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Eating meat is, in fact, the number one cause of global warming. Consider the facts:
• The United Nations report Livestock's Long Shadow determined that raising animals for food emits 18 percent of all global warming emissions, which is about 40 percent more than all the world's transportation systems—that's all the cars, trucks, SUVs, Hummers, ships, and planes in the world combined. (All residential and industrial buildings combined account for about 15 percent of emissions, and the entire chemical industry accounts for about 5 percent.)
• When measured by CO2 alone, power plants appear to emit more global warming emissions than animal agriculture, but this comparison is deceptive, as power plants don't generate energy for their own sake but rather to provide power for industrial and consumer purposes—like animal agriculture. To say that power plants are the number one cause of global warming would be like saying that humans are the number one cause. In fact, animal agriculture uses enormous amounts of the energy produced by power plants to grow and process feed crops (the vast majority of staple crops grown in the U.S. are fed to farmed animals); to operate factory farms, slaughterhouses, and processing plants; and to ship animals' flesh, eggs, and milk in refrigerated trucks and to store it in refrigerated cases.
• All this power used (and CO2 emitted) by the animal agriculture industry is in addition to the fact that the industry is the number one emitter of both methane and nitrous oxide. Along with carbon dioxide, these two gases cause the overwhelming majority of global warming.
• The official handbook for the Live Earth concerts says that "refusing meat" is the "single most effective thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint" (emphasis in original). The researchers for this handbook based this on their scientific research, based (we assume) on the points above.
If you'd like to learn more about helping to save the Earth one bite at a time or order a copy of PETA's free "Vegetarian Starter Kit" that's full of delicious recipes and handy shopping tips, visit www.GoVeg.com/eco.
This article’s focus on chickens is again misleading. The solution for environmentalists is to withdraw our support for animal agriculture. Eating chickens is unnecessary, and it's a part of the number one cause of global warming. In fact, according to Environmental Defense, "If every American skipped one meal of chicken per week [and substituted vegan foods], the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads."
In addition to emitting enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, the chicken industry also causes staggering amounts of pollution. Oklahoma's attorney general is suing poultry factory farms in Arkansas because their manure runoff is decimating life in Oklahoma's waterways. He said that if nothing is done, the chicken factory farms would "[d]estroy the water and … destroy the future for our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren." In addition, Greenpeace recently condemned KFC and the chicken industry in general for destroying the Amazon rain forest to grow crops to satisfy their voracious need for chicken feed.
It may be an inconvenient truth to meat-eaters who care about the environment, but solving global warming and the world's other leading environmental problems will not be accomplished simply by switching light bulbs or cars. Consider that researchers at the University of Chicago determined that switching to a vegan diet is more effective in countering global warming than switching to a hybrid car. And as noted, the U.N. report mentioned above says that animal agriculture is "one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."
Sincerely,
Matt Prescott
Assistant Director
PETA
