When talking to people about meat, I am always surprised about how little they know about it and how unconsciously they consume it. To be honest, I myself starting learning about the many implications of eating meat just recently even though my startup does work in environmental areas (more in the energy sector). In fact, my interest in this topic was sparked by the documentary Cowspiracy.

My intuition is that transforming the way we produce and consume food, mostly meat and animal based food, will be one of the big topics in the next two decades. My goal is to structure the complex problem in a simple manner, packaged in bite-sized blog posts. Here is the first one!

It’s getting hot in here!

It’s proven that the way humans live and do stuff has a negative effect on our environment. It is fancily called the anthropological climate change, meaning human-caused climate change, also referred to as global warming (If you want to appear smart at your next conversion: Anthropos is Greek and means human. Ha!). But why exactly? Basically, the Earth’s atmosphere is made out of different gases (see beautiful drawing above for a accurate depiction of the atmosphere). Some of these gases trap more heat than others. They are called the greenhouse gases (GHG). Everyone knows that CO2 is one. But there more, for example ozone, nitrous oxide, water vapor (yes, clouds are a greenhouse gas), methane and some more. Different gases trap different amounts of heat. That’s why some smart people decided that we should create an index to be able to compare their effect more easily. That’s where the term global-warming potential (GWP) comes in. GWP describes how much heat a gas traps compared to CO2 and its unit is hence CO2-equivalent. For example, methane’s GWP is 86x that of CO2 (over a 20 year period). The problem now is, that the way we live, behave and produce stuff puts more and more of these GHG into the atmosphere, fucking up the natural balance of Earth. This is setting off a chain of events that already today lead to unpleasant things like rising water levels, crazy-ass storms and what not. If we continue like this, eventually we will erase the human race and maybe some animals with us. The Earth doesn’t give a shit, it will recover. But we won’t.

Very rough break-down of global GHG emissions. About one third can be directly and indirectly attributed to livestock. Source: EPA (4)

Fine. But how does meat consumption affect the environment?

I guess you know that burning gas in your car emits CO2, that’s pretty straight-forward. “I don’t burn gas to cook meat”, you say. Yes, probably you don’t (unless you have a gas cooker or something). The thing is that livestock like cows, they eat a lot of grass and stuff. Therefore, they need to digest. And like you and me, they like to fart. You see what I’m getting at. Cow farts contain a shitload of methane (remember, one of the evil GHG). In fact, a single cow farts out 14.5 tons of CO2-equivalent methane per year (2, 3). That’s how much 20 elephants weigh. And those cows are farmed solely for the purpose of feeding you! Let’s try to put these 14.5 tons in perspective and answer the following question.

Is it worse for the environment to eat meat or drive a car?

Let’s pull up some facts, numbers and statistics to answer this question based on simple arithmetics. As mentioned, an average cow is estimated to produce 14.5 tons of CO2-equivalent methane per year. Also, we know that in the year 2013, the average US citizen consumed 80 pounds (or 36kg) of beef (4). Considering that the meat available from an average cow is ca. 195kg, one person consumes 18% of a cow per year. And 18% of 14.5 tons is 2.6 tons. So, one person contributes 2.6 tons of CO2-equivalent just by eating beef (and diary like milk and cheese). Please note that we are not taking into account other meat like lamb, chicken and fish and also other negative effects on the environment like transport, land and water use, waste etc. Furthermore, animal rights issues are extremely important but bracketed out of this article for focus reasons.

Putting the 2.6 tons in contrast to something more tangible, like driving a car, yields this: An average American dude drives about 11,400 miles per year. An average American car emits 411 grams of CO2 per mile driven. This leaves us with: 11,400 miles x 0.411kg = 4'685.4 kg or 4.7 tons of CO2 emitted per year while driving your car (5).

In conclusion: You eating beef (just beef) is more than 50% as worse as driving a car. Surprised?

Sources:

(1) EPA: Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data

(2) USDA: Cattle & Beef: Statics & information

(3) PSU: Livestock Methane Emissions in the United States

(4) USDA: Food availability per capita

(5) EPA: Greenhouse Gas Emissions from a Typcial Passenger Vehicle