Diet and Carbon Footprints

Children gathering potatoes on a large farm, vicinity of Caribou, Aroostook County, Me. Schools do not open until the potatoes are harvested (LOC)
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

The agroindustrial machinery (as Julia Whitty calls it in her article, Diet for a Warm Planet) currently in place around the world is a major contributing factor to carbon emissions. Changing what we put on our plate and thinking more carefully about how we produce and distribute food could go a long way toward curbing global warming.

Simply eating less could have a positive impact on reducing carbon emissions, Julia noted.

Seriously. Body fat. My personal flab is not just a private matter between me and my coronary arteries. Nineteen percent of US energy usage—about as much as is used to fuel our cars—is spent growing and delivering food to the average American who consumes 2,200 pounds of food a year. That's a whopping 3,747 calories a day—or 1,200 to 1,700 more than needed for personal or planetary health. The skinny truth is that as much as 7.6 percent of total energy in the United States today is used to grow human fat, fat that translates to 3,300 pounds of carbon per person.

Sure, liposuction is an untapped fuel source—and New Zealander Pete Bethune extracted 3.38 ounces of his own fat to add to the biofuel powering his carbon-neutral boat, Earthrace. But a more sustainable strategy would be to avoid growing the fat in the first place. A comprehensive Cornell University study found that we could cut our food energy usage in half by simply eating less, cutting back on meat and junk food, and considering the source of our food.

For starters, half of our food energy use comes from producing and delivering meat and dairy. If we gave up just meat, we could maintain that hefty 3,747-calorie intake but consume 33 percent less in fossil fuels doing it. If Americans cut just one serving of meat a week, it would equal taking 5 million cars off the road.

One-third of those 3,747 daily calories comes from junk food—potato chips, soda, etc. We can save on fossil fuel costs in this area by installing more efficient lighting, heating, and cooling in the plants that make the stuff and by using less packaging materials. But we'd save a lot more if you and I simply bought less of it. A can of diet soda, for instance, delivers only 1 calorie of food energy at a cost of 2,100 calories to make the drink and the can. Transporting the components and the finished product costs even more, and shipping processed food and its packaging accounts for much of the problem of America's food averaging 1,500 travel miles before it's eaten.

Changing habits--especially habits as personal as dietary preferences--is never easy, but it's worth considering that what we put in our mouths may be pushing us a few steps closer to global warming disaster.

Food and Climate Change

In discussions about what to do to reverse climate change, most people--whether environmentalists, politicians, or plain ordinary folks--overlook an obvious, yet largely ignored, source of greenhouse gas emissions: the global industrial food system. This elephant in the room seems to escape attention in the media, in legislative chambers, and in coffeeshop discussions, despite the fact that our crop- and livestock-raising practices represent about 33 percent of the greenhouse gas totals generated by human activities.

Anna Lappé, writing for Seattlepi.com, cites data analysis by the Pew Center on Global Climate that blames the livestock sector by itself for one-fifth of the total world emissions. This represents more emissions than is produced by all the planes, trains, and automobiles on the planet.

We are deeply wedded to a system that is inexorably leading to climate changes that could eventually make the planet uninhabitable.

Industrial farming is particularly problematic because it is a key emitter of methane and nitrous oxide, which have, respectively, 23 and 296 times the global warming effect of carbon dioxide. In the United States, widespread use of nitrogen fertilizer, roughly half of which is wasted in leaching and runoff, contributes to approximately three-quarters of the country's nitrous oxide emissions. Globally, agriculture is responsible for nearly two-thirds of methane emissions.

With climate scientists warning we need an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to avert planetary catastrophe, it's clear we need bold action -- and that bold action must include re-thinking food.

The article, despite the grim scenario depicted, has a hopeful tone, highlighting a rapidly emerging counterweight to the excesses of industrial farming: climate-friendly farming practiced on family-scale farms. Miniscule in scope at the moment compared to the overall agricultural behemoths that dominate the landscape, organic gardening as practiced by small farms such as Seattle Tilth, may be our best bet for the future.

As Anna concludes:

An organization such as Seattle Tilth may seem like a tiny drop in the climate-change bucket, but its impact should not be measured in isolation. Dozens of sister efforts are flourishing -- from Austin, Texas, to Ypsilanti, Mich. -- encouraging people to reconnect with their food and giving people the opportunity to get their hands in the dirt.

Yes, the specter of climate chaos is daunting, but day-by-day and garden-by-garden organizations such as Seattle Tilth are showing a homegrown way to address the crisis.

Well said...

Traversing the Biofuels Thicket

An article in Science last week caught everyone's attention. The title says it all: Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change. In a world where many governments are mandating a shift to ethanol, this sounds like trouble. It's trouble on top of trouble, since we're hearing more about how growing corn, soybeans, and sugar cane to convert to ethanol is raising food prices.

The Science article spawned mainstream media interpretations with eye-catching headlines. The Los Angeles Times hollered: Biofuel crops increase carbon emissions. The New York Times warned: Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat. Bloggers and environmental sites picked up the excitement and soon lively discussion threads were debating whether switchgrass, algae, and cropland waste posed the same challenge, and whether co-generation plants could produce the ethanol cleanly when compared to the plants springing up in Iowa that are burning coal to generate ethanol from corn.

Many of the discussions, both in the mainstream media (once clear of the headlines) and blog posts, were knowledgeable and intriguing, posing solutions that only occasionally get a public airing. I was fascinating by descriptions of techniques for modifying your car to run on denatured alcohol and inventive ways you could then distill your own fuel in the backyard. And, if you're worried about destroying croplands, why not make biodiesel from algae using smokestack emissions.

A couple of hours sorting through the voluminous articles, posts, arguments, and counter-arguments left me a bit dazed. What was fairly clear is that we have many possible solutions to our energy needs. Some of them have been viable for 100 years or more (such as alcohol-powered vehicles). But, in spite of a wealth of workable solutions, governments around the world and large corporations hoping to hedge their bets on energy futures are pushing large-scale, often destructive projects. Whether clearing rainforests to grow more sugar cane for ethanol or diverting corn from being a food source to being a fuel, the impacts of these processes are abundantly evident.

And a solution that is immediately at hand, and doesn't require toppling a single tree, is improving energy efficiency. A longtime champion of fuel savings as an unheralded solution to many of our energy needs, Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, sees profitability and smaller carbon footprints in using less fuel. A recent Newsweek article by Lovins, How to Fuel the Country While Saving the World, highlights a realistic path to conversing energy rather than squandering it.

Individual choices as well can make a huge difference as people adopt energy-efficient, low-impact lifestyles. We need to face that fact that change may not come from our prevaricating, slow-to-react national leaders, but local activism and lifestyle changes can induce energy savings from the community grassroots level. And on the individual level, especially when it comes to transportation, much can be done. Take a vacation by train this year instead of flying. Car pool to work. Get a bicycle or walk when running errands around town. Cut your weekly shopping trips to one instead of three. Think about getting an electric car--they're available if you do some hunting and more will be available in the near future. Talk your boss into letting you telecommute one or two days a week. Even simple steps like this can cut down your energy use for personal transportation 20 to 40 percent.

Personally, I'm going to look into converting my old SAAB 900 to run on alcohol and see what kind of vegetable matter already growing around my modest one acre lot might be fodder for the distiller. And, an alcohol-powered motorcycle might be fun...

The Energy Impacts of Meat

If you put the ethical issues aside (not an easy thing to do, because the ethical issues are monumental), the subsidized production of a commodity that Americans consume two or three times a day has far-reaching impacts. Meat, a commodity that contributes to a large number of environmental and health problems, is becoming increasingly popular outside the U.S. as well, a fact that is multiplying livestock production problems.

In an article written for the New York Times, Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler, Mark Bittman (who strenuously reminds readers that he is not a vegetarian) outlines the problem from a number of perspectives.

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.

Just this week, the president of Brazil announced emergency measures to halt the burning and cutting of the country’s rain forests for crop and grazing land. In the last five months alone, the government says, 1,250 square miles were lost.

So how much energy does meat production require? The answer is eye opening.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

Grain, meat and even energy are roped together in a way that could have dire results. More meat means a corresponding increase in demand for feed, especially corn and soy, which some experts say will contribute to higher prices.

Averting global warming is going to take more than switching light bulbs and driving a hybrid. It's going to require re-examining some of our most cherished habits--including the kind of food we put in our mouths.