This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 21 May 2008, by Steve Leckie.
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31 Aug 09
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Christopher Weber
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Scott Matthews
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Via Science News
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21 May 08
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The study is flawed because it counts CO2 equivalents of methane and nitrous oxide which have an atmospheric lifetime of only 10-15 and 120 years respectively while CO2 has a lifetime of several tens of thousands of years.
This means that after rime the 8.1 tons of CO2 equivalent from meat and dairy farming will decrease while the 4.4 tons of CO2 generated from your average car will still be the same for tens of thousands of years.
Of course it still isnt good that meat and dairy farming polutes but one must take into account the time factor in such a study before comparing it to transport as when you look at this some will think we should rather be careful of the farming then the transport.
Conclusion: Transport is far worse then farming even though on the short term it looks like the opposite.
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As others have pointed out, the article incorrectly compared automobile emissions to food emissions.
It also did not compare full lifecycle emissions from the operation, manufacturing and storage of automobiles.
Emissions during the manufacture of an automobile are typically equal to around 20% of the operating emissions.
Each automobile requires road space to operate and at least 3 parking spaces; one at home; one at work and one at shopping. If the spaces are in a parkade, significant emissions occur in the construction. If the spaces are surface lots, they decrease the land that can be used by vegetation to sequester.
Road and bridge construction causes significant GHG emissions as well.
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Glad to see dairy lumped in with meat as major contributor to global warming. Even organic, grass-fed dairy is not a solution for tons of reasons, including the fact that grassfed cows emit 4 times as much methane as grain-fed cows.
I disagree that switching from red meat to fish is a good idea, since geophysicists Eshel & Martin published a U. of Chicago study in 2006 reporting that a fish-based diet is as bad as a red meat-based diet. The commercial ocean fishing industry emits ton of CO2 in fossil fuels, and salmon farms are extremely inefficient.
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if i (and others) stop eating meat, it follows that the animal population will increase. and wouldn't more numbers equate to an increased carbon production, just by their very existence? and how will that [probable] overpopulation then affect the rest of the biological structure?
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Yes, less meat means less animals raised for food.
But farm animals would be replaced by an increase in wildlife on the land no longer needed for agriculture. Much of this land could be returned to wilderness. While some natural grazing animals like Buffalo emit methane, it is more than offset by the carbon sequestered in the soil and plants that make up a healthy grassland wilderness.
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