Taking a Bite Out of Carbon Emissions

I imagine you've all heard it before (on this site, even): one easy thing we can do to reduce our carbon footprints is eat less meat. People have been saying it for years, but now that a trans-Atlantic shouting match over this issue is amplifying, it's a good time to start paying attention.

Here's the claim: Meat is bad for the environment. Or, to be precise, I should say eating industrially produced meat, and especially eating a lot of it, causes a lot of carbon emissions. We Americans tend to be guilty as charged, and we typically don't like to be charged, so the debate that's heating up on this topic is sure to get hotter in short order.

And indeed, it's been getting a lot of airtime lately, the most recent installment of which is biting into the goodwill of industry leaders and cattle-country politicians. One of the UK's top climate gurus, Lord Stern of Brentford, told the Times of London the other day that meat production puts pressure on the world's resources, wasting water and releasing tons of greenhouse gases. "A vegetarian diet is better," he told the Times.

Before all you meat lovers start throwing hamburgers at me, let me insert a caveat: full vegetarianism is better emissions-wise, surely, but teetotaling isn't necessary to make a difference. According to Grist, if all Americans were to stop eating meat just one day a week, it would cause the same reduction in emissions as taking 8 million cars off the road.

As you can imagine, the industry and its supporters are up in arms. Senator John Thune hurumphed his way through a response to Stern, calling the Lord's opinion "elitist lecturing." British meat companies, predictably, took exception as well, according to another piece in the Times of London.

A witty commenter on the latter article, Dbrent Willis, succinctly expressed both sides of the debate: "If we quit breeding large herds of animals for meat, population goes down, less animals producing less methane gas. Unfortunately, there will still be Lords and politicians producing more than their fair share of gas . . ."

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