How your Beef Burger Contributed to Climate Change
Words by Emma Goldrick
This article is part of PULPCLIMATE week. CLICK HERE to join the facebook group. University of Sydney Students will be marching from Fischer Library at 10:00 AM on the 20th of September.
The 2018 journal ‘Science’ concluded that cutting meat and dairy products from your diet and lifestyle is the single biggest way to reduce your individual environmental impact. Discourse on climate change predominantly (understandably) places the onus on environmentally impactful corporations (i.e. mining companies) or government inaction (i.e. current Liberal Government), however, the discussion must also incorporate the day-to-day decisions individuals make that collectively fuel destructive industries.
Rather than only speaking about climate change at an arms-length and deferring the issue to higher institutional bodies, it is integral to make personal decisions to ensure you are making an environmentally conscious choice. As a consumer the decisions we all individually make when at the supermarket or out for dinner constructs the market. Consumer demand fundamentally dictates the larger institutions that contribute to the market. Individuals shifting their diet will eventually shift the entire market to a more environmentally sustainable future.
MEAT AND DAIRY
In Australia, the largest contributors to climate change are the mining sector and the agricultural industry. Within the agricultural industry exists a tiered and compounding environmental effect, that includes the land, water usage, pollution and energy.
Land: Land is continuously cleared in order to make room for the livestock required to cater to meat and dairy diets. 83% of farmland in Australia homes livestock that will then be processed through the dairy and meat industries. With land clearing comes the loss of native flora and fauna and the habitats that house these species. Data provided by The Wilderness Society recently showed that beef is the number one driver of the deforestation crisis. In the same research, The Wilderness Society analysed 1.6m hectares of land that was cleared between 2013 and 2018 in Queensland, finding 73% was cleared for beef production. The governments own report already showed that more than 90% of land clearing in the state was for pasture. Overall, the world uses 30% of landmass for livestock farming, a figure that is astonishing when resources are becoming more and more scarce.
Pollution: Meat and dairy production creates pollution through the use of fossil fuels, methane and effluent waste. Globally, the agricultural industry is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emission, with 75g of beef contributing 8kg of greenhouse gases. This means the production of beef emits eight times the amount of chicken and twenty times the amount of vegetable proteins i.e. beans. The production of meat, especially in the quantities required by the worlds current population hold devastating water and air pollution consequences.
Water: The meat industry is immensely water-intensive, in fact, each year nearly half of all the water used in the U.S. goes into the agricultural industry, used to raise animals for food production. The agricultural sectors use of water is a compounding effect, in which water consumption is required in every section of the process; not only does the animal require an abundant amount of water, so does the land it gazes and the food it eats. The production of red-meat is highly inefficient - to produce one kilogram of beef will require 15, 000 litres of water and 25 kilos of grain.
In a single year, over 50 billion animals will be raised and slaughtered for the production of meat and dairy for human consumption. Not only does the beef and dairy industry raise questions of morality both from an animal rights and environmental perspective, but they also contribute considerably to the destruction of the environment. Individuals decisions are what fuel large corporations, industries such as the agricultural sector would not hold such devastating environmental impacts if people consciously made the decision to cut or reduce meat and dairy products from their diets. Individuals opting for a vegetarian or vegan diet (or just reducing their red-meat intake) has a far less harmful impact of the environment.
Statistics state that a vegan diet produces a 42-84% lower burden on the environment than the diet recommended by the U.s. government. Vegetarian and vegan diets are also far less water-intensive, with researchers finding that if the world was vegan we would use 19% less water in food production. On top of this, it was found that if the world moved to a plant-based diet global land use would be reduced by 75%! Moving to a plant-based diet reduces Humans can meet their nutritional requirements through food that does have such harmful environmental consequences, a decision that significantly reduces the strain to the world's environment. The single biggest thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is to cut-out/reduce your red-meat intake and use other sources of protein to balance your diet.