“A woman should wear fragrance wherever she expects to be kissed”-Coco Chanel
Laura Reynolds looks at some of the cheapest beauty products available
It would seem that being a veggie is pretty much the single most worthy decision you can make. As well as the obvious animal welfare concerns of most vegetarians who just can’t accept something dying for them to eat, it also turns out that not eating meat can save the planet. Amazing.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization published a report in 2006 stating that raising livestock generates more greenhouse gasses than transport. The crucial thing here is that there are worse things than CO2, despite what the wider media would have us believe. Those things are other greenhouse gases, namely in this case methane, which is 21 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Animal Agriculture creates more than 100 tonnes of this greenhouse gas each year.
Scientists at The University of Chicago have calculated that an average meat-eater emits 1.5 tonnes more greenhouse gas per year than a vegan. What’s more global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tonnes in 1999/2001 to 465 million tonnes in 2050.
Not only does it put more carbon into the atmosphere but meat production is also the driving force for mass deforestation, especially in Latin America. About 70 percent of what used to be forest in the Amazon is now used for grazing. It’s not a small venture either, 30 percent of the earth’s land surface is used in meat production; most of this is pasture but this figure also includes the 33 percent of land used for growing crops which are used to feed livestock.
And when meat production is using all this land it’s not taking care of it very well. Large animal herds cause considerable damage to the land on which they graze. 20 percent of pastures used for livestock grazing are considered as degraded through overgrazing, erosion and compaction.
And the evidence builds when we turn our attention to animal agriculture’s effect on the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources.
Raising livestock contributes to water pollution, euthropication and the degeneration of coral reefs. Meat is pretty water intensive: Beef requires 100,000 litres of water per kilo whereas soya (the most water intensive plant crop) needs only 2,000.
So at the end of her foray into Eco Warrior this Yorker writer is going to be, at the very least, cutting down her meat consumption. The only thing being a carnivore seems to have going for it is bacon sandwiches and I’m pretty sure even they won’t taste quite as good with animal lives and the planet on my conscience.
An excellent article, good to hear someone raise the (mostly) unspoken truth of meat consumption- that it is responsible for a huge proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions.
I was at a conference on climate change in London in January, and some of the back of the envelope calculations on it's true greenhouse impact (we can only guess, such is the scale of the industry) were that shocking I have actually given up meat!
You're right to raise the point about water consumption Charlie; I'd actually extend that to include all supply chain and support activities around the industry, which further inflates its impact. I'm not a naysayer and I believe people should eat what they choose, but if one is really serious about taking individual decisions to reduce their greenhouse impact, then eating less meat is a great way to start.
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