All indications are that Green House Gas (GHG) emissions are causing higher global temperatures and climate change. Records show that 2024 was the warmest year on record. Climate change is increasing natural hazards, from hurricanes to wildfires. The Arctic permafrost is melting, emitting methane, a Greenhouse Gas (GHG) that is even more effective at trapping heat than CO2.
Globally, the energy sector is the greater contributor to GHG emissions, including heating/cooling buildings, roads, and transportation combined.
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However, the second-largest contributor to GHG emissions is agriculture.
While solutions such as rapid adoption of renewable energy options like geothermal, solar, wind, and energy conservation (insulation of buildings) or driving an electric vehicle ultimately can shift the trajectory of climate warming, such changes, assuming they are even enacted, require a significant cultural and economic shift in society’s values and policies.
Individually, one can ride a bike, use public transportation, insulate one’s home, and take other measures, but these options are not available to everyone.
However, there is one thing that everyone can do to reduce their GHG contributions. One does this by making careful food choices. What you eat can reduce individual GHG emissions, and also contribute to better water and land use.
The most immense single contribution to GHG emissions most people make is meat and dairy consumption. Cattle belches from rumination is the largest factor.
Depending on which study you consult, animal agriculture contributes more to GHG emissions than the burning of all fossil fuels for transportation.
Worse for the planet, much of the globe’s forests have been cut to create new pasture or ag land to grow livestock for forage. This has significantly reduced the ability of forests to store carbon. If these carbon emissions and losses are added to the emissions from livestock, the GHG emissions from this source are significantly increased.
When emissions from land use and land use change are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9% of CO2 derived from human-related activities.
However, other sources put the livestock contribution at 30%.
However, livestock produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65% of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure.
You can access this chart in full size with interactive features that allow you to choose various food products here.
Livestock production accounts for 37% of all human-induced methane (23 times as warming as CO2), produced mainly by the digestive system of ruminants, and 64 percent of ammonia, which contributes significantly to acid rain.
But there are other costs.
Consider that the majority of agricultural land across the globe is used for livestock production, primarily cows. Livestock now use 30% of the earth’s entire land surface, mostly permanent pasture, but also includes 33% of the global arable land used to produce feed for livestock.
Depending on how you calculate the total, as much as 86% of the Ag lands across the planet are used to support livestock. According to a new study, 60% of the mammals on the planet are cows.
Some 70% of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.
Cattle damage landscapes no matter how they are managed. They consume forage that would otherwise support native species. They pollute water. Irrigated pastures and hay fields are one of the main factors in de-watering of rivers in arid climates. They spread disease to wildlife. They compact soils and destroy bio-crusts (lichens and bacteria that hold soil together).
According to one study, eating beef causes 18-192 times as much GHG emissions as a plant-based diet.
Consuming vegetables can reduce GHG emissions. Photo George Wuerthner
The message is clear. Choose to eat less beef and dairy. A reduction in these two things will increase your personal and planetary health.
For another view into this check out The most damaging farm products? Organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb
Comments
Timely article! With the loss of our democracy in the U.S., the government will no longer be a responsible trustee of the public natural resource (wildlife) trust. The only hope is that people take on a much larger personal role. It is a slim hope but a barrage of this kind of article with concrete examples of personal action are more important than ever before.
“[N]o longer”? Where have you been? The U.S. has NEVER been responsible regarding the land or the native life here. The last responsible people were the Natives.
Not as responsible as we would like but we have the ESA, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, numerous national parks and wildlife refuges, etc. Perhaps the original “Natives” were responsible, or perhaps they lacked the means to do harm on a large scale but their modern descendants have a mixed record.
If you are a real environmentalist or if you actually care about ecosystems, habitats, and native life, you don’t eat beef, period. Most harmful food you can eat.
Eat more wild game.
‘According to one study, eating beef causes 18-192 times as much GHG emissions as a plant-based diet.’ Well which study was this? Also Salish rao, also writes about this issue of methane, but , once he gets into the ‘numbers’ it becomes gobblydegook. Unfortunately it is not you or Salish, it’s me, and my non math mind. Any help in deciphering these numbers would be appreciated.
Thank you!
I cannot tell you how tired I am of seeing article after article saying sure climate change is a problem but wait we can just give cows seaweed pills so we’re saved, no, no, IVF will mean less bulls so beef is back on the menu, or if more farms just used solar powered milking machines we will reach our climate targets. So to read this was great.