Anyone for Vegetarian?

The meat in the global warming sandwich

March 23, 2009
Sydney Morning Herald

Forget the carbon-belching car or the coal-fired power station - it's the humble steak we should be worried about, writes Tim Elliott.

Student Will Schmidt gave up meat for ecological reasons.

Picture a giant pile of meat. No - a much bigger pile than that. We're talking more than one million tonnes of the stuff - a huge, steaming tower of T-bones and rumps.

That is how much red meat Australians consume each year.

Now, place next to that all 38 of Australia's coal-fired power stations. Which do you think is the greatest threat to the environment?

The answer is clear, according to Mark Berriman, the director of the Australian Vegetarian Society.

"Not many people know it but the meat industry is a big contributor to climate change," he says. "People talk about helping the environment by stopping driving and getting low-energy light bulbs but the most effective thing you can do is cut red meat out of your diet."

Berriman is not alone in this opinion. Last year, Nobel laureate Rajendra Pachauri, the chief of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, strongly suggested the world's population curb its consumption of meat to counter global warming. Pachauri's suggestion was based in part on the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, which has estimated direct emissions from meat production account for about 18 per cent of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions, beating transport, which accounts for just 13 per cent.

The figure includes greenhouse gases released at every stage of the meat production cycle - clearing land, burning fossil fuels in farm vehicles and the front- and rear-end emissions of cattle and sheep. Indeed, Australia's cattle and sheep fart out about three megatonnes of methane a year.

Methane is a particularly noxious greenhouse gas the intergovernmental panel calculates is 62 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period. Some researchers have used these figures to conclude that three megatonnes of cow farts equate to 186 megatonnes of carbon, which is more than the 180 megatonnes of CO2 emitted by all of Australia's coal-fired power stations.

Naturally, the meat industry disputes this. It has also questioned claims by the University of California that it requires a staggering 19,737 litres of water to produce 450 grams of beef. (According to Meat and Livestock Australia, it takes between 27 and 540 litres to produce one kilogram of beef, depending on how and where livestock are raised.)

Still, environmentalists remain adamant that shunning meat is the best thing you can do for the environment - not to mention your health. Berriman cites the Hunza people, who live in a remote valley in the western Himalaya and whose mainly vegetarian diet enables them to reportedly live to 100, 120, even 140 years old. "They're bearing children into their late 90s," he says. "Riding horses at 120."

As disturbing as a 98-year-old mother breastfeeding on the bus might be, it is nothing compared with the seismic shifts that a beef-free world would inevitably unleash. Carnivores would have to contend with tofu schnitzels, legume sausages and meat substitutes like quorn, a scrumptious-sounding mycoprotein made from the fermentation of fungus mixed with egg white. Some might be able to subsist on kangaroo meat, as chief climate change adviser Ross Garnaut has suggested. But replacing beef and lamb with kangaroo remains impractical, due to the fact that the latter are virtually impossible to domesticate.

The Australian meat and livestock industry is worth $15.8 billion. Berriman concedes the collapse of this industry would be a blow but counters "it would also free up funds that otherwise would have gone toward treating people whose diet was crap. Then, you could quite feasibly put that money toward more sustainable industries."

Not that this is likely to happen soon.

"Unfortunately, meat eating is deeply culturally ingrained in Australians," Berriman says. "As Margaret Mead once put it, it's easier to change your religion than your diet."

And yet it's not impossible. Melbourne music student Will Schmidt gave up meat two years ago, after reading some "horrifying statistics about the meat industry's effect on land degradation and climate change".

"Raising cattle and sheep is just an amazingly inefficient use of resources," he says.

The 22-year-old Schmidt had been a life-long carnivore, so stopping wasn't easy.

"I made the transition really slow: I started eating kangaroo, then fish, then dropped all of it. And it was still a shock," he says.

"One of the main difficulties was social, just dealing with other people's prejudices: people would say stupid things like, `What if you were on an island alone with a sheep, would you eat it?' If people are open-minded about it, I will talk about it with them.

"I just think it's important to make the link between what we eat and its impact on our environment."