From the UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN and the “sir, put down that steak or you’ll hurt the planet and I’ll be forced to arrest you” department comes this study that blames beef for ruining the climate. The new guilt will likely be accompanied by a slogan such as “Grief, it’s whats for dinner” and “Let them eat kale!“.
20 percent of Americans responsible for almost half of US food-related greenhouse gas emissions
ANN ARBOR–On any given day, 20 percent of Americans account for nearly half of U.S. diet-related greenhouse gas emissions, and high levels of beef consumption are largely responsible, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Michigan and Tulane University.
To estimate the impact of U.S. dietary choices on greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers built a database that assessed the environmental impacts involved in producing more than 300 types of foods. Then they linked the database to the findings of a nationally representative, one-day dietary recall survey involving more than 16,000 American adults.
They ranked the diets by their associated greenhouse gas emissions, from lowest to highest, then divided them into five equal groups, or quintiles. The researchers found that the 20 percent of U.S. diets with the highest carbon footprint accounted for 46 percent of total diet-related greenhouse emissions.
The highest-impact group was responsible for about eight times more emissions than the lowest quintile of diets. And beef consumption accounted for 72 percent of the emissions difference between the highest and lowest groups, according to the study.
“A big take home message for me is the fact that high-impact diets are such a large part of the overall contribution to food-related greenhouse gases,” said U-M researcher Martin Heller, first author of a paper scheduled for publication March 20 in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
The study estimated the greenhouse gas emissions associated with food production only. Emissions related to the processing, packaging, distribution, refrigeration and cooking of those foods were not part of the study but would likely increase total emissions by 30 percent or more, Heller said.
“Reducing the impact of our diets–by eating fewer calories and less animal-based foods–could achieve significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. It’s climate action that is accessible to everyone, because we all decide on a daily basis what we eat,” said Heller, a researcher at the U-M Center for Sustainable Systems in the School for Environment and Sustainability.
If Americans in the highest-impact group shifted their diets to align with the U.S. average–by consuming fewer overall calories and relying less on meat–the one-day greenhouse-gas emissions reduction would be equivalent to eliminating 661 million passenger-vehicle miles, according to the researchers.
That hypothetical diet shift, if implemented every day of the year and accompanied by equivalent shifts in domestic food production, would achieve nearly 10 percent of the emissions reductions needed for the United States to meet its targets under the Paris climate accord, the authors wrote. Though President Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the accord, many states and municipalities are still working to meet the emissions targets.
In the United States in 2010, food production was responsible for about 8 percent of the nation’s heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. In general, animal-based foods are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions per pound than plant-based foods. The production of both beef cattle and dairy cows is tied to especially high emissions levels.
For starters, cows don’t efficiently convert plant-based feed into muscle or milk, so they must eat lots of feed. Growing that feed often involves the use of fertilizers and other substances manufactured through energy-intensive processes. And then there’s the fuel used by farm equipment.
In addition, cows burp lots of methane, and their manure also releases this potent greenhouse gas.
“Previous studies of diet-related greenhouse gas emissions have focused mainly on the average diet in a given country. This study is the first in the United States to look instead at self-reported dietary choices of a nationally representative sample of thousands of Americans,” said Diego Rose, principal investigator on the project and a professor of nutrition and food security at Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.
By linking their database of environmental impacts to the individual, self-reported diets in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the U-M and Tulane researchers were able to estimate the distribution of diet-related impacts across the entire U.S. population on a given day.
They found that Americans in the highest-impact quintile consumed more than twice as many calories on a given day–2,984 versus 1,323–than those in the bottom 20 percent. But even when the findings were adjusted for caloric intake, the highest-impact quintile was still responsible for five times more emissions than the lowest-impact group.
Meat accounted for 70 percent of the food-associated greenhouse gas emissions in the highest-impact group but only 27 percent in the lowest-impact group.
NHANES is a program of studies designed to assess the health and nutritional status of adults and children in the United States. The survey, which combines interviews and physical examinations, is a major program of the National Center for Health Statistics, which is part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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The study: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aab0ac/meta
Greenhouse gas emissions and energy use associated with production of individual self-selected US diets
Abstract
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I’m so tired of confirmation bias being used in studies like this.
A simpler answer would be kill all humans, and then the CO2 amount wouldn’t matter. And of course if we didn’t have any green house gases, then the gases would escape and we could be like Mars. Good work you guys.
This is exactly what it is all about. The catastrophic anthropogenic global warming/ “climate change” cult is Paganism all over again. Pagans just love killing others (especially those that oppose them) to appease the Gods and give them more power. Humans have NOT grown out of superstition- we like to think we have, but we are more gullible than ever before. This is evidenced by how many fall for the constant stream of propaganda and truly absurd scenarios of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Even though none of the predictions have come true, people continue to lap up the lies.
did he dieted?
I wanna know who was being paid to follow behind the steers and measure their flatulence.
Tried Kale once and had gas issues for several days
Shoot a deer & save a ton of CO2. PETA=personally enjoying tasty animals! Enjoy the outdoors!
In the nineteenth century we had prophets and visionaries who gunned down the estimated fifty million buffalo roaming North America. The mindless and myopic may claim that this slaughter was sadistic and cruel, but in retrospect we now understand their genius and compassion as they knew that the massive herds of buffalo would bring an early doom to this planet.
You can add in the rise in Vegans which is the same self guilted groupings. In a recent irony the German government has put out a statement that vegan diet is dangerous, funny given the percentage of germans thought to be vegan (https://www.germanpulse.com/2016/09/12/controversial-report-germany-warns-vegan-lifestyle/)
I suspect the government is just getting in, worried about climate action type law suits that they get dragged in as an accomplice when a pile of vegans either die or have serious problems in later life.
Why would anyone want to eat vegetation when vegetation scrubs CO2. Be kind to plants
Yikes! My cat just farted. I guess I’d better call the vet and have her euthanized to stop climate change. Oh wait, I just farted’ 🙂
Shh. Blame it on the cat!
The cat eats native birds and wildlife he is on the must be kept indoors or banned list anyhow you just added fuel to the fire.
https://www.peta.org/living/animal-companions/caring-animal-companions/caring-cats/indoor-cats/
You realize that ownership of dogs and cats is bad for the planet.
Not kidding. They’ve already gone there.
Whoa!
I’m smelling some bovine excrement in that study.
It is a classic example of “Bovine Scatology” or as it is more commonly known “BS” 🙂
As if rice farming does not produce methane? But that would not appeal to the vegan biases of some compulsively chic academics.
…the entire education system has gone F’in insane
So it appears. First my youngest brothers alma mater hires Michael Mann, then my alma mater hires Naomi Oreskes, and now my other brothers alma mater publishes this dreck.
oh- try reasoning with them
cuz it worked so wall last time and the time before
Just for an instant make believe that you are an impressionable/gullible child or an undergrad ( same thing). Yea, I would be depressed and suicidal considering all the the guilt that I am being fed on a daily basis. No wonder there is an opioid crisis in the US today.
The opioid crisis is due to Obamacare’s “patient satisfaction” mandate. Hospital’s reimbursement is based, in part, on patient satisfaction scores, the more drugs you give them the happier they become. I had a friend who had outpatient surgery on his hip and they tried to prescribed a 60 day supply of Vicodin. He took a few Aleve and was walking a couple miles in 3 days.
Another incentive system gets gamed, to the surprise of exactly no-one.
Here in OK, reaction to this has now made it harder for people with genuine chronic pain to get medicines that actually work for them, because of new knee-jerk “anything before narcotics” regulations on doctor prescriptions and outpatient clinics. And it’s maybe a two week supply at best when they do get them. Thanks Obama!
Reminds me of the reaction to another drug crisis, where you can now only buy one small box of Sudafed at a time in stores here, because wanting more must mean you’re planning to cook meth with it. 😐
From the article: ‘methane … is a potent greenhouse gas’
We have a new entry in the ‘Sensitivity’ scale of ‘greenhouse gases’? (other entries from earlier articles.)
Carbon Dioxide is an ‘IMPORTANT’ greenhouse gas
H2O is a ‘SIGNIFICANT’ greenhouse gas
Methane is a ‘POTENT’ greenhouse gas
The complete inability to quantify the purported ‘greenhouse gas’ property in any meaningful way is quite telling. How can those terms be compared and ordered?
Water vapor makes up 30 to 40% of our atmosphere, it can hold the heat or insulate, but never adds heat. Water is infamous for it’s cooling abilities.
CO2 makes up 4/100 of 1% of our atmosphere. A very rare gas. It’s atmospheric affect is insignificant.
Methane at 1.8 ppm, is four times less abundant than helium. 222 times less abundant than CO2. So rare that it is very difficult to measure let alone have any effect whatsoever in our atmosphere.
Humans do not compete with cows for food. Cows turn useless hay and grass into a food product. A near perfect symbiotic relationship. If cows did not eat hay and grass, it would just lay on the ground rotting every winter, turning into methane anyway.
Max — you’re off by a factor of 10. Air can hold about 4% water vapor at 86 degrees F.
Just check their relative routine Viagra dosage. It should correlate with potency.
“On any given day, 20 percent of Americans account for nearly half of U.S. diet-related greenhouse gas emissions”
In other words, on any given day 80% of Americans do not account for nearly half of U. S. diet-related greenhouse gas emissions.
When you have two wolves, a dark negative one and a bright positive one, which one will prevail?…….
The one you feed the most.
I smell a “FAT TAX”!
Feed ’em all heaping helpings of free range, humanely raised, all organic beans, with cabbage and kale… and plenty of beer to wash it all down. Then make sure their out of your house before the eructations and flatulence set in! ‘Lowest impact quintile’, my arse!
Animals used for food are consuming plants that will one way or another become CO2 again. It is the natural cycle. The picking and choosing of measures to imply that all humans (excluding radical environmental vegans who hold their breath for 80% of the time) are a blight on the planet is a nice hobby for some jet setting academics but of absolutely no use to people just trying to live comfortable lives, or to those who live in deprivation and can only dream of living comfortable lives.
I’ve always found it amusing that these studies pretend the grass would simply die and become part of the soil without decomposition taking place. It’s up there logically with the melting permafrost will release gas department, ignoring that net carbon sequestration takes place when those soils are warm enough to support primary production. This train of thought shouldn’t pass for high school biology, but it’s published “science”. Yikes.
Grassland and pasture-land is a very good Carbon sink even if grazed on by cattle.
This more than offsets (2 or 3 times higher) the methane released from the same cattle.
I can guarantee you these researchers did not count the Carbon-sink from grassland. They never do because they are not real researchers. They are activists.
Usually Vegan activists with an agenda.
“… if implemented every day of the year and accompanied by equivalent shifts in domestic food production, would achieve nearly 10 percent of the emissions reductions needed for the United States to meet its targets under the Paris climate accord, the authors wrote.”
OK, every stupid thing is on the table …
How much of an emissions reduction would we get if 100% of the people, that are in the country illegally, would leave? If they went back to their country of origin would Mexico need to cut 100% of its meat production to meet Paris goals because of its increase in population?
Should Mexico get some sort of a Paris Accord credit from El Salvador for facilitating the El Salvador population decrease, by allowing the El Salvador illegals a fairly free walk through and to the USA border?
If logic says CEO’s get paid too much based on what they produce, then shouldn’t the author of this paper be required to pay everyone that reads it $25 for it’s lack of productive value?
As a ‘developing’ country, does Mexico have Paris goals? Is their Paris goal simply the collection of money?
The players for the Wolverine football and basketball teams will only be fed tofu and kale.
Maybe the researchers are Buckeye fans? 😎
Allenic: Reminds me of when I was a college student at Michigan, lived in the same dorm as football players. They got steak every day. We nerds in the Honors Program had to eat the often uneatable regular dorm food. I usually went to the snack bar in the basement and fed my brain with two hamburgers.
“While the decline in beef availability from its peak of 88.8 pounds per person in 1976 to 51.5 pounds per person in 2014 is not a new story, availability of other red meats has dropped as well. Pork availability is down from an average 47.0 pounds per person from 1979 to 2010 to 43.1 pounds per person in 2014, and veal and lamb availability is down from 4.2 pounds per person in 1970 to 1 pound per person in 2014. Fish and shellfish availability, up from around 12 pounds per person in 1970, has fluctuated between 14.1 and 16.5 pounds since 1984 and was 14.5 pounds per person in 2014.”
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/januaryfebruary/us-per-capita-availability-of-red-meat-p
Oddly, the per capita consumption of human flesh is way up over the same period. Should that not be expressed in a chicken equivalent metric?
Mebbe there is a connection … has obesity risen in the USA since the 1970’s? Does it correlate with the reduction in real food consumption?
(not talkn to u doreen)
USDA isn’t going to count the side of beef my wife and I bought which will exceed the 88.8 lbs.
OTOH, what does the USDA have to say about the increase in consumption of Tide Pods?
Is it “availability” or “demand” that has changed?
This is what the article from the other day about speciation reversal reminded me of.
I think these wackos are suffering from acute species retrogradation — choosing to eat no meat and gradually reverting physiologically back to our ancient ancestor herbivore ape kin, starting with their cerebrum of course. Now we have generational herbivorism and it’s having a serious effect on cognition.
herbivore ape kin
==============
chimps are omnivores. they hunt in packs for meat. anything to avoid kale.
Babies need to have enough fat in their diet, otherwise their brains will not develop properly.
It’s all fun and games till they mess with beef or porn, then the unwashed masses will show their muscle. Bring it on kaletards
It’d be like messing with tea in Britain. Nothing gets between a red-blooded Englishman and his Earl Grey!
Yet Earl Grey is a euphemism for #grandma.
Someone once described puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” In that regard, vegans and climate activists are but rebranded Puritans. Insufferable pseudoreligious busybodies.
Not fair. Lots of people who choose diets different than yours do not care what you eat, or at least they’re not preaching . Some people just find that they feel better when they eat little or no meat, dairy, whatever. Often they are just people who are learning about health and nutrition.
Right on Albert! I chose to become vegetarian (i eat yogurt) 28 years ago because it was a natural progression and, honestly, my body just started saying “No”–taste and smell made me nauseous. This continued for 3 years until I finally stopped eating any kind of seafood. I’m 64, very in-shape, healthy and everyone tells me I look 1-2 decades younger. It’s absolutely the right choice for me to make on all levels, but I don’t preach to others. I figure everyone has to deal with their own karma.
As someone who grew up on a small family farm in NC, factory farming is the big evil and the health of Americans is suffering because of it. Anyone who doesn’t see problems with raising thousands of head of cattle on a postage stamp size feed lot where the cows do nothing but eat corn (not what nature intended) and are allowed very little movement should take a drive on Interstate 5 past a massive feed lot near the town of King to witness a bit of hell on Earth. You can smell the foul air miles away. What initially looks like an ant hill buzzing with activity in the distance eventually comes into view, and you realize the cattle are so packed into the dense space that it’s difficult to distinguish one body from another. No wonder these animals living in such crowded conditions must be pumped full of antibiotics to prevent infections because of existing in such an unhealthy and unnatural environment.
So, eat whatever you want, but don’t try to argue that the way animals are raised and processed these days is healthy for the environment or consumers in the USA where factory farming controls the food supply for the majority of the population. I’ll spare you the descriptions of the mega pig and chicken farms today. There’s plenty of reliable data on the environmental damage such large-scale operations produce.
@Henry Lewis
I grew up on the tall grass prairie of Oklahoma, where all you could see for miles was grass and grazing cattle. I never heard the term, feed lot. A good portion of my neighbors had chickens roaming the yard.
You make some good points, but there’s more than one thing going on.
Ps I thought you weren’t going to preach.
Most Puritans didn’t care much what others were doing in their private lives either.
Back when I was minoring in anthropology I saw an estimate that when “native Americans” arrived in the New World their may have been a billion head of just bison, a ungulate and not the only ungulate. Similar the herds of ungulates in Africa were huge. There were ungulate herds on the Steppes Eurasia. Bison and I imagine the herds in Africa are more efficient converting grass to meat and milk. Yet the environmentalists do not want farmers raising bison because they may contaminate the genetics of wild bison.
And 200 years later we have the bisontennial.
“the researchers built a database that assessed the environmental impacts involved in producing more than 300 types of foods”
Admission to fabricating the entire study—built a database designed only to prove their conclusion. Nothing more. Walk away, nothing to see.
To estimate the impact of U.S. dietary choices on greenhouse gas emissions, the researchers built a database …
I like the kind of research where people actually touch stuff — soil, lab rats, humans, microscopes, gamma counters, scales, glassware, solvents, plants, instruments. You know, do experiments.
In the spirit of turning the lights on for earth hour – red meat for dinner
Great suggestion Another Ian
I bet the folks who did the study are not strict vegetarians, typical liberal hypocrites, say one thing but do another.
“I bet the folks who did the study are not strict vegetarians”
Or worse yet, they are and are trying to spread that plague to us carnivores.
I consider myself an omnivore.
Some animals we think of as carnivores would more accurately be described as lipovores. Many apex predators primarily eat the fat off their kills –the most energy-rich part and the easiest to get to–leaving most of the lean meat and offal to the scavengers.
Sustainable Bafflegab is UN subversion grafted onto American Universities. Donald Trump, don’t pay for this ‘field office’ of the UN Bring-Down-America-Campaign, either. This is interference in American governance. America leads the world in CO2 emissions already – Enjoy your beef and speed up the effort to undo this ugly ‘progressives’ scourge. I look at the once great UK, now with rings in their noses cowering and obedient. An EU citizen was held in custody at Heathrow Airport until he could be sent back to Austria. He was to give a speech on free speech a Speakers Corner! This what they want for the US and they were maybe half way there before Trump.
I’m sure this will be heart-warming news to these vego-fascists: “Soya has become the cash crop for half of Argentina’s arable land, more than 11m hectares (27m acres), most situated on fragile pampas lands on the vast plains. After Argentina’s economic collapse, soya became a vital cash export providing cattle feed for Europe and elsewhere.”
Much better than maintaining it as grassland covered with hordes of farting cows.
Soy is primarily an oilseed, the world’s most common, in fact. It is a large component in the blended vegetable oils on the supermarket shelves.
The soy-meal fed to cattle is the byproduct that remains after the oil is extracted. Canola meal and cottonseed meal are byproducts of the same process.
They are valuable byproducts, but we should not kid ourselves that soy is grown “for cattle” when the most valuable product of soy is not the part fed to animals.
As a veggie for 10+ years now I really get annoyed with people linking their cause to being veggie. I am okay if other people want to eat animals. That is their choice. Enjoy. If anyone is thinking of trying the veggie diet then make sure you get your B12 and EPA/DHA.
Just in your description you classed yourself as vegetarian NOT a vegan or similar grouping.
Vegan is not only following a vegan diet but extending the philosophy into other areas of their lives, and they oppose the use of animals for any purpose.
You are obviously an old school vegetarian but the new kids on the block have an activism belief under the dietary choice and you are as guilty as us meat eaters in their eyes.
they oppose the use of animals for any purpose.
=========
reminds me of all the horses liberated from pulling carts. only to find themselves turned into pet-food and glue.
without a purpose animals quickly find themselves homeless without any visible means of support. unless they turn to drug dealing or prostitution it can be very hard to make a living.
Not just the new kids on the block.
Back in the ’90s I spent time on AOL’s Pet Care Forums subsection “Animal Rights/Animal Welfare”.
Lots of different kinds of vegetarians (octo-, lacto-, I forget the prefix’es for the vegetarians that allowed chicken and fish or just fish). They generally just tried to persuade but not force others to eat as they do.
But the Vegans! They were full blown Animal Rights types. They’d ban owning pets and eating meat and the use of anything that had been tested on animals. They were the types that defended ALF when they burned or vandalized research labs.
CO2 wasn’t evil back then. They argued that raising animals for food was using up all our water.
I had lots of fun with them. 😎
Luckily we got rid of the Buffalo and the Woolly Mammoth. This saved the planet from almost as much hot air as the average climate conference.
All the vegetation that does not get eaten will still decompose at a later date……… unless it gets turned into coal.