A CONVENIENT LIE??

ARE WE OVERLOOKING ONE OF THE MOST AVOIDABLE CAUSES OF GLOBAL WARMING - OUR DIET!

By Tina Volpe

I applaud Al Gore for shaking this country to the core and creating such an educational and jolting film.  However, whether it be political, or just plain ol’ family history (The Gore family are cattle ranchers) Al Gore failed us terribly.  He neglected to tell us the whole truth.   Global warming poses one of the most serious threats to the global environment ever faced in human history.  But he conveniently decided NOT to mention one of the main culprits behind the global warming we see today. Factory Farming: huge agribusiness's raising animals for food.  The most effective and immediate strategies for reducing global warming in our lifetimes: advocating a vegetarian diet.

Kicking the meat habit is a required choice for anyone who cares about the environment.  More than one million animals are raised and killed every hour to supply Americans with flesh. This process destroys the environment... accelerating global warming and polluting the air, soil and our water. Meat production also drains scarce land, water, and mineral resources. Every meal you eat provides an opportunity to help or hurt the environment and to set an example for others.

Global warming threatens planetary survival through destruction of wildlife habitats, flooding of coastal communities, and extreme weather conditions. Melting glaciers deny habitats to polar bears and seals. The resulting rise in ocean levels will flood low-lying coastal communities like New York and New Orleans. Warming of ocean waters intensifies hurricanes and droughts that cause extensive property damage and destroy soil productivity.

Global warming is brought on by emission of so-called “greenhouse gases,” primarily carbon dioxide and the much more potent methane and nitrous oxide. These gases trap the sun’s heat in our atmosphere creating a greenhouse effect.

Most of us, as well as Gore, blame automotive and industrial emissions for global warming, and rightly so. But animal agriculture is a major culprit as well. It contributes carbon dioxide from burning forest land to create animal pastures and from combustion of fossil fuels to operate farm machinery, factory farms, animal transport vehicles, and slaughterhouses. It contributes methane from the digestive tracts of cattle and nitrous oxide from animal waste cesspools.

According to a recent study by University of Chicago professors Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, a vegetarian diet uses less fossil fuel and is therefore more energy efficient and less polluting than the “mean American diet,” a mixture of plant and animal foods. They found that adopting a vegetarian diet reduces greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide per year - as much as switching from an SUV to a compact.

The food that people eat is just as important as what kind of cars they drive when it comes to creating the greenhouse-gas emissions that many scientists have linked to global warming, according to a report published in the April issue of the Journal Earth Interactions.

Both the burning of fossil fuels during food production and non-carbon dioxide emissions associated with livestock and animal waste contribute to the problem, the University’s Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin wrote in the report.

The average American diet requires the production of an extra ton and a half of carbon dioxide-equivalent, in the form of actual carbon dioxide as well as methane and other greenhouse gases compared to a strictly vegetarian diet. Cutting down on just a few eggs or hamburgers each week is an easy way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, they said.

“We neither make a value judgment, nor do we make a categorical statement,” said Eshel, an Assistant Professor in Geophysical Sciences and the College. “We say that however close you can be to a vegan diet and further from the mean American diet, the better you are for the planet. It doesn’t have to be all the way to the extreme end of vegan. If you simply cut down from two burgers a week to one, you’ve already made a substantial difference.”

The average American drives 8,322 miles by car annually, emitting 1.9 to 4.7 tons of carbon dioxide, depending on the vehicle model and fuel efficiency. Meanwhile, Americans also consume an average of 3,774 calories of food each day.

In 2002, energy used for food production accounted for 17 percent of all fossil fuel used in the United States. And the burning of these fossil fuels emitted three-quarters of a ton of carbon dioxide per person. That alone amounts to approximately one-third the average greenhouse-gas emissions of personal transportation. But livestock production and associated animal waste also emit greenhouse gases not associated with fossil-fuel combustion, primarily methane and nitrous oxide.

“An example would be manure lagoons that are associated with large-scale pork production,” Eshel said. “Those emit a lot of nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.”

While methane and nitrous oxide are relatively rare compared with carbon dioxide, they are—molecule for molecule—far more powerful greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. A single pound of methane, for example, has the same greenhouse effect as approximately 25 pounds of carbon dioxide.

In their study, Eshel and Martin compared the energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions that underlie five diets: red meat, fish, poultry, vegetarian (including eggs and dairy) and the average American diet, which consists of a little bit of everything, all equaling 3,774 calories per day. Some of the food containing these calories is discarded rather than eaten.

The strict vegetarian diet turned out to be the most energy-efficient.

The impact of producing fish came as the study’s biggest surprise to Martin, an Assistant Professor in Geophysical Sciences and the College. “Fish can be from one extreme to the other,” Martin said. Sardines and anchovies flourish near coastal areas and can be harvested with minimal energy expenditure. But swordfish and other large predatory species require energy-intensive long-distance voyages.

Martin and Eshel’s research indicated that plant-based diets are healthier for people as well as for the planet.

“The adverse effects of dietary animal fat intake on cardiovascular diseases is now well proven. Similar effects are also seen when meat, rather than fat, intake is considered,” Martin and Eshel wrote. “To our knowledge, there is currently no credible evidence that plant-based diets actually undermine health; the balance of available evidence suggests that plant-based diets are at the very least just as safe as mixed ones, and most likely safer.”

We must not only avert this crisis by changing our diets to avoid consuming all animal products altogether, but consider the consequences of mass producing animals on our world.  The insanity of over a billion people, or 1 in 6 people going hungry is so barbaric when we think about how much of our food grown goes to feeding animals.  40% of food grown in the world goes to feed livestock. 

Animals suffer in nearly the same way as humans. They feel pain, they feel joy, they feel fear and every single animal, humans included, holds on to life with everything in it’s power....None welcome death.   In factory farms, countless veal calves, pigs, and chickens are routinely crowded, subjected to 24-hour darkness (or 24-hour bright light), detailed or de-beaked, shot up with hormones and antibiotics and left to wallow in their own excrement. There is no sunshine or dirt.  The natural environment that animals were meant to exist in, is nonexistent.   The systemic abuse inflicted in factory farms challenges our sense of ethics and morals.  Plutarch said:  "But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy."  I believe this says it all.

The world, in this writers opinion, would be a much more compassionate, healthy, cool place if we all were to go vegan.

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