The Overconsumption of Meat and the Climate Crisis

Images: OurWorldinData.org

Shayna Blum

I became a pescatarian in the Summer of 2021. I mainly decided to become a pescatarian for environmental reasons since eating meat increases CO2 emissions.  With the influx of CO2, the carbon cycle is disrupted and thus causes our earth to overheat. This leads to many other problems for life on our planet, resulting in what we know as the climate crisis. This is an issue that I’m sure we all have heard about, but I’m here to tell you that it might just take eating one less burger a week to have a large impact. 

For some context, meat consumption has caused 26% of our global greenhouse gas emissions annually. You may be thinking: where does all this greenhouse gas come from? There are many factors that weigh into this but some key causes are the use of food and water during meat production, as well as land used to produce the meat, and distribution.

Emissions caused by food and water use: Many farmers feed cows soy & corn because of a congressional bill that pays farmers for growing these crops. Cows' digestive systems are designed for eating grass so this diet makes them produce extra gas and methane. Additionally, cow manure contains nitrous oxide and methane (a greenhouse gas). The fertilizer that helps grow the food for the cows also contains nitrous oxide. Runoff from fertilizer creates eutrophication (when there is a growth of plants in ponds or bodies of water causing a lack of oxygen and death of animal life). It also takes a lot of water (1,800 gallons) to produce one pound of beef. This is incredibly wasteful and harmful to the environment considering that we are in a drought.

Emissions caused by land and distribution: Many places where cows and other animals are raised are on land that has been cleared of trees. This deforestation creates pollution (burning trees releases CO2) and also removing trees is taking away important carbon sinks that take in a lot of our emissions in the first place. Trucks that transport meat from factories also create CO2.

Altogether, cows produce more greenhouse gas than 22 million cars per year. Additionally, America’s cows produce around 500 million tons of manure in a year (3x more than humans). This manure is responsible for 3⁄4 of nitrous oxide in the world. This may seem like a problem that is very remote and not easily solved.

However with further research about this system, I found that there are many ways to reduce your carbon footprint without cutting meat out of the picture completely. Cutting just one burger a week would remove as much greenhouse gas as not driving for 350 miles and if all Americans ate no cow products one day a week, it would have the equivalent climate-change prevention effect as taking 7.6 million cars off the road for a year.

Furthermore, many people do not realize that what they eat impacts the climate crisis dramatically. The more people that know about the importance of the food they consume, the more change we can make as a society. Of course, normal individuals are not the ones who are the most responsible for the climate crisis; big corporations and celebrities are. But we can still make a difference, even if it is just a small change in our lifestyles.

Sources:

Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2020) - "Environmental Impacts of Food Production". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food' [Online Resource]