Meat Free Monday in the US! Feel good or bad?

During my last post, I promised to explore some of the dark side of switching from an omnivorous diet to ones that are either vegetarian or vegan. I have to admit, as the majority of the research articles do generally conclude that reducing meat, particularly red meat, is more environmental-friendly, that it was a bit difficult to find counter arguments. Luckily, I came across some research papers that provide a different point of view. Notably, the researches published by Dr. Capper Jude are pro-meat and her arguments do raise some interesting aspects that I have not thought of. Click here to see her series of lectures on meat and sustainability (http://wsu.academia.edu/JudeCapper). Over the next few post, I will examine critically her comments and against a wholesale change to plant-based diets. This post will focus on whether reducing meat consumption will have a significant or negligible effect upon greenhouse gas emission in the US.

According to Dr. Capper Jude in this study, she claims that movements such as ‘Meat free Monday’ will do nothing to help the environment as the reduction in US national GHG emission will only be as low as 0.3%. Let’s give her the benefit of doubt and suppose her statistics are correct, what does the reduction of 0.3% in US national GHG emission mean when put into context? The US commitment to reduce GHG emissions under President Obama's administration targeted to reduce emissions by 2020 to 17 percent below 2005 levels. Given the emission level in 2005 was 6,741 million tons, the emission would have to be decreased to 5595 million tons in 2020. Therefore, the rate of reduction will have to be 67.5 m tons of CO2 reduction roughly every year from 2005 to 2020.  In contrast, a reduction of 0.3% in annual US national GHG emission means that 20.2m tons of CO2 reduction every year. Note that the former statement is focusing on the rate of decrease while the latter is simply a reduction of constant. Therefore, from this point of view, it does seem that by going meat free Monday, there will be limited effect on reducing GHG emissions. Nonetheless, it is some progress. If the whole of US stop producing meat, following her statistics, around 141m tons of CO2 equivalent would be saved each year. This is equivalent to 63 % of the amount of GHG emissions saved by a constant increase in fuel efficiency of 5% each year from 2017 to 2025, which is kind of impressive.

Personally I find her statistics somewhat questionable, partly due to her affiliation with many meat industries and organisations, and partly because the figure she quoted from US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA 2012) only includes limited aspects through which livestock farming could contribute to GHG emissions.

Her figure is likely to be underestimated for two reasons. Firstly, as it only includes the GHG emissions from US national meat production and does not include meat that are imported from other countries such as Brazil. Not only would this increase the carbon footprint of meat consumption through increasing mileage, it also shifts environmental burden e.g. eutraphication, pollution, and land conversion to other country. However, it is known that carbon footprint weighs less significantly for meat product. Buying local meatonly reduces carbon footprint by 1-3%. Secondly, the analysis of agriculture GHG emissions only include aspects such as agricultural soil management, enteric fermentation, manure management and rice cultivation. It does not include aspects such as process of land conversion to croplands and grasslands. They amount to 5.9 and 23.9 Tg CO2 equivalent annually respectively, which are around 30m tons collectively every year. This figure pushes the CO2 saving upto 170 tons roughly, however dwarfed shyly in comparison to other sectors in the US.

So overall, with the information that I have researched so far, it does seem that going vegan has somewhat limited effect in reducing CO2 emission. 

To be honest, I am fairly disappointed by the findings so far, as much as I’d like to convince myself that eating more vegetables and less meat is helping the environment. However, it must be noted that this is partly due to the fact that the carbon emissions per capita in the US is significantly larger than other countries and the food industry does not take up as much proportion of the carbon emission in comparison. The saving in carbon emissions through having less meat is still comparable to carbon emissions in other countries. Additionally, in the UK and other countries whether developed or developing, there might be a different story to be told!