Eating less meat won't reduce global warming: study

Yahoo News 22 Mar 10;

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Eating less meat will not reduce global warming, and claims that it will distract from efforts to find real solutions to climate change, a leading air quality expert said Monday.

"We certainly can reduce our greenhouse gas production, but not by consuming less meat and milk," Frank Mitloehner, an air quality expert at the University of California-Davis, said as he presented a report on meat-eating and climate change at a conference of the American Chemical Society in California.

Blaming cows and pigs for climate change is scientifically inaccurate, said Mitloehner, dismissing several reports, including one issued in 2006 by the United Nations, which he said overstate the role that livestock play in global warming.

The UN report "Livestock's Long Shadow," which said livestock cause more greenhouse gases than all global transportation combined, distracts from the real issues involved in looking for a solution to global warming, said Mitloehner.

The notion that eating less meat will help to combat climate change has spawned campaigns for "meatless Mondays" and a European campaign launched late last year called "Less Meat = Less Heat," backed by former Beatle Paul McCartney, one of the world's best-known vegetarians.

"McCartney and others seem to be well-intentioned but not well-schooled in the complex relationships among human activities, animal digestion, food production and atmospheric chemistry," said Mitloehner.

"Smarter animal farming, not less farming, will equal less heat," Mitloehner said. "Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries," he said.

Rather than focusing on producing and eating less meat, Mitloehner said developed countries "should focus on cutting our use of oil and coal for electricity, heating and vehicle fuels."

In the United States, transportation creates an estimated 26 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, whereas raising cattle and pigs for food accounts for about three percent, he said.

The UN report, issued in 2006, said global livestock rearing was responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in carbon dioxide equivalents. The UN report said that was more than the greenhouse gases produced worldwide by transport.

Mitloehner said the UN report did not compare like with like when it analyzed the role of livestock versus fossil fuel emissions in spurring global warming.

UN to look at climate meat link
Richard Black, BBC News 23 Mar 10;

UN specialists are to look again at the contribution of meat production to climate change, after claims that an earlier report exaggerated the link.

A 2006 report concluded meat production was responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions - more than transport.

The report has been cited by people campaigning for a more vegetable-based diet, including Sir Paul McCartney.

But a new analysis, presented at a major US science meeting, says the transport comparison was flawed.

Sir Paul was one of the figures launching a campaign late last year centred on the slogan "Less meat = less heat".

But curbing meat production and consumption would be less beneficial for the climate than has been claimed, said Frank Mitloehner from the University of California at Davis (UCD).

"Smarter animal farming, not less farming, will equal less heat," he told delegates to the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting in San Francisco.

"Producing less meat and milk will only mean more hunger in poor countries."

Leading figures in the climate change establishment, such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chairman Rajendra Pachauri and Lord (Nicholas) Stern, have also quoted the 18% figure as a reason why people should consider eating less meat.

Apples and pears

The 2006 report - Livestock's Long Shadow, published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) - reached the figure by totting up all greenhouse-gas emissions associated with meat production from farm to table, including fertiliser production, land clearance, methane emissions from the animals' digestion, and vehicle use on farms.

But Dr Mitloehner pointed out that the authors had not calculated transport emissions in the same way, instead just using the IPCC's figure, which only included fossil fuel burning.

"This lopsided 'analysis' is a classical apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issue," he said.

One of the authors of Livestock's Long Shadow, FAO livestock policy officer Pierre Gerber, told BBC News he accepted Dr Mitlohner's criticism.

"I must say honestly that he has a point - we factored in everything for meat emissions, and we didn't do the same thing with transport," he said.

"But on the rest of the report, I don't think it was really challenged."

FAO is now working on a much more comprehensive analysis of emissions from food production, he said.

It should be complete by the end of the year, and should allow comparisons between diets, including meat and those that are exclusively vegetarian.

Different pies

Organisations use different methods for apportioning emissions between sectors of the economy.

In an attempt to capture everything associated with meat production, the FAO team included contributions, for example, from transport and deforestation.

By comparison, the IPCC's methodology collects all emissions from deforestation into a separate pool, whether the trees are removed for farming or for some other reason; and does the same thing for transport.

This is one of the reasons why the 18% figure appears remarkably high to some observers.

The majority of the meat-related emissions come from land clearance and from methane emissions associated with the animals' digestion.

Other academics have also argued that meat is a necessary source of protein in some societies with small food resources, and that in the drylands of East Africa or around the Arctic where crop plants cannot survive, a meat-based diet is the only option.

Dr Mitloehner contends that in developed societies such as the US - where transport emissions account for about 26% of the national total, compared with 3% for pig- and cattle-rearing - meat is the wrong target in efforts to reduce carbon emissions.