Home/Posts Tagged ‘livestock’
Posts Tagged ‘livestock’
Climate Change, Green living, Sep 8th, 2010,
Environmental writer and Guardian columnist George Monbiot knows a lot more about environmental issues than I do. But his latest article, ‘I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly’, seems too much of a flip-flop: from advocating one ‘extreme’ lifestyle to going a bit close to absolving meat eating’s environmental damage, because theoretically, the livestock industry could be a lot more sustainable. It is admirable for a public intellectual to admit he was wrong and Monbiot’s article makes good points, gleaned from Simon Fairlie’s book Meat: A Benign Extravagance. But the issue was never…
Tags: environmental, farm, George, industry, livestock, meat, Monbiot, vegan, veganism
Green living, Aug 18th, 2010,
A: The environmental impact of meat and dairy products is a complex problem. The livestock industry is damaging our planet in many ways. It is polluting the air – according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report, it generates more greenhouse gas emissions, including CO2 (18%) and methane, than the whole world’s transport (13,5 %). It is polluting the water – gigantic containers called “lagoons”, where livestock animals’ manure and urine are stored, may leak or even break under heavy rains and storms. The waste is highly toxic and very often contains lots of antibiotics and dangerous bacteria….
Tags: Air Pollution, biodiversity, co2, dairy, ecosystem collapse, environment, lagoons, livestock, meat, methane, overfishing, TOXIC, water pollution
Climate Change, Green living, Aug 2nd, 2010,
As an alternative to cutting meat consumption in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is considering the promotion of insects as a food source. The idea comes from a UN policy paper by a Belgian scientist at the University of Wageningen named Arnold Van Huis, who points out that most of the world already eats insects. In meat-rich Western diets – which are growing throughout the rest of the world and thereby causing emissions to increase – eating insects is somewhat taboo, but eating shrimp, which are very similar to insects, is considered…
Tags: beetle, citrus, emissions, farming, food, gas, greenhouse, insects, livestock, longhorn, meat, shrubs, trees, UK, UN, Van Huis
Green living, Health, Jul 16th, 2010,
A recent piece for The Ecologist, entitled ‘Biomass Britain: do fields of energy crops spell an end to grazing livestock’, explores the possibility of a revolution in the UK’s land use. 70-80% of land in the UK is used by the British livestock industry. The possibility of a near-complete shift from livestock farming to the growing of food crops and biomass for energy production may sound revolutionary to some and catastrophic to others. It would mean the de-industrialization of Britain’s meat industry and a 60-70% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, according to The Ecologist article. It’s a revolutionary vision that…
Tags: biomass, British, carbon, change, diet, emissions, energy, farming, forestry, industry, livestock, meat, Peel, plant, Scotland, Scottish, UK, wood
Climate Change, Science & Technology, Videos & Documentaries, Apr 11th, 2010,
One third of greenhouse gasses in New Zealand come from livestock, according to the below report from CNN Eco Solutions. Home to just 4 million people, New Zealand has 38 million sheep 9 million cows, which fuel large export industries in dairy, meat and wool. These animals produce vast amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times stronger than CO2. Scientists in New Zealand are attempting to produce a vaccine that inhibits the microscopic methanogens that live inside the stomachs of sheep and cows from producing methane. CNN – Tackling belching cows Vaccinating the world’s cow population is one approach…
Tags: CNN, cows, dairy, emissions, gas, greenhouse, livestock, meat, methane, New Zealand, sheep
Climate Change, Science & Technology, Mar 28th, 2010,
When it comes to the effect livestock has on the environment, most people “in the know” will cite the UN’s “Livestock’s Long Shadow” report. This report basically claims that more greenhouse gas comes from livestock (18%) than all of the world’s transportation combined (15%). However, Frank Mitloehner, an air quality expert from the University of California-Davis, did some detective work recently and his findings strongly suggest otherwise. Mitloehner discovered that the livestock vs. transportation comparison is based on faulty data. How? Well, according to him, the livestock portion of the report takes into account everything that goes into animal agricultural…
Tags: Climate change, flawed comparison, fossil fuels, greenhouse gas emissions, livestock, meat, study, Transportation
Climate Change, Science & Technology, Feb 19th, 2010,
A new article in The Ecologist shines a light on methane, the often-ignored greenhouse gas that is produced from both natural and human sources. Methane’s contribution to the greenhouse effect is estimated to be about 18% compared to CO2′s 63%. Yet it is also 20-30 times more potent than CO2 and has only one tenth the atmospheric life span. This means that methane emission reduction could have a significantly more immediate effect on curbing climate change than cutting CO2, which hasn’t happened yet on a global level anyway. Man made methane emissions can be reduced in among the following ways:…
Tags: acid rain, arctic, capture, carbon, Climate change, co2, emissions, gas, global, greenhouse, livestock, methane, permafrost, warming, wetlands
Climate Change, Wildlife & Flora, Jul 31st, 2009,
Last summer I happened to see an exceptionally interesting episode of the BBC News interview program HARDtalk hosted by Stephen Sackur. It was one of several installments of HARDtalk dealing with topics concerning the environment, climate change and specifically man-made greenhouse gas emissions. One portion in particular called attention to the often conveniently ignored opinion that the livestock farming industry – and meat eating especially – are the practices which contribute most to global warming or climate change over the shortest period of time. This means that their effects are more immediate and more severe than other, far more publicized…
Tags: Climate change, environment, greenhouse, livestock, meat
