Ever since Leonardo di Caprio, Julia Roberts and the other Hollywood superstars discovered the Prius, the hybrid car has become the symbol of the consumer battle against global warming. But few consider that a much more efficient, cheap way to prevent sea levels, floods and droughts from devastating the planet as we know it, is to turn vegetarian.
A study “Earth Interactions – Diet, Energy and Global Warming” published last year shows that a person adopting a vegetarian lifestyle, including no components from the animal world, contributes more to halting global warming than a person who abandons his regular car for a Prius.
Shifting gears to a Prius saves more than a ton of carbon-dioxide emission a year, while adoptin vegetarianism saves at least 1.5 tons of carbon-dioxide emission a year.
“Livestock impacts on the environment”, a study recently published by the UN’s food and agriculture organization, finds that the livestock industry is responsible for a fifth of the greenhouse gas emissions in the world, more than the transport industry. Billions of cows and chickens crammed into industrialized farms are responsible for 37% of the world’s methane emissions. There may be less methane emissions than carbon dioxide emissions, but it’s 23 times more efficient as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
If that weren’t bad enough, cultivating animals for meat, milk and eggs increases carbon dioxide emissions, the main greenhouse gas, because of the tremendous amount of energy used in heating and cooling chicken coops, sties and cowsheds; transporting their food and drink; removing their waste; slaughtering them; processing them into food; and storing the food in cold storage.
The amount of fossil fuel needed to create one calorie of food from livestock is ten times greater than the amount of fossil fuel needed to create one calorie of vegetarian food. Producing food from livestock therefore causes ten times the amount of carbon-dioxide gas emissions.
Moreover, the amount of energy that chicken gives a person eating it, is 14% of the amount of energy invested in producing it. Cultivating corn and soy beans provides seven and six times the amount of energy invested in their production, respectively.
Breeding and processing animals for food is not only wasteful of energy. It requires tremendous amounts of an increasingly scarce element – water.
Producing one kilogram of meat takes 20,000 liters of water. That is 50 times the amount of water needed to produce one kilogram of wheat.
Producing one kilogram of protein from meat takes 15 times more water than producing the same amount of protein from vegetable matter.
The environmental devastation being caused by the world livestock industry does not end in energy and water. Industrial economies are the main source of pollution in the world, and are responsible for two-thirds of the ammonia that contributes to acid rain. Excretions of animals cultivated in the developed economies contain a plethora of dangerous chemicals like phosphorus, arsenic, and antibiotics. Waste from slaughterhouses is the source of more than half the toxic organic pollution found in potable water. The U.S. has found that waste from industrialized farms creates double the pollution of any other industrial source, and ten times the amount of pollutants that humans excrete into the sewer.
A coop with 30,000 chickens produces 40 tons of waste each week. Each cow excretes feces and urine equivalent to that of 40 people. To vacate land for grazing, rain forests are cut down in South America and in southeast Asia. During the last 25 years, almost half the tropical forests of central America were destroyed, mainly to create grazing land.
An inter-governmental report on climate change that the UN released last week ruled, once and for all, that humans are responsible for global warming.
So the next time you’re deliberating between a shwarma or a felafel, between a chocolate milk versus a fruit shake, go for the latter. Adopting a vegetarian lifestyle is about the most efficient thing you can do to reduce greenhouses gases.