A Chicken in Every Pot?  A Car in Every Backyard? 
by Terry Jensen

Sierra Club's True Cost of Food Campaign 

 In the 1928 presidential campaign of Herbert Hoover, a Republican paid newspaper advertisement promised prosperity in the form of "a chicken in every pot and a car in every backyard, to boot." 

 Hoover's prosperity has arrived in spades with food and with cars. Yet, less than 100 years later, worries about global warming and suburban sprawl are making most Sierrans doubt the wisdom of the cars, even suggesting we should often forego the private automobile in favor of public transportation or even bicycles. 

It now seems that we should often forego the chicken, too. 
 
Despite the assurance of "Big Agribusiness" that our food is the most affordable in history, the Sierra Club's True Cost of Food campaign exposes the hidden costs to our planet of our meat-rich, pesticide-laden, and transportation-heavy diet.

At the end of 2006, the United Nations released a report Livestock’s Long Shadow Environmental  Issues and Options. This report on the environment  and livestock (beef cattle, dairy cattle, chickens,  pigs, and other animals domesticated for food uses)  had a stunning conclusion: "The livestock sector  emerges as one of the top two or three most  significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to  global." It turns out that raising animals for food is a primary cause of land degradation, air  pollution, water shortage, water pollution, loss of  biodiversity, and not least of all, global warming. 
 
The following are findings from the UN Report: 

 Air Damage 

 

 Animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions as measured  in CO2 equivalents. By comparison, all transportation emits 13.5% of the CO2. In addition  to CO2, environmentally toxic gases produced by  livestock include nitrous oxide, methane, and  ammonia generated from the animals’ intestinal belching, flatus, and manure. The report says “The impact is so severe that it needs to be addressed with urgency.”
 

Livestock: 

Produces 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. 
 

Accounts for 37 percent of all human-induced methane  (which is 23 times as warming as CO2). 
 
Generates 64 percent of the ammonia, which contributes to acid rain and acidification of ecosystems. 

Diversity Damage 

Livestock’s very presence in vast tracts of land and its demand for feed crops also contribute to loss of other plants and animals; livestock is identified as a culprit in 15 out of 24 important  ecosystems that are assessed as in decline. The loss of species is estimated to be running 50 to 500 times higher than background rates found in the fossil record. 

 

Water Damage 
 
The livestock business is among the most critical users of the earth’s increasingly scarce water  resources; in addition, contributing to water pollution, excessive growth of organisms, depletion of oxygen, and the degeneration of coral reefs, among other things. 
 
The major water-polluting agents are animal wastes, antibiotics, hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers, and the pesticides used to spray feed crops.

 
In the United States livestock is responsible for 55 percent of the erosion and sediment, 37 percent of the pesticide use, 50 percent of the antibiotic use, and a third of the load of nitrogen and phosphorus put into freshwater sources. 

 

Widespread overgrazing disturbs water cycles, reducing replenishment of above and below ground water resources. Significant amounts of water are withdrawn for the production of feed. 

Land Damage:

 
The total area occupied by grazing livestock is equivalent to 26 percent of the ice-free terrestrial surface of the planet. In addition, the total area dedicated to producing feed crops for these animals amounts to 33 percent of the total arable land. 

Clearing forests to create new pastures is a major source of deforestation, especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70 percent of former rainforests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing. The forests are the major “sinks” for removing the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere they are the “lungs of the Earth.”

University of Chicago Study 

The journal Earth Interactions published a study on diet, energy and global warming by Pamela Martin and Gidon Eshel, Assistant Professors in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. 

In their study, Eshel and Martin compared the energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions that underlie five diets: average American, red meat, fish, poultry and vegetarian all equaling 3,774 
calories per day. 
 
The vegetarian diet turned out to be the most energy-efficient, followed by poultry and the average American diet. Fish and red meat virtually tied as the least efficient.  The scientists concluded that the food people eat is just as important as what kind of cars they drive when it comes to creating the greenhouse-gas emissions that many scientists have linked to global warming. They wrote that both the burning of fossil  fuels during food production and non-carbon dioxide emissions associated with livestock and animal waste contribute to the problem. 
 
The average American drives 8,322 miles by car annually, emitting 1.9 to 4.7 tons of carbon dioxide, depending on the vehicle model and fuel average of 3,774 calories of food each day. 
 
In 2002, energy used for food production accounted for 17 percent of all fossil fuel use in the United States. And the burning of these fossil fuels emitted three-quarters of a ton of carbon dioxide  per person. 
 
That alone amounts to approximately one-third the average greenhouse-gas emissions of personal transportation. But livestock production and associated animal waste also emit greenhouse gases  not associated with fossil-fuel combustion, primarily methane and nitrous oxide. While methane and nitrous oxide are relatively rare compared with carbon dioxide, they are “molecule for molecule “ far more powerful greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. A single pound of methane, for example, has the same greenhouse effect as approximately 50 pounds of carbon dioxide. 
 
“We neither make a value judgment nor do we make a categorical statement,” said Eshel. “We say that however close you can be to a vegan diet and further from the mean American diet, the better you are for the planet. It doesn’t have to be all the way to the extreme end of vegan. If you simply cut down from two burgers a week to one, you’ve already made a substantial difference.”

Individual Choices 

 

Three times a day we can help the planet by shifting our food choices towards more: 
Plant-based, Organic and/or Locally grown food

Terry Jensen is active in the Fort Worth Group, Texas and a member of the National Sustainable Consumption Committee