A version of this article first appeared in WFAE’s Climate Newsletter. Sign up here to receive weekly climate news straight to your inbox.
To eat or not to eat meat is a perennial question among the climate-conscious. The systems that allow us to eat what we eat, including beef and other meats, often are one of the biggest contributors to global warming before and after that food arrives on our plate.
Researchers and industry professionals gathered in Charlotte this week to discuss food waste and its relationship to climate change, including the role that beef production plays in our warming planet.
“Agriculture is really one of the top pressures leading to land conversion,” said Dana Gunders, president of ReFED, a nonprofit that aggregates national food waste data.
She pointed to deforestation as an example. Globally, cattle pastures have replaced more forests than any other form of agriculture, converting forests to grasslands for grazing. The planet has also lost significant forested land to timber sales, palm oil plantations and biofuel production.
These disruptions hamper Earth’s natural system of checks and balances. Clear-cutting forests and draining wetlands releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, while simultaneously degrading the forests that recycle carbon dioxide into oxygen.
On the backend, when people leave food on their plates, it often ends up in landfills, where it releases greenhouse gases, such as methane, as it breaks down.
Gunders said that you don’t have to eliminate food waste entirely to make a positive impact on your waste-related emissions.
“If you just waste a little bit less, that's less food that goes to the landfill next week, and that's methane that doesn't get emitted the week after,” Gunders said.
About 14% of Charlotte’s carbon dioxide pollution comes from waste, which includes wastewater and solid waste disposal.
Breeding a more polite bovine to help the planet
Fossil fuels — and the carbon dioxide pollution that they emit when we burn them — are the largest contributors to global warming. But Charles Brooke, a program director at Spark Climate Solutions, is also focused on so-called super-pollutants, like methane.
“Right now, 30% of all the global warming that we feel is driven by methane,” Brooke said.
A significant fraction comes from livestock. It’s a problem that University of Georgia professor Jeferson Lourenco is tackling head-on. He wants to know how we get cows to burp — or eructate — less.
“Methane production is a waste of energy, so every time an animal burps methane, it's eructating calories. It’s losing energy,” Lourenco said.
That’s energy that could have ended up on the plate instead of as a super-pollutant in our atmosphere. Brooke said farms could cut that waste by changing cattle diets, incorporating probiotics and selective breeding.
Some farms abroad are implementing these practices: Farms in Canada and Spain have already started breeding high methane production out of their cattle.
