Spitting In The Ocean
Meat and Atmospheric Carbon
Our family took up a claim from the Pennsylvania Climate Network concerning meat consumption and greenhouse gases at our dinner this evening. (Our dinners have changed recently as one of the family members has chosen to become more parsimonious in her meat consumption.) The claim was that meat consumption was responsible for greater loadings of atmospheric carbon than the annual burning of fossil fuels.
I am not an earth scientist, so I only have a general knowledge of the issue. But it seems to me that any meat I eat was not long ago a plant, and before that it was carbon molecules in the atmosphere and the top layer of the soil. So, from a "mass balance" perspective, where is the additional carbon coming from, with respect to the production and consumption of meat? There is another layer of processing for the carbon pulled from the soil and the atmosphere to feed me, but it is not clear to me how more atmospheric carbon is created by adding this layer. It was already part of the carbon cycling that goes on around here.
The counter point to this idea was that adding meat animals to our food chain reduces important carbon sinks (places outside the atmosphere where carbon can be stored for longer periods) because it takes more acres of land to feed meat animals than if all that crop production was being directly consumed by people. Certainly, that must be true. You could sequester more carbon for slightly longer periods of time if you didn't cut down so much forest to create so much cropland. But there, it seems to me that you are not so much reducing additions to atmospheric carbon as trying to maintain a natural system that, even before it was lost, was being overwhelmed with respect its regulation of atmospheric carbon.
The root of the greenhouse gas problem is that we are extracting 300 million years' worth of sequestered carbon from its underground storage and spewing it into the atmosphere as quickly as is economic (without counting environmental costs). Our burning of fossil fuel is what creates excessive atmospheric carbon. So, while the production and consumption of meat has some knock-on effects in that process, what is really a problem is the way we grow our foods (with fertilizers produced with fossil fuels, using tractors run on fossil fuels), the way we distribute them (in planes, trucks and ships - all run on fossil fuels - and by way of grocery markets heated and cooled with fossil fuels), and in the way that we seem disposed to eat them (cool in the summertime and warm in the winter - all made possible in one way or another by fossil fuels).
I do not know how the Pennsylvania Climate Action group generated the carbon loading estimates for the various meat animals, but I expect that they are valid with respect to their assumptions. However, I think that most of what they are measuring is "carbon cycle" carbon, not the additional carbon that we annually put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. And, even if fossil fuels generate a smaller volume of carbon than is cycled by meat animals, I believe that the serious part of the problem lies in reducing those additions to atmospheric carbon. Perhaps by buying local, driving less, dressing for the weather, and generally being more thoughtful about burning fossil carbon.
Ultimately, of course, we will need to get the prices right, and add in the un-captured costs of burning fossil fuels to what we all have to pay for its benefits. But that will make us all a little poorer, and I think selling that idea will have to wait for another day.