Carbon Hyprocrisy

I had better start this by being clear about my stance on carbon and climate change – it is real, the climate is affected by increasing levels of C02 and other greenhouse gases. Humankind has been responsible for emitting sufficient quantities of those over the couple of hundred years since the start of the industrial revolution to alter the levels in the atmosphere, and so bring about the changes in climate that are underway.

Not everyone agrees with that, but the weight of scientific evidence is strongly against those who doubt it. Once again, we find those with an ideology are the hardest to convince, and maybe some of you will find that what I am about to say also contains elements of an ideology.

We don’t really have to look very hard to see where greenhouse gas emissions are coming from, as fossil energy use is ubiquitous – it powers so much of our lives from the electric light, heating and cooling, the manufacture of the consumer goods we so willingly buy, production of agricultural fertilisers and on to the transport of goods, our food and of course ourselves. Depending on where you are reading this, there will be varying degrees of renewable energy generation, but overall, we are all hooked to fossil energy. The more we consume, the more we are involved.

There are other factors that have contributed to the build up of GHGs, and I won’t even pretend to be exhaustive in this; conversion of forests, savannahs and rangelands have played their part, and so have extractive industries of every sort. Disturbing the environment releases carbon, so clearly much of what we as a species do contributes to emissions.

A whole industry exists to calculate the precise amounts of GHGs emitted in the life cycles of any product or service you care to think of, and a whole counter industry is evolving to pass the buck on to others, to deny any responsibility, or to claim that there is nothing that can be done about it.

Those of us with any familiarity with the beef industry have of course been told that beef, as a product, has a very high carbon footprint; just as we have been told that it has a high water footprint as I discussed in my last blog post. What is actually meant by this? The figures, as most often quoted include an element of emissions for land conversion (deforestation, conversion to arable land etc), the fossil energy used in the whole value chain – from ploughing to grow feed, to production of chemical fertilisers, to transport etc.

They also include, probably most famously to the general public, the enteric methane emissions from rumen fermentation. People get hot under the collar about this one because the warming potential of methane is 64 times higher than that of C0². So apart from land conversion and enteric emissions which I will come to, basically all of the other emissions of beef boil down to our fossil energy use – which as I noted earlier is ubiquitous.

Land conversion is always an emotive issue – especially for those who started to develop later than western industrialised countries. The industrialised countries do not pay to maintain the tropical forests of South America, Africa and South East Asia, and yet they expend a lot of hot air telling the countries of those regions that the forests must be preserved; i.e. those countries should forgo development, at their own cost, for the public good not only of their own people, but for the whole world. In the case of Brazil, this is taken a step further, as individual and commercial private landowners are expected to preserve forest at their own cost for the good of mankind. Don’t misunderstand me, I find the preservation of those forests to be very important, but the absurd inequality of the means by which we expect it to happen should be patent to everyone. Needless to say, land conversion that took place historically in now industrialised countries does not figure in product footprints today – even though the benefits of removed forest are lost every year, not just in the year they are removed.

The next question around land conversion is what drives it, and how should it be apportioned? The fashionable view up until a few years ago was that Amazon deforestation was driven by the beef industry, and undoubtedly the beef industry played a significant role, with institutions such as the IFC (the World Bank’s lending arm) investing heavily in slaughter plants in the region. More recently it has been shown that cattle are simply the default option on land cleared for speculative purposes, as extensive ranching requires less investment than other options. So are the emissions from this clearing only attributable to beef, or should a share go to the financial system that encourages land speculation? Of course, when serious money is available, there are other options with a much higher return – such as soy, sugar cane or palm oil. A fair proportion of the land originally cleared and used for cattle in the amazon is now used to grow one of those crops – should the attribution to beef now be transferred from the beef industry to the crop? None of this is to suggest that beef has not been involved – there are after all around 50 million head of cattle in the legal amazon after all, but it does raise questions about how boundaries are established. And on deforestation, there has been a very encouraging trend in Brazil over the past 8-10 years, the rate of deforestation has decreased significantly, while the production of both beef and soy has continued to increase. In other words intensification (through better pastures, improved management, genetic improvements etc) has led to higher production per ha, and a lower pressure on remaining forest. This has not been picked up in mainstream media, even though a slight increase in deforestation rate in 2013 compared to 2012 was widely trumpeted;  and despite the fact that 2013 was still one of the lowest of recent decades, and that Brazil has kept 3.2 billion tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere since 2005 (Nepstad et al).

Other forms of land conversion should not be forgotten, and maybe one of the worst is simple degradation; we have around 4.5 billion ha of rangeland, prairie, savannah etc in the world, and over a quarter of this is degraded to some extent. That basically means that it has been mismanaged for whatever reason, has become less productive, and has lost soil carbon to the environment; not just on ranching land, but on poorly managed common lands, in national parks etc as well. This has contributed a significant part of the emissions attributable to livestock systems. The only positive is that it can be reversed, using livestock, and the carbon can be sequestered in the process of restoring the land, with all of the concomitant benefits.

Now onto the enteric emissions; what are they? As the rumen flora ferments grass to break it down, one of the by-products is methane, which cattle burp back into the atmosphere. The exact amount produced depends upon a number of factors including the quality and digestibility of the feed, the rumen flora and other environmental factors. Cattle browsing thorny scrub in an arid environment will burp out a lot of methane but gain very little weight, and so the emissions per kilo of final product are high, whereas cattle grazing and browsing in a silvo pastoral system with high legume content will gain weight fast on protein rich digestible forage and therefore emissions will be much lower per kilo of weight gain. There are a myriad of other scenarios, and there is a lot of variation between them. Cattle fed on a formulated ration can produce even less direct methane emissions, though the embodied carbon in that ration also needs to be taken into account. There are also feed additives and rumen inoculations (i.e. different strains of bacteria) that can reduce methane production in any given scenario.

That is what enteric emissions are; but just as with the water footprint issue, I want to question why this has been made to seem such a big issue. The number of cattle on the planet at this moment is likely to be higher than ever, but we have to remember that the human race has at the same time been responsible for the mass removal of many wild species; think of the bison (buffalo) in North America, massive wildlife migrations in Africa that no longer exist, and the saiga antelope in Asia – and these are just the relatively recent declines of large species – we humans have been doing this on a grand scale for millennia. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that wildlife removal has been a positive thing, but it does mean that a significant background level of enteric emissions from ruminants has always been present, and that with well-managed grazing systems we can sequester significant amounts of carbon and keep livestock systems well balanced.

Finally I think we should also question the ethical basis of comparing emissions from producing food on land incapable of growing crops to that of our fossil energy consumption to which we already know there are alternatives. The preposterousness of this comparison was brought into stark relief earlier this year when Richard Branson, multi billionaire owner of some of the most fossil fuel intensive and unnecessary businesses in the world announced that he would stop eating beef to save the planet. At the time, this seemed to be nothing more than absurd. However, in the light of his dissimulation around promised $3 billion investments in moving his businesses to a lower carbon future, and his full awareness of the potential of grazing systems to sequester more carbon than any other option currently being proposed to mitigate climate change, it is clear that it is a conscious ploy to transfer the focus from the real problem, fossil fuels, to the livestock industry that so many fashionable metropolitans love to hate.

Whatever the background to that fashion, what it boils down to once again is a quick fix ideology that tells people that they can keep living life at full tilt, buy and dispose of all the consumer goods they like, travel the world in Branson’s planes to their hearts content, as long as they don’t eat beef. It seems to be seductive to many, whose direct experience with animals is restricted to pets and to zoos. Once again, a simplistic message appeals more than the fascinating complexity of real life.

Water Footprint

I just read one of the many articles that appear at regular intervals telling us how much water it takes to produce beef. I thought it would be interesting to follow the story back to the source: that took me to this Unesco paper downloadable at UNESCO water footprint, from which the article had extrapolated some figures based on this quote:

"The production of one kilogram of beef requires 15 thousand litres of water (93% green, 4% blue, 3% grey water footprint). There is a huge variation around this global average. The precise footprint of a piece of beef depends on factors such as the type of production system and the composition and origin of the feed of the cow."

Take note of that 93% green figure (13,950 litres, leaving 1,050 litres in the blue and grey parts); Green is defined as rainwater in so far as it does not become run-off.

The logic of including rainwater in a generalised product footprint is elusive. The water cycle is an essential part of the natural environment, not something that we control directly. The role of land on which precipitation falls is key in determining how available water is to us afterwards – management is a determining factor in how much runs off, with accompanying sediment and thus influences the replenishment of aquifers, river flows etc. Slowing the movement of water to the sea, and reducing evaporation both contribute to better water availability. The implication made by counting green water as a cost is that there is no ecosystem benefit to be gained through land management strategies. Using this logic would suggest that forests have a very high water footprint indeed; consider the amount of rain that must fall to produce any timber product, and yet no one would seriously consider this methodology a valid argument against the existence of forests. Well-managed rangelands and pastures have a hugely important positive role to play in the water cycle – given their extent, this ecosystem service they provide is second only to forests; on condition that they are managed well.

Now remember that 70% of the land we use for agriculture is grazing land, simply because it is land not suited to other purposes - it cannot economically produce crops that humans can consume directly. If we choose not to consume ruminant products, is it realistic to think that we can replace all of them with food from the other 30% of productive land without having a negative environmental, social or economic impact? 

Consider the biodiversity benefits of maintaining grazing lands, particularly native rangelands (I recognise that this value can and is regularly eroded depending on management), as well as the benefit of sequestering carbon in the soil (again, not automatically the case, but it is in well managed grazing systems).

If changing climate is forced by excessive carbon in the atmosphere, and one of the effects of this change is increased variability and severity of weather events, including droughts and flooding, should we not be looking hard for ways of sequestering carbon to a) remove it from the atmosphere to mitigate its negative effects there, b) help retain soil moisture for longer in dry spells and c) to soak up more water when floods come? The soil is the largest carbon sink available to us; so why not look at the problem from two sides - not enough carbon in the soil ≈ too much in the atmosphere.

There are hundreds of millions of acres of degraded rangelands and pasture in the world - mostly through poor grazing management (often due to a failure to allow rangelands or pasture time to recover following grazing, or due to over resting; i.e. the problem is thus frequently one of timing, not of animal numbers). Restoring rangelands would have multiple benefits; in sequestering billions of tonnes of carbon, putting it back in the soil where it belongs and thus increasing the moisture retention capacity to mitigate flooding, increase resilience to drought and enhance productivity. Slowing down the water cycle by storing water in the soil is beneficial, not least due to the fact that water vapour in the atmosphere amplifies warming. To restore rangelands, we need to restart the carbon flows, and the most effective way to do this is by managing grazing animals well. This will also deliver high quality protein from  animal products - should we consider those products to have a large water footprint? Or are they part of providing ecosystem services?

Now to the biodiversity side of the equation; there may be some who consider that returning grazing lands to "the wild" would be a suitable alternative and just as beneficial to the planet. There are a few obstacles. A lot of people live in those areas today, and would not take kindly to finding that they are suddenly live in a wildlife preserve. Secondly the teaming hordes of wildlife that once roamed those plains are no longer there, and neither are the carnivores that hunt them. Without grazing, rangelands turn to desert - the carbon flows grind to a halt, and all of the benefits mentioned above do not transpire, the opposite does; plants oxidise, carbon is lost and bare ground reflects solar radiation forcing warming.

Blue water is consumed, e.g. directly by animals, or in producing crops fed to animals, and grey is polluted water, defined as the volume of freshwater required to assimilate it. Let us look at those figures; these include water that the animal drank - very little of which stayed in the animal of course, it was returned to the soil, enriched as urine and dung as a short and positive loop in the water cycle - and water that was used to grow crops. In many cases today, that crop would be corn, and in increasing amounts that corn is first used to produce ethanol and then fed to cattle (being too wet to be used to feed monogastrics). Is all of that crop water attributed to beef, or does some now get attributed to "green" flexfuel cars? There is also the matter of buffering of grain supplies - in years of larger surpluses, grain can be diverted to livestock production to tranform it into higher value products and in times of scarcity less grain is used in the livestock industry, leaving enough for the primary uses. This buffer may not work perfectly, and more grain than strictly necessary may end up being fed to livestock, but there are great efficiency trade offs to be made in finishing livestock on a partial grain diet, meaning a lower supporting herd, and thus lower emissions per kg of product.

Blue water also includes the water used in the processing lines, and this is an area where best in class facilities have demonstrated both huge water savings and the ability through water treatment, to return water safely to the environment (rivers, ground water); these need to be adopted more widely and should be encouraged.

Looking at things in a little more detail often reveals a complexity that gives the lie to the simple fixes we are so often presented with. Simple statements often suit people with a ideological agenda, who have already decided what they think is best as well as what is bad, and who look for simple "facts" to support their position.

Overconsumption = wastage; that is a fairly simple concept to grasp - maybe that is the one we should focus on, in terms of everything we consume, rather than pushing simple ideologies as if they were solutions to complex problems.