Here's the Meat of the Problem - washingtonpost.com

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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

<http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=20772 & Cr=global & Cr1=environment>,

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

<http://geosci.uchicago.edu/%7Egidon/papers/nutri/nutriEI.pdf> (PDF). A

study out of Carnegie Mellon University

<http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/environment/2009/winter/wheres-the-beef.shtml>

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

<http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=are_cows_worse_than_cars>

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

<kleine// or through his blog at

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

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