saul Griffith (author of Break Glass Book) speaking on a podcast recently about how to move to a carbon neutral economy in the US. He was challenging the meat argument, making the points that the figures are often fairly significantly overstated and it's not an option to simply stop eating meat and save those CO2 emissions, you have to eat something so you'll increase your consumption of non-meat foods which require many of the same CO2 generating processes that meat creation does (repurposing land from foresty to fields, fossil fuel use on farms, processing, transport to retails outlets).
The EPA in ‘‘Inventory of United States Greenhouse Gases and Sinks: 1990–2007’’ estimate that the entire argi industry in the US generates 5.8% of human CO2 created emissions. Livestock specifically represented 2.8% of the total. For comparison transportation is 26% of emissions in the US.
In summary his argument was that meat emissions are overstated, even we stopped eating meat altogether we'll start eating veg/grain, so the net gain will not be the full 2.8% by a longshot. He also feels meat eating is so culturally engrained that trying to persuade people to stop eating meat is likely to turn them off climate change action altogether.
Food for thought.
The farming of grazing Animals takes up about 80% of the world's arable land and delivers less than 20% of our calories. In other words if we farmed other produce and consumed the calories directly rather than feeding them to a cow for its lifetime in order to eat it once, we would free up an area the size of the USA on which we could plant trees. The opportunity cost is massive. The fact that grazing animals produce 13 times more waste than humans and the population of grazing farm animals is increasing twice as fast as the population of people is also a cause for concern. If we are going to eat red mean we should certainly ban framing them on grass as free range production is the most environmentally damaging. We should farm beef the way we grow chickens and pigs so we can minimise the land use and recover and process their waste. Saudi Arabia have farms like this already where one farm with no fields has over 22,000 cows.
All cars pollute. Bikes or walking are preferable. In saying that I'd still prefer to walk the kids to school by a line of EV or hybrids sitting in traffic than diesels. It's not just climate change but also local air quality that's important. Hence you'll see me chip in with anti-diesel comments in threads like this.
Very fair points yes, there's much more to this than just CO2 emissions, particularly the destruction of habitats, reduction of ecosystem diversity, animal welfare etc. I try to eat less meat for these reasons.
However my post was purely focussed on CO2 emissions, to offer a counter to the narrative that stopping eating meat would make a big difference to climate change (the data doesn't support this), specifically that it would make a bigger difference than swapping to an EV or various other actions people can take (again the data does not support it).
Don't you have any concerns regarding the animal cruelty in such animal factories?
Statements like that add nothing but hyperbole to the debate. At 2019 rate of production, it'd take over 15 years for Germany to replace the current fleet. That's a long way off overnight.
When it comes to agricultural emissions and land use change, stopping the consumption of animal protein (including meat) has the greatest mitigation impact, and the research and science DOES support that, including multiple references by the IPCC. The selective quoting of one country's emissions data does not present the bigger picture. It's done here in Ireland almost every day to justify the status quo.
If there are concerns about the cruelty inherent in the industry then a blanket ending of consumption (which is the cheapest material action any of us can take) would seem to be the only way.
Unfortunately for those tying to balance the use of animals with emissions, intensively farming the animals allows the emissions to be lowered*, but obviously will have issues for the welfare of the animals themselves. You can have one or the other, failing that it's a balancing act that is hard to justify either way. Better to move away from these efforts altogether.
*many of the animal-related emissions can be captured/reduced when animals are housed permanently.
Exactly. Effluent can power electricity generation, produce fertilizer and clean water rather than running untreated into waterways as it does now. If we are balancing that against animal welfare then the impact of climate change on the welfare wild animal has to enter the equation.
No, the data strongly supports that. The swapping of farming meat to farming carbon (growing trees) being the most obvious. The number one reason for reforestation at the moment is farming meat.
Sure, but in addition to Rob's point above ultimately I'm going to have someone put a steel bolt through the animals head so that I can eat it. Why pretend I'm concerned about what happens before that?
I think you're maybe being unnecessarily argumentative here, I think we're broadly in agreement in our views on the environment and I was just suggesting to check the figures on this particular point as I was surpised by them (as a bit of an eco nut)?
If the production of meat only creates 2.8% of CO2 emissions (including land-repurposing/deforestation) in the US, which I'd imagine is very siialr to Europe, stopping producing it would at most improve things by 2.8%. But as people will need to eat something to compensate, the improvement will be much smaller, probably <1%. That is not a big number. Now if you looked at programmes to repurpose the saved land as forests or solar farms or nuclear power stations then I can see the point, but again I'm just countering the simplistic "stop eating meat and you'll make a dramatic difference to CO2 emissions". "Stop eating meat, reclaim the land for a massive reforestation and solar generation programme" is different, but we can do reforestation etc. without necessarily stopping eating meat, there's plenty of land (though again, I'm in favour of stopping for all the other very good reasons!)
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