how does not eating meat helps us in global warming?

Answer 1

When we eat meat, we consume animals that need to eat 10 to 100 times their weight in vegetable matter to produce the meat.

If instead we eat the vegetation ourselves, we save that much energy.

It's not as simple as a 1 to 1 transfer, but you can get the idea. For example, a must consume loads of hay, corn and other food to 'bulk up' enough to be slaughtered for meat, so each pound of meat represents several pounds of vegetables.

But humans are omnivores, and it is not healthy or practical for us to avoid eating meat. The best thing to do is to produce meat in the most efficient way possible, and that is the grass-fed open range Argentine cattle instead of the US corn-fed feedlot cattle. Argentine beef provides more meat per pound of animal at a lower cost and energy expense.

Answer 2

Cindy W, I would have to say Gengi told you wrong. The reason the CO2 output from cattle can greatly exceed the total from the carbon in the plants they eat has to do with the fact that the grain, silage, or whatever you feed them requires gasoline, diesel or whatever to till, plant, irrigate, cultivate and harvest. This is all CO2 emission over and above whatever carbon the cattle food contains. Then factor in that a cow is going to consume many times (like 1000 times) the nutritional value it will provide when it is slaughtered. If cows ate only their nutritional equivalent in plants and the plants required no assistance from the farmer involving an internal combustion engine, then you would have a "break even" situation. The "water footprint" is also about 1000 times the nutritional equivalent in plants. As the article mentions, transportation has been found to be a minor issue by comparison. edit Yes Heretic, you have me there. Free range is free range. But tell me, have you ever met a farmer really into his cows who didn't cheat (just a little bit?). Also, if they are raising them for market, do they get fattened up before slaughter? I'm just asking, I don't know. I don't know what you mean by the manna thing. It's a nonsequitor.

Answer 3

Well meat is simply more expensive when it comes to energy and energy overuse is the problem. The farmer who grows feed must use electricity and/or gas, or oil to live and produce the feed. Remember they must watch t.v, go shopping like the rest of us plus harvest the feed. Then more usually pollutive energy is used to transport and package the feed to the factory farms. His house must also be produced somehow usually involving harmfull polllutants. The truck and driver that ship the feed have similar if not bigger carbon footprints than the farmer as well. Then those who offload and feed the animals in the factory farm that uses coal or oil produced electricity must also live and so the foot print becomes larger yet again. The animal must be slaughtered which will at times use some sort of electrical device. Electricty is not completely clean oil or coal must be burned to produce it. Unless its coming from nuclear which causes thermal pollution itself. The animal must then be shipped amd packaging yet again. (made usually out of plastic) a byproduct of polluting fractioning techniques. All the people involved in this process also consume, in the united states the largest carbon footprints by humans on earth. Then you have all the people who work in some way whose houses must be built. Whether in retail selling or manufacturing or shipping of the meat product. These people must be considered in the true answer to your question. They do contribute to the emission of greenhouse gases. Also there are all the people who created the structures where these things happen. It may seem a bit extreme but its true. All this goes into, including the carbon you use, disruption of the natural cycle of the biosphere. Global warming is only one consequence of eating meat. Meat also transfers less efficiently than other forms of protein in the human body meaning we must repeat this process more often. There are a considerable number of people who are left out of the total footprint total in the eating of non meat products. Understand of course that vegetarianism requires some carbon footprint but not one nearly as large as that of eating meat. So i hope this answers briefly your question. I could go on but I think the idea is across.

Answer 4

Every time food is processed, energy is wasted. A cow eating grain and turning the grain into meat takes a tremendous amount of energy. If you bypassed the middleman (middle-cow?) and ate the grain that the cow would have eaten, that energy would not be wasted.

Also, trees are very important to the environment. They clean our air. For cows to graze, trees have to be cut down. Much of the time the trees are burned, further adding insult to the injury to the environment.

Answer 5

I guess it's because if more and more people stop eating meat, then the grazing land for cattle would be used for crops (more oxygen and less methane being put into the air). It is a stretch, but when it comes to global warming, it's kind of an "every little bit helps" kind of thing. This is just a guess.

Answer 6

In my personal opinion, we do not have conclusive evidence to say we are causing global warming. For all we know, this could be a natural phenomena that appens every couple thousand years or so. There is no evidence stating this sort of thing HASN'T happened before either.


FYI just a little more info. Cows produce 70 (or 75 % Ive forgotten) or green house gases threw the methane they produce

After reviewing your sources, I've come up with several conclusions.
1: Industrial revolution led to an easied lifestyle, therefore increasing population. With an increased population that leads to an increased need for a food supply, supplemented by an equvalent increase in cow population do satisfy our ravenous nature. The cow methane released is a greenhouse gas.
2: one of your references uses a study of the ice caps to determine if global warming has ever occured before, yet if it HAS the ice caps would have melted and reformed since then.

(qoute)you don't understand!!!!!!jeese!!!!i don't know where you live and I DON"T CARE. but where i live(midwest of the usa) the temparature is above average. around this time of year it like 60 -70. but know it like 80-90!!
(/qoute)

And how many other things were factored into this study? Is there research out there stating submarines, ships, and oil spills are causing this, not greenhouse gases? What about mining and drilling for oil? Couldn't that upset the Earth's core, causing an increase in techtonic activities, leading, to say, more underwater earthquakes over the last centry, causing tsunami's etc. On top of that, it could cause an increase in underwater geysers (the vents at the bottom of the ocean releasing gases from the earths core into the water).

Answer 7

Not eating meat doesn't help global warming
Eating meat does
The more meat we eat the less cows there are
Cow give off methane gas when they breathe and F**t
I think that's how u spell it

Answer 8

The food pyramid explains that when food is passed from one level to another, much of the energy is wasted.

OK, so if you had 1000 pounds of grain you could feed it to people, or you could feed it to cows and then eat the cows. But, if the cows eat 1000 pounds of grain you wont get 1000 pounds of cow, you'll only get 100 pounds of edible meat, or less. Eating grain (like wheat or rice, right?) is more efficient than eating meat. Although many of us enjoy eating meat, it is perfectly healthy to eat a diet with little or no meat. Millions of people do without it. Certainly in developed countries there is far more health impact from OVEReating meat in the form of heart disease and obesity, than from lack of meat.

So, not eating meat means that we need less grain. If you don't have to grow wheat, corn or rice then you can save a tremendous amount of fuel used in agriculture, save on fertilizer which often requires a lot of fuel to produce, and save tremendous amounts of electricity used in taking care of the cows, or used in processing and preserving the meat.

The amount of farmland that must be used is reduced, so you can preserve tropical forests that are being cut down to provide land for cattle farms or to grow cattle feed.

ps the evidence for Global Climate Change is clear and convincing to scientists. That's why thousands of them have approved the IPCC report and endorsed the showing of "Inconvenient Truth" which give an accurate, succinct account of the situation. The same guys who are climate change deniers would, a few years ago, have been telling you that cigarettes are healthy.... Don't buy it!

Answer 9

McDonalds is cutting down a large piece of the Amazon for cattle grazing. On the plus side that's more food I suppose, if you like McDonalds. On the other hand the Amazon produces 33% of the earths oxygen. That won't be the statistic for long if we keep cutting it down.

Answer 10

-Half of the water used in the U.S. is used for animal agriculture.
-Every year in the US an area the size of Connecticut is lost to topsoil erosion--85% of this erosion is associated with livestock production.
-Livestock already consume half the world's grain, and their numbers are still growing almost exponentially.
-Every kilogram of beef we consume, according to research by the agronomists David Pimental and Robert Goodland, requires around 100,000 litres of water.
-Approximately 1.3 billion cattle populate the earth at any one time. They exist artificially in these vast numbers to satisfy the excessive human demand for the meat and by-products they provide. Their combined weight exceeds that of the entire human population. By sheer numbers, their consequent appetite for the world's resources, have made them a primary cause for the destruction of the environment.
-In the US, feedlot cattle yield one pound of meat for every 16 pounds of feed. It takes an average of 2,500 gallons of water to produce a single pound of meat. According to Newsweek, "The water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer could float a destroyer." In contrast, it takes only 25 gallons of water to produce one pound of wheat. Feeding the average meat-eating American requires 3-1/4 acres of land per year.
-Feeding a person who eats no food derived from animals requires only 1/6 acre per year.
- Studies by North Carolina State University estimate that half of the some 2,500 open hog manure cesspools (euphemistically termed "lagoons"), now needed as part of hog productions there, are leaking contaminants such as nitrate--a chemical linked to blue-baby syndrome--into the ground water.
-Worldwide demand for fish, along with advances in fishing methods--sonar, driftnets, floating refrigerated fish packing factories--is bringing ocean species, one after another, to the brink of extinction. In the Nov., '95 edition of Scientific American, Carl Safina writes, "For the past two decades, the fishing industry has had increasingly to face the result of extracting [fish] faster than fish populations [can] reproduce." Research reveals that the intended cure--aquaculture (fish farming)--actually hastens the trend toward fish extinction, while disrupting delicate coastal ecosystems at the same time.
-A scientist, reporting in the industry publication Confinement, calculated in 1976 that the planet's entire petroleum reserves would be exhausted in 13 years if the whole world were to take on the diet and technological methods of farming used in the US.
-If tomorrow people in the US made a radical change away from their meat-centered diets, an area of land the size of all of Texas and most of Oklahoma could be returned to forest.
-It is estimated that livestock production accounts for twice the amount of pollution in the US as that produced by industrial sources.
-Livestock in the US produce 130 times the excrement of the entire US population. Since farm animals today spend much or all of their lives in factory sheds or feedlots, their waste no longer serves to fertilize pastures a little at a time. One poultry researcher, according to United Poultry Concerns literature, explains: "A one-million-hen complex will produce 125 tons of wet manure a day." To responsibly store, disperse, or degrade this amount of animal waste is simply not possible. Much of the waste inevitably is flushed into rivers and streams.
-Methane is one of the four greenhouse gasses that contributes to the environmental trend known as global warming. The 1.3 billion cattle in the world produce one fifth of all the methane emitted into the atmosphere.
-.Agricultural engineers have compared the energy costs of producing poultry, pork and other meats with the energy costs of producing a number of plant foods. It was found that even the least efficient plant food was nearly 10 times as efficient in returning food energy as the most energy efficient animal food.
-Since so much fossil fuel is needed to produce it, beef could be considered a petroleum product. With factory housing, irrigation, trucking, and refrigeration, as well as petrochemical fertilizer production requiring vast amounts of energy, approximately one gallon of gasoline goes into every pound of grain-fed beef.
-The direct and hidden costs of soil erosion and runoff in the US, mostly attributable to cattle and feed crop production, is estimated at $44 billion a year.
- Each pound of feedlot beef can be equated with 35 pounds of eroded topsoil.
-A nationwide switch to a pure vegetarian diet would allow us to cut our oil imports by 60%.
-Compared to a vegan diet, three days of a typical American diet requires as much water as you use for showering all year (assuming you shower every day).An acre of land can produce 20,000 pounds of potatoes, but only 165 pounds of beef.
-In the U.S., 260 million acres of forest have been destroyed for use as agricultural land to support our meat diet (over 1 acre per person).
-Since 1967, the rate of deforestation has been one acre every five seconds.
-Trees are being cut down at an alarming rate in the US, as well as around the world, for meat production. For every one acre cleared for urban development, seven acres are cleared to graze animals or grow feed for them.