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RSS FeedMaking Meat and Fuel: A Recipe for Climate Change?
by Brian Halweil on February 13, 2008
There’s been a lot of talk the last few days about the
"ingredients," if you will, that go into making biofuels—fuel made from plants
and other biomass. Two recent studies in the journal Science
have shown that instead of saving energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions
(GHGs), biofuels are actually contributing to climate change and global
warming.
How? The answer is pretty simple. Prior to these new studies, scientists, energy experts, and the biofuels industry were leaving land use changes—deforestation, conversion of grasslands, etc.—out of the equation. Forests, savannahs, peatlands, grasslands, and well-managed pastures act as carbon sinks, sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locking it up. Destroying those areas to plant biofuel crops releases the carbon and, according to an article in the New York Times, will make climate change worse rather than better.
And it’s not just the biofuels industry that ignores land use changes. The carbon (and methane and nitrous oxide) footprint of producing meat, eggs, and dairy products has also been overlooked. Like biofuels, food animal production—especially in facilities that confine hundreds and even thousands of animals—precipitates land use changes. In just the last five months of 2007, more than 3,000 square kilometers of forest in the Brazilian Amazon has been destroyed thanks to high prices for beef and soybeans. Even slaughterhouses are being built where rainforests used to stand.
A recent article published in Environmental Health Perspectives (coauthored by my colleague Danielle Nierenberg) suggests that consumers and policymakers need to think more about not just reducing meat consumption, but considering all of the ingredients—from the production of fertilizers to grow livestock feed to deforestation—that go into meat production.
Our fuel and our diets will likely never be carbon neutral, but there are steps we can take to make them climate friendly.
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Problems with US model of agriculture in India and elsewhere and
I have been following your writing and work for quite some time. I am a cultural anthropologist and have been working in rural parts of South India for more than 40 yearts. I lived through critiquing the "Green Revolution" by farmers, etc. Recently I completed a small piece of research sponsored by the Netherland's Embassy in Delhi. It looked at unsuccessful sustainable agriculture in the four southern states. All of these are programs that emphasize small scale local production, crop rotations etc. however, what we found was that government policy which sees the US model as envious, as well as State governments that are focusing on export crops or tourism. When I gave a talk in Delhi in 07 I was able to use your work as well as others to point out the growing emphasis in the US of alternative agriculture and its popularity from farmer's markets, to CSA's, the your materials on Nebraska, etc. But, we really need to get the message out to much more of the people in the developing world that the official US model including all of the impossible things still remaining in the "farm bill" is being fought hard. The message that more and more people both consumers and small scale farmers are fighting in the US-- and that focusing on local production will produce greater food security in times of global warming. I do not know how much Worldwatch reaches out to other countries, but it is very important.
I am now working full time on these issues as well as trying to raise funds to support these nascent NGOs, the farmers they work with. I have my own tiny non-for-profit for which I try to raise funds for this purpose, but I want to link up with others doing similar things. I was a Professor at CUNY in NY but am now retired.
And by displacing soya and other food production out of the USA
the ethanol programme has contributed to that Amazon deforestation surge, it is widely acknowledged.
Please will Worldwatch and Sierra Club now call for abolition of biofuel targets whether these demand corn, or grasses that feed livestock, or woody biomass that gets far better CO2 savings used to substitute for coal.
These targets are also unnecessarily worsening recession, being absurdly expensive ways to deliver emissions savings as the leaked JRC and OECD reports as well as UK biomass strategy pointed out, to the extent there even are savings.