Cool farming: Greenpeace's report on the impact of argiculture on climate change

Date: 2008-01-10

Agriculture is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Greenpeace’s new report Cool Farming details the destructive practices resulting from industrial agriculture and presents workable solutions to help reduce its contribution to climate change.

The full PDF report is here.

Interesting points in the study

Organic verse non-organic farming practices

Often we here from those who apologies for consuming animal products that they only eat organic. (We know the "only" in this respect means "when it is convenient", which comes down to some of what they eat at home.) The report shows that the production of organic animal based foods has a worse effect on climate change then does non-organic. If you want to cut your greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions either eat battery farmed eggs or give them up.

Livestock farming

This diagram nicely depicts the sources of GHG. What would improve it would be to show how livestock contributes to all those source, bar rice products.

Here is the executive summary for livestock:

Animal farming has a wide range of different impacts, ranging from the direct emissions of livestock, manure management, use of agrochemicals and land use change to fossil fuel use. Enteric fermentation contributes about 60%, the largest amount, to global methane emissions. The demand for meat determines the number of animals that need to be kept. Furthermore, the livestock sector is the largest user of land, with a shift in practice away from grazing to the growth of livestock feed crops. The use of high energy feed crops has recently encouraged the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, a major producer of soya used in animal feed. The demand for meat is increasing steadily, driven by economic growth, and is likely to encourage the expansion of intensive animal farms. The greatest increase in meat consumption is observed in developing countries (77% increase between 1960 and 1990), which previously had a very low meat consumption (8% of calories from animal very low meat consumption (8% of calories from animal sources) compared to developed countries (27% of calories from animal sources) in 1960. Sheep and beef meat have the highest climate impact of all types of meat, with a global warming potential of 17 and 13 kg CO2-eq per kg of meat, while pig and poultry have less than half of that. The production of pesticides is a comparatively low GHG emitter with 0.003 to 0.14 Pg CO2-eq annually.

We, those who campaign for veganism and vegetarianism, also get a mention:

Consumers can play an important role in the reduction of agricultural GHG emissions. A reduction in the demand for meat could reduce related GHG emissions considerably. Adopting a vegetarian diet, or at least reducing the quantity of in the field. meat products in the diet, would have beneficial GHG impacts. A person with an average US diet for example, could save 385 kcal (equating to 95 – 126 g CO2) of fossil fuel per day by replacing 5% of meat in the diet with vegetarian products.

Greenpeace - I hope they read the report too.

My hope now is that Greenpeace will recommend a vegetarian, or better still, a vegan diet publicly , because up to now, Greenpeace have ignore the vegan argument even more than Friends of the Earth.

Those of you who watched "Battleship Antarctica" about Greenpeace's attempts to stop a whale hunt by buzzing around tha Antarctic with a big ship and a helicopter, where no doubt as confused as I was about them expending all that effort on saving a few mammals and at the same time eating considerably more of them in their canteen. At one laughable point in the documentary one of the activists says "we are try to make this a fish free ship". Surely they understood that cow is more closely related to a whale than is a fish, and surely, they understanding, that if you must, eating fish is better for the environment and your health that eating cows. They do understand this don't they?

What is easier to do, mount an expedition to the antarctic or go vegan?

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