So the 1/2 pound cheeseburger with bacon, pastrami, prociutto, speck, and steak shavings I was going to have for lunch is out then?

interesting how the health of the planet and the health of humans coincide on this one.

Wow, a pure, unadulterated, Green rationale for talking about yummy food on Ezra Klein.

As long as the yummy food is "lower CO2 emitting than the average American diet".

Nice to see Food police are now using the Climate Change excuse on why they should be dictating how people should live their lives.

I find it very difficult to believe that pasture finished beef that is not raised in CAFO conditions and is not feed with corn based feed is truly a great producer of CO2. I suspect that conclusion is only true if you focus strictly on local-ness and ignore sustainability

I feel like you should be a bit more upfront about the fact that the best thing we can do for carbon emissions is stop eating meat.

Nobody's dictating how you should live your life, Paul.

Is it really so outrageous to suggest that maybe we should start paying full price for our consumption choices, rather than foisting part of it off on everyone else?

if you shifted diets away from meat and toward some other product, you'd just shift agriculture to a different greenhouse emitter. instead of flatulent cows, you'd have 10x as many tractors and tillers. as i see it, the problem isn't so much that we demand meat. it's that the world, in general, demands a whole lot more food. American meat industries supply 43% of all the meat for the world.

In place of beef, may I suggest a massive shift of the American diet to soylent green? It will be locally produced in most areas and will produce a diet rich in protein without adding to our existing carbon footprint.

Cody-

The greenhouse emissions from meat production don't just come from flatulus, though that is part of it. Rather, the problem is that modern meat factories require a lot of grain, several times as much grain as would be required if it were consumed directly.

Substituting meat with more plant-based foods would therefore REDUCE overall crop acreage and the associated greenhouse emissions (or feed more people with the same acreage).

my (admittedly limited) understanding is that the grain that is fed to livestock is not the kind of grain that people generally consume except in cases of famine, like barley, but is much easier to grow and requires less intervention from farmers than would replacing all that acreage with something like corn.

but my second point was that it isn't exactly a fair measurement to say that growing livestock adds more to the footprint than transportation, since if every market for American meat had to grow it themselves, our share of the livestock carbon output would drop precipitously, and likely below the contribution from transportation. i hate to sound like a conservative blowhard, but this all seems like a confirmation bias on the part of those who'd like to see Americans eat less meat.

i should say, i also don't think, with world population growth as it is, that we can truly avoid a huge carbon footprint from food production. there's no reason to think, and no history to confirm, that a huge human population can be fed in any sustainable way.

in other words, as long as the United States plays farmer to the world (as we should since we have huge tracts of fertile land), we'll probably just have to live with the carbon output that results or develop new technologies to cope, because otherwise, were we to simply give it up, the development which we encouraged in much of the 3rd world that can not feed its own people would be a death warrant for millions of people. part of being progressive is making pragmatic choices that result in the best good, or at least, the least bad.

Cody, I may be mistaken, but I don't think we're sending huge shipments of beef out to famine-stricken countries. And I think the grains that food animals eat require nearly as much energy to harvest and ship as grains that humans eat.

As someone who cares about the environment, I wish people would eat less red meat. As someone who cares about the welfare of chickens as much as the welfare of cows, I wish people would eat more red meat, since you have to kill way more chickens than cows for the same amount of calories.

This study is very good news. The Seattle Riot Crowd really no longer has any credible justification for its efforts to calcify the impoverishment of the developing world.

Here's a relevant talk by Mark Bittman, a well-known food writer:
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/263

It's becoming increasingly clear that the meat industry is the single greatest threat to the planet -- not just an imminent threat but a deadly assault in progress. No one who eats meat has any claim to being an environmentalist.

Cody - It's pretty clear from the article that they measured the greenhouse gases from different types of food and that the greenhouse gas output of fruits/vegetables is significantly lower than that of meat. It would be reducing supply via reducing demand, not simply moving production elsewhere.

Cody,

In most CAFO settings, beef cattle over the age of six months are fed a mix of corn, soy, and other high-energy inputs. I believe the majority (over 80%?) of the beef cattle sold by US farms is raised this way. These high energy inputs come from land, the bulk of which could be diverted to cereals/other products for human consumption. I can't speak to the change in fertilizer- or labor/machine-intensiveness that would be required to produce food that meets human consumption standards, but my guess is that this change has a magnitude of GWP far smaller than the GWP directly attributable to beef production. Plus, considering ag in terms of total calories produced, if the land being used presently for beef cattle grain were converted to human “feed”, the net calories added to the world food markets would surely come out quite a bit higher (beef has a very low production calorie efficiency).

I understand your point about there being cases where marginal grasslands or certain forage sources, which cannot be used for human consumption, are efficiently used as cattle feed. However, if one were to optimize beef cattle production (using GWP as the driving metric) the number of beef cattle sold in this country would be quite a bit smaller than it is presently, and the world would probably not be the worse off for it.

my (admittedly limited) understanding is that the grain that is fed to livestock is not the kind of grain that people generally consume except in cases of famine, like barley, but is much easier to grow and requires less intervention from farmers than would replacing all that acreage with something like corn.

That's an interesting point. Certainly there are differences in nitrogen fertilizer needs for different crops (nitrous oxide is the greenhouse gas we're concerned about here - not tractors). There are a lot of complexities, of course. Even if a particular crop is more efficient, you have to consider what part it plays in an overall maximally efficient crop rotation scheme. I'd be delighted if you had a cite, some googling around didn't turn up anything that addressed the question directly (nothing outside a paywall, anyway).

Anyway, in practice, it's a moot point. Nobody is complaining about cattle fed with sustainably grown barley and forage. The problem is the vast quantities of meat produced in factory growing operations, fed on...Corn and soy.

Growing it locally is still a red herring. You still have to either grow substantially less, but sustainably, or you're just replacing replacing long distance shipments of meat with 6 times larger shipments of feed grain...

I failed math, so help me out here. How does driving 12,000 miles a year in a car that gets 25 mpg produce 4.4 metric tons of greenhouse gases? 12,000 divided by 25 = 480 gallons X 8 lbs a gallon =3,840 pounds, which is slightly less than 2 tons. How does that translate into 4.4 metric tons of gas? Does one American(?) ton equal 2.2 metric tons? Does one ton of flammable liquid increase in weight when burned?

in other words, as long as the United States plays farmer to the world (as we should since we have huge tracts of fertile land), we'll probably just have to live with the carbon output that results or develop new technologies to cope, because otherwise, were we to simply give it up, the development which we encouraged in much of the 3rd world that can not feed its own people would be a death warrant for millions of people.

I'm not sure I understand this.

No one is suggesting we shut down agricultural production. On the contrary - the point is that for every 1 billion people that can be fed on a meat-heavy diet, we could feed say, 2 or 3 billion on a meat-light diet (pulling the number out of my ..., but you get what I mean).

A metric ton is actually 1000kg, so 3,840 lbs is 1.7 metric tons.

A british ton is 2240 lbs, and a US ton is 2000 lbs.

Does one ton of flammable liquid increase in weight when burned?

Yes. One gallon (~6.3 pounds) of gasoline makes about 20 pounds of CO2. The carbon atoms combine with TWO much heavier oxygen atoms from the air.

Paul,

The gas in the tank is mostly long chain hydrocarbons. When these are combusted, most of the carbons end up reacting with oxygen, resulting in carbon dioxide. As a simple example, the perfect combustion of methane is represented by the following

CH4 + 2O2 -> 2H2O + CO2

The methane is analogous to the fuel you are talking about and weighs 16 g/mol. The greenhouse gas in this case is CO2 which weighs 44 g/mol. Here the weight difference is because of the reaction with oxygen. The GHG to fuel mass ratio is 2.75. Anyway, this should help explain the difference in mass of the combustion product versus the fuel input.

Damn Lecou, ya' beat me to it!

Off topic a bit, why is it that all of the nominally progressive blogs I read are riddled with John McSame 2008 adds... seriously.

Oh. Thanks.

How is it that chicken/fish/eggs combine to produce a smaller carbon footprint than cereals? Chicken are fed a diet that consists almost entirely of corn and soy, just as cattle are. Yet somehow by feeding the grain to chickens we reduce it's carbon footprint?

Actually, the graphic doesn't make any sense to me. Are these figures indicating the amount of carbon release by each component as a percentage of the total carbon footprint of world food consumption? If so (and I don't see how else to read the chart) that's not particularly useful. The fact that red meat is a big piece of the pie might simply mean that people eat a lot meat but that meat production releases no more carbon than oils/sweets/condiments per calorie. I don't think that's the case, but the way the chart is constructed it's a possible interpretation.

Rob Mac-

It's a chart of the share of greenhouse gas produced by various food industries in the US. It is not a comparison of the carbon intensities.

For example, it's not saying that meat produces 3x more greenhouse gas per pound/calorie/whatever than grain. It could be that they have the same carbon intensity, but we eat 3x as much meat. Or it could be that meat is actually 6x as carbon intensive as grain, but we eat half as much. Both are consistent with the chart. (Of course, the latter is closer to reality.)

That explains the chicken/eggs/fish as well. They probably have similar overall carbon efficiency to red meat, they're just produced/consumed in much smaller quantities.

Rob Mac, the truth is eating chicken isn't very carbon friendly, either. And eating fish is problematic for lots of other reasons.

And this study seems to have looked only at carbon and other greenhouse gases. Anyone want to guess how much more water, protein pound for protein pound, it takes to produce meat than potatoes? (Yes, potatoes contain protein.)

Looking more closely at the article, I see that it does say substituting "chicken, fish or vegetables" for red meat and dairy will reduce your carbon output.

Probably technically true, but I'd guess substituting chicken or fish probably doesn't reduce nearly as much as substituting vegetables.

The original paper is behind a pay wall, but the abstract says that red meat is 150% more carbon intensive than chicken and fish. No word about vegetables.

Jack: Since vegetables don't fart, don't eat other vegetables, and don't have a lifespan of several years before harvest, vegetables (plants) are indeed less carbon intensive than chicken or fish.

The main advantage of chicken over beef is that chickens generally live shorter lives before they are slaughtered, thus consuming less grain. However, chicken feed usually comes from rainforests cleared to grow soybeans.

For more see the UN report: Livestock's Long Shadow.

Also, I'm pretty sure the book Diet for a New America has lots of figures for various environmental costs of meat vs plants, though it's dated somewhat.

"Additionally, food shipped from far off may be better for the environment than food shipped within the country -- ocean travel is much more efficient than trucking."

Well, I don't know about that. Really, what this says is that people concerned about the environment should live on the coast or on major waterways.

Funny how that worked out...

Same comment I left on Brad Plumer's post (he's since edited it in response). Is there a reason you cite Plumer by name and quote him, while referring to the authors of the study (Christopher Weber and Scott Matthews, of CMU's Civil and Environmental Engineering department) as "two Carnegie Mellon researchers"? (Incidentally, the exact same formulation as Plumer's original post).

Aside from any issues of academic etiquette (or common decency, giving respect to the guys who probably spent a year of their lives studying this), it would seem more important to me to publicize and promote the people doing the hard work of contributing to human understanding. As far as I can tell, though, your sense of etiquette tells you that the important thing is to cite the author of the blog by which you came across the academic article, and leave the authors of the article itself unnamed.

Sure, you'd write the names and nobody would recognize them. But that's the point. They're the ones who need their names promoted.

I've always felt some skepticism about Pollan. I should probably read it before judging, but nonetheless what I've heard has always sounded a bit... wrong to me.

Anyway, I have a suspicion that a pound of humanely raised, small-farm, free range chicken is worse for the environment than a pound of CAFO-raised industrial chicken. Overall, of course, the small farms do less damage, but that's because the scale of their production is so much smaller, not because each pound of chicken (or whatever) produced has less environmental impact.

I'll admit I don't have figures to back this up off hand, but it's nonetheless I have some vague memory of hearing. If anyone has greater expertise, though, and knows otherwise, I'd appreciate a correction.

Keep things in perspective, from the article:

"For perspective, food accounts for 13% of every U.S. household's 60 t share of total U.S. emissions; this includes industrial and other emissions outside the home."

Three things the study overlooks that need to be accounted for.

1. Millions of buffalo existed in the US before cattle showed up. Buffalo emit methane just like cattle do.

Given that buffalo have been replaced with cattle it is likely that the amount of methane produced has remained static.

2. Cattle graze on and preserve prairies and other native habitats. Prairies act as tremendous carbon sinks and the amount carbon sunk needs to be accounted for in the emissions calculation.

3. If ag land is not used for grazing cattle it is going to be used for raising crops.

This means the existing habitat will be destroyed and replaced with a monoculture crop.

This process will release massive amounts of carbon as the prairie is converted to cropland. Then the fertilizer applied to the new farmground will lead to the release of N20, making the situation even worse.

The concept of changing the types of food consumed as a way of improving the environment is fatally flawed.

It is fatally flawed because it ignores the primary driver of grain commodity production, ag subsidies.

Ag subsidies pay farmers to raise grain, even worse they mandate the use of grain to produce ethanol for fuel. In spite of this people continue to cling to the mistaken idea that not eating meat is going to reduce grain production.

If you really want to improve the environment

1. Work to end ag subsidies
2. Eat more beef.

Many ecosystems evolved being grazed and they require grazing to maintain their health. Cattle grazing can produce food from areas that would suffer massive environmental degradation if crops were planted on it.

Also, cattle are very effective at creating additional food from farming. For example cattle can graze wheat while it is growing and then be removed when the wheat starts to mature. This wheat is harvested after it matures and the cattle have the weight they gained from grazing the wheat while it was growing. Another example of this is cattle grazing on cornstalks after the corn has been cut. They pick up the grain the harvesters missed, gain weight and again produce two crops from the same ground.

As a bonus for those concerned about animal welfare cattle raising is the most non intensive and animal friendly form of meat production there is.

The link below illustrates why the focus on diet is environmentally destructive.

The focus on diet causes people to expend time and effort on activities that have no chance of reducing environmental destruction while ignoring issues that have substantial impact.

This mis-allocation of effort allows ag environmental destruction to continue unimpeded.

What About the Land? A look at the impacts of biofuels production, in the U.S. and the world

The hype over biofuels in the U.S. and Europe has had wide-ranging effects perhaps not envisioned by the environmental advocates who promote their use. Throughout tropical countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, and Colombia, rainforests and grasslands are being cleared for soybean and oil-palm plantations to make biodiesel, a product that is then marketed halfway across the world as a "green" fuel.

One final link to help illustrate the futility of trying to change grain production by modifying the amount of meat you consume.

It helps illustrate the substantial negative impacts ag subsidies have in many environmental and societal areas not related greenhouse gas emissions. Please notice that beef is not in the list of commodities that receive the majority of subsidies.

Crop the Crap, An unacceptable farm bill.

Since the last farm bill was enacted in 2002, the five crops that receive the lion’s share of farm subsidies have also enjoyed massive price hikes: cotton (105 percent price hike), soybeans (164 percent), corn (169 percent), wheat (256 percent), and rice (281 percent).

They harm the environment by encouraging over-planting. By undermining America’s trade negotiations, subsidies raise consumer prices and restrict U.S. exports. Cotton subsidies undercut impoverished African farmers desperately trying to make a living. They contribute to obesity and rising health care costs by subsidizing corn and soy (from which sugars and fats are derived) rather than healthier fruits and vegetables.

I'm not a vegetarian, but the attitude of my fellow carnivores, desperate to build an argument to defend their current behavior rather than change it, is disappointing at best.

Look, I used to argue that local was better than veggie, but I admit that I was wrong. Can't you people man up and consider the possibility that your behavior might have to change at least a wee teensy bit? To be honest, the fact that it is more responsible for me to eat bananas out of season and enjoy a Chilean sea bass than it would be to eat local beef is not a bad compensation.

If you have a local CAFO, then maybe the locavore argument doesn't work as well.

However, I don't think there's anything wrong with supporting local, pastured cattle farms. Supporting these farms can change the culture of cattle farming.
Sustained by a local economy, these farms will likely operate on a more eco-systemic (as opposed to mono-culture) model, producing more than just meat - dairy, for one, but also whatever agriculture can be cultivated with cow manuer (sc). Chicken's can nourish themselves from the insects embedded in cow patties, for example.

If the option is buying a portion of a cow and storing it in your freezer, every six months or so, consumption will still stay relatively low anyway. The impact on public health will be minimal as well, since pastured beef is a lot higher in Omega-3 than grain fed.

For a great explanation about food and greenhouse gases read both Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. You don't have to be a mathematician or a scientist to see how CAFOs and factory farming exponentially contribute to greenhouse gases starting from the ubiquitous reliance on corn as the foundation of our food chain. It's a vicious circle that has reshaped food consumption and cost internationally while profitting no one but the big growers. And by the way, no is telling anyone how to live their lives or what to eat - it's your choice to support the system and kill the planet one small step at a time. But maybe the rest of us have a different view. If you want to have a look at the REAL "food police" read Pollan and you'll see who's REALLY dictating what you eat!!

I don't think the ocean vs. trucking comparison is apt -- food from abroad must use BOTH. Unless you are shopping right at the port...

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