Wash Post: Environmental Impact of Eating Meat

[Guest guest]

The Meat of the Problem

By Ezra Klein

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

The debate over climate change has reached a rarefied level of policy

abstraction in recent months. Carbon tax or cap-and-trade? Upstream or

downstream? Should we auction permits? Head-scratching is, at this point,

permitted. But at base, these policies aim to do a simple thing, in a simple

way: persuade us to undertake fewer activities that are bad for the atmosphere

by making those activities more expensive. Driving an SUV would become pricier.

So would heating a giant house with coal and buying electricity from an

inefficient power plant. But there's one activity that's not on the list and

should be: eating a hamburger.

If it's any consolation, I didn't like writing that sentence any more than you

liked reading it. But the evidence is strong. It's not simply that meat is a

contributor to global warming; it's that it is a huge contributor. Larger, by a

significant margin, than the global transportation sector.

According to a 2006 United Nations report, livestock accounts for 18 percent of

worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Some of meat's contribution to climate

change is intuitive. It's more energy efficient to grow grain and feed it to

people than it is to grow grain and turn it into feed that we give to calves

until they become adults that we then slaughter to feed to people. Some of the

contribution is gross. " Manure lagoons, " for instance, is the oddly evocative

name for the acres of animal excrement that sit in the sun steaming nitrous

oxide into the atmosphere. And some of it would make Bart Simpson chuckle. Cow

gas -- interestingly, it's mainly burps, not farts -- is a real player.

But the result isn't funny at all: Two researchers at the University of Chicago

estimated that switching to a vegan diet would have a bigger impact than trading

in your gas guzzler for a Prius (PDF). A study out of Carnegie Mellon University

found that the average American would do less for the planet by switching to a

totally local diet than by going vegetarian one day a week. That prompted

Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change, to recommend that people give up meat one day a week to take

pressure off the atmosphere. The response was quick and vicious. " How convenient

for him, " was the inexplicable reply from a columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune

Review. " He's a vegetarian. "

The visceral reaction against anyone questioning our God-given right to bathe in

bacon has been enough to scare many in the environmental movement away from this

issue. The National Resources Defense Council has a long page of suggestions for

how you, too, can " fight global warming. " As you'd expect, " Drive Less " is in

bold letters. There's also an endorsement for " high-mileage cars such as hybrids

and plug-in hybrids. " They advise that you weatherize your home, upgrade to more

efficient appliances and even buy carbon offsets. The word " meat " is nowhere to

be found.

That's not an oversight. Telling people to give up burgers doesn't poll well.

Ben Adler, an urban policy writer, explored that in a December 2008 article for

the American Prospect. He called environmental groups and asked them for their

policy on meat consumption. " The Sierra Club isn't opposed to eating meat, " was

the clipped reply from a Sierra Club spokesman. " So that's sort of the long and

short of it. " And without pressure to address the costs of meat, politicians

predictably are whiffing on the issue. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, for

instance, does nothing to address the emissions from livestock.

The pity of it is that compared with cars or appliances or heating your house,

eating pasta on a night when you'd otherwise have made fajitas is easy. It

doesn't require a long commute on the bus or the disposable income to trade up

to a Prius. It doesn't mean you have to scrounge for change to buy a carbon

offset. In fact, it saves money. It's healthful. And it can be done immediately.

A Montanan who drives 40 miles to work might not have the option to take public

transportation. But he or she can probably pull off a veggie stew. A

cash-strapped family might not be able buy a new dishwasher. But it might be

able to replace meatballs with mac-and-cheese. That is the whole point behind

the cheery PB & J Campaign, which reminds that " you can fight global warming by

having a PB & J for lunch. " Given that PB & J is delicious, it's not the world's

most onerous commitment.

It's also worth saying that this is not a call for asceticism. It's not a value

judgment on anyone's choices. Going vegetarian might not be as effective as

going vegan, but it's better than eating meat, and eating meat less is better

than eating meat more. It would be a whole lot better for the planet if everyone

eliminated one meat meal a week than if a small core of die-hards developed

perfectly virtuous diets.

I've not had the willpower to eliminate bacon from my life entirely, and so I

eliminated it from breakfast and lunch, and when that grew easier, pulled back

further to allow myself five meat-based meals a month. And believe me, I enjoy

the hell out of those five meals. But if we're going to take global warming

seriously, if we're going to make crude oil more expensive and tank-size cars

less practical, there's no reason to ignore the impact of what we put on our

plates.

Ezra Klein can be reached at kleine or through his blog at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ezraklein.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/28/AR2009072800390.\

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