GLOBAL WARMING....CO2.....WHAT ABOUT METANE DID YOU HEAR THAT METANE IS MORE LIKELY TO BE THE BIGGEST POLLUTER OF THE WORLD......When I started to investigate the impact of food on the environment
a month ago I thought I would find myself fretting over food miles. In
fact transport is a tiny component of agriculture’s worldwide
contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.
No, the main culprit is out there in the fields, chewing her cud. It
turns out that
livestock – predominantly cattle – are responsible for
an astonishing proportion of
GLOBAL WARMING gases - 18 per
cent of the
total, to be precise.
That’s right, almost a fifth of all
emissions which is more
greenhouse gas emissions than all the transport on earth – planes,
trains, cars, skidoos the lot.
You’ll be wondering how I reach that staggering conclusion. Indeed,
regular readers of this blog may be worried that my decision forgo
flesh and become a vegan during January has fostered an irrational hatred of animals.
Not so. The research implicating Daisy and her bovine brothers and
sisters in global warming is very well sourced. A good start is
“Livestock’s Long Shadow”, a report by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation.
So why is the meat we eat so polluting?
Well,
first of all we need to get a sense of scale. Seventy per cent of all
agricultural land is used to raise
animals – that’s a third of the land
surface of the entire planet. What’s more, over a third of all cereal
production goes to feed those animals.
The UN report estimates that 160 million tonnes of carbon dioxide
are associated with the fossil fuels emitted by this vast global
industry – that’s roughly a third of the UK’s
total CO2 emissions.
More abstracts about the AIR POLLUTION