I want to make something crystal clear: no matter how many half-truths and dishonest implications do you spread, animal agriculture will still not play a truly major part in global warming. It plays some part, but so does: running your car, heating your house, using electricity. More: skepticalscience com/news php?n=3209 Want to stop global warming? Sell your phone and computer, go off grid. It will contribute to lessening the climate change effects a lot more. What's that? That's unreasonable?
âThe livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of this reports suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity.â - UN.
âAnimal products, both meat and dairy, in general require more resources and cause higher emissions than plant-based alternatives.â - also the UN.Â
âAlternative diets that offer substantial health benefits could, if widely adopted, reduce global agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, reduce land clearing and resultant species extinctions, and help prevent such diet-related chronic non-communicable diseases. The implementation of dietary solutions to the tightly linked dietâenvironmentâhealth trilemma is a global challenge, and opportunity, of great environmental and public health importance⊠As is well known,relative to animal-based foods, plant-based food shave lower GHG emissions. This difference can be large; the largest we found was that ruminant meats (beef and lamb) have emissions per gram of protein that are about 250 times those of legumes.â
The website that you linked to also leaves out several very key pieces of information, which are important factors in the global climate.Â
Production of meat is a major contributor to wildlife extinction and threatens biodiversity.Â
Consumption of fish is having a serious toll on the oceans. It is possible that oceans may be depleted of current âseafoodâ species by 2048.
Thereâs also the fact that âdepending on the type and number of animals in the farm, manure production can range between 2,800 tons and 1.6 million tons a year (Government Accountability Office [GAO], 2008). Large farms can produce more waste than some U.S. citiesâa feeding operation with 800,000 pigs could produce over 1.6 million tons of waste a year.That amount is one and a half times more than the annual sanitary waste produced by the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania(GAO,2008). Annually, it is estimated that livestock animals in the U.S. produce each year somewhere between 3 and 20 times more manure than people in the U.S. produce, or as much as 1.2â1.37 billion tons of waste (EPA, 2005). Though sewage treatment plants are required for human waste, no such treatment facility exists for livestock waste.â - CDC. Agriculture waste runoff is known to create ocean dead zones. And as Iâm sure you know, the oceans are a huge carbon and nitrogen sink.Â
â Livestock are already well-known to contribute to GHG emissions. Livestockâs Long Shadow, the widely-cited 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), estimates that 7,516 million metric tons per year of CO2 equivalents (CO2e), or 18 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions, are attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, horses, pigs, and poultry. That amount would easily qualify livestock for a hard look indeed in the search for ways to address climate change. But our analysis shows that livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 32,564 million tons of CO2e per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions â - Worldwatch Institute.
âGiven the urgency for global actionâcalls echoed by scientists and world leaders alikeâindividual consumers must also participate. McMichael et al. (2007) put forth several recommendations, including the reduction of meat and milk intake by high-income countries as âthe urgent task of curtailing global greenhouse-gas emissions necessitates action on all major frontsâ; they concluded that, for high-income countries, âgreenhouse-gas emissions from meat-eating warrant the same scrutiny as do those from driving and flying.â
I mean, youâre not wrong that electricity and other modern technologies are big contributors to climate change, and itâs very important for us to find alternatives. But reducing animal consumption is a huge step that people can make right now. If they wanted to, many people could make a dent in their contribution to climate change in a very short amount of time, with minimal lifestyle impact (compared to giving up a car or phone).
It honestly seems like people like you are unwilling to make any changes to their life to help prevent climate change.Â
When people give false information anonymously because they have no valid sources to back up their claim.
