Conscious Choice of Food Can Substantially Mitigate Climate Change, Research Finds

Reducing the consumption of meat and dairy products and improving agricultural practices could decrease global greenhouse gas emissions substantially. By 2055 the emissions of methane and nitrous oxide from agriculture could be cut by more than eighty percent, researchers of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research find. The results of the modelling study have recently been published in the journal Global Environmental Change.

"Meat and milk really matter," says Alexander Popp of PIK. "Reduced consumption could decrease the future emissions of nitrous oxide and methane from agriculture to levels below those of 1995," explains the first author of the study. In the past, agricultural emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly methane and nitrous oxide, have increased steadily. In 2005 they accounted for 14 percent of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. "Besides the conscious choice of food on the consumers' side there are technical mitigation options on the producers' side to reduce emissions significantly," says Popp.

The researchers used a global land use model to assess the impact of future changes in food consumption and diet shifts, but also of technological mitigation options on agricultural greenhouse gas emissions up to 2055. The global model combines information on population, income, food demand, and production costs with spatially explicit environmental data on potential crop yields.

The calculations show that global agricultural non-carbon dioxide (non-CO2) emissions increase significantly until 2055 if food energy consumption and diet preferences remain constant at the level of 1995. Taking into account changing dietary preferences towards higher value foods, like meat and milk, associated with higher income, emissions will rise even more. In contrast, reducing the demand for livestock products by 25 percent each decade from 2015 to 2055, leads to lower non-CO2 emissions even compared to 1995.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100628075744.htm

I think eating more carefully would be the less traumatic option.

Wow. DU shocks me yet again.

I NEED my chicken-fried steak with a side of bacon for breakfast, 18-inch Philly cheese steak for lunch, and full 16 ounces of chemically cured ham with potatoes au gratin for dinner. :puke:

There, ya happy?

I want dozens of posts about how vegetarians are snotty, proselytizing windbags trying to control what everyone eats! I want PETA kills dogs and "oh, we should all eat like Hitler now, eh?" I want downright factual lunacy about how vegans can't get what they need without vast sums of supplements, and even then they're scrawny little morons with no "big carnivore brain" I want H2 finger-waggers and chastising climate-changeers screaming about what dead animal they'll be eating tonight!

I HAVE CANINES FOR A REASON! Practically a lion with these friggin things.

I haven't made my point-and-laugh quota yet today. Can you tell?

"I'm koo-koo for couscous"

If there was, I'd give up meat in a heartbeat.