Would you stop eating meat to save the planet?

December 28, 2006

Although I do enjoy a good steak, I don't eat red meat all that often. I'm beginning to think I never should again. The conclusions of a new report released by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization are rather sobering. Among them:

Eat meat, destroy the Earth?
• Livestock now use 30 percent of the earth's entire land surface, mostly permanent pasture but also including 33 percent of the global arable land used to producing feed for livestock.

• Livestock generate 18 percent more greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2 equivalent than transportation.

• Livestock account for 9 percent of CO2 derived from human-related activities, but considerably larger portions of much more potent greenhouse gases: 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, and 37 percent of all human-induced methane.

• In Latin America some 70 percent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.

• Meat and dairy animals now account for about 20 percent of all terrestrial animal biomass.

Yikes!...

Source: Would you stop eating meat to save the planet?

Link: Kick off 2007 with a compassionate resolution


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