By Ted Nordhaus at The Breakthrough Journal: As much as 60% of global agricultural emissions comes from livestock production, with a significant majority of that coming from beef and dairy production. These estimates include all greenhouse gasses and incorporate emissions associated with land use change and deforestation as well as the fossil energy inputs associated with growing cattle feed and raising and transporting livestock.
So score one for vegetarianism right? Not exactly.
Beef constitutes less than a third of total meat consumption while accounting for most of the emissions and environmental impact. So simply shifting global beef consumption from beef to chicken and pork would very substantially reduce emissions and environmental impacts associated with meat production and consumption. All the more so as most chicken and pork production globally is still relatively low productivity. Achieving higher productivity through more intensive production systems like those common in the United States and Europe, would bring significant further reductions in impacts from such a switch.
Moreover, much of the emissions impact associated with beef and dairy production comes from methane emissions that are produced by enteric fermentation in the digestive systems of cattle as they transform cellulose into energy and a lot of that could be eliminated by simply shifting to more intensive livestock production systems. The prototype for a lot of people of environmentally destructive beef production is a massive feedlot operated by a global corporation located somewhere in America’s flyover country. But intensive livestock production of this sort actually has far lower methane emissions per pound of meat produced than far less productive systems in much of the rest of the world, in which beef is generally pasture finished. And these more intensive systems are actually not the norm at all, accounting for only about 20% of global beef production.
More here.
