Meathane - Village Magazine

6 8 April 2016

ENVIRONMENT

Meathane

A joint of meat is more

damaging to the climate

than a long-haul ﬂight

We must swap

most of the animal

protein we eat for

vegetable protein

Charles Jones: Resting Cattle, Sheep And Deer

April 2016 6 9

by George Monbiot

he ﬁgures were so astounding that I refused

to believe them. I found them buried in a foot-

note, and assumed at ﬁrst that they must

have been a misprint. So I checked the source,

wrote to the person who ﬁrst published them,

and followed the citations. To my amazement, they

appear to stand up.

A kilogramme of beef protein reared on a British hill

farm can generate the equivalent of 643kg of carbon

dioxide. A kilogramme of lamb protein produced in the

same place can generate 749kg. One kilo of protein

from either source, in other words, causes more green-

house gas emissions than a passenger ﬂying from

London to New York.

This is the worst case, and the ﬁgure comes from a

farm whose soils have a high carbon content. But the

numbers uncovered by a wider study are hardly reas-

suring: you could exchange your ﬂight to New York for

an average of 3kg of lamb protein from hill farms in Eng-

land and Wales. You’d have to eat three hundred

kilograms (300kg) of soy protein to create the same

impact.

In choosing what we eat – or making any other choice

– we appear to take informed and rational decisions.

But what looks and feels right is sometimes anything

but. In this case, the very features we have been led to

see as virtuous – animals wandering freely across the

mountains, tended by horny-handed shepherds, no

concrete and steel monstrosities or any of the other

ugliness of modern intensive farming – generate aston-

ishing impacts.

The ﬁgures are so high because this form of hus-

bandry is so unproductive. To produce one lamb, you

need to keep a large area of land bare and

fertilised. The animal must roam the hills

to ﬁnd its food, burning more fat and pro-

ducing more methane than a stalled

beast would.

Yes, there are payoffs here. What is

good for farmed animals is often bad for

the natural world. The cruelties of inten-

sive indoor production are matched by

the wreckage of extensive outdoor pro-

duction. Free-range pig and chicken

farming, practised on the current scale,

can be environmentally disastrous.

Nitrates and phosphates sometimes pour

from their paddocks and into the rivers. Unless they are

kept at low densities or on well-drained ﬁelds, pigs tend

to mash the soil: a friend describes some of the farm-

ing he’s seen as opencast pig mining.

You can raise production – which means fewer green

house gases per kilo of meat – by dosing your animals

with hormones and antibiotics. But this too has a cost.

It’s now almost too late, the director of Antibiotic

Research UK warned this week, to prevent a global

superbug crisis. This is partly because unscrupulous

farmers have been chucking shedloads of the antibiotic

colistin – the last great hope of killing resistant bacte-

ria – at their animals, as it raises their weight.

But of all forms of production, the most attractive is

one of the worst. Hill farming not only makes a wildly

disproportionate contribution to climate change; it also

trashes our watersheds, increasing the chances of dan

gerous ﬂoods, and destroys what would otherwise be

our wildlife refuges: the great empty uplands, in which

economic activity is sustained only through lavish farm

subsidies. It is hard to think of any human activity with

a higher ratio of destruction to economic product.

My friends in the industry accuse me of being anti-

farmer. It’s true that I emphasise the dark side, largely

because so few other journalists seem prepared to

cover these issues. But I have no visceral dislike of

farming – quite the opposite. Visiting a farm on Exmoor

last week, I was reminded of all that is beautiful about

keeping sheep. The Arcardian idyll, a conception of the

shepherd’s life (in both Old Testament theology and

Greek pastoral poetry) as the seat of innocence and

purity, a refuge from the corruption of the city, reso-

nates with us still. But in the midst of a multifaceted

crisis – the catastrophic loss of wildlife, devastating

but avoidable ﬂoods, climate breakdown – entertaining

this fantasy looks to me like a great and costly

indulgence.

As for eating local food, well in some cases it makes

sense. It helps to engender a sense of place and belong-

ing, which should not be lightly dismissed. When we buy

seasonal fruit and vegetables from local farmers, it

works environmentally as well. But we’ve tended to over

emphasise food miles and to under emphasise other

impacts. On average, transport accounts for just 11% of

the greenhouse gas emissions caused by the food indus-

try. Pulses shipped from the other side of the world can

cause far lower impacts than meat produced here.

A paper published in December suggests that switch-

ing from meat to green vegetables would be

environmentally damaging. Per calorie, growing let

tuces produces more greenhouse gases than rearing

pork. But all this establishes is that lettuces are low in

calories. You would need to eat 15kg of lettuce to meet

your daily energy requirement, which might be reason-

able if you were a 200kg rabbit. As another study

remarks, “20 servings of vegetables have less green-

house gas emissions than one serving of beef”.

As the world’s people adopt the Western diet, a paper

in Climatic Change estimates, the methane and nitrous

oxide produced by farming could rise to the equivalent

of 13 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year by 2070.

This is more than all human activities combined can

safely produce without exceeding two degrees of global

warming. Climate breakdown looks inevitable – unless

we change our diets.

This, above all, means swapping most of the animal

protein we eat for vegetable protein. It’s not painful,

unless we make it so. Many British people used to eat

dhal every day. They called it pease pudding, pease

pottage or pea soup. As in South Asia, its ingredients

varied from place to place and season to season. It’s

just one component of a diet that offers plenty of vari-

ety – without trashing the great variety of life.

I’m not suggesting that you eat no meat or other

animal products. I am suggesting that we should all eat

far less.

This article ﬁrst appeared in the Guardian

www.monbiot.com

A ﬂight to New York has

the climate impact of

3kg of lamb protein from

hill farms in England.

You’d have to eat 300kg

of soy protein to create

the same impact